De Queens Pa’l Mundo: A Brief History of the OLLANTAY Center for the Arts
OLLANTAY Center for the Arts founder and executive director Pedro Monge Rafuls standing in front of the OLLANTAY Gallery at 87-03 Northern Blvd., with a representative of Chemical Bank to receive a donation. Photo undated. Circa 1981-1991. Pedro Monge Rafuls Collection, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida.
Let’s say you live in Jackson Heights, it’s the early 1980s and you’re looking for things to do during the week, but like most, you don’t really want to leave the neighborhood. Bueno, here are some options: you could learn to play the harp from an Ecuadorian musician; maybe attend a lecture on classical music by a Paraguayan instructor; participate in a writing workshop led by a Cuban author; visit an exhibition of sculptures by a Puerto Rican artist; watch a play by a Chilean playwright; etc. Further enticing is the fact that all of the above activities take place at the same location: a modest storefront on Northern Blvd with a curious name. Throughout the 1980s, Hispanic immigrant arts established a home at the OLLANTAY Center for the Arts, the first Latin American cultural center in the borough and an unparalleled hub for the many talented immigrant artists who arrived in Queens beginning in the 1960s. Today, such a multicultural milieu in Queens is the norm, but back then, it was the start of a movement.
When Pedro Monge Rafuls first moved to Queens in 1974, he was already somewhat aware of its growing community of Latin American immigrants. Much of the audience at INTAR, the Hispanic theater company where Monge Rafuls worked, traveled to Manhattan from Queens to attend shows. Monge Rafuls himself was a recent arrival, an aspiring playwright who left Cuba as a teenager, just after the Revolution. He had lived and studied in Tegucigalpa and Medellín before settling briefly in Chicago, where he co-founded the first Hispanic theater company in the city, El Círculo Teatral de Chicago, in 1970. Once in Queens, Monge Rafuls understood why Hispanic audiences crossed the East River for a night of entertainment. There just wasn’t as much going on in Queens in terms of culturally relevant programming for Spanish-speaking immigrants. But that would change over time thanks to Monge Rafuls and other like-minded Hispanic community advocates.
By 1977, Monge Rafuls had formed another theater group, the OLLANTAY Theater Ensemble (OTE). The name ‘Ollantay’ was derived from a play of the same name—a forbidden love story between an Incan warrior and a princess, considered by some scholars to be the oldest, most authentic expression of Quechua literature to survive the Spanish conquest. Monge Rafuls chose to invoke this indigenous antecedent to Latin American theater precisely because its narrative predates the arrival of the Spanish, when the Incan empire stretched from Panama to Argentina, that is, long before present-day borders and nation-states.
Five centuries later, Queens boasted a vibrant, heterogeneous community from the same region, sans borders, in the belly of another empire; Colombians, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Argentines, and so on, living side by side in a much denser, modern urban context. Elsewhere, the significant Puerto Rican majority and burgeoning Nuyorican movement were still synonymous with Hispanic presence in the city. ‘Quinz’, in this sense, was and is an outlier, with no clear majority among its many Latin American diasporas.
The OLLANTAY Theater Ensemble, led by Monge Rafuls, inaugurated its traveling theater program in Queens on August 7, 1977 with a production of El delantal blanco (The White Apron), a one-act play by Croatian-born Chilean author Sergio Vodanović. The performance took place at La Casa Social Cultural Ecuatoriana, an Ecuadorian civic center in Elmhurst. Similar venues would provide a theater circuit for Spanish-language plays to travel throughout the borough: Club Perú in Richmond Hill, Sociedad Cubana de Queens in Astoria, Chile Club in Jamaica, Centro Cívico Colombiano in Elmhurst, to name a few. Other locales for OLLANTAY productions included branches of the Queens Public Library, CUNY campuses, churches, and public schools.
Pedro Monge Rafuls Collection, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida.
Pedro Monge Rafuls Collection, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida.
The following month, in September of 1977, OTE partnered with a church in Woodside to host the Hispanic Shadow Puppet Theatre of New York’s adaptation of a children’s story by Pura Belpré, the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York City. OLLANTAY’s productions would remain nomadic until securing a storefront in Jackson Heights in 1981. By then, Monge Rafuls relied on the support of a group of regular and recurring collaborators—artists and volunteers who would contribute to OLLANTAY’s success in various capacities over the next two decades. An incomplete list includes: Cuban artists Rodulfo Tardo, Gisela Hernández, Lucía Álvarez Castellón, and Jorge Hernádez, who designed the OLLANTAY logo; Colombian artists Gustavo Rojas and Luis Monje; Argentine painter Raúl Conti and his family; Puerto Rican author Marithelma Costa; Venezuelan artist Elba Damast; Cuban poets Maya Islas, Mireya Robles, and Alina Galeano; Baruch College professor Elena Martínez; and Hispanic community advocates like Betsy Dávila, Dr. Nelson Colón, Noel R. Pagan, Aida González, and Nayibe Nuñez Berger; among many others. OLLANTAY was also incorporated as a nonprofit under a new name: the OLLANTAY Center for the Arts, the first Latin American cultural center in Queens. Monge Rafuls would quit his day job and drive a cab in order to run the new organization as its artistic and executive director.
The new gallery space would provide a home to what was already an active visual arts program. Like the alternative art space movement in SoHo, the OLLANTAY Gallery originated in response to a lack of opportunities, in this case, for Latin American artists. Monge Rafuls had already helped organize several group exhibitions around Queens, partnering with larger institutions like the Queens Museum and the Jamaica Arts Center (now the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning). The latter would host OLLANTAY’s first exhibition, “Art from the Other Americas,” which opened in January of 1978 and featured sixteen Latin American artists. The following year, OLLANTAY organized smaller group exhibitions at Queens College and LaGuardia Community College, as well as the first Latin American festival in Queens, which coincided with the opening of an unprecedented, two-part exhibition of 28 Latin American artists at the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park—a fitting location, in the heart of the “World’s Borough,” just across the Unisphere, its most iconic symbol.
Top left: Art from the Other Americas (1978). Top right: New York Through Latin Eyes (1979). Bottom left: 14 Latin American Artists (1979). Bottom right: 5 Young Artists (n.d.). Pedro Monge Rafuls Collection, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida.
OLLANTAY Gallery, one of only a few professional art galleries in the neighborhood, allowed the visual arts program to expand considerably and showcase emerging and established Hispanic artists alike, including the Ceballos brothers (Victor and Carlos), Gladys Triana, Juan Sánchez, Jorge Luis Rodríguez, Elba Damast, and Gustavo Rojas, among many others. In effect, the OLLANTAY Gallery functioned as a smaller, Queens-based satellite to the influential Cayman Gallery in SoHo: an informal and inclusive space where group shows of Puerto Rican, Nuyorican, Latino, and Latin American artists——in addition to some non-Hispanic artists—were generally organized by committee and curated by Monge Rafuls around broad, yet provocative themes or a specific artistic medium.
Meanwhile, OLLANTAY, even with limited funding, broadened its scope to include an ambitious array of programming, utilizing the gallery space to host theater performances, readings, concerts, screenings, workshops, and lectures—essentially any and all manifestations of Latin American immigrant arts and culture in Queens. The organization also launched a folk arts program that actively sought to research, preserve, and promote Latin American folk traditions by recruiting local artisans to teach workshops and by producing materials such as posters and pamphlets that explained the origins and significance of holidays like Three Kings Day and Day of the Dead.
The OLLANTAY Center for the Arts was instrumental in several historic convenings as well, from helping to establish the Queens Arts Consortium in 1980 to an important Hispanic community outreach event with Mayor Ed Koch in 1984. Other noteworthy gatherings include the “First Latin American Writers Conference in New York” in 1987 and the “First Latin American Visual Arts Conference in New York” in 1990, which was later adapted into a book. In addition, OLLANTAY organized a series of three conferences in 1989 that brought together New York-based Cuban, Colombian, and Dominican writers, respectively, for the first time, under the direction of Silvio Torres-Saillant, who took over OLLANTAY’s literature program from Laureano Corces in 1988.
Similar community-oriented literary gatherings sought to critically engage with authors on topics found in their writing that were also relevant to the broader Hispanic community, such as family, immigration, gender and sex, identity, culture, and so on. The result was a three-part series published by the OLLANTAY Press that effectively asserts the intrinsic value of Latin American and Latino literature for both Hispanic audiences and the general public—a unique and prescient model to preserve discourse on many of the same topics that the Latine community is still addressing today. One example is the ongoing debate on labels like “Hispanic” vs. “Latino.” Neither is described as adequate, but OLLANTAY publications went further by including scare quotes around such terms, as well as footnotes to further problematize them.
The publishing arm of OLLANTAY, which was launched in 1983 with a book of short stories by Peruvian author Carlos Johnson, would become much more active towards the end of the decade, as the organization shifted its focus—in part due to looming cuts to arts funding. By the early 1990s, OLLANTAY relocated to a second floor space on Roosevelt Avenue and changed its name to the OLLANTAY Art Heritage Center, ostensibly to document for posterity the contributions of Latin American arts and culture in Queens. Unable to host a gallery at the new space, the visual arts program was phased out.
Around the same time, Monge Rafuls decided to launch the OLLANTAY Theater Magazine and serve as editor-in-chief for the new publication. The first issue was released in January 1993. The magazine was published twice a year, and included interviews, scholarly articles, reviews, obituaries, and a section called “The Playwright Speaks,” which invited Latino playwrights to bypass critics and engage directly with readers in regard to their work. Each issue also incorporated short summaries in English or Spanish throughout to promote language accessibility and ended with an excerpt from a play, thereby ensuring the preservation of a corpus of Latino, Chicano, Nuyorican, and Latin American playwriting.
The OLLANTAY Press, in turn, produced a modest catalog that includes several edited collections, such as PoeSída (1995), a groundbreaking anthology edited by Carlos A. Rodríguez Matos that features Latino poets addressing the AIDS epidemic and its particularly devastating, yet under-appreciated impact on the Latino community in New York (see: “Silencio=Muerte: An Interview with Julian de Mayo on the Legacy of ACT-UP’s Latina/o Caucus”). A directory of Latin American writers in New York City, the first of its kind, was also published in 1990.
OLLANTAY continued to host readings and workshops, as well as stage theater productions well into the 2000s, though its presence in the borough diminished over time. The playwriting intensive would celebrate 35 years in 2012, having invited numerous distinguished Latin American playwrights to lead workshops, including José Triana, Hugo Argüelles, Emilio Carballido, Eduardo Rovner, Ricardo Halac, Gabriela Roepke, Sergio Vodanović, Edilio Peña, and Rodolfo Santana. Monge Rafuls, a renowned playwright in his own right, would eventually donate a portion of his papers to the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage collection and the bulk to New York University, where it is held in Special Collections.
Otherwise, the history of the OLLANTAY Center for the Arts remains largely inaccessible. In my case, it was pure luck that I picked up a used copy of a book from a shelf at WordUp Books in Washington Heights. From there, I tracked down more books published by OLLANTAY, as well as back issues of OLLANTAY Theater Magazine, in circulation at several branches of the public library system in New York City, and occasionally for sale online. Other traces around Queens include Librería Barco de Papel, a community bookstore in Jackson Heights and the de facto home for Spanish-language literature in Queens, which previously collaborated with OLLANTAY on numerous events. The Feria del Libro Hispana/Latina de Nueva York en Queens, which honored Monge Rafuls in 2011, celebrated its 17th year earlier this month, while venues like Terraza 7 continue to cultivate pan-ethnic, immigrant arts and culture, with an emphasis on Latin American folk genres and Latin jazz. Most recently, LaGuardia Community College inaugurated its Casa de las Américas in 2022.
It would be impossible to recreate the circumstances or unique trajectory of an organization like OLLANTAY. But Queens is the future, even when we look to its past. The demographics of New York City’s Hispanic population continue to look more like Queens did in the 1970s. That said, further research remains to be done in order to fully comprehend OLLANTAY’s legacy as 1) an under-appreciated appendage of the Latin American literary tradition, 2) a vanguard institution of Latino playwriting and literary criticism, 3) an arts organization that promoted Latin American visual artists long before mainstream attention from the art world, or like the play from which it derives its name, an authentic and enduring expression of the immigrant experience in Queens.
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To learn more about the OLLANTAY Center for the Arts, follow @ollantay_qns on Instagram.
Néstor David Pastor is a writer, editor, and translator from Queens, NY. He is the founding editor of Intervenxions, a Latinx arts and culture publication of the Latinx Project at NYU, and Huellas, a bilingual magazine featuring long-form writing by emerging Latin American and Latine writers. His past editorial work includes the award-winning NACLA Report on the Americas, a print magazine by the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), and CENTRO Voices, a digital publication of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. He is the editor of Latinx Politics–Resistance, Disruption, and Power (2020), Intervenxions Vol. 1 (2022) and Intervenxions Vol. 2 (2023). In 2022, he was the recipient of the Queens Arts Fund ‘New Work’ grant. Most recently, he was selected to participate in the 2023 NALAC Leadership Institute. An essay on Cayman Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art is forthcoming in Nuyorican Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press, 2024). To see his full portfolio and current projects, visit: www.ndpastor.com