Nuyorican Poets Cafe

The Nuyorican Poets Cafe began in 1973 as a makeshift literary salon held inside the living room of writer and Rutgers University professor Miguel Algarin. Algarin hosted fellow poets, playwrights, and musicians who found themselves shut out of mainstream academic and publishing circles. This intimate gathering space soon became the home of an emerging cultural movement that reclaimed the term Nuyorican, a descriptor for Puerto Rican New Yorkers that had previously been used as a slur.