Photos by Mateo Toro
Edna Garcia-Dipini
Hip Hop Is Our Culture
Written by Amanda Martin
Spoken by: Edna Garcia-Dipini &
RIZE members
Edna Garcia-Dipini smiles playfully at the group of ten people seated around the table in the dance studio, “You don’t know my dreams guys!” The person across the table from her returns the smile, “They come true?”
“They come true.”
RIZE, a non-profit organization based in Reading, Pennsylvania, and founded by Edna to provide children with free arts education, was born from one of those dreams and a whole lot of hip hop.
Hip hop is tireless.
​
It was sweat that powered RZA through two years of releasing failed singles before he joined the Wu-Tang Clan.
Photo by Mateo Toro
Hip hop is a voice for the marginalized: unabashed and unapologetic.
It was brutal honesty that infused “Runaway Love” by Ludacris and Mary J. Blige as they sang about the plight of three girls with absent parents.
Hip hop is rhythm.
Hip hop is expression.
Hip hop is performance.
“I am hip hop; that is my culture.”
​
Even before Edna was born, hip hop was in her blood. Edna’s grandmother was tireless. She had come from Puerto Rico to New York City unable to read or write the language of her new home. She had gotten a job as a Spanish-speaking operator at a telephone company called Bell Atlantic. And for thirty-eight years in rain or snow or wind or fog, she had gone to work to provide for her family, her neighbors, and her community. She fostered Edna’s own tenacity and passion for the arts as Edna grew up.
Edna sang a melodic note before she ever spoke. She went to her first hip hop festival when she was four years old. “I just remember a big radio and a cardboard box being opened on the floor, and people dancing, and I was in awe.” So in awe that when she went home she spent hours trying to mimic the dancers on her own.
She performed in glee clubs and school plays all through elementary school. At nine years old she joined a group that danced Pop & Lock and battled other groups in the neighborhood skating rink. She also got her first record: New Edition, Candy Girl. She spent hours in front of the TV watching Fame. The young singers, dancers, and actors portrayed onscreen fascinated her, and she became enamored with the High School of Performing Arts in New York City, telling anyone who would listen “I’m gonna go to that school.” Her family would smile and nod, and her grandmother would say “Edna, everything you say, you do. We believe you.”
That same grandmother, as well as Edna’s friend Kim, took the train ride with Edna to her first audition at the High School of Performing Arts. She passed with flying colors and was admitted to the school. The first of Edna’s big life dreams had come true. “The best four years of my life were spent there…and it was just like, y’know, we danced on the tables, and we did all that good stuff, and we drove our teachers crazy playing the piano in the lunch room, and it was just a great time.” More importantly, during those years, she made friends that she now refers to as family, friends that have continued to support her throughout her life.
But, high school ended, and the first of Edna’s dreams had come to a close. Yet, Edna was fortunate enough to get an internship and job that meshed perfectly with her passions and ambitions straight out of high school, a job with the first hip hop music video channel in New York City: Video Music Box.
She leapt into the opportunity with both feet, excitedly offering to do grunt work like carrying equipment and running PA systems, but as she worked, her coworkers and her mentor Ralph McDaniels coached her and trained her in the company. Through them, she was given the opportunity to work on videos for hip hop idols such as Mary J. Blige, Wu-Tang, De La Soul, and others in various capacities: PA system operator, casting director, and producer.
This work with Video Music Box presented Edna with her love next to performing arts: Public Relations. She began to be drawn to work behind the scenes, because beyond a love for performing, a love for people, relationships, and connections had formed within her, and after Video Music Box, she got a job in Public Relations, working her way up from administrative work to the position of director and up again to the executive office.
Her direct connection with hip hop had begun to wane, and life in New York City was expensive: “I was paying $1,875 just for rent alone. I probably wouldn’t have owned my home right now. I would have still been renting. My car note, everything else was just outrageous. I wanted a slower paced living for my children, but I still wanted city life for them too because I believe both hand-in-hand are spectacular.”
She found that amalgamation of excitement and peace in Reading, Pennsylvania. To her, Reading was a place that perfectly married the fire of the city with the peace and quiet of rural Pennsylvania. She’d been working in public relations in New York City, but when she moved to Reading, she found herself in need of work. She enrolled in a leadership class at the Daniel Torres Hispanic Center with the goal of finding a job.
​
But the longer she spent in Reading, she began to notice a need. Arts programs at the Reading High School were being cut as the city teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. She felt a kinship with the youth of the city who were going through adversity because she had gone through the same. As Edna explains, “I grew up in a household of adversity...single parent...family on drug dependency...16 years my father was in jail.” These struggles fostered her passion for working with youth: hip hop was their culture too. They were tirelessly fighting against hardship; they were marginalized and in need of a voice.
Edna founded RIZE to give them that voice. She’d found a passion for community both through her work in public relations and through the leadership class, so to her, founding a non-profit organization based on giving the youth in her community an artistic outlet was the perfect fusion of her passions. “I just went on a wing and a prayer...and I started doing film and media [classes]. And folks were like ‘Oh kids won’t show up on a Saturday at 11:00am. Parents aren’t going to bring them.’...I said, “Ok, well I’m not going to know unless I try, and the
first week, we had about 10 to 12 students. Second week, we had 20. Third week, we were telling folks that they couldn’t attend that program. We had to wait because the classroom only held 25 students, and it’s been nonstop ever since.”
Since its birth, RIZE has seen nonstop movement and expansion. Six former members of the Reading High School dance team, Jaymes Williams, Stephanie Seda, Liyanah Sheriff, Theresa Gonzalez, Caliph Shabazz, and Ashanique Monlyn, part of the generation of youth from the Reading High School who watched as their arts programs disappeared, grew up alongside of RIZE. Begun as a film and media program, RIZE took on journalism, digital arts, and theater. But, as the youth that first inspired Edna to form RIZE got older, she looked for new ways to enable their self-expression by providing them an outlet to share their talents with the next generation of youth. So, Edna turned to her first love as the subject for new RIZE program: hip hop. And she asked the six members of the dance team, now their own dance troupe called “We Are Reading,” to be teachers at RIZE.
Photo by Mateo Toro
Freestyle dancing at RIZE
Photo by Mateo Toro
The team were elated to have a means of continuing their passions. Both Stephanie and Jaymes hold dance as an important, almost sacred part of their lives. For Stephanie, dance is a way of life, and if she isn’t dancing, she isn’t breathing. And to Jaymes, dance is the strength that gets him through the moments he feels most helpless. Their and the rest of the team’s pursuance of their passions has been and continues to be an inspiration to Edna, and in turn, she has purposed to do whatever she can to assist their professional hip hop goals.
Most importantly, the collective goal of RIZE is to serve and give back to the youth in the community of Reading through hip hop. Whenever asked about RIZE’s goal, Edna invariably replies, “To provide an outlet for the youth to express themselves as artists.” To her, RIZE is not about her or her own desires; instead, she says, “it’s about the youth that we serve. And so, they (the teachers) inspire me; in turn, they inspire the youth, and the youth inspire them, and it really creates a synergy of accountability.”
That spirit of service, that collective, collaborative desire to provide a safe, fun atmosphere for youth to express themselves through movement pervades every aspect of RIZE’s operations. The atmosphere of the weekly Wednesday dance classes crackles with the energy of 20 or more kids in the dance studio all tirelessly jumping, bouncing, and dancing to a pulsing hip hop beat. Some are quiet and reserved, others are leaping into splits on the dance-floor, but all are accepted. And ALL are dancing, speaking through movement.
The benefits of that unbridled expression have shone through the students to their parents. Mothers of RIZE students, Martha, Jeannette, and Angelique, have said the following of the organization:
Hip hop is tireless.
It keeps kids active. Y’know, kids need to be active, and kids need to be exposed to new things, and this is a great way to do that.
Hip hop is performance.
It’s a confidence builder….When they go to their performances and they see the reactions that other people have just by seeing them dance and have fun, it just makes them happy ‘cause it gets to show them that their hard work is paying off….They’re not just dancing for no reason, they’re doing it ‘cause they love it.
Video by Michelle Hnath
Hip hop is a voice for the marginalized.
They’re really inclusive….as long as (the kids) wanna have fun, that’s the name of the game I guess, so that works for us, so they’ve been really cool; they’ve been really open and inviting…I actually wanted to take my child to something you know. I keep to myself mostly, so the fact that she wanted to do it and then tried it out, and then that there are so many benefits, and it made me want to come back with my child….
And with those statements, yet another of Edna’s dreams has come true. When she heard of the ways that RIZE has affected the youth in Reading and through them, their parents, Edna beamed from ear-to-ear. Taking a moment to absorb their words, she said, “To me that means it’s serving its mission, ‘cause that is the mission: self-awareness, self-care, health, education. It’s doing what it’s supposed to do, (laughing joyfully) and that makes me so happy!”
But this time, the dream does not come to a close, this time it grows. Edna and RIZE are currently in the process of organizing the yearly Dance on the Streets (DOTS) festival in downtown Reading, one of the largest annual arts festivals that the city has ever seen. DOTS aims to use hip hop as a universal language to draw in people of all cultures and backgrounds to reverse stigmas about the city, to tell the participants that Reading is a city worth being in and a community worth celebrating.
RIZE aims to stand as a model for other cities to follow for other community engagement programs. The organization is working with Penn State in the hopes of pursuing and furthering a program called RIZE Above Bars focused on assisting youth with parents in prison through the arts. RIZE is also furthering its global awareness campaign, iCommit, which looks for needs around the world and finds ways to fill them. Currently, they’re gathering money to build a boat to assist children in the Philippines in getting to school as many are forced to walk across rivers along the way. Employing more young artists from Reading, fostering young adult entrepreneurship, and building community in Reading through working with other community organizations are all goals for RIZE as it continues to expand and grow.
Edna is hoping to begin classes in other cities, including the city where she was born, the city where she first fell in love with hip hop: New York City. Because, like hip hop:
Kids learning hip hop dance at RIZE
Photo by Michelle Hnath
RIZE is tireless.
RIZE is a voice for the marginalized.
RIZE is rhythm.
RIZE is expression.
RIZE is performance.