The smell of hot hibiscus tea fills the air and the acidity of freshly cut limes lightly stings my eyes as I stand in Las Parcelas, one of the largest community gardens in North Philadelphia. Roosters roam the streets, the homes are vibrantly painted, and music booms through car windows out into the air—it’s as if I have entered a new soundscape altogether.
Norris Square, located just west of York–Dauphin Station in North Philadelphia, has been home to Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community for over 50 years. However, it’s far from the community’s first walking grounds.
Over the course of the 20th century, Puerto Rican Philadelphians have been pushed farther and farther east by encroaching developers and gentrification. Today, the neighborhood stands out in our city of brick row houses with vibrant Puerto Rican art dotting the landscape and architectural styles mimicking housing on the island. This has been a trend among Puerto Rican communities across the United States which, in hopes of maintaining their attachment to home, commonly attempt to recreate aesthetics of the island in their new neighborhoods.
The neighborhood still faces challenges with gentrification, though, with new apartment complexes popping up around the area. Music isn’t as frequently heard in the streets anymore, and passerby greet each other less and less. As the neighborhood changes, the community works its hardest to stand their ground.
Many residents in the area are second– or third–generation migrants to the United States, with the older generation slowly dying out over time. Of course, Puerto Ricans still frequently migrate to Philadelphia, especially after Hurricane Maria in 2017, which devastated the island and forced over 100,000 people to leave. But the large population of Puerto Rican youth who live physically disconnected from the island has presented a problem for the community: How can they maintain their cultural identity?
The Norris Square Neighborhood Project was founded in 1973 by Natalie Kempner, a local schoolteacher and active Quaker activist, and Helen Loeb, a professor at Eastern University, to bring environmental education to youth from the neighborhood.
“They would take them on camping trips and canoeing trips and teach them about the trees in Norris Square Park, which is a publicly owned park,” Andria Bibiloni (C ’04), a former Street writer and now the current executive director of NSNP, says. “And over time, the members of the community, mostly … the moms, became a really important part of the organization in terms of teaching the youth about Puerto Rican culture and about the importance of actually planting vegetables and different types of plants that were significant to the Puerto Rican culture.”
Until the 1990s, this made up the vast majority of the project’s work. Throughout this time, the city tore down vacant and damaged homes, leaving massive empty lots scattered throughout the neighborhood. “There were no fences. People were dumping garbage. People were standing around, loitering, doing drugs,” Bibiloni says.
A group of local women, many of those same mothers from the 1970s, who called themselves Grupo Motivos, or “Group of Reasons,” banded together and “took it upon themselves to say, ‘Okay, you know, we’re going to clean this up,’” Bibiloni says. They worked to clean up the lots, fence them in, and transform them into gardens as a way of making their community safer. Carol Keck, the director of NSNP and a locally respected nun, took notice of their efforts and chose to use her political connections to support Grupo Motivos by providing resources and acquiring the legal rights to the lots. Through these gardens, they have planted their Puerto Rican roots in the soil of Norris Square.
Bibiloni, who joined the project in 2021, says that with the help of the gardens, the organization has been able to uplift its youth through gardening, cooking, and cultural programming. Although Norris Square has become more diverse over the years, its Puerto Rican roots are as vibrant as ever. With NSNP coordinators teaching local Puerto Rican youth recipes to bring home, growing produce local to the island, and holding arts and crafts events and community reading sessions in the gardens, they’ve ensured the installation of Puerto Rican culture in their youth for years to come.
All but one of the women of Grupo Motivos have died, and they are memorialized through a Mural Arts Philadelphia project in Las Parcelas, the largest of the community gardens. Iris Brown, the last remaining founder of the group, was only recently brought out of retirement when Teresa Elliott, the last executive director of NSNP, managed to revive it after around 20 years of the organization dwindling down. She stepped into the role in 2019 when NSNP was looking to shut down, and instead of closing the organization, she was able to secure new funds and hire more staff. She reemphasized cooking through online Zoom classes, and the organization was slowly able to start rebuilding the garden education program and hire garden educators and gardeners.
Still, the organization faced legal challenges, especially with taxation on the gardening plots. Bibiloni, who received her JD from Temple University in 2021, initially joined the project as a legal aid, rising up to her current position just last year. She caught notice of NSNP while she was a young real estate law volunteer in the area, helping community members assert ownership rights over abandoned properties they’d been taking care of for a long time through adverse possession: when a non–owner acquires legal rights to a property after several years of occupation. The community is rapidly gentrifying, with an increase of people losing their yards at sheriff sales—public auctions of foreclosed properties by a local sheriff. In doing that work, she met Elliott. NSNP was struggling to stay afloat due to tax lien issues—the government’s legal claim against a property when the owner fails to pay their tax debt—and so Bibiloni joined to help out.
Since her joining, NSNP’s two youth programs—Semillas del Futuro, or Seeds of the Future, and Raíces de Cambio, or Roots of Change—have grown, collectively serving over 100 youth annually. They teach 15–20 students a day during the school year, and over 50 students a day in the summer, with a majority of their students—74.6%—identifying as Latino, 17.5% as Black, 4.8% as white, and 3.2% as two or more races, according to Bibiloni.
Semillas del Futuro focuses on arts–related activities, but Raíces de Cambio hosts growth and harvesting lessons that culminate in selling produce at a farm stand. “They’ve taken an interest in cooking as well, because sometimes they’re sitting at a farm stand and there’s not a lot of people coming, so they’ve installed an outdoor kitchen at the Raíces garden, and the youth cook there on Saturdays when they’re doing the farm stand,” Bibiloni says.
The gardens offer a diverse range of activities, with Las Parcelas having its own casita, a small Puerto Rican–style home, and kitchen, as well as mock market stands to emulate Puerto Rican life. Just across the street is Brown’s favorite garden, Villa Africana Colobó. According to its website, the garden “explores the West African diasporas intrinsic to Puerto Rican and Caribbean culture,” and is dotted with West African–style huts, a storytelling room, and El Fogón, one of NSNP’s outdoor kitchens. There are three small gardening plots within the garden, each dedicated to different parts of the diasporic experience. One grows produce local to West Africa, one to Puerto Rico, and one to the East Coast.
Others, like Raíces, contain murals dedicated to Puerto Rican history or student–made mosaics. The El Batey garden, named after Taíno, or indigenous Puerto Rican, community plazas, is dedicated to Taíno ancestry and honors its indigenous visual language and agricultural traditions.
This programming is a big part of what keeps the community alive, especially in the face of gentrification. “I’ve heard Iris talk about the fact that it was very important to her and her friends that their children and grandchildren understand how special it was to be from Puerto Rico, and to teach and pass on those traditions,” Bibiloni says. “Although I didn’t grow up in this specific community, I could speak from firsthand experience. You know, you do start to lose the language. You start to lose firsthand knowledge of recipes and things like that. Unless you grew up in a household where your grandma or your parents, you know, were really very connected to that and it was very important to them to keep that alive.”
Brown used to run a trip to Puerto Rico every year, taking a group of young students to the island to reconnect with their history. The tradition was expensive and fell out of practice, but it has been recently revived through alumni funding. Bibiloni explains that “[NSNP has] alumni … who are [now] parents themselves, [and] we talk about how impactful it was for them to learn what they learned here as children and go on that trip to Puerto Rico.” A grant came from one such alumnus last year who felt the trip had made such a huge difference in his life that he wanted kids today to be able to experience the same thing. With the money, NSNP was able to run its first trip back to Puerto Rico in over 30 years.
Things are undoubtedly tense right now under the current administration, as despite their citizenship status, many residents are at risk of harassment from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. NSNP puts red cards—small red slips with information on immigrant rights—out in front of its office for anyone to grab, but for safety reasons, the organization cannot comment on much of the happenings within the community. For now, it is “trying to just find a balance between, you know, educating them and not like overburdening them with stuff that’s just going to make them more anxious and afraid,” Bibiloni explains.
Despite looming fear, activities continue to grow at NSNP, with youth leaders planning out activities over the summer to respond to the interests of those around them. They promote “youth choice and youth voice,” according to Bibiloni, hoping to spur programming that fits within the goals of both adults and youth within the community. Many of the students participating in the cooking program are now working on their food handling certifications, and in the past, students have gone to Harrisburg to advocate for after–school programming. This passion for education was recently expanded as the students are now frequently visited by a friend of Bibiloni’s, a law professor at Temple who has been hosting “Know Your Rights” workshops on educational rights.
In terms of the organization’s future, Bibiloni explains that “with all the unexpected things that are now happening because of changes in the government … we’re really just focused on making sure we can keep our programs intact, making sure that we can continue to serve the number of youth that we’re serving, and making sure we can continue to grow the volume of food that we’re growing.” After receiving a grant from the Philadelphia Food Justice Initiative, NSNP hopes to find new ways to donate surplus food to the community, as currently, most food grown is used to cook for and feed the youth. “I think right now, we’re just trying to prove the concept … since we really tripled our annual budget during the time that Teresa was in leadership. I don’t know that NSNP has been quite this big in a long time,” she says.
Bibiloni encourages people from outside of the community to come volunteer as well, as the organization has just begun to host volunteer days every fourth Saturday of the month. Its next big volunteer day will be on April 26 for Earth Day, for anyone looking to get off campus and get involved in the greater Philadelphia community.
In the next few months, the NSNP gardens will be in full bloom, with various peppers and flowers sprouting across the neighborhood. Children will be playing in the park, giggles will fill the air while steam rolls off grills, and Bad Bunny’s new album—which is #IrisApproved—will be on blast in the summer heat.
