any Puerto Rican and Dominican New Yorkers are proud of an ancestral connection with the Indigenous Taíno population which inhabited the island when Spanish colonists arrived in the early 16th century. As a center of Puerto Rican nationalism, New York is also a significant site for a number of activist groups working to revive the Taíno language from the sources that remain, including Friends of Naguake, which has worked from the Dyckman Farmhouse in upper Manhattan. East Harlem's Taino Towers were opened in 1979 as an innovative, federally-funded housing project to serve the Puerto Rican community and honor the Taíno people.