The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CENTRO) is excited to announce its new fellows for its Rooted + Relational Summer Research and Artist-In-Residence: Alexandria Ramos, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Seattle; Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed, an independent scholar of social movements in the Americas and the Caribbean; and Estelle Maisonett, an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the intersections of material culture, identity, and urban space.
As CENTRO’s new Artist-In-Residence, Maisonett’s project is Archiving Nuyorican Identity: A Living Visual Record, where she approaches the archive as a living entity, extending into personal collections, artistic spaces, and everyday life to create a visual survey of Nuyorican material culture in contemporary NYC.
“[Maisonett’s] work offers a critical lens on the complex ways we navigate our condition as colonial subjects—sometimes quietly, sometimes defiantly. As the first year of Rooted + Relational, centered on the theme ‘Archives, Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico,’ comes to a close, this project brings us back to the core of our lived experience,” Ángel Antonio Ruiz Laboy, the Associate Director of Arts and Culture for CENTRO, said.
For the Summer Research Fellowship, Ramos will be working on a chapter titled “‘In No Page of Our History’: The Critical Pedagogy of Jesús Colón” in the book manuscript she is developing, tentatively titled Pedagogies of Struggle: The Print Politics of Latinx Writer-Activists, 1898-1968. This project explores the archives of antiracist, feminist, and anti-colonial writer-activists in the pre-Civil Rights era, and considers the relationship between literature, learning, and social justice.
Reed will dive into CENTRO’s archives on Puerto Rican feminist healthcare, anti-colonial learning, and dissident desires for their new book project, Hemisphere in Bloom. As the author of New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University, Tomás Reed is co-developing the multilingual anthology Black Feminist Studies in the Americas and the Caribbean (Malpaís Ediciones). They are also a contributing editor with LÁPIZ Journal and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and serves on the Board of Directors for CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at CUNY.
To learn more about year one of Rooted + Relational and the selected fellows, click here.