One of the most cherished and entertaining events during Lower East Side History Month is the annual Loisaida Festival
by Robin McMillan
Festival poster by Ana Teresa Rodríguez and María Domínguez
It’s Festival time again! The 38th edition of the Loisaida Festival, the area’s celebration of Puerto Rican heritage, music, arts, and food comes to Loisaida Avenue—aka Avenue C—on Sunday May 25.
The day’s events begin with the Opening Community Parade at 11 am—anyone can sign up to march!—with the Festival proper beginning at noon. Artists and artisans of all ages and disciplines will occupy and engage the avenue from E5th to E12th Streets, while a couple of adjacent community gardens will stage what Alejandro Epifanio Torres, the Executive and Artistic Director of Festival organizer Loisaida Inc., calls “Festivals within a Festival.”
The Festival has come a long way since its modest beginnings in 1987. Says Torres, “Today it is much more than entertainment. It is the cornerstone of all our community efforts, because it brings art and activism together. We call it ‘artivism’. It’s a lifeline that connects generations of Latino residents through creativity, resistance, and care.”
This year’s Festival honors the memory of legendary Lower East Side/East Village photographer Marlis Momber, who died on April 2 aged 81. A native of Berlin, Germany, Mombis arrived in New York in 1966 with her sights set on a career in fashion photography. But in 1975 she moved to the Lower East Side, and for the rest of her life documented a community battling to reclaim respect after periods of devastation and neglect. She is perhaps best known for making the iconic film documentary “Viva Loisaida” in 1978, as well as her still photography in the bimonthly magazine “The Quality of Life on the Lower East Side.” The community became her life’s work.
Other 2025 honorees include David “Daso” (Day-So) Soto, Community Organizer, Singer/Songwriter, and Record & Brand Executive with the LES-based Daso Entertainment; Willing Chin-Ma, the CEO of Grand Street Settlement, the social services organization she has been with for 22 years; “Las Dinámicas,” a Brooklyn female folk-dance group from Brooklyn, and celebrated actor Ramon Rodriguez, star of ABC-TV’s popular police procedural Will Trent.
A lot of the focus will be on the Loisaida Festival’s Main Stage, at E12th Street, with such performers as Joe Bataan, the Filipino-Latin singer who coined the term “salsoul”; non-binary Puerto Rican musician Ana Macho, and classical musicians from the Third Street Music School performing works popularized by opera singer Jessie Montgomery.
But what separates the Loisaida Festival from so many of the city’s other community celebrations, says Torres, are the “festivals within a festival.” In La Plaza Cultural, on the southwest corner of East 9th Street, for example, a “Theatre Lab” will showcase such local musicians as Sugar Hill Salon, along with “Artisferio Circus” a troupe of NYU multidisciplinary artists who will perform Latinx-driven poetry, dance, painting, and more.
Things will be just as vibrant right across the Avenue, in “Pancho’s Garden” (officially the Francisco Ramos Community Garden). Brooklyn’s Los Fascinantes will bring back fond memories of Puerto Rico through rural folk music called “La Jibaro,” and will be complemented by a younger group, called Jotoco, whose music fuses Latin and Afro-Caribbean Folk. Throughout the day, meanwhile, wordsmiths from the local Nuyorican Poets Café will hold a poetry marathon.
One of the more recent additions to the Festival has been the Puerto Rican Institute for the Development of Artists (PRIDA). Their artisans—painters, photographers, printmakers, et al—will occupy the block between E5th and E6th streets. “The Festivals usually ran from 6th to 12th streets,” Torres says. “But by adding a block that didn’t interfere with any existing bus re-routing or parking restrictions, we were able to add PRIDA to our Festival line-up and expand the variety of offerings from and for the community.”
This sort of evolution has been key since Torres began to work on the Festival. Born in Puerto Rico, he moved to New York when he was 19, earned his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2006, and became involved with the Festival as part of a team from the Acacia Network, the Hispanic-led non-profit community development organization that in 2012 welcomed Loisaida Inc. into a network that remains based in New York but which now works nationwide.
“Loisaida had always been a community development organization, providing social services and such,” Torres explains. “But in the early 2000s, the political landscape was shifting. There were a lot of other options for services elsewhere, and our traditional funding streams were drying up. We knew that arts and activism had always worked together here, that this ‘artivism’ is not a trend but a tradition. So we started to brainstorm, to ask ‘Where, or what, is the meeting place?’ It became clear that the place was the Loisaida Festival.
“To put things in context,” he continues, “since the 1970s Latino artists and community organizers on the Lower East Side have used creative expression not just as cultural production. From hand-painted banners in rent strikes to augmented reality murals commemorating neighborhood history, artivism has continually served as a weapon against erasure and a map for liberation—as a political tool for resistance, survival, and empowerment.
“So under the leadership of Acacia CEO Lymaris Albors, we developed a plan to tap into cultural-related funding and the Loisaida Festival became our cornerstone—the artivism arm of Loisaida Inc. Since then we’ve always looked for engaging ways to grow the Festival.”
And grow it has. In truth, the Loisaida Festival began on Memorial Day weekend for the benefit of a lot of families who on a major American holiday weekend had nowhere else to go. Now the tide has turned, and visitors and locals in their thousands flock to Loisaida Avenue to celebrate the history and heritage of Puerto Rican culture—proof positive that artivism is alive and well and living on the Lower East Side. — Robin McMillan
