Children in the Syracuse community will perform dances and drum with handmade instruments at La Casita Cultural Center’s annual Caribbean-style Christmas celebration this Friday. 

Fiesta de Navidad en La Casita will take place on Friday, Dec. 8 at their 109 Otisco St. location from 6 to 8 p.m. The event, which is free and open to the public, will feature live performances and traditional Hispanic foods.  

The holiday festival is an opportunity to celebrate the year’s accomplishments, as well as to come together to celebrate cultural traditions. 

Established in 2011, La Casita is a program in extension of Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences that aims to bridge the Hispanic communities of the local Near Westside neighborhood and SU. The center is multifaceted in its civic, cultural and educational engagement, housing an art gallery, classrooms, a bilingual library and performance space while also providing research and internship opportunities for SU students. 

“[La Casita] would not be seen simply as the university serving the community,” said Silvio Torres-Saillant, a member of La Casita’s advisory board and SU English professor. “We want it to be configured as an exchange, something that would showcase the talent that people in the community have as well, and how much they have to teach.” 

Torres-Saillant was one of the co-founders of La Casita when it was still a project back in 2008. He organized events, solicited support from people “in the city, from the university (and) from various institutions,” and demonstrated to the university that there was a desire in the communities for something like La Casita that promotes the Hispanic heritage in central New York.  

Now, university-affiliated groups work with the center to put on programs. Members of SU’s Raices Dance Troupe, the only Latin dance group on campus, instruct weekly dance classes, where children are taught traditional Afro-Caribbean movements. At Friday night’s festival, the children will perform with a member of the Latin dance group. Guests can enjoy foods such as pernil, which is slow-cooked roasted pork leg, arroz con gandules, which is rice, pigeon peas and pork, and empanadas, while they watch the performance. 

This year’s Fiesta de Navidad features music performances that both students and professors from the Setnor School of Music have worked on with children. Volunteers assisted with the Orquesta program, where children built music instruments from recycled materials. They will play old Spanish Christmas carols with the instruments they made. 

In Spanish, “La Casita” translates as “the little house.” The name gained significance during an “ear of much confrontation” in the 1960s and 70s, said Torres-Saillant, when Latinos and Hispanics took to the streets to demand inclusion and equality. 

“Sometimes you had these neighborhoods surrounded by blight, by ugly-looking structures, abandoned buildings, half-demolished structures,” he added.  

This changed when one man, Jose “Chema” Soto, built a small one-story wooden home of traditional Caribbean and rural Puerto Rico style in a vacant space in the South Bronx, NY. The casita grew into a social movement that eventually created Rincón Criollo, a reclaimed neighborhood of casitas preservative of the Hispanic cultural heritage and its sense of community. 

“We wanted to honor that tradition, and that’s why we picked that name, and we also picked that concept,” said Torres-Saillant. 

“La Casita” carries the idea of collaboration with the community because that’s where the movement began, Torres-Saillant explained. 

Tere Paniagua, executive director of La Casita and faculty member of SU’s department of languages, literatures & linguistics, said that this year’s Fiesta has a sense of nostalgia, particularly with the number of people in the community who have struggled with the disasters that overcame the country. 

“It’s just been a really tough year for everybody,” she said. “These last few months especially have been very challenging, and I think this is a time that we all look forward to come together.” 

Luma Trilla, programming coordinator at La Casita, moved from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to the city of Syracuse last May. 

“It was very exciting for me to be able to do something related to my own culture,” Trilla said. “This was like having my Christmas traditions from my homeland all over here.” 

She coordinated the menus for the event as she did last year, providing her recipes to the SU Catering Service and offering little tips and how-to-dos. 

“It’s about our culture but it’s not only for the Latino community,” Paniagua said. “This is something that everyone enjoys, everyone can come and have a little piece of that Latino flavor.” 

Published on December 7, 2017 at 12:54 am

Contact Jiaman: jpeng04@syr.edu