The City of Brotherly Love doesn't often live up to its name.

An invitation to open conversation and strengthen connection

We are a city of neighborhoods that are set in orbit around themselves; rarely spinning out to interact with each other in deep or significant ways. We live and work among our own in these neighborhoods — and in the cases of El Barrio or Chinatown, this cohesiveness helps preserve our language and customs. 

But it has a cost. 

Events and news stories that are of supreme importance to any one community don't necessarily make it out of the neighborhood where they originate and into the broader conversation about Philadelphia as a whole. 

At AL DÍA we're interested in the ways and points of intersection between all the distinct communities that comprise our great city. We try to do our part by widening our editorial view and, for example, have recently engaged in collaborative reporting— our own Ana Gamboa with AxisPhilly's Solomon Jones  produced the multimedia report "African Americans vs. Latinos?" in January of this year, and Gamboa again, this time with Chinese Business Times' Bole Yuan reported on "The 'amigos' of Chinese Business" in May. 

Many of the live events we have sponsored focus on deepening conversation and strengthening connections to our fellow Philadelphians — like our "Media in the City" panels that have brought together journalists from the African-American, Latino, Jewish and LGBT communities to discuss issues from our communities that rarely get play in mainstream news reports.

And we're always on the lookout for the people and organizations that do the legwork of building bridges between all of our communities in the city — even if they do so quietly and without fanfare. In fact, maybe even more so in those instances, because we know then that the outreach and the bridge-building comes from a genuine desire to hear each other's words.

We recently attended an event that exemplifies just that, at the National Museum of American Jewish History in the Independence Mall area of Philadelphia. The "Pop-Up Poetry" performance that took place unannounced at the museum's café the morning of May 6 brought together students, teachers and poetry aficionados from the African-American, Jewish, Latino and other communities to share poetry in a very impromptu way, amid a small audience of museum goers. 

Led by Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, Temple University's associate professor of Urban Theater and Community Engagement, and with the participation of Temple students Neha Sharma and Anthony Katz, in addition to members of the audience, the hour-long presentation made clear that performed poetry has deep roots in many communities, and that it speaks across generations and across racial lines. 

For people of color who see themselves represented far too infrequently in the arts — particularly the literary ones — the reminder that we, too, have words to uplift, to call-out, to evoke, and portray our own histories and realities, is a powerful one. Particularly on the streets of Independence Mall, where the city and nation we share was born.   

"Poetry is always welcomed here,"  says NMAJH's Rob Levin at the end of the video of the event on our website (www.pontealdia.com). We hope that means there will be more of these kinds of intriguing, unexpected gatherings.  

For ourselves at AL DÍA, we are planning more ways to broaden our reach: more panels and conversations; more movie screenings and opportunities. A new website with as much English content as Spanish. More expansive coverage on these pages.

We invite you — everyone reading this — to engage with us online, in social media, in person. We want to hear your words.