Hyde Square Task Force
Centering Afro-Latin arts to reaffirm the identities, belonging, and experiences of neighborhood youth and help them contribute to a vibrant Latin Quarter.
Photo Credit: Mark Saperstein
Founded in 1991, Hyde Square Task Force (HSTF) began as a coalition of residents and community leaders addressing the epidemic of youth violence in this Boston neighborhood. In recent years, executive director Celina Miranda has emphasized arts and culture in the organization’s youth development programs and centered Afro-Latin arts as a means to reaffirm the identities, belonging, and experiences of the youth in its community, and to support them in contributing to a vibrant cultural neighborhood now called the Latin Quarter. The neighborhood around HSTF has high rates of poverty and faces ongoing pressure caused by gentrification, as many of the people who made the area a thriving cultural hub can no longer afford to live there. HSTF works with the belief that seeding change in larger systems requires many diverse entities to be in trusting community with each other.
