{"id":647,"date":"2024-12-11T21:01:32","date_gmt":"2024-12-11T21:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/price-healing-garden\/?p=647"},"modified":"2024-12-11T21:21:50","modified_gmt":"2024-12-11T21:21:50","slug":"puerto-rican-newark-the-past-and-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/price-healing-garden\/puerto-rican-newark-the-past-and-present\/","title":{"rendered":"Puerto Rican Newark: The Past and Present"},"content":{"rendered":"

Puerto Rican culture flourishes in New York City, the hub of the Nuyorican Art Movement in neighborhoods like Manhattan\u2019s Lower East Side and Spanish Harlem. However, although Newark\u2019s Puerto Rican community is lesser known, its art is just as vibrant and as outspoken in its critique of colonialism and racism within the United States. The city has been home to many Puerto Rican activists such as Miguel \u201cDon Mike\u201d Rodriguez and Rutgers professor Hilda Hidalgo. It also has been the home base for community centers such as La Casa de Don Pedro, and uprisings such as the Puerto Rico Rebellion at Branch Brook Park in 1974. In 2024, the Newark Puerto Rican parade celebrated its 63rd year!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This Thursday, the Newark Public Library and the Price Institute will be hosting its next installment of the Our Newark Futures<\/em> series, inviting performers Chris Rodriguez, Clara Diaz, and Julio Evans to bring to life Bomba, one of the most popular music and dance styles in Puerto Rico. This event will continue a conversation about the connection between art and place, how art can be an act of community making in the midst of a diaspora. The larger topic of culture and place is one that Newarkers engage with everyday, as Newark\u2019s wards have held ethnic enclaves of all kinds during its rapid growth. They have come to represent their own eras in Newark history: Irish Newark, Jewish Newark, Italian Newark etc. Considering that this week\u2019s event is highlighting Puerto Rican culture in Newark, it seems only fair to focus our inaugural blog post on the Puerto Ricans who have come together to shape Newark\u2019s public spaces and cultural landscape in the past 50+ years.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Let’s start with El Club del Barrio, fully named the St. Columba Neighborhood Club. It was established in 1975 as a nonprofit organization meant to provide health and social services to low-income residents living around Lincoln Park. First centered at 25 Pennsylvania Ave, later moving to 76 Clinton Ave, these services included a daycare, support groups for pregnant mothers, house visits for seniors, a food pantry, ESL classes, and various divisions centered on providing information to those with HIV. Although open to everyone in the neighborhood, the organization served mostly a Latino population which thrived following an exodus of Irish Newarkers and an influx of Puerto Rican migrants in the 1960s.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Members of El Club Del Barrio in the Workshop<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Like the Healing Garden here at the Price Institute, El Club Del Barrio recognized that the residents of Newark and the Indigenous people of the Americas shared a common plight in regards to a disconnect from the land in which they live. A Florence and John Schumann Foundation report from 1978 compared the relocation of the Navajo in New Mexico to the evictions of Hispanic renters on South Broad Street, stating that while the Navajo lived thousands of miles away in an entirely different arid environment, \u201cThe Hispanic faces the challenge of getting an education, then getting a job, in effort to survive in what is often an urban desert where prejudice and injustice still bloom\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This report was in reference to Project Encounter, in which Sister Debbie Humphreys of the St. Columba Catholic Church and others came together to work towards providing better housing, jobs, and safety to the residents of the neighborhood. The community closed a bar that was attracting crime close to an elementary school, and fought against the evictions of almost 60 families on Thanksgiving who could not read the eviction notices placed on their houses in English. What they could not stop was the destruction of housing, leading to many open lots of rubble in the area. This was part of the urban renewal movement that Newark pushed for in the mid 20th century, a predecessor to the gentrification of Puerto Rican neighborhoods that artists such as Julio Evans seek to stop fifty years later. In the midst of this loss, the organization would go on to renovate a storefront on 57 Pennsylvania Avenue, used to house their club<\/span> Taller<\/span><\/i>, Spanish for \u201cworkshop\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n