Justo A. Martí Photographic Collection. A woman giving a speech at a Rockefeller rally. Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, CUNY.

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Text by Pedro Regalado, Historias Advisor, historian, and author of the forthcoming book 
Nueva York: Making the Modern City

New York’s Latinx community is the country’s largest. Its total population, roughly two and a half million (or nearly a third of the city’s residents) is nearly equivalent to that of Chicago, the third-most populous city in the U.S. They comprise Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans—who together make up over seventy percent of the city’s Latinxs—as well as Ecuadorians, Colombians, Hondurans, and many others scattered across the five boroughs, and increasingly in the counties of the New York metropolitan region. They are New York.

This vast presence is rooted in a rich history. Latin American and Caribbean migration to New York dates back to the seventeenth century and was largely driven by the city’s commercial and political relationship to the Western Hemisphere. However, it wasn’t until the 1920s that Latinx migrants began forming their first enclaves in East Harlem, The Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, and Downtown Brooklyn and its waterfronts. By the end of World War II, migrants from Cuba, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, but mainly from Puerto Rico, grew to roughly 200,000. These newcomers arrived hoping to secure the kinds of jobs in the city’s garment factories, docks, hotels, restaurants, and beyond that made the metropolis a symbol of American industrial might. 

Their journeys were rarely smooth, but beginning in the 1970s, when the number of Latinx New Yorkers ballooned to over one million, many of them filled neighborhoods that bore the brunt of deindustrialization, municipal disinvestment, and racial fantasies that associated Latinx life with deviance and criminality. Indeed, here is the iconography that has long been associated with the community, which scholars and residents in recent years have demonstrated obscured Latinx activism and creativity.

Historias emerges from this history, paying tribute to a community that has been and remains formative to the city’s culture. An ambitious approach to Latinx contributions to the city in the realm of arts, activism, commerce, and more, it reinterprets migrant’s relationship to the metropolis over the last century. Over the coming months we will feature windows into our archival research, coverage of our signature programs, and looks at new artist commissions that interpret the inheritances of past movements into contemporary creation.  Welcome to the Historias Dispatch.