On a Sunday in September, Penn Street in downtown Reading fills with the sound of plena drums and the snap of flags in the wind. For one day the old industrial city wears the colours of San Juan. But the Puerto Ricans in Reading, Pennsylvania are not visitors here. They are the majority. In a city that the Reading Railroad once made famous, a community that began with a handful of mushroom pickers in the 1960s now numbers close to thirty thousand, and Reading has become one of the most thoroughly Puerto Rican cities in the mainland United States.
The Place
Reading sits in the Schuylkill River valley in Berks County, about sixty miles northwest of Philadelphia, ringed by the wooded ridge of Mount Penn. For most of the twentieth century it was a factory town, a place of iron mills, hosiery plants and the great Philadelphia and Reading Railroad that gave the city its name and one corner of the Monopoly board.
The skyline is still watched over by the Pagoda, a seven-storey red-and-gold tower built in 1908 on the shoulder of Mount Penn, intended as a luxury resort and donated to the city in 1911 when the rest of the plan collapsed. It is an odd, beloved landmark, a Japanese silhouette above a German-Pennsylvanian town that has since become a Caribbean one.
Today Reading is a city of roughly ninety-five thousand people, and more than two thirds of them are Latino. It is the most heavily Hispanic city in Pennsylvania, and the single largest group within that majority is Puerto Rican.
How It Became Puerto Rican
The mushroom fields, the 1960s
The first Puerto Ricans did not arrive in Reading for the factories. They came for the farms. From the mid-1960s, growers in the rolling country around Reading and nearby Kennett Square recruited Puerto Rican labour for the mushroom houses and produce fields of southeastern Pennsylvania.
Puerto Ricans had been United States citizens since the Jones Act of 1917, so there were no visas to wait on, no border to cross. There was only the distance: from a Spanish-speaking tropical island to cold Pennsylvania winters and English-only workplaces. Some came directly, some by way of New York or New Jersey, following word of steady work from cousins and neighbours.
One of them was the grandfather of Michael Toledo, who worked the mushroom fields before settling in Reading proper. Toledo would grow up to lead the city’s oldest Latino institution. His family’s path, from farm labour to civic leadership in two generations, is the arc of the whole community in miniature.
Into the city, the 1970s
As field hands moved off the farms and into Reading itself, they found a city whose old industrial economy was already faltering. The anthracite trade that had made the Reading Railroad one of the richest corporations in America collapsed after the Second World War, and by the 1970s the city was hollowing out, its mills closing, its white working-class families leaving for the suburbs.
That decline left cheap rowhouses and empty storefronts, and into those spaces the Puerto Rican community grew. Where an earlier generation might have found factory floors, this one found a city in need of new residents, new shopkeepers and new churches. They became both.
In 1972 the community founded its anchor: a centre on North Second Street that would, in time, take the name Centro Hispano Daniel Torres. It began as a place for English classes, job training and legal help, and it has stayed open for more than fifty years.
Becoming the majority, the 1990s to 2020s
The numbers tell a transformation few American cities have matched. By 1990 roughly twenty-one thousand Puerto Ricans lived in the Reading metropolitan area. In 2000 Latinos were about thirty-seven per cent of the city. By 2010 the figure was around fifty-eight per cent, and by the 2020 Census it had reached sixty-seven per cent of a population of 95,112.
The 1990s and 2000s also widened the story. A large Dominican community arrived, along with Mexicans and Colombians, drawn by the same affordability and the established Spanish-speaking life Puerto Ricans had built. But the Puerto Rican community remained the largest single group, the foundation the rest was laid upon.
In 2019 the city elected Eddie Moran, who took office as Reading’s first Latino mayor and the first Latino mayor of a major Pennsylvania city. For a community that had started in the mushroom fields, the mayor’s office was a long way travelled.
The Landmarks
Centro Hispano Daniel Torres, 25 N 2nd Street. The oldest Latino institution in the city, founded in 1972 and now a registered nonprofit running workforce development, youth programmes and family services. For more than fifty years it has been the first door many new arrivals knock on, and its current executive director, Michael Toledo, is himself the grandson of a mushroom-field worker.
St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church. A downtown parish that has become a Puerto Rican spiritual home, where elders like Luis Hernandez have worshipped for decades. The Catholic faith carried from the island is woven through the city’s religious life, alongside a growing constellation of Spanish-language Pentecostal and Baptist congregations.
Mofongo Restaurant, 124 S 5th Street. A Caribbean kitchen named for the dish itself, serving the plantain mofongo of Puerto Rico alongside Dominican fare and tropical juices. It is one of dozens of family restaurants that have turned the side streets off Penn into a map of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.
4th & Penn Street Restaurant, 400 Penn Street. A homestyle spot on the central artery of downtown, cooking traditional Puerto Rican and Dominican food. Its corner sits at the heart of the festival route, where the parade’s floats give way each September to vendors and live music.
The Penn Street parade route. Each September the Puerto Rican Day Parade steps off near 11th and Penn and marches down the city’s main street, ending in the 400 block with a festival of music and food that has drawn crowds of more than ten thousand. It is organised with help from La Mega, the local Spanish-language radio station, and the city’s Latino civic groups.
The Pagoda, Mount Penn. Not a Puerto Rican landmark, but the symbol every resident shares. The 1908 tower on the ridge above the city is where the postcard skyline is photographed, the German-built emblem of a city that is now Caribbean in everything but its rooftops.
Penn Street, downtown. The commercial spine itself is the landmark. Walk it on a weekday and you hear salsa and merengue from open doorways, smell arroz con pollo and roasting pork, and pass bakeries, money-transfer shops and bilingual storefronts that have made the old main street a Latino main street.
Where They Came From
Reading’s Puerto Ricans came from across the island, but the early migration leaned, like much of the mid-century Puerto Rican diaspora, on the rural interior and the towns ringing the coast. These were communities where agricultural work was familiar, which is part of why the Pennsylvania mushroom and produce industry could recruit there so successfully.
Many arrived not directly from the island but as a secondary migration, moving inland from the crowded and expensive Puerto Rican neighbourhoods of New York and northern New Jersey. The pattern echoes the journeys traced in the Puerto Ricans of the South Bronx and the river-valley mill towns of New England, where similar communities took root in the same decades. Reading offered what those cities could not: cheap houses, open storefronts and quiet streets.
Once a few families settled, chain migration did the rest. A cousin found work, a sister found a rowhouse, a neighbour opened a bodega, and word travelled back to the island and to the barrios of the Northeast that Reading was a place where a Puerto Rican family could afford to stay.
Reading Today
Reading is not a wealthy city. It carries the weight of its industrial collapse, with high poverty rates and the worn housing stock that affordability was built on. But it is no longer emptying out. The Latino majority that filled its rowhouses has given it a second life, and downtown is busier on a Saturday than it has been in decades.
The community has moved from the margins to the centre of civic power. A Latino mayor governs from City Hall, Latina members sit on the city council, and Spanish is as much the language of Penn Street as English. Centro Hispano marks more than half a century of service, and the September parade is now a fixture of the regional calendar.
What began with a few hundred mushroom pickers is now a city. The Puerto Ricans in Reading did not assimilate into someone else’s town. They became the town, and in doing so they kept a small piece of the island alive in the Pennsylvania hills. You can read the parallel story of the city’s earlier arrivals in the Italians of Reading, and trace the wider Puerto Rican migration through Springfield, Massachusetts, Hartford, Connecticut, and the steel town of Lorain, Ohio.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Puerto Ricans live in Reading, Pennsylvania?
The Puerto Ricans in Reading, Pennsylvania number close to thirty thousand, with recent estimates putting the figure at 29,953, around 46 per cent of the city’s Hispanic population. They are the single largest group in a city that is more than two thirds Latino.
Why did Puerto Ricans settle in Reading?
The first Puerto Ricans came from the mid-1960s to work in the mushroom houses and produce farms of Berks and Chester counties. As United States citizens since 1917 they needed no visas, and as Reading’s old industries declined they found affordable housing and open storefronts in the city itself.
What is Centro Hispano Daniel Torres?
Centro Hispano Daniel Torres, at 25 North Second Street, is Reading’s oldest Latino institution, founded in 1972. It is a nonprofit offering workforce development, youth and family services and community resources, and it has served the Puerto Ricans in Reading, Pennsylvania and other Latino residents for more than fifty years.
When is the Puerto Rican Day Parade in Reading?
Reading holds its Puerto Rican Day Parade each September, stepping off near 11th and Penn Street and marching down the city’s main street to a festival in the 400 block. It draws crowds of more than ten thousand and is supported by the local Spanish-language radio station La Mega and Latino civic groups.
Is Reading a majority-Latino city?
Yes. As of the 2020 Census, about 67 per cent of Reading’s 95,112 residents identified as Hispanic or Latino, up from roughly 37 per cent in 2000. Reading is the most heavily Hispanic city in Pennsylvania, and Puerto Ricans are its largest Latino group.
Where can you find Puerto Rican food in Reading?
Family restaurants across downtown serve Puerto Rican cooking, including Mofongo Restaurant at 124 South 5th Street and 4th & Penn Street Restaurant at 400 Penn Street. Penn Street and its side streets are lined with kitchens, bakeries and grocers serving mofongo, pasteles, alcapurrias and roast pork.
If your family’s story passed through Reading, or any of the places Puerto Ricans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the mushroom fields of Berks County and the barrios of the island, to the rowhouses off Penn Street, to wherever you are now.