East Harlem’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College currently features two important new exhibitions. One explores how the Puerto Rican diaspora has spread outward from the archipelago, while the other examines how New York City’s Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood of San Juan Hill was aggressively gentrified and transformed into Lincoln Center.
“Diasporic Collage: Puerto Rico and the Survival of a People” and “Afterlives of San Juan Hill” are both free to the public and will be on view through September 2025.
“Diasporic Collage” documents the multiple diasporas that have migrated to and journeyed away from Puerto Rico. Created in collaboration with Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum and the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, the exhibition showcases works by various artists.
One wall in the gallery is covered with photos by New York City-based photographer and community activist Frank Espada. With a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Espada took photographs from 1979 to 1981 that documented how Puerto Ricans lived in the United States, particularly those who had formed a community in Hawaii, as well as those who had returned to Puerto Rico. Espada illustrated the various settings and traditions that Puerto Ricans experienced in the diaspora.
Alongside Espada’s photographs, his son Jason has added the oral history interviews Espada conducted with the many people he photographed, allowing exhibition visitors to hear the voices of the people he portrayed.
The video art of Daniel Lind Ramos is on display in a small, contained room. In “Talegas de la memoria” (2020), the artist performs on Vacía Talega beach in his hometown, the traditionally Afro Puerto Rican town of Loíza. Lind’s presentation in the video underscores the need to acknowledge the colonization of Puerto Rico by both Spain and the United States.
In the wool woven piece “Piquete en el capitolio” (“Picket at the Capitol,” 2023), the artist Alia Farid worked with Mohammed Al Maghribi, a weaver, to recreate a Puerto Rican newspaper photo from 1973. That photo showed members from the island’s Arab Cultural Club protesting U.S. military aid to Israel. Standing in front of Puerto Rico’s capitol building, they carried signs that read “Let my people go,” “Down with Zionist Occupation,” “Justice for Palestinians,” and “Golda: Los Palestinos existen (Golda: Palestinians exist),” in reply to then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s denial of a Palestinian identity.
The works of these and other artists vividly show how Puerto Ricans have been able to adapt and use elements of their culture to thrive in diverse environments.
“Afterlives of San Juan Hill” looks back at how residents of the Lincoln Square and San Juan Hill neighborhoods were pushed out of their homes in the late 1950s by the Lincoln Square Urban Renewal Project, which was designed to promote the creation of what is today Lincoln Center and Fordham University’s Manhattan campus buildings. To move that development along, the real estate company Braislin, Porter and Wheelock worked with the New York Bureau of Real Estate Slum Clearance Project Office and the New York City Housing Authority to steer nearly 3,000 local families toward new homes.
Puerto Rican families lived in substandard conditions in the Lincoln Center area. Data showed that a good portion were relatively new migrants who had been affected by Operation Bootstrap, the manufacturing push in Puerto Rico that led many islanders to migrate to the United States. Residents earned meager wages and had moved to this neighborhood because housing was affordable. “Afterlives of San Juan Hill” presents the intimate stories of these families, who once lived in an area the city declared blighted and had taken over by eminent domain.
CENTRO researchers examined Lincoln Center’s archives on the urban renewal process. With “Afterlives of San Juan Hill,” they detail how Puerto Rican families were frequently coerced and deceived into relocating. The exhibit shows how the mid-Manhattan community was disrupted and pushed out of a community they had come to depend on.