The 39th Annual Loisaida Festival takes over Avenue C from East 5th to East 12th Street on Sunday, May 24, 2026, from 11am to 5pm — a free, all-afternoon Puerto Rican block party that has anchored Memorial Day weekend in the Loisaida neighborhood since 1987.
39th Loisaida Festival 2026
This is a mostly Puerto Rican festival because Loisaida has long been a Puerto Rican stronghold in NYC.
The 39th annual commemorative poster is by artist and designer Maite Nazario, currently a resident artist at the Loisaida Artist in Residence (L.A.I.R.) program.
2026 Theme: “Our AmeRícan Thing”
Puerto Ricans are one of the communities that define New York City.
This year’s festival is dedicated to the poetry and spirit of Jesús “Tato” Laviera (1950–2013), one of the greatest voices of the Nuyorican literary movement.
Laviera was born in Santurce, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and moved to the Lower East Side at age nine — to the very neighborhood where this festival is held. He became one of the founding voices of the Nuyorican Poets Café, and his 1985 collection AmeRícan gave the world one of the most powerful coinages in American poetry.
The capital R embedded in the word — fusing América and Rican into a single identity — captured the experience of a generation of Puerto Ricans who were neither fully of the island nor fully of the mainland, but entirely themselves.
AmeRícan remains the most anthologized Puerto Rican poem in the history of American literature. Laviera, who was also deeply shaped by Afro-Caribbean traditions, described his own work as drawing on “the musicality of Afro-Caribbean poetic traditions with the distinct sounds and voices of El Barrio.”
He died in 2013 after years of complications from diabetes that had left him legally blind — but as he used to say, not without vision. His papers are held at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. A street corner in East Harlem has been renamed Jesús “Tato” Laviera Way in his honor.
The festival theme “Our AmeRícan Thing” honors his legacy and reflects the festival’s ongoing commitment to celebrating Loisaida not only as a geographic place, but as a language, a rhythm, and a way of belonging carried through music, poetry, theater, food, and shared community experience.
Acknowledging NYC’s Puerto Rican heritage is important because in the traditional immigration pattern, NYC’s Puerto Rican community is integrating and spreading around the country.
It’s been three generations since the 1950s “Great Migration” from Puerto Rico, and we are slowly losing our connections to the island, and even Nuyorican life in the city that welcomed us. Many young Americans of Puerto Rican descent don’t know anything about Puerto Rican culture. It’s a beautiful culture worth preserving.
The Community Parade — 11 AM
The day begins at 11 AM with a Community Parade headlined by Batalá New York — the premier all-women, Black-led Afro-Brazilian percussion ensemble in New York City, playing Samba Reggae, a music born out of the Black pride movement of Salvador de Bahia in northeast Brazil.
The parade assembles at East 5th Street and marches north up Avenue C to the festival’s main stage at East 12th Street. Joining Batalá NY in the parade: the Loisaida Cabezudos (oversized puppet heads), Las Dinamicas, La MAMA, Bond Street Theater, Pleneros Callejeros, and Artisferio Circus.
The choice of Batalá New York as parade headliners is no accident. Samba Reggae — with its Afro-Brazilian roots, Caribbean reggae influence, and female power — embodies exactly the cross-diaspora identity that Loisaida has always represented: Puerto Rican, African, Caribbean, and fully New York. Women are the guardians of culture.
Besides “Tite” Curet Alonso, the salsa poet who wrote countless salsa hits, said that he was listening to the Brazilians.
The Main Stage — 12 PM to 5 PM
The main stage on Avenue C at East 12th Street is co-hosted by Caridad “La Bruja” de la Luz, one of America’s leading spoken-word poets, an Emmy Award–winning writer, renowned stage actor, and Executive Director of the Nuyorican Poets Café — and Giraldo Luis Alvaré, cultural advocate and host of the podcast Siempre Pa’Lante!
The main stage lineup includes:
Throughout the Festival
Along the seven-block footprint of the festival, attendees can experience: TheaterLab at La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez Community Garden (Avenue C at East 9th Street), featuring artists including Fernandito Ferrer and the Loisaida Conjunto de Plena, visiting urbano artist Guada from Puerto Rico, and community partners including Dorill Initiative, El Bohío Inc., and Third Street Music School.
There is live música típica puertorriqueña by old-timers conjunto Los Fascinantes y Yotoco in the Francisco “Pancho” Ramos Community Garden across the street, throughout the afternoon.
BombaYo and the Nuyorican Poets Café are in street-level collaboration. The Artisan Block at East 5th–6th Streets, is presented in partnership with PRIDA (Puerto Rican Institute for the Development of the Arts) — and over 20 local artisans. These are not cheap tchotchkes. Most of the artisans are highly-educated artists and educators in their own right. Look for santos de palo, Puerto Rico’s hand-carved statuettes of saints, the Virgin, and Tres Reyes. It’s a mountain jíbaro tradition.
There is a BioBus mobile pop-up science lab for children and families at Avenue C and East 9th Street.
Loisaida Festival
The numbers tell the story: 39 years of continuous celebration, 15,000+ attendees, 60+ artists, more than 20 artisans, all on seven blocks of a neighborhood that the city has repeatedly tried to gentrify out of existence.
The Loisaida Festival is produced and presented by Loisaida Inc., one of the last remaining Puerto Rican-led and founded community-based organizations of Lower Manhattan, in partnership with the Acacia Network, the largest Hispanic-led nonprofit in New York State.
Get Loisaida Festival Info
I don’t know about you, but all this Puerto Rican culture makes me want to go home (to Santurce).