Top: Randi Rubin Rodriguez and Sergio Rodriguez. Bottom: Soto with members of PRU as he accepts his award. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Juancarlos Soto can still remember Three Kings Day in Cayey, Puerto Rico when he was just a kid. Each year, his parents would present him with a giant box, stacked neatly to the brim with art supplies. Around him, the house was always filled with joyful noise: Christian gospel, salsa music, his mom’s vibrant, laughter-studded storytelling and snippets of the "Ramón Arrieta Show" and "El show del mediodía."
When the tradition started, he was barely tall enough to see over the lid. As he got older, he realized that it wasn't just a box at all—his parents were giving an invitation to be exactly who he wanted to be. Now, the self-described “artivist” is working to pass on that connection to culture—and the permission to create—to the next generation.
Soto, who has for years married arts, activism and his Taíno and queer identities in his work, was one of several people honored last Thursday night, as Puerto Ricans United, Inc. hosted its ninth annual awards gala at Anthony’s Ocean View. Titled “Nuestras Raices” or “Our Roots,” the event centered and celebrated a spirit of community, from the power and urgency of artmaking to the importance of peer mentorship and sustainable, youth-focused programming.
Honorees included Soto, who is a co-founder of PRU; community pillars Randi Rubin Rodriguez and Sergio Rodriguez; the youth mentorship powerhouse Leadership, Education, Athletics in Partnership (LEAP); and Paul Nuñez, who is currently a partner and lobbyist for DePino Associates. All four have worked to make New Haven—and Connecticut—a kinder and more welcoming place to be through their work. Four hundred people attended.
Emcee Ruben Ortiz, who is the artistic director of the New Haven based theater troupe A Broken Umbrella Theatre, with PRU President Joe Rodriguez.
“Nine years ago, we said, ‘Do you remember the Loíza festival?’” and that was the beginning of a movement, said PRU President Joe Rodriguez shortly before Soto’s father, José Orlando Soto, led the evening’s prayer. “We’re committed to this community because the Puerto Rican community is committed to us.”
That message wove from the tables to the podium to the dance floor, where the night ended with booming music, rainbow glowsticks and a Bad Bunny look alike who made an entrance just before 10 p.m. Long before that, Soto entered the ballroom with his parents, rocking a gold crown and embroidered sash for the evening. Around him, attendees trickled in, chatter rising to a polyphonic, laughter-threaded hum.
As his family headed towards a table, Soto reflected on his own creative journey, from a childhood spent among his siblings in Cayey, Puerto Rico to his introduction to New Haven and tireless work as an organizer and advocate at JUNTA for Progressive Action, Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, and the New Haven Pride Center.
During those early years, his parents could see that Soto was deeply curious about the world around him and eager to document it. When he was just a few years old, he received his first box of art supplies for Three Kings Day. It included “paint, crayons, scissors, paper—everything,” he said. It also instilled in him very early the significance of culture, to which he has held fast to this day.
“That box of art supplies wasn’t just a gift,” he said in an acceptance speech that also included a passionate appeal to support the arts. “It was an invitation—to create, to express, to dream, and to become exactly who I was meant to be.”
When he moved to New Haven at 15, art helped him communicate, particularly as he learned English. “It was sort of a therapy for me,” he recalled in an interview with the Arts Paper in 2017, as he was advocating for DACA recipients, and just getting the small creative business Artivism by JC off the ground. “I had left everything behind, and art was something that anchored me.”
That love for the visual arts—and the fierce belief that they can and should be tied to social justice—informed Soto in the way he moved through the world (it still does). It led him to Paier College of Art, where he deepened his practice. It followed him to JUNTA, where in 2016 he worked with the organization to mount the exhibition Faces of DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans).
It joined him as an organizer at Planned Parenthood, where he yoked it to his belief in reproductive rights and community safety. And it accompanied him to those very first conversations around what became Puerto Ricans United, when he was sometimes the youngest voice in the room.
During those years, Soto was still finding his footing as a young artist and organizer, and PRU board members cheered him on. He remembered how proud he felt to be celebrating Puerto Rican culture, which remains a core part of who he is.
“It feels crazy because I was fresh out of college when I started with the group, and these were the folks that I looked up to,” he said. “So this, it’s humbling. I don’t do what I do for recognition. I do what I do because I love my community and I love art.”
The honor holds particular significance because PRU is a kind of extended family, he added. In the past years, members have supported him not only when the group is planning events—its annual festival and celebration of the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico, for instance—but also in his professional work.
Tiana Ocasio: "Everybody puts their heart into this [group], and Juancarlos goes above and beyond.”
Earlier this year, they stood by him as he transitioned from the New Haven Pride Center, where he had been its deputy director and then executive director, to Anchor Health, where he is now the organization’s PrEP (Pre-exposure Prophylaxis) navigator.
Thursday, each board member took time to describe him in a single word, from “hermano” to “powerful” to “inspirational” (at least one board members also commented on Soto’s exquisite hair, adding a nod to The Barberie & Salon’s Marlie Rodriguez as she watched from the Soto family table).
“When we celebrate who we are, we remind the world of how powerful we have always been,” Soto said from the podium. To cheers, he added: “I want to invite you all to fight and support the arts in a moment when we need them more than ever.”
Gala Co-Chair Tiana Ocasio, who was there for those first meetings around PRU, said she is thrilled to see Soto receive just some of the flowers that he deserves. Before PRU, the two orbited each other from afar, always hearing anecdotes about the other through a shared group of friends. Through the organization, the two have become close friends and confidants; it is not uncommon to hear them use some form of spousal affection to describe each other. That connection, Ocasio said, “was instant.”
“It was like we had known each other forever,” she said. “Juancarlos is PRU. He designed our logo, he’s been there for every single bit of hard work we've done. Everybody puts their heart into this [group], and Juancarlos goes above and beyond.”
That love extended to a table nearby, where Randi Rubin Rodriguez donned her tiara over a bright, tiered dress that seemed made for the summer heat. Over three decades ago, she moved to New Haven to run a federal grant program for pregnant people who were struggling with substance use disorder. When she saw how stacked the system was against them, she stayed—and made helping families in New Haven her life’s work.
Even then, Rubin Rodriguez knew that it was necessary to work not just for parents and families, but with parents and families, she said. She met them where they were, and without judgement. She had been made for the role, perhaps: before coming to New Haven, she had studied both art education and psychology, worked in Bridgeport as a counselor, and served as the inaugural president of the New Jersey Task For for Substance-Abusing Women.
During her time in New Jersey, she was also part of the team that launched a residential detox program, which is where she also met Rodriguez for the first time (the two were colleagues, then friends, before they were partners, Rodriguez said warmly).
Working in New Haven, “we were seeing kids get bounced around,” she remembered. If the Department of Children and Families (DCF) removed a child from their parents, there was often a chance that that child would remain in the system until they aged out of it. At the time, it didn’t feel like there was the infrastructure in place to work with both parents and with professionals in the field—social workers, clinicians, educators—to reunify families.
She wanted to shift that paradigm. When Sergio Rodriguez joined her in New Haven in 1993, the two became family advocates together, working with and for the city’s children and families not only professionally, but also personally. In 1996, the two founded the ‘r kids, which four years later opened in a temporary home on Winchester Avenue, and then a permanent location on Dixwell Avenue in 2001.
‘r Kids seeks to fill some of the structural gaps that Rubin Rodriguez often saw in her work, including the reunification of children with their biological parents, as well as the support for foster and adoptive families, after intervention from the DCF. For her, that included (and still includes) a deep understanding that “family” is as much an action as it is a noun, requiring a suspension of judgement, a generosity of spirit and extension of grace that has come to define so much of who she and Rodriguez are.
In those first few years of the organization’s existence, she added, that work would have been impossible without the support of PRU Board Member Frank Alvarado, who at the time was the director of New Haven’s Livable City Initiative and kept an eye on city properties as they became available. It was Alvarado, as the two built a grassroots organization, that brought their attention to the 45 Dixwell Ave. space that would become ‘r Kids longtime home.
“I think the idea of family and the commitment to family” is what keeps her dedicated, Rubin Rodriguez said. At ‘r Kids, she remained fiercely dedicated to her work, which has served close to 10,000 Connecticut kids and families since its founding. From their Westville home, she and Rodriguez also became foster parents 51 times over, opening their home again and again to children who needed a safe place to land. They adopted two children, Paolo and Marilynn, and are now the proud grandparents to four boys.
In their comments Thursday, they made time to honor the memory and legacy of their late son, Paolo Sergio Rubin Rodriguez, who died tragically last year. In addition to a legacy fund at the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven (donate here), the two have pledged $1,000 to PRU to provide a scholarship to a Latino student who is attending college to major in history.
“This has been a real honor for me and Randi,” Rodriguez said, later slipping his crown on for a photo. “Together, we’ve done public service for over 100 years.”
Sophia Quiñones and Johanalyz Arroyo.
He, too, has worked tirelessly as an advocate for young people and for their families: he worked in substance abuse prevention for the city, became an alder for upper Westville, and later stepped on board with both the New Haven Public Schools and the Connecticut Department of Education, championing children in every role he held. To this day, he credits a social services counselor who “chased me down” in his birthplace of Tampa, Florida, and convinced him to finish his GED.
“To watch PRU grow, it’s been amazing,” Rubin Rodriguez chimed in, praising the all-volunteer board for nearly a decade of hard work.
Across the room, members of LEAP settled in at their table, whole decades of youth advocacy on display as counselors, mentors, youth coordinators and members of leadership all took their seats. It would be just an hour or so until multiple members of PRU’s board recalled their own connections to the organization, from working as its first development assistant to inspiring whole careers in public service.
For just a moment, Henry Fernandez, who was the organization’s founding executive director in 1992, seemed to take in the whole room. Decades after his own childhood in Poughkeepsie, New York, he said, “I see a lot of myself in the kids I work with.”
Top: LEAP Executive Director Henry Fernandez. Bottom: Maithé Ulloa, Jadah Smith and Aysia Reese, who are all counselor development coordinators for the organization. "Just seeing the impact you're making on the kids," Ulloa said when asked what brought her to the work. "You're a safe haven for them."
In LEAP’s 33 years, Fernandez has played an integral role in its success, including returning to the organization in 2014 after the sudden resignation of its then director, Esther Massie (in the intervening years, he worked as the city’s chief of LCI, launched a consulting practice, ran for mayor and continued to advocate for young people). In the years since, and with a village of dedicated staff, board members, and alumni, he’s expanded programming, brought in more young people, and nurtured generations of youth.
The organization’s operating budget is now roughly $7 million, he said Thursday night. LEAP, in turn, has worked with over 30,000 kids.
Fernandez is extremely quick to say that he has not done any of it alone—and that he credits the nonprofit’s model of trusting and training young people for much of its success. Any person who has been, volunteered with, or known a member of the LEAP family can attest to that: its counselors and site directors, many of whom were once LEAPers themselves, are the wildly beating heart of the program.
“I feel like Dr. King in a lot of his speeches spoke about the beloved community, not as an aspirational dream but as a real space,” he said, adding a kind of full-body side eye to the people who caution him that teenagers will be too difficult to work with. “I think of LEAP in that context … there’s a whole community of people who want to take care of all kids,” regardless of their lived experiences.
When it was time to present the award, PRU board member Magaly Cajigas remembered being a newly-minted college graduate in 1994, freshly done with her studies at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) and prepared to work a part-time job in retail as she looked for a full-time gig. A friend suggested that she interview at LEAP, which was hiring its first development assistant.
Cajigas arrived for the interview early. While she was waiting, she remembered, the phone rang, and Fernandez stepped out of his office to answer it. She didn’t know at the time that he was the executive director of the organization. What struck her, instead, was the kindness and patience with which he spoke to a mother on the other line, walking her through how to register her kid for the program.
Cajigas got the job. For her, LEAP became a professional launchpad to jobs at the United Way of Greater New Haven, Bridgeport Child Advocacy Coalition, the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, and Hispanic Federation, where she is now the Connecticut state director. It also became a family.
“You became part of a colorful quilt that continues to grow and wrap itself around the community,” she said. She nodded knowingly as PRU’s Jhonnathan Rivera took the mic, recalling his own introduction to LEAP “as a kid from Loíza, Puerto Rico,” pounding the pavement on Kensington Street as a youth counselor for the neighborhood’s site.
“LEAP planted the seed that led to a career in public service,” he said. He added that it’s come full-circle: his 20-year-old daughter is now a counselor herself. “LEAP is more than a program. It’s a movement.”