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READING — Jesús Centeno arrived in Reading from Puerto Rico in 1952 with little more than a plane ticket paid for by selling one of his farm animals.
There were challenges. At 18, he didn’t speak English, knew few people, and quickly encountered discrimination. But he stayed and helped build the Latino community and support systems that exist in the city today.
“There were not that many Hispanics in the city,” Centeno said. “We had problems going to the hospital because there were no interpreters like today.”
Over time, Centeno found community spaces. He recalled gathering in a pool hall on Sundays after work. The informal gatherings over time grew into more structured organizations, like the Puerto Rican Civic Society and Centro Hispano, which helped new Latino residents navigate daily life and build political power.
Now in his 90s, Centeno is one of 11 elders from Reading’s Puerto Rican community interviewed for Roots of Solidarity (Raíces de Solidaridad), a student-led documentary that aims to preserve the stories of Latinos who settled in the city decades ago.
The students were part of a summer camp organized by RIZE, a youth arts organization that mentors and provides educational opportunities in the county. The Berks Latino Chamber of Commerce, which provided a $5,000 grant for the project, hosted a screening of a promotional trailer for the documentary on Three Kings’ Day in January.
Esteban Serrano, filmmaker, co-director, and mentor for the students, said the goal is to resume production this spring or early summer, conduct more interviews, and dig into archival footage that could bring the community’s history to life.
The hope is to complete the film by December and have it ready to screen in January 2027, said Edna García-Dipini, executive director of RIZE. The final product will weave together the elders’ stories and the students’ trip to Puerto Rico, while the long-term goal is to create a digital archive of community history, with each interview individually preserved online, Serrano said.
Serrano said the project is an opportunity for students to learn core film production skills, like operating cameras, audio editing, lighting, research, and conducting interviews. But the experience also goes beyond the technical training.
“Every camp, it’s a different medium that we’re teaching them, but it’s always about expression, or it’s always about identity, and it’s always about problem-solving,” Serrano said.
The project hopes to raise at least $50,000, which would go toward production expenses and phase two of the project — a student trip to Puerto Rico to visit the towns where the Reading elders came from and trace the roots of their migration stories.
García-Dipini said the trip would also be an opportunity for the students, many of whom are of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent, to connect their cultural identities and the stories that brought their families to Reading.
“We come here, and we want to get so Americanized that we forget our roots and where we come from,” García-Dipini said. “I feel it’s so important for the youth to understand the trajectory.”
The experiences shared by the elders in the community helped Alexiyani Williams, a communications student at Albright College and a peer mentor for the project, understand how Reading has changed over time and the discrimination older generations went through. It made her think about her own family’s experiences.
“It just taught me to appreciate what’s going on, appreciate our freedom, and get closer to my grandparents, ask them more questions about what they had to go through,” Williams said. “I noticed they’re not going to really tell you unless you ask and give interest in it, because obviously, that’s probably something that’s traumatizing and that’s not something that you want to bring up for fun.”
The documentary will also feature an interview with Raquel O. Yiengst, vice-chair of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission.
Born and raised in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, Yiengst arrived in Reading in the late ‘50s after marrying her husband, who had been working at a naval base in San Juan. What was supposed to be a trip to meet his parents turned into a permanent move. Crossing the Penn Street bridge for the first time, she remembers thinking, “What did I get myself into?”
The transition to life in Reading was challenging, Yiengst said. She found that employers would not hire her despite having a college degree and being fluent in English. Some assumed that she was a farm worker and did not know Puerto Ricans are American citizens by birth, she recalled. After an acquaintance at a family party made an offensive remark stereotyping Puerto Ricans, Yiengst made a decision that would define her work and role in the community going forward.
“I decided right then and there that my mission was going to be to educate people and to prove to them who we are,” Yiengst said.
Yiengst later worked as an English teacher in the Reading School District. Despite having limited resources and no designated classrooms, she built an English as a second language (ESL) program from the ground up and later established a transitional bilingual program for non-English-speaking students. She eventually became the director of the Reading School District’s Bilingual Education Program, a position she held for 35 years.
For the students working on the documentary, hearing stories like Yiengst’s helped put the city’s history and the progress made over time into perspective.
“The Reading that they’ve inherited now was nothing like the one that their grandparents inherited,” Serrano said. “A lot of people’s blood, sweat, and tears went into the freedoms and the luxuries that they experience now, and that really was hitting home for them.”
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