Festival de la Palabra (The Word Festival) is the top literary event in Puerto Rico, and the only literary festival in the world based on one single community -the Puerto Rican community- which is held in two very distinct cities: San Juan and New York, and for the first time celebrated at Loisaida Inc. in the heart of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
As diversity initiatives gain in popularity, how can we ensure that equity is at the root of their focus? Together, let’s explore the landscape and ask what is needed for tangible, real success around race, gender, disability status, and artistic aesthetic in the arts and beyond.
The Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) is committed to protecting and enhancing
the daily economic lives of New Yorkers.
The issue of how vacant or underused community facilities have played a role on the dismantling and “de-culturalizing” economic dynamic of historical Latino Core Neighborhoods comes to the foreground as neighbors and community partners discuss the future of PS.64/ CHARAS El Bohio and the strategies to convert them into cultural resources that strengthen and fully represent the historical and diverse fabric of the Lower East Side.
Ours to Lose tells the oral history of that movement through a close look at a diverse group of
Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to
keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal
occupancy into legal cooperative ownership.
FREE Community workshop on how to use traditional herbs in modern daily life and creating at home remedies influenced by elder and ancestral healing methods and the passing down of stories. Participants will make a salve to take home.
Loisaida Inc. leads the local cultural planning project, in partnership with the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center and Teatro SEA that will ensure that Latino arts organizations, cultural workers, and residents in Lower Manhattan are heard and their recommendations included in the City's 10 year cultural plan. Loisaida Inc. was chosen from a competitive pool of applicants as one of the winning proposals to conduct community engagement and feed-back activities around the City's cultural planning process, which will wrap up in the late spring of 2017.
Join us Sunday, March 12th 3-5PM at Loisaida Center for our second workshop with Celeste Casillas of Nativa Remedies and other women seeking to connect with their feminine wisdom, honor their mother energy, and share sacred space.
6:30-8 PM. Panel: Loisaida: Then & Now. With Chino Garcia, Maria Dominguez, Noah Jemisin, Kristin Reed, Seth Tobocman. Libertad Guerra, moderator
With “The Street Gangs of the Lower East Side,” Jose Cochise
Quiles and Clayton Patterson provide a brutally honest, self-reflective and moving account of one person’s struggle to break the cycle of violence and poverty since birth through creativity and compassion for others in the East Village / Lower East Side. Quiles pulls no punches about the experiences that took him from gang leader to an historian of gangs, artist, and author who creates with a joyous yet desperate edge, for the sake of sheer survival.