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Mapping the Unsung History of Puerto Rican Resistance

Hunter College students explore the story of El Barrio using the new app Radical Atmospheres.

Children in El Barrio stand before the Young Lords’ 1969 Garbage Offensive.

Alana Gonzalez, a student at Hunter College, stood at the corner of Third Avenue and 120th Street in East Harlem, New York City, with her phone in hand and wired headphones wrapped loosely around her fingers. After pressing play on the Radical Atmospheres app, the streets of Harlem quickly transformed around her into a living memory of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican political organization focused on housing, education, and healthcare issues. Through her headphones, voices recalled a march the group had organized in East Harlem in the late 1990s to protest colonial rule in Puerto Rico. Crowds moved up Third Avenue chanting slogans like “Puerto Rico sí, Yankee no” and “Pa’ arriba, pa’ abajo, los Yankee pal carajo,” where they expressed frustration with the US government’s influence over the island. Gonzalez closed her eyes briefly, taking in everything she heard before continuing down the block.

Radical Atmospheres is an audio augmented reality project created by Andrew Demirjian, a professor at Hunter College, in collaboration with the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. The app transforms East Harlem, known to many residents as El Barrio, into a living archive of Puerto Rican radical activism. The app layers oral histories, poetry and immersive soundscapes over the streets in El Barrio, guiding listeners through sites where movements of protest and liberation took place.

During a walking tour through these streets on May 7, students from Hunter College used the app to hear these stories in the very places they unfolded. Soundscapes and layered historical art pieces were activated at multiple sites, turning these “ordinary” streets into historical markers. The experience connected Puerto Rican radical activism to urgent present-day conversations around immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Latino social justice movements.

The Young Lords expanded to New York City from Chicago, where the group focused on political organizing in El Barrio during the late 1960s and early ’70s.

The audio introduced students to key figures from the Young Lords movement like Felipe Luciano and Miriam Jiménez Roman, and framed East Harlem as more than just another neighborhood in the city. Near 116th Street, students paused at a crowded intersection while the app explained the Young Lords’ free breakfast program, which combined equal food distribution with political education.

For some students, hearing those histories through their headphones while standing in the same streets where they occurred changed how they viewed Puerto Rican activism and how those movements are preserved and remembered.

Hunter College student........

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