Latinx Placemaking in Filadelfia: The PHLAFF Experience
A mural of Doña Iris at Villa Africana Colobó by Puerto Rican artist Celso González. Photo by author.
Having worked in various capacities with several Latinx festivals over the years, each experience has been unique in the way a sense of identity, place, and community is conveyed. The Philadelphia Latino Film Festival, or PHLAFF, is no exception, ostensibly serving as a showcase for the undervalued and underrepresented work of Latinx filmmakers. PHLAFF, however, has evolved to become much more than a film festival. Transitioning to a hybrid format for its 11th edition, the virtual component adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic remains as a complement to in-person programming around the city of Philadelphia. And with the reopening of local economies, the festival could map its pan-Latinx, largely Puerto Rican DNA in a way that embodied the practices of creative placemaking, a popular and broad approach that “integrates arts, culture, and design activities into efforts that strengthen communities.”¹ This is very much intentional, a byproduct of festival curation that took place over the course of eight days in late May and early June.
El Bembé & Villa Africana Colobó
A striking example of creative placemaking within the festival occurred during El Bembé II: Places of Power, which was held on the penultimate day of PHLAFF at Villa Africana Colobó, one of six community gardens established by Norris Square Neighborhood Project (NSNP) between 1980 and 2006. The garden is located in West Kensington, in north Philadelphia, an area once overcome by urban blight and the drug epidemic. One of its founders, Doña Iris Brown, welcomed me to the space as volunteers were preparing for the event—the second in a series of events to activate the garden, with a third event scheduled for the Fall. El Bembé also celebrated its second year as part of festival programming. In this case, Villa Africana Colobó would be premiering a community art exhibition in collaboration with Termite TV that utilized augmented and virtual reality to present the stories of long-term residents from the neighborhood.
Doña Iris is one such elder. Her family has been in Philadelphia for close to five decades and are originally from Loíza, Puerto Rico, the cradle of Black Puerto Rican culture, resistance, and heritage on the archipelago. It was Doña Iris, along with co-founder Tomasita Romero and a group of women calling themselves Grupo Motivos, who partnered with NSNP and helped to revitalize the abandoned lots that would become Villa Africana Colobó and five other urban gardens in the neighborhood.² Villa Africana Colobó, in particular, exists as a satellite to the Loíza community, its African influence most visible in several small huts built years ago by volunteers. For El Bembé—which in Puerto Rico may signify a boisterous celebration with dancing and libation—the garden would feature Afro-Caribbean expression through the hip-hop of El Hijo de Borikén and the Puerto Rican bomba fusion of El Laberinto del Coco. Throughout the festival, the two acts, along with Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Dayme Arocena, would participate in a kind of informal residency around the city. Arocena, for example, would premiere a composition entitled “Treinta vueltas” at the Barnes Foundation, with El Laberinto del Coco playing an energetic set to close the evening.³ The event was part of First Friday!, a monthly curated series of performance, art, and cuisine. Here, it should be noted how PHLAFF moves from the downtown area encompassing Philadelphia’s cultural, historical, and municipal district, to a historically Puerto Rican neighborhood.⁴ West Kensington thus becomes a destination for festival-goers, presumably outsiders and community members alike, rather than a site of extraction via luxury development and real estate speculation. As such, the atmosphere on Saturday was one of a block party, with a live-stream available thanks to festival partner PhillyCam.
Doña Iris’ decision to stay in the neighborhood and devote her time to repurposing vacant lots—not unlike the community gardens created and maintained by Puerto Rican residents in the Lower East Side of Manhattan—is an example of how placemaking endures. Her strategy emphasizes horticulture, a word she playfully breaks into two parts: -culture, she says, was immediately understood in terms of bringing people together, celebrating heritage, and so on; horti-, on the other hand, required a process of trial and error. So much so that Doña Iris recalls a condescending visitor to the garden explaining that a certain plant species wouldn’t normally be placed in direct sunlight. Regardless, the plant thrived in the garden—much like the community that has stubbornly flourished despite harsh circumstances.
An Afro-Caribbean Connection
The same smile that greets visitors to the garden is reflected in a mural by Puerto Rican artist Celso González, commissioned the year prior. Located on the side of one of the huts in Villa Africana Colobó, it is a small, glass mosaic that echoes past murals by González, as well as the artwork adorning Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, an iconic example of creative placemaking within a city known as the “Mural Capital of the World,” with over 4,000 murals.⁵ The face is that of Doña Iris, thus fulfilling the criteria she had provided the artist to create a mural of a woman from Loíza—a Black woman, specifically. She appears in shards of black and silver, head wrapped, with an affable, closed-lipped smile, eyes almost shut behind oversized glasses.
When they were first introduced, Doña Iris recalls caressing González’s face with both hands, an intimate gesture that transported her back to Loíza and the faces she knew as a child. As it turns out, the two shared several overlapping familial connections. González’s grandfather, for instance, had been Doña Iris’s English teacher and someone she credits with helping her to develop a strong sense of self-worth from a young age.
These overarching connections mirror González’s own trajectory as a festival collaborator, having curated an exhibition at Corredor Afro in Loíza with a virtual component that was hosted by PHLAFF during a previous edition of the festival—in addition to the premiere of two music videos. Corredor Afro, much like Villa Africana Colobó, is a site of creative placemaking for the African and Afro-Caribbean diaspora, threading a sense of place that makes West Kensington as familiar to González as his face was to Doña Iris.
The work took place over the course of several days, with González installing a plastic tent to protect the mural from inclement weather. Doña Iris, meanwhile, left shortly after meeting González and could not track the mural’s progress. While she may have seemed like an obvious choice for a subject, the opportunity to give flowers to an underrecognized figure in the neighborhood was an important factor for González. Even so, Doña Iris is demure, preferring to let everyone know that, perhaps more importantly, the mural reminds her and many others of another face: her late mother’s.
Building Capacity
Ultimately, creative placemaking attempts to lay the groundwork for systemic change in the same way a community garden invites participation or a mural captures its essence. Needless to say, PHLAFF’s Youth Salon, launched in 2016 as a film showcase and workshop series for Latinx youth, is attuned to this long-term vision.
The 2022 Youth Salon kicked off with a community celebration at Concilio highlighting the work of Frankford High School students, through a PHLAFF partnership with Concilio and Big Picture Alliance to establish a digital filmmaking after-school program. University of the Arts, or UArts, then hosted a day of workshops and film screenings that included an awards ceremony. The workshops were facilitated by the Fantauzzi brothers, who also premiered a new documentary, We Still Here, an earlier version of which had been workshopped at the festival in 2020 while still in production. Delving even further back into this relationship with festival alumni, the Fantauzzi brothers premiered Bakosó: Afrobeats in Cuba in 2019, in addition to facilitating a workshop for filmmakers.
Youth Salon coordinator Daniel de Jesús shares this sort of mutable, rather than fixed, experience with PHLAFF. “What I love about the festival is that it has no interest in claiming anything; all the festival does is celebrate the filmmakers and the creators who are here.”
De Jesús, a multidisciplinary artist and Philadelphia native, first approached festival organizers when they saw an opportunity to bring the festival closer to underserved communities. At the time, they worked as the youth artist program manager at Taller Puertorriqueño, a Latinx cultural center in West Kensington. Eventually, de Jesús was able to raise funds and offer PHLAFF a space for programming, taking over as coordinator in 2017. Since then, the Youth Salon has established youth filmmaking programs in several local high schools, as well as the DULCE initiative, a two-year program for emerging filmmakers divided into cohorts from neighborhoods in North and South Philadelphia, respectively.
Despite these efforts, lack of access continues to be a problem, both in the recruitment of Latinx youth to participate and the actual resources needed to produce media and film. “Talent doesn’t believe in economic means,” says de Jesús. “More often than not, people who become artists become artists because they had some kind of privilege.”
It is therefore fitting that this year’s Youth Salon took place at the alma mater of de Jesús, whose past work with Taller Puertorriqueño involved creating access to the visual arts as a viable career path for marginalized youth. Through PHLAFF, experience with an institution like UArts becomes an invaluable investment in the future. “A young person might come here and be like, ‘I want to go to UArts for filmmaking because I went to the Philadelphia Latino Film Festival,’” says de Jesús.
The final component of the 2022 Youth Salon takes advantage of de Jesús’ background as a trained musician, as well as their role as Director of Music Education & Community Relations at Artístas y Músicos Latino Americanos (AMLA), a Latin music school in North Philadelphia. Much like Dayme Arocena, Puerto Rico cuatro player Fabiola Méndez was able to premiere work in another artistic medium: an audiovisual project entitled Negrura, which documents the stories of Afro-Latinx residents in Boston’s Latin Quarter Cultural District. AMLA’s annual summer recital then became a launch event for what will hopefully be a sustainable program for students of all ages to learn Puerto Rico’s national instrument.
Looking Ahead
Technically, PHLAFF is a week-long festival with film at its core. But the ability to link one artistic medium with several others, such as music and visual art, speaks to the robust platform that PHLAFF has constructed through a network of artists, cultural workers, institutions, and community stakeholders, among others—in Philadelphia, Puerto Rico, and beyond. That PHLAFF has expanded not only in the context of the pandemic, but also amid a declining relationship between municipal government and the arts sector, is admirable to say the least. It’s no longer just a film festival. It’s a year-round platform for music programs, community art installations, culinary experiences, live music, and more. Luckily, the PHLAFF acronym has a couple of extra letters to accommodate what may very well become the platform and incubator for Latinx art, with a generation of talented, homegrown filmmakers and a thriving local industry. For now, PHLAFF is what its community needs it to be: an inclusive and responsive platform for authentic Latinx expression.
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Submissions for the 12th edition of the Philadelphia Latino Film Festival are now open. Visit www.phlaff.org for more information.
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Notes
¹ https://www.arts.gov/impact/creative-placemaking
² https://myneighborhoodproject.org/gardens/our-gardens/
³ Arocena also presented an experimental narrative short film entitled Sunlight Around the Corner: The Golden Sparrow, which screened in a theater on a lower level of the Barnes Foundation during her performance at First Friday!
⁴ It is worth noting that the Barnes Foundation and Villa Africana Colobó share similar missions that both emphasize horticulture and arts education.
⁵ The mural program began in 1984 as an anti-graffiti program. For more information, visit www.discoverphl.com/blog/city-of-murals/
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