El Espace is a column dedicated to news and culture relevant to Latinx communities. Expect politics, arts, analysis, personal essays and more. ¿Lo mejor? It’ll be in Spanish and English, so you can forward it to your tía, your primo Lalo or anyone else (read: everyone).

The other day, Jeff Roth, an editor at the Times in charge of our photo archives, came across some never-published images of the founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The subjects sought to build a creative, social space in the city for Puerto Ricans, where patrons could bear witness to what the writer David Vidal called “ a new, intensely cathartic poetry that was born on New York City's streets.”

The cafe is frequently packed on Friday nights. Outside, long lines of people wait to get into the weekly spoken word competitions, and many of the young faces in the audience and onstage are black or brown. For many spoken word performers of color — especially those of Latinx and black descent — the Nuyorican Poets Cafe is what the Comedy Cellar has been for stand-up comics: a place to cut their teeth and test the resonance of their work in front of a live audience.

It’s come a long way from its humble beginnings in a poet’s living room.

In the early 1970s, Miguel Algarín, born in Puerto Rico but raised on the Lower East Side, began inviting other Nuyorican poets to his apartment on East Sixth Street for readings and performances. Algarín and his contemporaries, including Miguel Piñero, Pedro Pietri and Lucky CienFuegos, were part of a growing artistic scene in what was then a primarily Puerto Rican neighborhood, drawing on their identities and daily struggles for their work. The salon quickly outgrew Algarín’s living room, so he and a few other artists began renting an Irish bar down the street to fit more people. In 1981, they bought their current building on East Third Street and, after a lengthy renovation process, formally opened it to the public in 1990 as a space for Nuyorican poets to experiment and hone their craft.