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New York, NY – October 23, 2025 – The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center presents Nueva York Chronicles, a new fully bilingual interactive digital platform and community resource dedicated to archiving and documenting the history of Latinx cultural contributions to New York City. As the cornerstone of Historias Entrecruzadas, the second phase of Historias, Nueva York Chronicles is created as both an archive and a living record that responds to the systemic erasure of Latinx histories by preserving narratives of migration, activism, and art in an evolving public resource accessible to journalists, artists, scholars, and community members alike.
“This archive is a living chronotope of who we are and how we got here,” said Libertad Guerra, Executive Director of The Clemente and Editor in Chief of NY.C. “Nueva York Chronicles is a first-of-its-kind, community-sourced archive that documents the interconnected Latinx communities shaping New York City, ensuring these histories are not only remembered and shared but actively built upon.”
At the heart of Nueva York Chronicles is an interactive map with pinpoints of cultural sites alongside a timeline of scholarship. Designed as an ever-evolving repository, the map and timeline will allow users to explore a rich archive of entries, scholarly essays, listen to oral histories, and browse archival images. Each entry in Nueva York Chronicles is organized according to Historia’s six thematic tracks, from migration and spiritual belief, material culture and archives, labor and commerce, everyday poetics to embodied heritage, connecting oral histories, archival records with commissions and editorial essays produced throughout the initiative.
For example, a click on a color dot on 14th Street reveals Chicanx scholar Miriam Juarez’s analysis of David Alfaro Siqueiros’s Experimental Workshop, a fleeting but impactful site for creating paintings, murals, and parade floats that challenged nationalist aesthetics and helped define Mexican revolutionary art in New York. A journey further uptown leads to Colombian anthropologist Amalia Uribe Guardiola’s editorial essay exploring The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity (1990) hosted by The New Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, which brought together artists of color alongside white artists to challenge dominant narratives around race, gender, and class in U.S. art. A point in South Slope, Brooklyn directs to an essay by researcher Adam Osman-Krinsky on Las Deliveristas Unidos, a group founded in 2020 that works to ensure safe working conditions, improve bike infrastructure, and provide pathways to unionization for app-based delivery drivers. Libertad Guerra’s writing on playwright Pedro Pietri and visual artist Adál Maldonado’s El Puerto Rican Embassy, a performance piece that mocked colonial borders through faux passports, performances, and the creation of a “Spirit Republic”, can be found Alphabet City. In total, Nueva York Chronicles will launch with 100 entries across all five boroughs, and with limitless capability for expansion.
The platform is initially co-authored by a wide range of notable guest contributors, including curator Dulcina Abreu, curator and art historian Yasmin Ramírez; scholars Marithelma Costa, Berta Jottar, Amalia Uribe Guardiola, and Beatriz Yanes Martínez; poets Sheila Maldonado and Edwin Torres; folklorist and Co-Artistic Director of the Bronx Music Hall Elena M. Martínez,; cultural anthropologist Libertad Guerra, oral historian Amy Starecheski; and community leaders and organizers including Monxo López, Museum of the City of New York’s first Latinx permanent curator and its first curator of community histories, and Rev. Juan Carlos Ruiz, a pastor of a Bay Ridge congregation and a longtime advocate for undocumented immigrants in New York City.
“With Nueva York Chronicles, we’re not only preserving the cultural record, we’re building pathways for access, collaboration, and learning,” said Sofía Reeser del Rio, Curator and Associate Director of Programs at The Clemente. “This archive creates a framework for how our stories connect across time, place, and movement, weaving the academic and the communal into one living fabric, a bilingual, participatory history built by and for the people who continue to shape New York’s Latinx future.”
Nueva York Chronicles is part of Historias Entrecruzadas, the second phase of The Clemente’s Historias initiative. The three-year-long citywide presentation of cultural programming, art commissions, and scholarship is the largest initiative in The Clemente’s thirty-year history. Historias is co-presented by the LxNY arts consortium of cultural organizations serving Latinx communities. Nueva York Chronicles will contribute to a living, participatory archive that continues to expand throughout the duration of The Clemente’s Historias initiative, ensuring that these histories remain accessible and celebrated.
Nueva York Chronicles will launch to the public on November 13, 2025. Members of the media interested in previewing the beta phase may do so by contacting Katrina Stewart at katrina@bluemedium.com.
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About The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center
Founded in 1993, The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center is a Puerto Rican/Latinx multi-arts institution with an inclusive and international vision rooted in NYC’s Lower East Side/Loisaida. The Clemente engages diverse audiences in heritage preservation, neighborhood history, and cutting-edge multicultural experimentation, emphasizing the humanities’ role in bridging civic and cultural life.
As a downtown cultural mainstay for three decades, we focus on cultivating, presenting, and preserving Puerto Rican and Latinx culture while embracing a multi-ethnic and international perspective. Committed to operating in a polyphonic manner, The Clemente provides affordable spaces to artists, small arts organizations, and independent community producers, reflecting the rich cultural diversity of the Lower East Side and New York City. Guided by our namesake’s values of culturally grounded multigenerational leadership, local empowerment, and mutuality, we are a collaborative hub for creating and co-producing multidisciplinary contemporary work.
The Clemente is a proud co-founder/partner of LxNY Consortium and the Coalition of Small Arts NYC (CoSA NYC).
About LxNY
LxNY | Latinx Arts Consortium of New York is a collaborative peer network dedicated to knowledge exchange, resource-sharing, and collective action towards systemic change. Formed in 2020 by organizations serving Latinx communities and artists across New York City, LxNY aims to transform the historical underfunding of Latinx arts by advocating for the equity-driven missions of our cultural institutions, nurturing our deep relationships with community, and stewarding our hard-fought legacies into the future. Advancing cultural work as essential work, LxNY honors the expertise of our multigenerational arts leaders and culture bearers, harnessing their collective experience to better serve the city’s diverse cultural landscape.
About Historias
Historias is a transformative citywide effort led by The Clemente that re-centers Latinx cultural narratives in New York City through exhibitions, performances, oral histories, and digital storytelling. Launched with key support from the Rauschenberg Foundation and in partnership with the Latinx Arts Consortium of New York (LxNY), Historias unfolds across three phases: Sembradas, Entrecruzadas, and Reveladas, each building on research, collaboration, and community engagement.
At its core, Historias leverages cultural work as a form of resistance to erasure. It brings together curators, researchers, artists, and communities to activate physical and digital spaces through interdisciplinary practice. By leveraging Latinx contributions to the city’s culture, space, and economy, Historias offers a more inclusive historical lens and catalyzes a reimagined cultural future, one rooted in equity, visibility, and collaborative innovation.
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For images, further background, or interviews, please contact:
Katrina Stewart
Account Manager, Visual Arts
Blue Medium
T: +1-212-675-1800
katrina@bluemedium.com
Fernando Salazar
Communications Manager
LxNY
info@lxnyarts.org |
