"Bambulaé be it now,” (Bambulaé sea ya) someone called out from a window on a street in New Haven, Connecticut.
To Kevin Díaz Rodríguez´s surprise, the director of Movimiento Cultural Afro-Continental, the call didn't come from an adult or someone raised in Puerto Rico. It came from a child about six years old, born in this state, where 8% of the population is Puerto Rican, totaling more than 300,000 residents.
Díaz Rodríguez recalled the moment in an interview with El Nuevo Día as special, confirming to him that bomba, an Afro-Caribbean tradition with more than four centuries of history, is still alive among generations that grew up far from the island and, in many cases, without speaking Spanish.
Movimiento Cultural Afro-Continental is a nonprofit community organization based in Connecticut dedicated to preserving, teaching, and spreading Puerto Rican bomba and plena. Through workshops, performances, and partnerships with schools and universities across the state, the organization has brought these cultural expressions to spaces where they previously had no presence.
"The drum and the dance connect us. Bomba is life, it is healing, and it is resistance," the leader of the organization confessed to this outlet.
Díaz Rodríguez was born in Manhattan, New York, but is the son of parents from Arecibo and Luquillo, though he was raised in the Palmas neighborhood in Cataño. From a young age, he was immersed in Puerto Rican folk traditions, learning percussion and timba informally.
"I didn't study it, I learned it the old-school way, as people say. In Puerto Rico, they tell you, ‘Sit there and play,' and that's it, you pick it up fast," he recalled with a laugh.
Back then, he said, bomba didn't have the visibility it has today, because "it was limited to big families like the Ayalas and the Cepedas. So at the gatherings I went to, rumba was dominant, but in those jam sessions there was always someone with a timba, and before you knew it, there were seven or eight drums going."
In the mid-1980s, after earning a Bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts from the Inter American University of Puerto Rico, he returned to the United States in search of work and settled in Connecticut. There, he reconnected with the Puerto Rican community, particularly in New Haven and Bridgeport, two of the cities with the largest boricua populations.
Bomba's cultural transmission and its relationship to the community have deep roots in the state's migration history. A large part of the Puerto Rican community in Connecticut arrived after World War II, recruited to work in the tobacco and poultry industries. A significant number came from Loíza.
From Loíza to Connecticut
The earliest records of Loíza natives in Connecticut show that some families came from the Medianía Alta neighborhood, the birthplace of the Fiestas de Santiago Apóstol, as documented by anthropologist and professor Samiri Hernández Hiraldo in her book Black Puerto Rican Identity and Religious Experience.
In 1973, Menén Osorio Fuentes, a member of one of those families, moved to the state to help his sister, who had arrived months earlier, care for her children.
It was Osorio Fuentes who co-founded the Fiestas de Loíza en Connecticut en Honor al Apóstol Santiago (FLECHAS), first celebrated in 1977 as a direct extension of the patron saint festivities held in the coastal town of Puerto Rico.
In 1979, FLECHAS received the First Connecticut Arts Award, and drew over 10,000 visitors in its 25th anniversary, becoming the most important cultural event in the city.
From 1990 to 2000, Puerto Ricans made up 6.8% of the population in New Haven County and 14.3% in the city of New Haven. In neighborhoods like Fair Haven, where FLECHAS was based, the Hispanic population grew by 50% during that decade and was composed mostly of Puerto Ricans.
In that context, the festival became not just a cultural event but a space for identity affirmation, symbolic power, and community organizing.
In 1999, FLECHAS was incorporated as a nonprofit cultural and educational organization, the result of the "hard work and financial sacrifice" of Osorio Fuentes and its other co-founders, according to the book's author.
By 2006, when Hernández Hiraldo published her work, approximately 1,500 Loíza natives lived in New Haven.
According to the New Haven Independent, the last edition of FLECHAS was held in 2010, after a construction project at the festival's longtime location forced organizers to move to a new site, making it too difficult to continue.
Another factor is the changing demographic reality. Today, the majority of Puerto Ricans in Connecticut are in the second and third generations, and their ties to the culture are not as strong. According to the 2023 American Community Survey from the U.S. Census Bureau, 40.8% of Puerto Ricans in Connecticut only speak English.
The birth of Movimiento Cultural
Kevin Díaz Rodríguez had ties to FLECHAS when he arrived in Connecticut, where he documented and promoted cultural events at the state's public television station. In 1986, he joined the organization and eventually became its lead coordinator.
Movimiento Cultural Afro-Continental was born to fill the void left by FLECHAS. One day, a Puerto Rican mother asked Díaz Rodríguez to perform a folk piece at an event at her daughter's school.
"They were international pavilions, and every country was represented except Puerto Rico, and I told her we'd make it happen," he said. The event sparked interest from other institutions and marked the group's formal beginning.
In 2015, Díaz Rodríguez registered the organization as a nonprofit cultural and educational entity in the Fair Haven neighborhood, the same home as FLECHAS and an area that "houses the largest Black and Hispanic population living in low-income and poverty conditions."
In fact, 22% of Puerto Ricans in Connecticut live below the general poverty line.
Since then, his work has been entirely "voluntary." Depending on the budget and the event, he brings together the barrileros (drummers), cantadores (singers), and dancers he needs from a roster he has built over the years.
"I have never charged for this. I do it from the heart," he said, adding that the organization's mission stays anchored to a clear purpose: to uplift Afro-Puerto Rican roots and confront ignorance and racism.
On the subject of racism, Hernández Hiraldo argued in her book that Loíza natives in Connecticut feel the need to "reaffirm their Puerto Rican heritage" and, in this case, to distinguish themselves from African Americans.
With that in mind, and given that bomba was once music of resistance and liberation for enslaved people, Movimiento Cultural Afro-Continental organizes a commemoration each year for the Day of the Abolition of Slavery in Puerto Rico, celebrating Afro-Puerto Rican heritage from Connecticut.
The organization's two long-term goals are to form a group composed exclusively of barrileras and to establish a permanent cultural center in Connecticut that creates jobs and offers cultural programming every day.
In 2025, the organization held more than 25 community events and workshops, at times featuring folklorists such as William Cepeda, Johnsito Rivera, Jerry Ferrao, and Nitzie Judith Sánchez, as well as other regional groups, such as Bomba de Aquí, whose members include Saúl Peñaloza and Brendaliz Cepeda.
"I have had the privilege of learning from great masters like Henry Genaro Álvarez Jr., Tito Ayala, and other members of the Ayala family from Loíza," said Díaz Rodríguez.
Bomba classes
Movimiento Cultural Afro-Continental launched a bomba workshop at the Viva Dance & Fitness Center for the Arts studios.
Classes will cover everything from the history and vocabulary used in bomba to the mechanics of dance and barril. Sessions are held on select Tuesdays on the following schedule:
- Bomba for children at 6:00 p.m.
- Bomba for adults at 7:00 p.m.
- Advanced bomba from 8:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
For more information about the course, contact Kevin Díaz Rodríguez @movimiento_cultural or mcultural15@gmail.com.
Address: 243 Captain Thomas Boulevard, West Haven, Conn.
