For the past three decades, the Clemente cultural center has supported and showcased Latinx cultural diversity from its Dutch Neo-Gothic building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Named for the Puerto Rican writer and activist, Clemente Soto Vélez, it has hosted international puppetry festivals, been a home base for the city’s capoeira community, launched artists to Guggenheim fellowships, and incubated Latinx theatre through Teatro LaTea.

Now, the Clemente is set to expand its reach and impact further through Historias, a three-year citywide program that will pour $2.5 million in funding into cultural activities. It’s the largest initiative in the organization’s history and will run from September 2024 through the end of 2026.

In Spanish, the word “Historias” is broad, capturing both the official history of scholars and the personal stories of everyday people. The Clemente’s initiative strives to fuse the two together.

Opening Performance of Los Tecuanes de Nueva York, held in 2022 at The Clemente. Photo: Courtesy of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center.

The initiative is set to unfold across three distinct phases, roughly one per year. First comes an exploratory stage, which the Clemente calls “thinking in public.” Next, a collection stage centered on a digital platform. Last, a performance stage that will tie into the works discussed and collected in the preceding two years.

“The inspiration for Historias came from a deep recognition of the need to re-center Latinx narratives in New York City’s cultural landscape,” the Clemente’s executive director Libertad Guerra told me via email. “Historias emerged from a desire to use the arts as a translator of fact-based stories and research, whether academic or vernacular, to bring these narratives to life in a meaningful way.”

To do so, the Clemente is partnering with LxNY Consortium, a group of more than 40 Latinx-serving cultural organizations, and New York institutions including the Kinfolk Foundation, the Public Art Fund, the Vera List Center, BRIC, the Incite Institute, and Latino Arts and Activisms at Columbia University.

Historias will kick off with a two-day block party at its Loisaida home on September 28 and 29, which will feature street performances, music, and artist commissions including new work from Seth Tillet and Lucía della Paolera that will be projected onto the cultural center’s façade.

Installation image of “Una Vida Plena,” an exhibition by Tito Matos hosted at The Clemente in 2023. Photo: Photo: Courtesy of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center.

The first phase, Historias Sembradas, Sown Histories, hopes to explore key themes of Latinx cultural expression through collective research, programming, and community events. These include a public domino tournament, the staging of visual artist Edra Soto’s sculptures inside Central Park, and a pair of literary events held in partnership with Brooklyn Public Library and Brooklyn Book Festival.

In the fall of 2025, the second phase, Historias Entrecruzadas, Interwoven Histories, will launch The Nueva York Chronicles, a digital platform that hopes to create a timeline of Latinx cultural movements over the past 100 years using both scholarship and oral histories.

The third and final phase, Historias Reveladas, Histories Revealed, will take place in the spring of 2026. The season-long festival will coincide with the renovation of The Clemente (it’s installing a six-story elevator to become ADA-compliant) and will include art exhibitions, commissions, walking tours, and lectures.

For Guerra, success not only means recognizing and celebrating the full, complicated diversity of the city’s largest immigrant group, but establishing something of a blueprint. “It means establishing not just a pilot experiment, but as a recurring, triennial marker in the city’s cultural landscape with proof of concept and measurable impact,” Guerra said.