The October 17 Vamonos Pa’l Monte procession celebrates Puerto Rican heritage in Philly

Award-winning interdisciplinary visual artist Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, who conceived Vamonos Pa’l Monte (in English, Let’s Go to the Mountains), will lead the four-mile procession beginning at City Hall at 9am and heading east. The main route will kick off at the Independence Visitor Center (599 Market Street) at 10am, and end in Norris Square, a North Philly neighborhood at the heart of Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community.

A return home

The procession takes its name from the eponymous salsa track by famed Puerto Rican American pianist Eddie Palmieri.

“This procession … serves as a metaphorical return home, an act of collective remembrance that guides participants from the center of American civic power toward a landscape shaped by Puerto Rican history, resistance, and self-determination,” says Raimundi-Ortiz. “In Puerto Rican culture El Monte refers not only to the mountains and countryside, but to ancestral knowledge, refuge, healing, and freedom.”

The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage provided major funding for the project, with additional support from the William Penn Foundation and Pennsylvania Creative Industries. Project curator Marángeli Mejía-Rabell partnered with Mural Arts Philadelphia, the nation’s largest public art program, and Taller Puertorriqueño, a community-based cultural organization that preserves and promotes Puerto Rican arts and culture. The Norris Square Neighborhood Project, a cultural hub that unites and inspires the surrounding community, also supported the event.

A long history

The city’s Puerto Rican roots made Philly a natural choice for Raimundi-Ortiz’s project. The city has had pockets of Puerto Rican settlement since the late 1800s. The sugar trade meant commerce with the island. Itinerant Puerto Rican and railroad workers also resided here.

“Today, Philadelphia is home to the second-largest Puerto Rican population in the contiguous States,” Raimuni-Ortiz says. As of 2019, more than 146,000 Philadelphians have Puerto Rican heritage.

Some migrants yearned to live on the island again.

“They envisioned a return home that never materialized,” Raimundi-Ortiz says. “Their stories of migration, longing, sacrifice, and adaptation form the emotional foundation for this project.”

Personal inspiration

Raimundi-Ortiz’s life also shaped Vamonos Pa’l Monte. Her parents migrated to the US in the 1950s, settling in the Bronx where she was born.

Raimundi-Ortiz’s father died young, leaving her mother with several children. It was hard.

“My mother used to walk barefoot to church and put shoes on once she arrived [to spare the soles],” she recalls. Vamonos Pa’l Monte was two years in the making.

“I’m wary of artists who come into a place and try to impose their idea,” Raimundi-Ortiz says. She conducted hours of listening sessions and relationship-building to ensure a creation faithful to the community. After giving workshops during that time, she decided on the procession as a capstone.

“[The procession] is a way to be in direct contact with the community,” she says. “The streets collapse the space between the artist and the community.”

A design challenge

A procession meant challenges. “The biggest challenge was translating Wanda’s vision into costumes and performance objects,” says Kristina Tollefson, professor of costume and makeup in the University of Central Florida’s Department of Theatre. Tollefson’s designs have appeared in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, among other prestige venues. “The costumes I designed and built needed to function simultaneously as works of art, performance tools, and functional garments while helping tell a story that moves from Philadelphia’s colonial founding sites through themes of Puerto Rican resistance, migration, diaspora, and community celebration.”

Costume changes must take place publicly without stopping the flow of the story. The solution? Raimundi-Ortiz will wear layers of costumes, “pounds of clothes, all made from found fabric,” and shed them along the procession’s route.

How to join in

The public is invited to join the start of the procession at 10am at 599 Market Street, or they can join at 12pm at Cruz Playground (5th and Master Streets), or at 1:30pm at Norris Square Park (North Howard and Diamond Streets). It’s free to join, but registration is required. (The rain date for the event is Sunday, October 18.)

The procession will end with a huge party in the park. Raimundi-Ortiz hopes that, more than a one-and-done event, the celebration will be a doorway, an invitation for Philadelphians to explore the city’s Puerto Rican culture.

At top: Vamonos Pa’l Monte creator Wanda Raimundi Ortiz in Puerto Rico in March 2025. (Photo by Jon Kaufman.)

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