Tag Archives: Mexico

ARTIST TALK AT MEDIANOCHE – Thurs, Jan 4, 6:30PM

“Turnstyle”
A transnational, interactive installation by Zulma Aguiar

Through February 2, 2007

Artist Talk: Thursday, January 4, 2007 at 6:30PM

Recreating the experience of crossing the U.S. – Mexico border is by its very nature controversial and new media artist Zulma Aguiar plunges waist deep into the fray with her interactive video installation Turnstyle.

As any tourist, day laborer, businessman, or immigrant (legal and illegal) will attest, these border crossings divide North from South. Turnstyle cleverly delivers the style of each side through the persona of its border agents who are portrayed by the Mexican American artist herself. According to Aguiar, “One is María and the other is Maria. The Mexican guard’s name has an accent over the “i.” When I play the American border agent, I am portraying my American self. When I play the Mexican one, I am steeped in my Mexican identity. The same white-gloved hand waves people through and keeps them from entering.”

Turnstyle represents the reality of border crossing as a transnational experience, where both sides are patrolled by Mexicans or their descendants. exploding popular myths about any simple white/brown dichotomy. In an urban landscape unfamiliar with border life, Aguiar reconstructs an emblematic turnstile through which visitors pass back and forth, under the encouragement or harsh scrutiny of the border agents.

Zulma Aguiar is a new media artist from Calexico, California. She is a Masters in Fine Arts candidate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she collaborated with Aeronautical Engineer Rafael Antonio Irizarry and time-based media artist Jonathan Lee Marcus to create an interactive installation based on her U.S. – Mexico border experience.

MediaNoche is a project of PRDream and is located in Spanish Harlem, just blocks away from Museum Mile. By subway, take the IRT#6 train to 103rd Street and walk north along Lexington Avenue to 106th Street. Turn right on 106th Street. MediaNoche is on the north side of the street, in the middle of the block. Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 3PM – 7PM.

Mexico Now! presents ABSENCE/PRESENCE AT MEDIANOCHE

Opening Reception: WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 6PM – 9PM

PLEASE NOTE NEW ADDRESS:
MEDIANOCHE
1355 PARK AVENUE, FIRST FLOOR
(ENTRANCE ON 102ND STREET)

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ABSENCE/PRESENCE
an exhibition in two parts: at MediaNoche and Casa Puebla
September 4 – October 12, 2007
Drawings and Mulitmedia by Antonia Guerrero
Opening Reception at MediaNoche: Wednesday, September 12, 6PM – 9PM

Two concurrent exhibitions allow artist Antonia Guerrero to explore the Mexican immigrant experience through different media, articulating a lightness of being that challenges our notions of culture and identity. Crossing the Mexico/U.S. border becomes a rite of passage that is self-contradictory, self-affirming and transformative.

The immigrant is iconically in a state of coming and going, of absence and presence. Through her drawings, the artist establishes a verisimilitude of home at Casa Puebla that is overturned by the virtual reality of a foreign land at MediaNoche. Both become illusive worlds that do not clash as much as meld the familiar with the unfamiliar.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Antonia Guerrero is an award-winning Mexican artist working in a variety of media. Her recent work combines photorealistic paintings and drawings re-purposed for her multimedia installations that include video, photographs, digital prints and performance. She has exhibited throughout the U.S. and Mexico, including the Snite Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art of Mexico. Guerrero studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico City and at Pratt Institute in New York City.

Rafael Tufino, 1922 – 2008

PRdream mourns the passing of our great painter and friend Rafael Tufino

Rafael Tufino is one of the central figures in the history of 20th Century Puerto Rican art. A versatile artist in many media, Tufino has been a major force in founding and furthering modern Puerto Rican art–both on the Island and in the Caribbean Diaspora.

Tufino’s work spanned a period of more than 65 years, depicting Puerto Rican life in urban New York, and pre-industrial Puerto Rico. While the artist’s work often celebrates popular traditions, including folk artists, religious and secular festivals, Tufino remains committed to fostering the appreciation of the Island’s African cultural contributions, especially as expressed in dance and music. Tufino’s images have become a trademark of Puerto Rico’s rich cultural heritage.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Tufino moved permanently to Puerto Rico with his Puerto Rican parents in 1936, initially studying under the Spanish painter Alejandro Sánchez Felipe and with Juan Rosado at his sign-painting workshop in San Juan. In the late 1940s he studied painting, printmaking and mural painting at the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico with José Chavez Morado, Antonio Rodríguez Luna and Castro Pacheco. He joined the staff of the Division of Community Education in Puerto Rico as a poster artist and illustrator in 1950, serving as director of the graphic arts workshop of this division from 1957 until 1963. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 and the National Award for the Arts in 1985. He had two major retrospectives at El Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan, Puerto Rico; and El Museo del Barrio in New York, in 2002 and 2003, respectively. PRdream has an extensive interview with the artist in its archives, interview clips may be viewed along with his work in LA GALERIA of this web site.

LATINAS IN CINEMA: FILMWORKS BEYOND THE GLASS CEILING

Pagan Images, Inc., in association with Anthology Film Archives, cordially invites you to the NewLatino Filmmakers Screening Series – The best and only independent Latino “cinematheque” showcase in New York City — now in its 6th year! — is still ONLY $5! Docs, shorts & features. “Come early, stay late, pay one price.”

When: Wednesday, July 30, 2008 – 6~9:30PM
Where: Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue at Second Street
Price: $5 admission ~ at the box office

6:00PM – Documentary Shorts Program
7:15PM – Narrative Shorts Program
8:150PM – Narrative Feature

“LATINAS IN CINEMA: FILMWORKS BEYOND THE GLASS CEILING”

Curated by Edwin Pagan

NewLatino Filmmakers puts the spotlight on creative Latinas working behind the cameras in both the independent film and Hollywood systems as image-makers. This emerging crop of dynamic filmmakers and producers are putting their unique mark on the industry with their own unique spin on the Latin Film New Wave, and blazing the trail as today’s emerging auteurs. Featuring short-form documentary, narrative shorts and feature presentations. Live panel discussion and Q&A with the filmmakers.

6:00PM NEWLATINO FILMMAKERS – DOCUMENTARY SERIES

* AL OTRO LADO Natalia Almada, Altamura Films, (2006, 66 Minutes, Video)

Al Otro Lado (To the Other Side)” tells the human story behind illegal immigration and drug trafficking between the U.S. and Mexico through the eyes of Magdiel, a 23-year-old fisherman and aspiring composer who dreams of a better life. For people south of the border, the “other side” is the dream of an impossibly rich United States, where even menial jobs can support families and whole communities that have been left behind. For people north of the border, “Al Otro Lado” sheds light on harsh choices that their neighbors to the south often face because of economic crisis.

As movingly chronicled in “Al Otro Lado,” Natalia Almada’s debut feature, the border is a place where one people’s dreams collide with another people’s politics, and the 200-year-old tradition of corrido music vibrantly chronicles it all. In fact, if you really want to understand what is happening on the U.S./Mexico border, listen to the corridos, troubadour-like ballads that have become the voice of people whose views are rarely heard in mainstream media.

7:15PM NEWLATINO FILMMAKERS – SHORT FILM PROGRAM

* JOLOPEO, Glenys Javier, Director / Michael Diaz, Producer (2007, 5 Minutes, Video)

Living that life leads to death, I choose to LIVE!

* SOLEDAD IS GONE FOREVER, Mabel Valdiviezo, Writer/Director (2007, 14 Minutes, 16MM)

SOLEDAD IS GONE FOREVER is a spellbinding, visually stunning, psychological drama that explores the long-term psychological impact of political persecution. Based on real accounts, this film presents an intimate portrait of a young immigrant photographer living in San Francisco, Soledad Gonzales, who learns her father’s remains have been found in a mass grave in Chile. Soledad’s recurring visions of chilling childhood images shatter her life, making her discover that these are real memories that have been repressed for twenty years.

Torn by her aunt Delia’s advice to forget the past but faced by the implications of her father’s death, Soledad must make a crucial decision. Does she have the courage to pursue the truth and will this realization finally bring peace to her tortured soul?

* LOSS OF INNOCENCE IN LOISAIDA, Veronica Caicedo, Writer/Director (2007, 30 Minutes, Video)

Joana is a curious teen ready to explore and have sex and willing to go all the way with her boyfriend, Tommy. Not prepared for the situation, Tommy must score some condoms — FAST — but he must first get past the gatekeeper to his bliss: the local pharmacist, who also just happens to be Joana’s father!

8:15PM NEWLATINO FILMMAKERS – FEATURE PRESENTATION



MUNECA, Christina Soto, Writer/Director (2007, 70 Minutes, Video)


You find love in the most unexpected places. All Esteban wants to do, is to be happy and recapture his creative inspiration. With the death of his muse, and best friend, Pepe — a miniature fox terrier — it seems as if everyone in his life is trying to push their idea of a replacement on him with that of a perfect woman. What’s a man to do?

ABOUT THE SERIES

NewLatino Filmmakers showcases emerging Latino filmmakers/producers whose work is contributing toward the face of the Latino Film New Wave and who have not yet had a major commercial theatrical release. It also features non-Latino filmmakers/producers whose films are Latino-themed and/or whose primary subject matter touches upon the Latino/Latin American experience in a respectful manner, and who have not yet had a major commercial theatrical release. The series is now in its six year and is organized in collaboration with New Filmmakers at Anthology Film Archives.

Anthology Film Archives is America’s only year-round film cinematheque and is one of the few festivals in the world today that is entirely curated and administered by filmmakers. Currently celebrating its 35th year of serving the independent film community. (www.anthologyfilmarchives.org)

“Tell’em Who You Are” screening at Camaradas El Barrio

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Preview Screening & Fundraiser

DATE: DECEMBER 10, 7p.m.
LOCATION: Camaradas El Barrio, 2241 1st Ave /115 St./ Manhattan

Please join us in support of the documentary “Tell’em Who You Are.”

We will be screening exclusive clips from the film followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Michelle García.

The Wall is rising along the southern border. Even as the federal government reports construction delays and cost overruns, the Department of Homeland Security condemns hundreds of acres of privately owned land, Tejano owned land, the birthright of gU.S. citizens, whose roots in the region run centuries deep.

You are invited to preview a documentary film, a work in progress that strikes at the Border Wall by rescuing memory of a region and its people whose land and identity has come under siege for over 150 years and the story it tells about being an “American.”

Film Summary:

The U.S.-Mexico border occupies a mythical place in the U.S. psyche, a wasteland of lawlessness, dirty and wild. With that image firmly rooted in our minds,, the U.S. government sold the public on the idea of a multi-billion dollar Border Wall across hundreds of miles of the southern border.

Turns out, there’s some truth to those tales and legends. Blood once soaked the brush country and Tejano and Mexican rebels sacked towns and traded gunfire with Texas Rangers and Army soldiers. My heart pumps with the blood of those rebels, I am their heir and successor and the spirit of their cause summons me home.

Tell’em Who You Are is a return home, the embattled South Texas frontier, to recover memory, the historical memory of the Tejano-owned land that will be lost to the wall. Fighting on the front lines of Border Wall battle are the descendents of those largely known Tejano rebels and revolutionaries, continuing in a struggle for respect that began over a century ago. Our ancestors, the bandits and outlaws of Hollywood stories were actually Tejanos defending their protect land,identity and dignity from colonization. More than a century later, their fight is now ours.

MUSICA DE CAMARA PRESENTS SOPRANO CAMILLE ORTIZ IN A SPRING CONCERT

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CAMILLE ORTIZ IN A SPRING CONCERT

Musica de Camara Inc. presents a concert, “Painted By Sea and Sun”, at the Museum of the City of New York, featuring the soprano Camille Ortiz on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 3 pm. The Museum os located at 1220 Fifth Avenue at East 104th Street in New York City. Admission is free. Ms Ortiz will sing works by Jesus Guridi, Enrique Granados, Hugo Wolf, Claude Debussy and Heitor Villa Lobos. She will be joined at the piano by Jeanne-Minette Cilliers.

Camille Ortiz was born in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico and completed her Master’s Degree of Music at the Manhattan School of Music under the tutelage of Joan Patenaude-Yarnell. She appeared in the Festival of Interpretation of Spanish Song in Granada, Spain where she worked with the acclaimed Spanish mezzo soprano Teresa Berganza. In Italy, she sang leading opera roles with the Centro Studi Lirica and at the Scuola di Leonardo da Vinci in Rome, she completed her Italian studies. Among the numerous venues in which she has been presented in concert are the Carlos Chavez Hall at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma of Mexico, the Sala Manuel de Falla in Granada, Spain, the Tenri Cultural Institute and the Bruno Walter Auditorium. She has been the subject of a nationally broadcast television program on the network Telemundo and last season, after participating in a Master Class conducted by the renown soprano Martina Arroyo, Ms. Ortiz won accolades for her opera portrayals in the subsequent concert “Prelude to Performance” at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College. A winner of the 2008 Gerda Lissner Foundation Award and a finalist in the coveted 2009 Liederkranz Competition, she is founder-director of ALMA, an organization that promotes Hispanic American classical repertoire.

Currently on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music, South African pianist Jeanne-Minette Cilliers has been called “a pianistic poet” and has garnered rave reviews for her color-rich and imaginative performances. Much in demand as a collaborator, she has performed in Austria, Germany, Israel, Japan, Sweden, South Africa and across the United States. She fosters a strong interest in contemporary music and her recording of Dominick Argento’s “Andre Expedition” will be released next season. Ms. Cilliers has earned both her Bachelor and Master’s Degress of Music with distinction at the University of Michigan, while studying with fellow South African Anton Nel who is a Naumberg Competition Gold medalist. Ms. Cilliers remains the first and only recipient of an Artist Diploma in Vocal Accompaniment from the Manhattan School of Music. Her upcoming schedule of performances include appearances in New York City, San Francisco, Sweden, South Africa and the Caribbean.
Now celebrating its 29th Year, and founded by soprano Eva de La O, Musica de Camara has presented Puerto Rican, Hispanic and non-Hispanic classical musicians in concert in major concert venues such as Alice Tully Hall; Lincoln Center, the Merkin Concert Hall; Kaufman Cultural Center as well as community centers, schools, colleges, churches and museums. The organization also travels to public schools in under-served communities with its Lecture Demonstration Program.

This concert has been made possible in part with the support of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Council, the New York State Senate and Assembly, the East Harlem Chamber of Commerce, the Museum of the City of New York, the Con Edison Company, Bronx Lebanon Hospital, Consultiva Internacional of Puerto Rico, EMK Enterprises, Deloitte LLP, First Republic Bank, Credit Suisse, Fiddler – Gonzalez – Rodriguez PSC, the Delmar Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

PRDREAM’s SUMMER FILM FEST formerly the Handball Court Summer Films Series

PRDREAM’S SUMMER FILMS SCHEDULE IN THE 103rd STREET COMMUNITY GARDEN (103rd Street and Park Avenue)

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Contact: Judith Escalona
212.828.0401
judith.escalonaATgmail.com

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From Elisa Perea’s “Nogales: Aqui Es….”

**Joe Falcon and Coco Rico play opening night, August 11

FILM SCHEDULE

Tuesday, August 11, at Sunset (approximately 8:30PM)
La Venganza de Correa Cotto: Feature Crime Story, 1969. Puerto Rico. Spanish, no subtitles. Some graphic scenes.
Producer Anthony Felton will be available for questions

Correa

Correa

Correa

Wednesday, August 12, at Sunset (approximately 8:30PM)
La Palomilla: Feature Crime Story, 1970. Puerto Rico. Spanish, no subtitles. Some graphic scenes.
Actors Jaime Sanchez (La Palomilla) and Ritchie Velez (cellmate) will be available for questions

Thursday, August 13, at Sunset (approximately 8:30PM)
Nogales: Aqui Es… : Documentary. 2009. Mexico. Spanish, English subtitles.
Filmmaker Elisa Perea will be available for questions

Thursday, August 20, at Sunset (approximately 8:30PM)
Taking Root: Documentary. 2008. English, no subtitles.

Thursday, August 27, at Sunset (approximately 8:30PM)
Addicted to Plastic: Documentary. 2009. English, no subtitles.

Friday, August 28, at Sunset (approximately 8:30PM)
Swim the River: Documentary. 2006. English, no subtitles.

THE PUERTO RICAN CRIME FILM AS PROTEST

This year PRDREAM’s Summer Film Fest presents two Puerto Rican crime films La Venganza de Correa Cotto, directed by Jeronimo Mitchel; and La Palomilla, directed by Efrain Lopez Neris, as an exploration of crime as a form of protest. Classics in their own right, they were produced in Puerto Rico in the seventies and reflected an earlier period of transformation and transvaluation of island society brought on by U.S. investment policies known as Operation Bootstrap.

These films portray the law as an external imposition, foreign to the values of the common folk, and the outlaw as the unconscious expression of revolt. Both Correa Cotto and Jose Anibal Gerena Lafontaine (La Palomilla) were simple men, thrust by circumstances into extraordinary acts of transgression that challenged the colonial status quo. Correa and Gerena were men of their times, embodying the passions of a people experiencing the trauma of rapid urbanization and displacement. Anthony Felton who also produced Correa Cotto: Asi Me Llaman will be present for a Q&A after the film. Jaime Sanchez. A leading actor in both Puerto Rican and American cinema, who stars in La Palomilla will be present after that screening. Ritchie Velez, an actor who appears as a cell mate in La Palomila will also be present. Some graphic scenes.

BORDER ART: AN INTRODUCTION

Elisa Perea’s Nogales, Aqui Es gives an extensive overview of the current art scene in Nogales that sits Janus-face between Mexico and the U.S. Actually, there are two towns named Nogales, the one South of the border is highlighted here as home to a fine pool of artists whose work clearly reflects the transnational nature of life on the border. In Spanish with English subtitles.

IT’S THE ENVIRONMENT…

In keeping with our practice of presenting films dealing with the environment and ecology, the summer film series presents three remarkable documentaries.

Taking Root: The story of the Kenyan Green Movement spurred by Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai. In seeking to stave off the starvation of her community, this woman challenges modern Kenyan life, teaching her people once again how to plant and grow their own. In the process, she uncovers the legacy of colonialism, the forgotten history, the lost culture and tradition of a ravaged land.

Addicted to Plastic: A revealing documentary about our use and abuse of plastics. So dependent have we become on things made of plastic, and so accustomed to their quick disposal, that we are choking our planet, fish and birds. There is an area in the world’s ocean that has been likened to a cesspool floating with every type of plastic imaginable, old and new.

Swim the River: Looks at one man’s ambition to swim the entire length of the Hudson River in order to draw attention to its contamination and destruction. Chris Swain swims from the Adirondack Mountains to New York City, braving whitewater, sewage snapping turtles, hydroelectric dams, homeland security patrols, factory outfalls, and PCB exposure.

CANCELLED DUE TO RAIN! Nogales: Aqui Es… – Free Screening at the 103rd St. Community Garden

PRDREAM’S SUMMER FILMS SCHEDULE IN THE 103rd STREET COMMUNITY GARDEN (103rd Street and Park Avenue)

Thursday, August 13, at Sunset (approximately 8:30PM)
Nogales: Aqui Es… : Documentary. 2009. Mexico. Spanish, English subtitles.
Filmmaker Elisa Perea will be available for questions

BORDER ART: AN INTRODUCTION

Nogales

Elisa Perea’s Nogales, Aqui Es gives an extensive overview of the current art scene in Nogales that sits Janus-face between Mexico and the U.S. Actually, there are two towns named Nogales, the one South of the border is highlighted here as home to a fine pool of artists whose work clearly reflects the transnational nature of life on the border. In Spanish with English subtitles.

Nogales

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Contact: Judith Escalona
212.828.0401
judith.escalonaATgmail.com


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América Latina: Nueva Literatura de Extremo Occidente, II

Literature at Americas Society
Americas Society ¦ 680 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065 ¦ www.americas-society.org

Roundtable discussion (in Spanish)

América Latina: Nueva Literatura de Extremo Occidente, II

Thursday, October 29
7:00 pm
Free admission

Novelist and poet Mayra Santos-Febres (Puerto Rico) will lead a discussion with fellow writers Fernando Iwasaki (Peru), Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia), Cristina Rivera-Garza (Mexico/USA), and Jorge Volpi (Mexico) on the state of Latin American literature today. This program also celebrates the publication of Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash, translated by Alfred Mac Adam (Open Letter, 2009).

Presented in collaboration with the Salón Literario Libroamérica, a non-profit organization whose mission is the internationalization of Puerto Rican literature. We thank the Consulate General of Peru in New York for helping to promote this event.

Reservations:
Americas Society Members: Reserve today at membersres@americas-society.org .
Non-Members: Reserve online now.

Americas Society gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our Literature Program donors: Honorary Benefactor Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat, The Reed Foundation, and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and U.S. Universities. The Literature Program is also made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. In-kind support is provided by the Salón Literario Libroamérica.

For Puerto Ricans, Sotomayor’s Success Stirs Pride

By DAVID GONZALEZ
New York Times (August 6, 2009)

In the summer of 1959, Edwin Torres landed a $60-a-week job and wound up on the front page of El Diario. He had just been hired as the first Puerto Rican assistant district attorney in New York – and probably, he thinks, the entire United States.

He still recalls the headline: “Exemplary Son of El Barrio Becomes Prosecutor.”

“You would’ve thought I had been named attorney general,” he said. “That’s how big it was.”

Half a century later, the long and sometimes bittersweet history of Puerto Ricans in New York is expected to add a celebratory chapter today as the Senate confirms Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Her personal journey – from a single-parent home in the South Bronx projects to the Ivy League and an impressive legal career – has provoked a fierce pride in many other Puerto Ricans who glimpse reflections of their own struggles.

“This is about the acceptance that eluded us,” said Mr. Torres, 78, who himself earned distinction as a jurist, novelist and raconteur. “It is beyond anybody’s imagination when I started that a Puerto Rican could ascend to that position, to the Supreme Court.”

Arguably the highest rung that any Puerto Rican has yet reached in this country, the nomination of Judge Sotomayor is a watershed event for Puerto Rican New York. It builds on the achievements that others of her generation have made in business, politics, the arts and pop culture. It extends the legacy of an earlier, lesser-known generation who created social service and educational institutions that persist today, helping newcomers from Mexico and the Dominican Republic.

Yet the city has also been a place of heartbreak. Though Puerto Ricans were granted citizenship in 1917 and large numbers of them arrived in New York in the 1950s, poverty and lack of opportunity still pockmark some of their neighborhoods. A 2004 report by a Hispanic advocacy group showed that compared with other Latino groups nationwide, Puerto Ricans had the highest poverty rate, the lowest average family income and the highest unemployment rate for men.

In politics, the trailblazer Herman Badillo saw his career go from a series of heady firsts in the 1960s to frustration in the 1980s when his dreams of becoming the city’s first Puerto Rican mayor were foiled by Harlem’s political bosses. Just four years ago, Fernando Ferrer was trounced in his bid against Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

All those setbacks lose their sting, if only for a moment, in the glow of Judge Sotomayor’s achievement, which many of her fellow Puerto Ricans say is as monumental for them as President Obama’s victory was for African-Americans. It has affirmed a sense of Puerto Rican identity at a moment when that distinction is often obscured by catch-all labels like Latino and Hispanic – and even as it is subjected to negative comparisons.

“Many elite Latin Americans have implied that Puerto Ricans blew it, because we had citizenship and did nothing,” said Lillian Jimenez, a documentary filmmaker who co-produced a series of television ads in support of Judge Sotomayor’s nomination. “But we were the biggest Spanish-speaking group in New York for decades, and bore the brunt of discrimination, especially in the 1950s. We struggled for our rights. We have people everywhere doing all kinds of things. But that history has not been known.”

That history is in danger of disappearing in East Harlem, long the cradle of Puerto Rican New York. After waves of gentrification and development, parts of the area are now being advertised as Upper Yorkville, a new annex to the predominantly white Upper East Side. While the poor have stayed behind, many of East Harlem’s successful sons and daughters have scattered to the suburbs.

“We have a whole intellectual and professional class that is invisible – people who came up though the neighborhood, with a working-class background, who really excelled,” said Angelo Falcon, president of the National Institute for Latino Policy.

“But it’s so dispersed, people don’t see it. They do not make up a real, physical community, but they have the identity.”

For those who paved the way for Judge Sotomayor, embracing that identity was the first step in charting their personal and professional paths out of hardship. Manuel del Valle, 60, an overachiever from the housing projects on Amsterdam Avenue, made the same leaps as the judge – to Princeton University and Yale Law School – but preceded her by five years.

Taking a cue from the black students at Princeton, he and the handful of working-class Puerto Ricans from New York pressured university officials to offer a course on Puerto Rican history and to admit more minority students. They saw their goal as creating a class of lawyers, doctors, writers and activists who would use their expertise to lift up their old neighborhoods.

“Talk about arrogance,” said Mr. del Valle, who now teaches law in Puerto Rico. “We actually believed we would have a dynamic impact on all the institutions American society had to offer.”

Judge Sotomayor’s nomination, he said, is a vindication of those efforts.

“We were invisible,” he said. “She made us visible.”

In New York, many have welcomed the judge’s visibility during a summer when the most celebrated – and reviled – local politicians were two Puerto Rican state senators who brought the state government to a standstill by mounting an abortive coup against their fellow Democrats.

“She really came at a moment when there is a public reassessment of the value of identity politics through this brouhaha in the Senate,” said Ms. Davila, a professor of anthropology at New York University who has written extensively on Puerto Rican and Latino identity. “Here came this woman who reinvigorated us with the idea that a Latina can have a lot to contribute, not just to their own group, but to the entire American society.”

But it is among her own – in the South Bronx, East Harlem or the Los Sures neighborhood of Brooklyn – where Judge Sotomayor’s success resonates loudest, for the simple reason that many people understand the level of perseverance she needed to achieve it.

Orlando Plaza, 41, who took time off from his doctoral studies in history about five years ago to open Camaradas, a popular bar in East Harlem, sees her appeal as a sort of ethnic Rorschach test.

“Whether it’s growing up in the Bronx, going to Catholic school or being from a single-parent household, there are so many tropes in her own story that we feel pride that someone from a background like ours achieved something so enormous,” he said. “This is the real Jenny from the block.”

And it is on the block, among the men and women who left Puerto Rico decades ago so their children might one day become professionals, where her story is most sweetly savored. The faces of the men and women playing dominoes or shooting pool at the Betances Senior Center in the Bronx attest to decades of hard work.

Many of them came to New York as teenagers more out of despair than dreams. Lucy Medina, who arrived in the 1950s, worked as a keypunch operator and in other jobs as she singlehandedly raised two children. Today, her son is a captain in the city’s Department of Correction and her daughter is a real estate executive.

Impressive as the judge’s accomplishments are, Ms. Medina is more impressed with the judge’s mother, Celina Sotomayor, who did what she had to do in order to raise two successful children in the projects.

“Her mother and I are very similar,” said Ms. Medina, 77. “I know what she went through. We sacrificed ourselves so our children would get an education and get ahead. A lot of women here have done that. We stayed on top of our children and made sure they didn’t get sidetracked.”