In 2024, The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center launched Historias, a multiyear public humanities initiative dedicated to rescuing and recentering Latinx stories and their role in shaping New York City. Developed with the Latinx Arts Consortium of New York (LxNY), Historias offers a curatorial and civic framework for rethinking how public memory is built, shared, and contested.

At the heart of the initiative is a simple proposition: Nueva York is the city inside the city. It names the dense, often underrecognized histories of labor, migration, artistic invention, spiritual life, and neighborhood formation that have helped make New York what it is. To trace the Nueva York inside New York is to look beyond official narratives and singular landmarks toward the social worlds and collective forms of remembrance through which Latinx communities have shaped the city over time.

This panel presents three artist commissions in development for Historias Reveladas, the initiative’s culminating exhibition and public program series. In dialogue with the digital platform Nueva York Chronicles, these projects demonstrate how artists can work with historically grounded material to activate public memory in rigorous, layered, and accessible ways.

Featured artists include Natalia Nakazawa, whose Dome Cartographies explores migration, collective imagination, and neighborhood-based worldmaking in Jackson Heights; Edwin Torres, whose editorial and artistic work revisits Loisaida’s 1990s poetry scene as a living archive of voice, performance, and gathering; and Alva Mooses and Mauricio Cortés Ortega, whose Hands of Time / Manos del Tiempo examines the labor, craft, and everyday infrastructures that have sustained Lower Manhattan beyond corporate narratives of development.

Together, these projects ask how artists, archives, and cultural institutions can help audiences trace the Nueva York inside New York.

The conversation will be moderated by Libertad Guerra, Executive Director of The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center and Chief Curator of Historias.