Clemente’s Legacy

Puerto Rican poet and activist Clemente Soto Vélez passed in 1993, but his legacy lives on in The Clemente Center, which was founded that same year by artists and activists inspired by Clemente’s conviction in the transformational power of art, and his coalitional and experimental approach to community-building across and beyond New York and its marginalized communities. 

For 30 years The Clemente has been the creative playground of an organic array of critical voices and identities -both local and global- who align with our namesakes’ values about art, activism, advocacy, and service. 

Today, we are positioned as a space of encounter, connection, and co-creation that intersects and transcends cultures and geographies while staying true to our Puerto Rican and other immigrant legacies.

Miguel Trelles, Portrait of Clemente Soto Velez, 2015, Silkscreen

Poetry and art were for Soto Vélez a rigorously playful process of constant experimentation that contradicted the language of artistic and political conventions. He sought a counter-diction that could speak to our spiritual hunger for new worlds and languages. 

Soto Vélez was a cultural worker, journalist, labor and migrant organizer, and mentor to generations of diverse folks. Ever the consummate internationalist Puerto Rican avant-gardist, he embraced the revolutionary power of total creativity, in which the literary and visual arts intersected with his lifelong struggle for personal and collective liberation. 

His legacy is inseparable from Latinx New York City and multi-ethnic communities such as the Lower East Side, and his visionary quest for an unconventional decolonial transformative praxis defies reductive geographies and identities.