She has used her own experiences as a Black Puerto Rican to educate the world on Afro Latinidad and to bridge the gap between the presence of African-Americans and Latinos in the US.

In Carmen Dolores Hernández’s Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers, Piri said that if people wanted to know what he had done after writing his novel, all they had to do was to “ask the communities, the schools, the universities, and colleges.”

Piri is remembered as an influential voices of the Nuyorican Movement, which captured the experiences of Puerto Ricans in New York through the discrimination and marginalization they faced.

She also went on to establish the Afro-Boricua El Coqui Theater, which the Panamerican Association of the New World Festival named “as the most important authority of Black Puerto Rican culture.”

Felipe Luciano is the founder of the Young Lords New York Branch – a Puerto Rican activist group started in Chicago and New York City with the same missions as the revolutionary Black Panther Party.