MUCH MORE THAN A "LITTLE HOUSE"
The Rincón Criollo Cultural Center has been an oasis of Puerto Rican history and traditions in the South Bronx for over 30 years. Founded in 1987, this incredible community garden also serves as an important cultural center, which is internationally recognized as a "school and performance" space featuring bomba and plena, traditional musical expressions of Puerto Rico's African legacy and it's current working class. Rincón Criollo is regularly visited by community leaders, foreign dignitaries and students of Puerto Rican and Latino culture.
RECENT HISTORY
In the recent past, the "Melrose Common Plan" which was passed by all the local governmental agencies in 1993 threatened to displace the Rincón Criollo Cultural Center from its original location, at the corner of Brook Avenue and the corner of E. 158th Street in the Bronx where the Center had existed for over 30 years. The site was designated for developement by the New York Housing and Preservation Department (HPD) and put in the hands of Nos Quedamos, a local community development corporation without any consideration for the Center's existence and legacy.
Massive community response to this threat, along with the support of local elected officials, especially the office of Councilmember Maria Del Carmen Arroyo and cooperation from Nos Quedamos facilitated a long negotiation process, which culminated with the voluntary transfer of the Rincón Criollo Cultural Center on the Fall of 2006 to an alternative site one block south located at the corner of Brook Avenue and the corner of E. 157th Street in the Bronx. As part of the deal, the City (HPD) has agreed to transfer the new sites title to Rincón Criollo Cultural Center, Inc., and with the asistance of Councilmember Maria Del Carmen Arroyo's office, the Center plans develop the site and build a single story structure, which will serve as administrative and opperational facilities.
World renoun artists like Tego Calderon (in photograph) who has vidited Rincón Criollo since 2003, have expressed their concern and disappointment at the real estate attack on our community places like Rincón Criollo.
-Photo: grupoHuracán
A CULTURAL EMBASSY
In addition to educating youth in cultural traditions such as music and dance and providing regular "performances" featuring local and international artists, the members of Rincón Criollo celebrate most major holidays with cookouts, typically attended by hundreds of people. Today, Rincón Criollo is one of the oldest community centers, gardens and casitas in the South Bronx, serving close to 300 members and the community at large. Its community significance has been recognized far beyond its immediate neighborhood. Rincón Criollo has been featured in exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution, the Bronx Museum of the Arts and El Museo del Barrio. It is the subject of numerous cultural studies, citywide festivals of Puerto Rican musical traditions and documentary films, such as the award winning "Americanos" directed by Edward James Olmos and aired on HBO, and Banco Popular's specials, "Raices" and "Dreammakers", and more recently in Rosey Paerez's "Yo Soy Boricua, Pa' Que Tu Lo Sepas", which recently aired on the Independent Film Channel (IFC).
HISTORY
During the mid-'70s, the South Bronx averaged 12,000 fires a year. The area lost some 40 percent of its housing stock, and 300,000 people fled. In the burned-out zone that remained, police fought a losing battle against junkies and gangs. The New York Times commented that the South Bronx was "as crucial to an understanding of American urban life as Auschwitz is crucial to an understanding of Nazism." The city was in the throes of a fiscal crisis, and the Feds were tired of watching money lost in failed urban policies. In 1977, Jimmy Carter visited the Bronx and promised to revitalize the area. Nothing came of his high-sounding words. When Ronald Reagan visited later, he compared the South Bronx to a bombed-out London after the Battle of Britain! By 1981, the Los Angeles Times could declare that the South Bronx was "both a place and a scare-word."
While the South Bronx was burning in the 1970s and the area consumed by abandonment and destruction, the founders of Rincón Criollo, under the leadership and initiative of Don José Chema Soto, decided to take action. Before Rincón Criollo was created, the site where it was originally located was then an abandoned lot filled with abandoned cars and garbage, another victim of the widespread disinvestment and rampant arson in the South Bronx in the late 1960s. In the 1970s, Chema and some friends cleared enough space for some folding chairs. While sitting by a bonfire there, Chema looked around and saw his homeland, Puerto Rico.
Chema and his crew cleared the lot, planted a small garden, and built a casita, or "little house" reminiscent of the wooden houses scattered through the Puerto Rican countryside. The neighborhood flocked to the site. They transformed a once abandoned and rubble-strewn lot into the image and likeness of their ancestral home, carried within their hearts to New York City. "La Casita de Chema" ('Chemas little house'), as it is known internationally, is the reflection of a communitys resistance and desire to survive. Since then, neighbors have used this corner to gather, garden, hold community events, and pass down musical and cultural traditions.
For Puerto Ricans, whose immigrant experience has been one of displacement rather than assimilation, the creation of casitas (literally: little houses) like the one at Rincón Criollo, has enabled us to take control of our immediate environment and, in the process, to rediscover and reconnect with our cultural heritage. The casita at Rincón Criollo was recreated in the Smithsonian Institution as part of an exhibit on Puerto Rican traditional culture. The cultural and architectural roots of the casitas and the clean-swept bateyes (from the indigenous word for courtyard) or open spaces that surround them are found in the community structures of the original Taino/Carib inhabitants, the Spanish conquistadors and the African slaves. Casitas are little houses built on empty lots in New York City neighborhoods that recall the look and feel of the Puerto Rican countryside.
These casitas, like Rincón Criollo have helped stabilize and revitalize our neighborhoods. But, like most powerful landscapes, casitas environments are fragile ecologies, susceptible to disruption. The casitas are community endeavors that transform vacant lots into valuable community spaces. Because Rincón Criollo functions as a social and cultural center for the entire neighborhood, it is a protected restful place where children can safely play, community members garden, converse and play dominoes away from the sounds and bustle of the city, just outside its margins. It is a haven for senior citizens and a effective deterrent to street crime (cars belonging to the local police precinct are regularly parked next door, with the tacit understanding that they will be monitored by the nearly always-crowded casita).
Folklorist and New York University professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has noted, "Now that you can put a card in a slot and do your banking without ever meeting a teller, now that you eat fast food without ever meeting a waitress, now more than ever we need to protect the shoemaker, the barbershop, the casita, places that hold together the fabric of community." Urban dwellers, she notes, "live in a city, which they did not build, and over which they have little control." At a time of diminishing government and philanthropic support, the city needs to support communities efforts to take control of their own environment and provide for their own cultural expressions. Environments like Rincón Criollo deserve a serious assessment of their social, cultural, aesthetic, and environmental value, and the need for their preservation.
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The Rincón Criollo Cultural Center is a non-profit institution (501 C-3), a garden and community spot where people come to breath culture that is not for sale. It is located at the corner of Brook Avenue and E. 157th Street, in The Bronx, NYC 10045.
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LINKS
Rincón Criollo: More Than just a little house in the South Bronx, nylatinojournal.com
Bronx Haven Is Threatened, But Denizens Still Dream: New York Times, 2003
With Greenspace for All: New York Folk Lore Society, 1998
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About the Featured Recordings:
1) "La Casita de Chema" by Tato Torres & YERBABUENA
2) "Debajo 'el Palo 'e Manzana" by Julio Colon & PlenaLuna
3) "Raices Plena Medley" by Los Instantaneos de La Plena
