North Philly’s Sugar Cane Festival marked 20 years of celebrating Puerto Rican workers

The Farmers’ Almanac may say the official start of summer begins with the solstice on Thursday, June 20, but in North Philadelphia, summer is launched with the opening of the annual Sugar Cane Festival sponsored by the Asociación Puertorriqueños en Marcha Inc. (APM).

On Saturday, the 20th anniversary of the festival, music boomed, children played, Puerto Rican flags flew, and adults swayed under the hot midday sun. For APM CEO and president Nilda Ruiz, “you couldn’t have asked for a better day.”

For four hours, APM, a Latino community and economic development nonprofit, transformed Germantown Avenue, between Diamond Street and Susquehanna Avenue, into a party plaza with music, food and games, and a social services resource fair with information on jobs, health care, and financial supports.

APM started in 1970 when a group of Puerto Rican Vietnam War veterans returned home and found the city’s Latino community lacked many basic social services.

Today, APM is a $65 million Latino-focused nonprofit social services agency serving 40,000 Philadelphians annually with affordable housing, food security, employment assistance, early childhood education and day care, foster care and adoption, substance abuse treatment, and behavioral health for adults.

Ruiz said the festival is a “fun way to get resources to the community.”

APM also hosted its second annual dominoes tournament, which Raymond Alvarez, president of La Liga del Barrio, the city’s first Latino youth basketball league, was busy overseeing. Alvarez insisted it was more about introducing youth to the iconic pastime with a rich cultural history throughout the Caribbean than crowning a city champion.

But Dalila Sosa, one of APM’s 400 multilingual employees, knew the true star of the festival was the sugar cane itself. “Everybody comes for that,” said Sosa, a director of childcare at an APM day care center. It was Sosa’s second year working at the sugar cane table where you could get about a two inch piece of the fibrous cane to chew.

Ruiz said there was another reason they held this year’s festival on the 2100 and 2200 blocks of Germantown Avenue. “We’re here because we are going to rehab this area,” said Ruiz, who shared APM’s vision not only of a state-of-art day care center but also new commercial space for retail and restaurants.

“We’re working on a strategic plan now,” Ruiz said.

The Pennsylvania Sugar Refining Company started operating the city’s first sugar refinery in 1881 and was later acquired by the National Sugar Refining Company, better known as Jack Frost, in 1947.

It was Jack Frost that attracted Puerto Ricans because of their experience working in the refineries. During the 1950s, an estimated 12,000 Puerto Ricans came stateside, and landed in Philadelphia, making the city home to one of the largest Puerto Rican communities in the country. According to APM, the festival was created to recognize those workers who migrated from the island to work in the refinery to build a new life in the city.

The Jack Frost complex grew to 18 buildings, but in the early 1980s the refinery halted operations and sold the property. Eventually the SugarHouse Casino, which was rebranded as Rivers Casino in 2019, was built on top of the old refinery.

Ruiz is hopeful that the festival will grow into a multicultural affair that attracts people from throughout the city.

“I had a wonderful time,” said Josephine Jackson, who grew up visiting her grandparents in South Carolina where sugar cane was also a treat in their hometown of Dillon. But for Jackson, an African American, it was her first taste of Puerto Rican cuisine. “It was all different but it tastes good,” she said.

Then Jackson proclaimed the festival was “wonderful” and set off in search for her piece of sugar cane.