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This episode focuses on the special relationship between New York City and Puerto Rico, via the tales of pioneros, the first migrants to make the city their home and the many hundreds of thousands who came to the city during the great migration of the 1950s and 60s. 

Today there are more Puerto Ricans and people of Puerto Rican descent in New York City than in any other city in the nation — save for San Juan, Puerto Rico. And it has been so for decades. 

By the late 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans lived in New York City, but in a metropolis of deteriorating infrastructure and financial woe, they often found themselves at the lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder, in poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

Puerto Rican poets and artists associated with the Nuyorican Movement, activated by the needs of their communities, began looking back to their origins, asking questions.

In this special episode Greg is joined by several guests to look at the stories of Puerto Ricans from the 1890s until the early 1970s. With a focus on the origin stories of New York's great barrios -- including East Harlem, the Lower East Side and the South Bronx.

FEATURING The origin of the Puerto Rican flag and the first bodegas in New York City!

WITH Dr. Yarimar Bonilla and Carlos Vargas-Ramos of CUNY's Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CENTRO), Kat Lloyd and Pedro Garcia of the Tenement Museum and Angel Hernandez of the Huntington Free Library and Reading Room and the Webby Award winning podcast Go Bronx.