By Caitlin Kasunich
The Brooklyn Music School has served the African-American community in Fort Greene almost exclusively during most of its 98 years in operation. That is changing as more and more Hispanics are moving into the neighborhood.
Executive director Frank Alvarado said he realized soon after he arrived in 2009 that his school, which offers extracurricular music and dance classes to adults and children throughout the week, could not continue to ignore the shifting ethnic makeup of the neighborhood. It came home to him, he said, when five Latino families who had recently moved to Fort Greene came to him and said they felt unhappy and isolated from the rest of the population. They asked him to find a way to bring diversity to the school.
Change came on Aug. 30, when a Manhattan-based cultural group called Mano a Mano: Mexican Culture Without Borders moved to the Brooklyn Music School to launch a new program aimed at integrating Mexican arts and customs into the lives of children, teenagers and adults in the neighborhood. The program, entitled Mexicanidad, allows singers, dancers and musicians of all ages and experience levels to enroll in Mexican cultural classes, such as mariachi trumpet and Son Jarocho strings and dance, which are taught by professional performers.
“Mexicans who are living in New York will feel that their culture is honored,” said Emily Socolov, 58, executive director of Mano a Mano. “They will come here and say, ‘Wow, this is great. Look at all these people who love Mexico and love Mexicans and love Mexican culture and want to promote it and support it.’”
As of Sept. 13, Alvarado, 55, said that 90 percent of the 191 total participants at the school, not including those in the Mexicanidad program, were African-American. But Alvardo said the new program is partly responsible for an influx of Hispanic students: so far, Mexicanidad has already attracted 30 to 40 new participants, almost all of whom are Hispanic, said Luz Aguirre, program manager of Mano a Mano.
U.S. Census statistics also indicate that Brooklyn’s Kings County, which includes Fort Greene, has experienced steady growth in the Hispanic population, from 462,411 in 1990 to 487,878 in 2000. For the past four or five years, Alvarado said, more and more members of the Hispanic community have been re-locating to Fort Greene, for two main reasons: one is the low-income housing in Downtown Brooklyn that makes the neighborhood more affordable than others in the borough, and the other is Fort Greene’s proximity to Sunset Park, which already has a strong Hispanic presence.
As communities change over time, however, cultural tensions between different ethnic groups inevitably arise, said Socolov.
“No spaces are new. This space used to be our space, and now it’s your space,” she said. “There will always be that kind of issue. It has happened in El Barrio, which was always Puerto Rican and somewhat Dominican and is now dominantly Mexican. These changes that happen constantly in our city both create a tension and a sense of ownership. It’s sort of a cyclical process in a sense.”
Eduardo Penaloza, educational programs coordinator at the Mexican Consulate in New York, said programs like Mexicanidad are effective.
“This is a way to bring the communities together,” said Penaloza, 45. “Just open a common space, and let everybody show his own culture, his own thing, his own music, dance and art..”
“These programs are pretty important,” agreed Lisia Leon, 33, a participant in the Tuesday night mariachi guitar class who moved to Park Slope two months ago. “When I first came to New York eight years ago, there weren’t a lot of Mexicans. People are away from their families, and we come from large families. This is something my family has listened to my whole life. I have obviously never played it, so this is a nice way to listen to it and be a part of it at the same time.”
Monica Guevara, Mexicanidad’s dance instructor for the kids’ ballet folkórico, says the program helps bridge ethnic divides. “It provides a forum or a way of interacting with people who aren’t necessarily in your race or ethnicity,” she said “Just being able to have that common ground – that common enjoyment of something like dance or music or art – allows you to explore that together and grow in that way.”
One of Guevara’s students, 5-year-old Emma, came to her first class on Sept. 20. Her father, 41-year-old Jean-Paul Forsans from France, said that he wanted his daughter to participate with the program so that she could connect with her Mexican background, and he had not heard of another program in the city where she could do so.
“My wife speaks Spanish to Emma, and I speak French to her,” he said. “This program is making the link between her Mexican roots and Spanish and the opportunity to practice Spanish outside of the home.”
Registration for Mexicanidad’s first semester began on Aug. 23, and the year-long session will run until June 18, 2011.
More on Brooklyn Music:
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Coney Island summer Siren Music Festival
Senator Schumer supports Pool Parties concerts in Williamsburg
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