Recognizing ‘Lil San Juan’: New Puerto Rican Cultural District in Holyoke is nation’s second
Published: 01-03-2025 5:55 PM
Modified: 01-06-2025 11:39 AM |
HOLYOKE — In the 1950s, Holyoke’s first Puerto Rican migrants met a city trending toward a has-been industrial powerhouse that didn’t offer the same economic opportunities their French, Irish and Polish neighbors experienced when they moved to the Paper City — opportunities Puerto Ricans had been told would await them.
More than seven decades later, however, the Puerto Rican community in Holyoke has persevered and thrived, using the beauty of its heritage to bolster both the city’s economic and cultural opportunities.
That contribution to the city’s rich history is now being officially recognized with a new Puerto Rican Cultural District in the city, approved in November by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. The district covers eight blocks along Main Street, stretching from Race Street to South Canal Street, and from the I-391 ramp to Dwight Street.
The designation comes as “part of a larger history,” explains Maria Cartagena, one of the founders of the district and a prominent voice on the history of Puerto Rican life in the city.
Kayla Rodriguez, executive director of Nueva Esperanza, which advocates for Puerto Ricans in the city, described it as “a process that has been one of layering different Puerto Rican expressions, traditions and history.”
The district’s creation unofficially began six years ago at Holyoke High School when community members wanted to tell the story of Holyoke’s Puerto Rican past. Members of Palante, a youth organization that at the time operated out of the school but is now in its own facility on Linden Street, called attention to the fact that there were no murals depicting Puerto Rican history in the school.
Some time later on Main Street, banners were attached to light poles depicting Holyoke’s influential yet “hidden” Puerto Rican legends. Cartagena, who was featured on one of these banners, cites them as beginning a process of Puerto Rican visibility in the city, calling them “markers that we are here, and we are not going anywhere.”
Meanwhile Holyoke’s Office of Planning and Economic Development established the El Corazon de Holyoke project, or the heart of the Holyoke Place Making Project. Corazon spearheaded several community revival projects, including murals, and catapulted the area to becoming a cultural district.
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Meanwhile the energy created by Puerto Rican restaurants downtown, Rodriguez said, has attracted the outside community looking for a slice of “Lil San Juan.”
“Fiesta Cafe created this whole Puerto Rican tradition of just bringing people, you know, into Holyoke to have a good time, similar to what you would see in Puerto Rico,” Rodriguez said.
She added that other nearby Puerto Rican restaurants, including De Todo Un Poco and food trucks that serve even in the winter, have also contributed to the cultural boom occurring downtown.
This process of layering culture, business and displays, said Rodriguez, “has brought so many events and so many people from outside and brought people from Connecticut, from Springfield, and people that normally wouldn’t come to downtown Holyoke,” which in turn has garnered more attention for concerts and block parties in the community, and outside business, she said.
“In Puerto Rico people just like sitting outside with just a little chair. Weather is a little nicer, right?” Rodriguez said. “So in the summer, that’s really what happens inside or outside of the cafe. It’s just like a party all the time, like all the cars are parked there to put on music. People just sit, have conversations, hang out and have some drinks.”
Other traditional events springing from Puerto Rican culture include Noche San Juan, which features city officials, free food, and a contest among Puerto Rican restaurants in the area. A summer festival is going on its fourth year, and a Three Kings Day celebration, which occurred Friday night to mark Epiphany.
“Coming to the district is like on St. Patrick’s Day being Irish for the weekend — all cultures and expressions of it are welcomed and valued,” said Rodriguez. All this, she hopes, will serve as a foundation for further business development.
But the new district is not only about business and tourism, said Stephanie Colon, coordinator of Holyoke Mass in Motion.
“The idea is, we already have a robust community,” she said. “We want them to stay and enjoy the space, and we want our own people here to take pride in where they live ... It’s really important to make sure that it’s not just about tourism, it is about building up our community.”
Commenting that the cheapest ride to Puerto Rico is one over the Chicopee bridge, she said: “We do have the highest rate of Puerto Ricans per capita outside of Puerto Rico. Like, that’s why my parents moved here. That why a lot of our ancestors came here, is because we have that community, we have the food, we have the events.
“We want businesses to come in, but we want to make sure that people still want to live here, who lived here their whole lives,” she said.
She also said that after Hurricane Maria devastated the Caribbean in 2017, many people were displaced into Holyoke. Colon said many were, “very, very depressed not being on the island: the tropical weather, the events. It’s just very cultural over there and moving out here, they didn’t know where to go, who to go to. We try to make everything we do very, very traditional, like we do on the island.”
Cartagena also explained the positive elements of a district like this for young Puerto Ricans who have been born in America and losing the culture of the island, including their language.
“There is no book that says Puerto Ricans did X, Y, Z in the city. A lot of it is oral tradition — a collection of stories and memories more than a history,” said Cartagena, adding that this has caused a “gap in who’s telling the story.”
The new cultural district allows the city’s Puerto Ricans to tell their histories. Cartagena, while not a professional historian, is the “people’s historian of Holyoke” and is currently writing a book reviving stories of Puerto Ricans in the city.
She said the Holyoke many Puerto Ricans found in the 1950s and ’60s was a far cry from the first half of the 1900s, when the city had more millionaires per capita than anywhere in the country due to the booming paper and textile industries. Decay began to set in in the middle of the century as mills and factories were boarded up due to bankers and investors leaving the city for the South and overseas.
Puerto Rican migrants at that same time moved predominantly to the Flats and to South Holyoke, drawn by cheap housing and agricultural work. Most of these farmers came from “Salinas,” an agricultural sector of the island which gave the flats the nickname “Little Salinas.”
“They made these neighborhoods their own,” Cartagena said, and explained that they brought with them Puerto Rican traditions, like block parties, which had been more than just about music, but also focused on community health and outreach.
The 1970s, she said, featured the most dense wave of Puerto Rican migration and led to a permanent change in the city’s demographic, which she said led to increasing racial tension.
That tension was the subject of a news story on “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS that covered Holyoke in the 1980s. Cartagena said the segment accurately captured the “blatant racism” shown toward Puerto Ricans at the time.
Nueva Esperanza was founded in 1982 as a way for the Puerto Rican community to come together to secure financing for property rehabilitation following a string of arson fires. Other hurdles faced by the community included limiting funding for education, where Puerto Rican children were now the majority; denying voting rights due to language barrier, and a lack of civic engagement, she said.
“We didn’t come here on funding, we came here with opportunities,” said Cartagena, who said that lawsuits and protests, made possible by community organizing, have been vital for the community to overcome obstacles it has faced in Holyoke.
Today, however, Cartagena is reassured by the increased opportunities for Puerto Ricans in the city, especially after the 2021 election of Joshua Garcia as the first Puerto Rican mayor, and the appointment of Anthony Soto as the first Puerto Rican superintendent of Holyoke Public schools.
Samuel Gelinas can be reached at sgelinas@gazettenet.com