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- Photographs of organizations mentioned
- Dots appearing on map

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- We can only see better if we strive for better
- There is hope, we can see it all around
-- South Bronx Unite, South Bronx Mutual Aid, Save Our Streets, Destination Tomorrow, etc.
- It is our turn to step into the shoes of our predecessors and create our own landmarks, our own change
- Poem TBD

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- Photographs of Eugenio María de Hostos
- Footage of construction
- HOSTOS today
+ To be updated with context

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- Photography of Young Lords
- Footage of Insurrection
- Political cartoons of the time
- Lincoln Hospital today
+ To be updated with context

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Who are you? (Introduce yourself)

How do you feel about the Bronx?

What would you say is the general perception of the Bronx?

If you could describe this place in 5 words, what would you say?

What do you know about the founding of HOSTOS?

Why is the college named after Eugenio María de Hostos? How has his image influenced the college and its practices?

Would you say the history of HOSTOS is recognized? Why or why not?

In what ways has HOSTOS impacted the community of Mott Haven, if at all? What would you say this college represents to the community and why?

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Who are you? (Introduce yourself)

How do you feel about the Bronx?

What would you say is the general perception of the Bronx?

If you could describe this place in 5 words, what would you say?

Would you say there’s been a lasting change at Lincoln Hospital since the Young Lords’ insurrection?

How knowledgeable do you think the community is on the history of the Young Lords and why do you think that is?

How does the Young Lords’ efforts show community and strength in the Bronx?

What would you say to the youth of Mott Haven as they grapple with Bronx life and identity?

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- Map of SBX landmarks
- Statistics of youth fleeing the BX
- The not so cute parts
-- Old buildings, boring streets, dull times
-- Common words to describe the BX

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- The Bronx has had a long legacy
- But one thing that hasn't changed is its reputation
- Even the people who live here hold this stigma tight
- When asked 'How do you feel about the Bronx?' most people respond with:
+ Responses to: How do you feel about the Bronx? Describe the Bronx in 5 words.
- So let's take a look around and admire just how much it took us to get the home we have

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- Tour of the garden
- Footage of building prior to garden
- BX fires
- Information boards located at garden
+ Other footage at park

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Who are you? (Introduce yourself)

How do you feel about the Bronx?

What would you say is the general perception of the Bronx?

If you could describe this place in 5 words, what would you say?

When was this garden founded and how? (How’d it get here)

Why was it established?

Who were the key contributors and how is it maintained today?

What impact do you believe this garden has on the community of Mott Haven, if any at all?

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- Train busy-ness ('Uptown and The Bronx' sign)
- Hip-hop to Bronx Drill
- Murals
- Bronx skyline
- Streets

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HOSTOS Community College

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A post shared by Nuevayorkinos® (@nuevayorkinos)

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Many Latino leaders demanded a school that met all the educational, social and cultural needs for the people of the Bronx. Later on, Hostos became the sole number 1 bilingual college in NYC.

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As the fires raging across California draw national attention, a new documentary explores a time when fires raged across a major metropolitan area - and no one seemed to care.

On Monday, Nov. 4, PBS Independent Lens will premiere "Decade of Fire," a look at why the Bronx burned in the 1970s, and how some community members chose to stay and rebuild their neighborhoods.

For co-director Vivian Vázquez Irizarry, the film was a chance to understand the forces that shaped her childhood and adolescence.

"Growing up in the South Bronx, I often heard that we were responsible for the neighborhood declining and burning," she said. "But we did not burn the South Bronx. In fact, we were the ones who saved it."

Vázquez Irizarry has good memories of growing up in New York City, but there were bad times, too. "There was always a fire. Everyone from that time, we remember the smell of smoke, how the fire trucks didn't come."

As a kid, she sometimes slept with her shoes on, ready to flee at a moment's notice; some families kept their shoes lined up by the front door at night.

Vázquez Irizarry and her partners made "Decade of Fire" to set the record straight about the history of the community she still calls home.

When Vázquez Irizarry's grandfather arrived from Puerto Rico in the late 1940s, the South Bronx was an integrated community with Irish, Jewish and African American residents. The South Bronx was then a desirable place to live, a step up from the tenements in Manhattan.

In the 1960s, urban renewal projects in Manhattan targeted areas where many African Americans and Puerto Ricans lived, displacing tens of thousands of people who moved to the already crowded South Bronx. As more people of color arrived, whites began moving to the suburbs. As the filmmakers point out, this option was not available to African Americans and Puerto Ricans, who faced discrimination in obtaining home loans or mortgages in many suburban communities.

Meanwhile, under a practice known as "redlining," any neighborhood with a significant African American or Puerto Rican population was seen by insurers and mortgage lenders as a bad bet. Residents could not get insurance or mortgages and landlords had no incentive to invest in their properties. And as New York City entered a financial crisis in the 1970s, the city made the decision to close firehouses across the Bronx.

"It is hard to accept now, how the city and the state basically ignored the South Bronx," said Evelyn Gonzalez, a history professor at William Paterson University and the author of "The Bronx," a history of the borough. "It was not just white flight. It was that this area was written off by the people in charge."

In the 1970s, nearly 80 percent of the housing stock in the South Bronx was lost to fires. Property owners burned their buildings for insurance payouts, or abandoned them altogether. Roughly a quarter of a million people lost their homes. In one scene from "Decade of Fire," Vázquez visits the Fire Department archives and learns that half of the fires in the South Bronx were never even recorded.

Mike Amadeo, who has owned a music store in the South Bronx for nearly fifty years, remembers the blight of the 1970s. "There were periods when we had no water, no heat. My phone was hooked up, somehow, directly to the telephone pole outside," he recalled. "It was really crazy; everything was being burned down."

"I went through hell here," Amadeo reflected. He stayed, he said, because he loved his customers and the community.

America got its first glimpse of what was happening in the South Bronx during the 1977 World Series, when a live broadcast from Yankee Stadium panned to a nearby blaze. Overnight the South Bronx became a symbol of urban decay, a negative image reinforced by films like "Fort Apache, The Bronx."

Vázquez Irizarry saw the effect that such stereotyping had on her community. There is a false narrative, she explained, that when people are poor or live in a bad neighborhood, they don't know how to take care of themselves or their homes. The truth, she asserts, has more to do with flawed government policies and civic neglect.

"Blaming people for their own oppression is like blaming the victim. It is a convenient way to ignore a community," she said.

The 1970s was probably the low point for the South Bronx, said Juan González, professor of communications and public policy at Rutgers University. "It was like a wasteland back then," he recalled. Then living in the South Bronx, González was a member of the Young Lords Party, an activist group that tried to help residents preserve city services. The area's elected officials, he said, were mostly corrupt and disinterested in helping their constituents. At times, street gangs functioned as a kind of police force, since law enforcement was often absent.

It was ultimately grassroots groups that helped bring the Bronx back to life. Some local residents reclaimed empty buildings on their own, remaking them into viable housing for their communities. Nonprofit organizations sprang up, spurring community involvement and demanding services from the city. In 1982, after the city assigned an arson investigation team to the Bronx, the fires that were once so prevalent declined. Another turning point came in 1986, when the city announced a multibillion-dollar plan to build affordable housing.

Since 2010, the Bronx has been the fastest-growing county in New York State, with 56 percent of residents identifying as Hispanic/Latino. Median household income ($37,500 in 2016) is lower than the rest of the city, while the poverty rate (28 percent) is higher.

Now the area faces the threat of gentrification, Gonzalez said. "I never imagined this would happen," he stated, "but displacement is occurring all over again, for different reasons. Middle-class people want to come to the Bronx, and they are driving out working-class and low-income people."

Real estate developers have tried to rebrand the South Bronx as "SoBro" and " The Piano District."

"Decade of Fire" touches upon this broader point: Across the country, neighborhoods like the Bronx in Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore and other cities that were once shunned by affluent people are increasingly subject to market forces and development.

Vázquez Irizarry hopes that viewers of "Decade of Fire" will take away not only the struggle of the South Bronx, but also its sense of community and creativity.

"Hip-hop was born here," she noted. Two of the country's most renowned Latinas, Jennifer Lopez and Sonia Sotomayor, grew up in working-class Bronx neighborhoods.

To Vázquez Irizarry, the South Bronx is full of unsung heroes. "They are people who stayed and made a difference in their communities. And there are people like that in all our communities."

"We need to hold on to the pride we have in our neighborhoods," she added. "To prove that we can tell our own stories, and that we have the courage to survive and thrive."
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NYC forgot the Bronx. Latinos and Blacks saved it, says new documentary.

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As the fires raging across California draw national attention, a new documentary explores a time when fires raged across a major metropolitan area - and no one seemed to care. On Monday, Nov. 4, PBS Independent Lens will premiere "Decade of Fire," a look at why the Bronx burned in the 1970s, and how some community members chose to stay and rebuild their neighborhoods.

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No artificial lightings, showing beauty in what is there-- not fabricating insta worthy skyline pics-- also avoids 'romanticizing' the BX

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As Americans across the country continue to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, many may not realize just how much one New York City borough has helped contribute to Hispanic culture across the nation.

And of course, that borough is none other than The Bronx itself.

Members of The Bronx's Mexican-American community celebrate Day of The Dead in St Mary's Park / Ed Garcia Conde, Welcome2TheBronx

While the terms Hispanic and Latino are not quite the same things, New York City's most Latino-identifying borough has plenty of overlap in these categories illustrating its rich history within the Hispanic world.

When the Great Migration from Puerto Rico to the mainland began in the 1940s, thousands of Puerto Ricans settled in the South Bronx as well as other New York City neighborhoods like East Harlem, aka El Barrio, and parts of Brooklyn.

In less than four years, between 1946 and 1950, over 100,000 Puerto Ricans had arrived in the city paving the way for the city's first sizeable Hispanic population yet still considerably less than 1% of New York City's population.

Fast forward to 2021 and Hispanics account for almost a third of New York City's population and it's not just Puerto Ricans anymore. New York City is now the epicenter of Dominicans, Mexicans, and many more from other Spanish-speaking countries. And in our borough, The Bronx is now home to one of the largest populations of Dominican and Mexican immigrants and their American-born children on the East Coast.

If current trends continue, Hispanics will be the largest demographic group outpacing the White population for the first time in the city's history.

And throughout all of this history in Hispanic New York, The Bronx has had a special place in being home and in some cases, the birthplace, of many shakers and movers known throughout the world.

From film and television to music, to government, to science, Bronxites of Hispanic descent have been helping shape our world for decades.

Some of these most notable individuals are:

Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of the world's best-known astrophysicists, was raised in The Bronx and went to Bronx High School of Science and is currently the director at the world-famous Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space right here in New York City.

The father of modern-day zombie apocalyptic films is none other than George A. Romero who ushered the iconic Night of the Living Dead series that changed the game in the sub-genre of the horror world.

Before heading to Hollywood and eventually becoming one of the few people to ever win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony award, the Puerto Rico-born Rita Moreno called the South Bronx home after arriving from the island at the age of 5 (remember the Great Migration we spoke about earlier?).

Many grew up watching Sesame Street and besides Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, we all remember Maria aka Sonia Manzano. Manzano, although not born in The Bronx, she was raised in our borough and has never forgotten her roots. Most recently, she created 'Alma's Way', a new kids' show on PBS about a Puerto Rican girl from The Bronx.

Speaking of Puerto Rican 'girls' from The Bronx, we have none other than Jennifer Lopez aka JLo who went from being just Jenny from the block to a global entertainment phenomenon in music, film, television, and fashion.

JLo performing at Orchard Beach in 2014 in her first concert appearance in her home borough / ©Katrina Davis / Katrina Davis Photography for Welcome2TheBronx

Another famous Sonia from The Bronx is none other than Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the country's first Latina Supreme Court justice who was appointed by former President Barack Obama in 2009 and has been serving on the nation's highest bench since then. Sotomayor, a native of Soundview, attended local Catholic schools Blessed Sacrament and Cardinal Spellman High School.

Sticking with government, we can't forget about another Bronx native, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialist who represents part of The Bronx and Queens in Congress and who has become pretty much a household name not just in The Bronx but across the nation as one of government's most vocal members against issues of inequalities and the destruction of our environment the latter of which is the subject of her Green New Deal plan.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (left) with Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark at Bronx Pride 2019/Ed Garcia Conde, Welcome2TheBronx

Another individual that lived in The Bronx and helped shape the world we live in today is another one that is often overlooked and that is Sylvia Rivera, a Transwoman and who, along with Marsha P. Johnson, another Transwoman, is considered to be the mother of the gay liberation movement and revolution that began with the Stonewall Riots in Greenwhich Village of which Rivera was at the forefront with other trailblazers.

If it weren't for the bravery of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, the LGBTQ community would probably not have made all the strides they have in the past 50 years since those fateful nights of rioting against police brutality and targeting of the queer community.

The Bronx is Musical

Sometimes it's not just one individual but a group of people that make an impact in the music world and that is certainly the case with The Bronx's Hispanic contribution to music that has changed the world forever.

Salsa

When it comes to music, The Bronx's role in the creation of one of the world's most popular Latin music genres, Salsa, is undisputed even if it isn't always acknowledged.

In 2004, Roberta L. Singer and Elena Martinez, who is the co-artistic director of the Bronx Music Heritage Center, wrote, "When the story of Latin popular music (salsa) is told in popular and scholarly writings, the South Bronx is consistently overlooked despite the critical role it played in the development of that music. From the late 1940s through the early 1970s Hunts Point, Longwood, and Mott Haven were thriving Puerto Rican communities where an explosion of musical activity and creativity was taking place."

Old ballrooms like the Hunts Point Palace and the Caravana Club in the South Bronx saw some of the greatest names in Salsa like Eddie Palmieri, a Bronx native, and the legendary Tito Puente who would eventually call the borough home, play to the masses in these storied places.

But after years of neglecting The Bronx's clear importance in the creation of Salsa, a group now wants to put the borough on the map by making it the home for the International Museum of Salsa.

While the music halls that once played live Salsa music to thousands of Bronx residents may be gone, the beat and rhythm of the music is still alive and well in The Bronx whether at weekly Salsa festivals at Orchard Beach or on the streets of 'El Condado de la Salsa.

Hip Hop's Hispanic influence

And it wasn't just Salsa that Bronx Hispanics were central to in the creation of the genre but also Hip Hop which was born in The Bronx. The Hispanic contributions to Hip Hop have been consistently overlooked despite being front and center of the movement.

Most particularly, the Puerto Rican community which was intimately involved in those early days in the 70s especially in the B-Boy breakdancing scene graffiti culture, two of the five pillars of Hip Hop.

The above individuals and examples are just a small example of the wide contributions that Bronx Hispanics have made not just to the city and country but to the world.

And to think, this is just one of the many groups that came from The Bronx or called our borough home.

Dear reader: Now more than ever, it is important to support local journalism, especially as told by a Bronx-born and raised journalist telling our stories. If you found this or any of our stories informative and enjoyed our photography throughout the past years, kindly consider donating to support local Bronx journalism for decades to come.

Dear reader: Now more than ever, it is important to support local journalism, especially as told by a Bronx-born and raised journalist telling our stories. If you found this or any of our stories informative and enjoyed our photography throughout the past years, kindly consider donating to support local Bronx journalism for decades to come.

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Celebrating The Bronx's Hispanic contributions to the world - Welcome2TheBronx™

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As Americans across the country continue to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, many may not realize just how much one New York City borough has helped contribute to Hispanic culture across the nation. And of course, that borough is none other than The Bronx itself.

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The Black Bronx: Realizing “A Dream Deferred”

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Local residents and people all around the world have identified the Bronx as the city’s “worst” borough for decades. When it’s featured in movies such as The Warriors, Rumble in The Bronx, and Esca…

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A Quick History of the Iconic Borough - The New Bronx

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The Bronx has quite a reputation. Grim and featureless slums as far away as Catena, Sicily have been dubbed “The Bronx” by their local residents. For decades, the name of the once-promising borough of New York City has been synonymous with urban blight and drug-related street crime—but it…

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Monument to Tribute Puerto Rican Humanitarian and Baseball Legend Roberto Clemente in The Bronx