Cleveland’s Latin American historians organize first-of-its-kind project to trace their roots

There’s a Flamboyan tree blossoming in an office building in Hough. 

Its roots stretch back more than a century. Its branches reach toward photographs and archival news articles chronicling the history of Cleveland’s Latin American community.

The tree is not alive in the conventional sense — it’s made of paper — but it’s growing faster than the real thing would. 

Crafted by the Latin American Historical Society of Cleveland, or LAHSO, the paper Flamboyan stretches across a wall at Neighborhood Connections, the current home of LAHSO’s ongoing exhibition showcasing its comprehensive research on Cleveland’s Latin American community.

Haz clic aquí para leer este artículo en español.

For LAHSO’s founders, the mission is to create a communal history — woven from the perspectives of many who make up the community rather than an individual historian. 

By blending oral histories with genealogical records and archival documents, LAHSO is situating the lived experiences of Cleveland’s early Latin American immigrants alongside dominant narratives written about them from the outside. 

Sometimes these perspectives align. More often, they diverge. 

Gladys Santiago, LAHSO’s co-lead, frequently comes back to the phrase “subjected to the voices of authority.” Moving to an unfamiliar culture and language — and living in a city torn by systemic racism against its Black residents — many in Cleveland’s early Latin American community learned to shrink down and blend in where they could, she said.

It takes generations to unlearn that, Santiago said. 

“The stories are what’s being lost,” said Evelyn Rivera, who leads LAHSO alongside Santiago. “They’re being told in families, but not to the greater community, to historians, and they’re not being captured.” 

‘We want to make sure our threads are in there’

LAHSO began in 2023 after Rivera and Santiago, longtime friends, both independently moved back to Cleveland after decades living away. 

“We came to return to our hometown, and we saw some things that were still the same,” Santiago said. “Things that were not changed, and things that were being erased.”

Rivera and Santiago trained with the Oral History Association, an international organization supporting oral history traditions. They brought together a team who shared their passion, and they spent months building a process for their interviews. They identified key interview topics and planned archiving methods. 

For now, LAHSO’s collection of oral histories includes three interviews with Cleveland residents who moved here from Puerto Rico between the 1940s and ‘60s. Cleveland’s early Latin American community was largely made up of people from Puerto Rico. As LAHSO continues interviewing people who arrived in Cleveland more recently, the organization aims to show how diverse the city’s Latin American community has become, Santiago said. 

Over the next year, LAHSO plans to interview 20 more Latin American Clevelanders and publish all of its oral histories, sorted into categories and topics, in an online database. More than 100 people have signed up for LAHSO’s oral history interviews so far.

To Santiago and Rivera, the oral histories they’re collecting are qualitative data, shining light on the Latin American community’s often overlooked contributions to Cleveland’s history, Santiago said.

“The tapestry of Cleveland is gorgeous already,” Rivera said. “We’re just gonna weave ourselves into that already-beautiful tapestry. We don’t want to take away from anybody else’s history. We want to make sure our threads are in there.”

LAHSO is also working with a genealogist to trace the lineage of Cleveland’s earliest Latin American immigrants. So far, they have family trees for immigrants who moved here from 1900 to 1910. The genealogist is now mapping out family lines between 1910-1920 and the late 1800s and will continue going forward decade by decade. 

In the process, LAHSO has identified who they believe to be the first Cleveland residents from Mexico and Puerto Rico: Jose Garcia and Jose Fernando Ortiz Arizaga, respectively. 

“I don’t know if people really understand what LAHSO really is doing,” Rivera said. “We’re basically becoming a university, a community research university, kind of.”

Moving to Cleveland in the 1950s

Hough resident Jose Ramos Peña’s journey to Cleveland is among the first preserved in LAHSO’s oral history archive.  

Peña, now 95 years old, remembers early mornings at his childhood home in Arroyo, Puerto Rico. His father would wake up before the sun, walking more than two hours to work on a sugar cane plantation every day. 

“I see my father struggling,” Peña said. “I see him so tired, you know? And to me, it still hurts me. But I could help him.”

In 1949, after he finished school, he travelled to the mainland United States for the first time, recruited to pick fruit on a farm in Delaware. 

“I had a hard time. Sometimes, you know, we barely have enough food. We didn’t have the money to buy it,” he said. “And sometimes, we don’t even know how to ask the guy, you know, the one taking care of us. We didn’t know how to say, ‘Well, I need something to eat.’”

Peña found work where he could, travelling across the country for a couple of years. He sent money back to his family in Puerto Rico when he could.

By the time he landed in Northeast Ohio in the early 1950s, he had taught himself English by jotting down translations in a notebook he carried everywhere. A tomato farmer in Huron, Ohio, hired him to oversee a group of Puerto Rican workers that he had been struggling to communicate with. 

Peña helped them navigate their new home, acting as a kind of liaison that he didn’t have in his first jobs on the mainland. 

He saved up money, and life came at him quickly. Like many Puerto Ricans working on the mainland, he often travelled back and forth from his home on the island. He married a grade school classmate back home in Arroyo, then served in the U.S. military, stationed at Fort Knox and a base in Germany, until 1955. After starting a family and earning a degree in Ponce, Puerto Rico, Peña settled down with his wife and six children in an apartment on Hough Avenue in Cleveland in 1965. 

From east to west

The Hough and St. Clair-Superior neighborhoods had been the heart of Cleveland’s Latin American community, made up mostly of people from Puerto Rico at the time. The neighborhood was home to Our Lady of Fatima, the first church in Cleveland to offer Mass in Spanish. Peña volunteered as a secretary there.

He was also part of the Hough Area Development Corporation, formed in the wake of the Hough Riots by community leaders who wanted to ensure residents had a say in their neighborhood’s reconstruction projects. 

In the following decades, Cleveland’s Latin American community began moving west toward Ohio City, Tremont and Clark-Fulton. Some historians suggest the community moved to be closer to jobs at the steel mills. Where one family moved, others often followed, Santiago said, maintaining networks of support that kept the community tight-knit. 

‘This is your house’

Faith continued to unite growing Latin American communities on the West Side. Spanish-speaking congregations sprang up throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, but many of them lacked churches to worship in. 

Olga “Margi” Colón is not part of LAHSO’s project, but she is a historian in her own right. She made her way from Puerto Rico to New York City, and then to Cleveland in 1974. She has meticulously collected news articles, photographs and documents tied to the history of her church: La Sagrada Familia on Detroit Avenue. 

To her, the church represents a kind of home for Cleveland’s Latin American community on the West Side. Before La Sagrada Familia was built in the late 1990s, Spanish-speaking Masses were relegated to church basements, private homes and leased storefronts, she said. 

People were “tired of running,” Colón said. The Catholic Diocese merged two parishes, San Jaun Bautista and Capilla Cristo Rey, and built a new church to form La Sagrada Familia in 1997. 

The merger brought tension and anxiety as much as excitement and joy, she said. She served on a committee that helped steward the parishes through it. Until they stepped through the doors of the new church, parishioners worried they wouldn’t be able to raise enough money to finish the project. Everyone donated what they could — many giving as much as $5,000 — to bring the new church to life, she said. 

La Sagrada Familia remains a staple in Cleveland’s Latin American community, said Jaime Cruz, who served on the merger committee alongside Colón. While the church’s membership was once mostly Puerto Rican, he said, it has become much more diverse now.

“This is the type of church where everybody knows everybody,” he said. “When Mass is over, we usually sell food in the plaza. People stay there, maybe an hour, an hour and a half, just socializing, talking with everybody. Nobody wants to leave.”

For Colón, the church is about more than just faith. A welcoming space like La Sagrada Familia goes a long way for newcomers in Cleveland. 

“I’m so happy to be part of this church,” Colón said. “We were suffering too much when we came to this country. They didn’t want us. So we don’t have to do the same thing. We let them know they are welcome. This is your house.”

Creating a new narrative

LAHSO is hoping to further honor Cleveland’s Latin American history by registering significant locations as landmarks and placing historical markers. The organization is still early in the process, but it has already secured funding from Neighborhood Connections to cover the cost of the first marker. 

The exact location for the first marker isn’t set yet, Santiago said, but LAHSO members have tossed around the idea of placing it somewhere on the East Side to honor their roots there. Wherever it is, Rivera said, the organization plans to give both those living near its location and Cleveland’s Latin American community opportunities to weigh in. 

“What LAHSO has found is that the East Siders have been ignored,” she said, referring to Latin Americans like Peña who have remained in Hough and St. Clair-Superior. 

“For Latinos, they have to come to the West Side just to even get basic groceries, Latino groceries. The attention paid to the West Side, which is great, lots of great things on the West Side, and I’m a West Sider, but we cannot neglect our pioneers and the families who were the base of who we were.”

Santiago, LAHSO’s other co-lead, sees the significance of the history in her family. She’s watched each generation carve out more and more space to express themselves and their culture. Her children, grandchildren and, more broadly, their generation find pride in their history. 

“They’re hungry to know the history,” she said. “And they’re creating a new narrative. This will allow for a grounding, you know? Here’s the roots, create the new narrative, but here’s from where you are creating that.”