The Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College has announced its exhibition, Revelando San Juan Hill (Afterlives of San Juan Hill), will open at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) in Rio Piedras. The exhibition will be on display starting December 3 in the central atrium of the José M. Lázaro Library at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus. This marks a historic collaboration between CENTRO in NYC and the Faculty of Humanities at the UPR in Puerto Rico to bring an exhibition of great relevance to our collective community.
Using never-before-seen archival documents made available to CENTRO by the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and other archival materials from that period, this exhibit delves into the larger history of the Lincoln Square Urban Renewal project. It traces the process through which Puerto Rican families were disrupted and displaced in 1958 from New York City’s Lincoln Square and San Juan Hill neighborhoods to make way for the construction of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and Fordham University. Infamously called “the Puerto Rican Slum” and “the worst slum in New York,” by Robert Moses, the architect of New York’s urban renewal process, Lincoln Square and San Juan Hill were home to approximately 2,000 Puerto Rican families.
Curated by Dr. Cristel M. Jusino Díaz and Christopher López, with curatorial support and research by Jorge Soldevila Irizarry, Damayra Figueroa Lazú, Dr. Laura Colón Meléndez, Afterlives of San Juan Hill combines data analysis with archival documents, visual storytelling, and oral histories to offer a community-centered perspective on a crucial period in U.S. urban history.
“This exhibition invites us to reflect on the invisible stories that mark the migrant experience and the impact of displacement on our communities, which are also very present in Puerto Rico today. Our collaboration promotes memory and social justice, as well as the interdisciplinary dialogue that these narratives inspire,” Dr. Agnes Bosch Irizarry, the dean of the College of Humanities of UPR in Rio Piedras, said.
“We’re so honored to collaborate with the esteemed faculty of the Universidad de Puerto Rico, and be able to showcase CENTRO’s research and archival work to the community in such a direct way. Our organization has always had strong ties to the archipelago, our beloved people, and our brilliant scholars, and we hope this is only the beginning of our work, our exhibitions, art events, and archival research being as available and open to the public in Puerto Rico, as it is in East Harlem—bridging the gap between our communities, one step at a time,” Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, CENTRO’s Directora, said.
At the center of this exhibit are the experiences of the Ramírez Zapata family: María Zapata and her four children, Gustavo, Magdalena, Harry, and Miguel Ramírez Zapata—one of thousands of families that were displaced in the name of urban development. These histories of dispossession and erasure are as crucial today as they were in the 1950s, and we are honored to illuminate an untold aspect of New York City history through the lens and stories of those who were directly affected.
Several events will take place in UPR to celebrate the exhibition:
- On December 3 at 4:00pm at the Seminario de Historia del Arte in the Faculty of the Humanities, join us for a screening of West Side Story (1961), a film based on a musical of the same name released in 1957, precisely at the time when the relocation of the Puerto Rican neighborhoods of Lincoln Square and San Juan Hill was being discussed.
- On January 21, join a round table discussion with Dr. Yomaira Figueroa, director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Cristel Jusino Díaz, director of Research Programs at the Center, and Maggie Ramírez Zapata, a descendant of Mrs. María Zapata, to explore the silences and omissions in the archives, the role of photography in documenting and highlighting the migrant experience in New York City, and the curatorial process.
The exhibition will be on view from December 3, 2025, through February 27, 2026.