We’re celebrating our Rooted + Relational Research initiative with the second annual symposium centering the 2025-2026 theme, Boricuas in Relation. We invited researchers, students, and artists to engage with the phenomenon of Boricua archipelagic and diasporic community formation with other racial and ethnic groups. Through special screenings, presentations, and panels, the current cohort of CENTRO fellows will engage with Puerto Rican relations, histories, and  practices with multiple communities across the US and beyond. Join us on  expanding Puerto Rican Studies as a field, a community, and a praxis of call and response as we learn how to tend to our complex and overlapping relationships across global geographies and specific communities.

May 1, 2026 | 5 PM – 8 PM

Screening: Archiving, Movement, & Mapping Memory

Join us for an evening of experimental and documentary film screenings to celebrate the opening of the “Boricuas in Relation” symposium. These screenings foreground documentary and experimental film as relational research practices. Through movement, montage, and archival intervention, these works interrogate absence, urban memory, and embodied mapping. Together, they ask: How do Boricuas narrate and navigate place when the archive is fragmented, incomplete, or silent? And how might creative practice become a method for tending to what history leaves behind?

Featured directors:

Noelia Quintero-Herencia | We are the city: Mapping No es extraño este sitio para la danza

Carla Gutiérrez and Kristofer Ríos | The Gaps Are the Story: Documentary Practice and the Incomplete Record

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May 2, 2026 | 10 AM – 7 PM

Day 2 of the Rooted + Relational: Boricuas in Relation Symposium will be hybrid. RSVP to join virtually here :

11 AM | Panel 1: Diasporic Formations — Language, Race, and Archival Silences

This panel examines how Boricua identities take shape across racialized landscapes of migration and settlement. Moving from Afro-Nuyorican poetics and linguistic struggle in New York City to overlooked labor histories in Utah, presenters trace how diaspora exceeds the nation-form and unsettles dominant archives. Together, these works explore relation as lived practice—through language, errantry, education, and survival—while confronting the silences that structure historical record-keeping.

Panelists include:

Cristel Jusino Díaz | Moderator

Janelle Viera | Contextualizing Race in Place: Diasporic Boricua Identities

Mell Rivera Díaz | Errantry Beyond the Nation-Form: Opacity and Afro-Nuyorican Relation

Katherine Morales | Relating to Spanish: Puerto Rican Oral Histories and the Making of Bilingual Education in New York City

Nichole Garcia | Making Life Beyond the Ledger: Puerto Rican Migration and Archival Silence in Utah’s Bingham Canyon

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12:45 PM | Panel 2: Archipelagic Solidarities — Revolutionary, Caribbean, and Transpacific Relations

Centering solidarity as method and practice, this panel maps Puerto Rican political and cultural relations across Greater Mexico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Vieques, Palestine, and South Korea. Presenters explore revolutionary networks, anti-militarism struggles, and inter-island friendships to illuminate archipelagic thinking beyond colonial borders. By foregrounding memory work and activist praxis, the panel considers how Boricua relationality generates shared political imaginaries across geographies.

Panelists Include:

Essah Díaz | Moderator 

Michael Staudenmaier | Puerto Rican Revolutionaries in Greater Mexico, 1978-1988

Kiana Gonzalez-Cedeño | Islander Friendships: US Virgin Island/Puerto Rico Friendship Day and Lessons on Caribbean Relation

Sara Awartani | Archiving Solidarity: A Memoir of Methods and Praxis

Yeongju Lee | Narrating Vieques Anti-Militarism Activism from a Transpacific Perspective

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3:30 PM | Panel 3: Cultural Afterlives — Literature, Comics, and Global Solidarity

From early women’s fiction to contemporary music and comics, this panel explores how Boricua cultural production theorizes relation across time and territory. Presenters revisit neglected literary texts, examine global solidarities articulated in popular music, and trace graphic storytelling as diasporic worldmaking. Together, these works show how art not only reflects social conditions but actively constructs relational futures rooted in feminist, anti-colonial, and transnational struggle.

Panelist include:

Jillian Baez | Moderator 

Suuru (Ashley Torres Carrasquillo) | Afro Saberes: Co-constructing a Community-Based Archive–Archivo de Historias, Aspiraciones, Resistencias y Cuidados Colectivos de personas negras que viven y sueñan en Barrios, Barriadas y Caseríos de Puerto Rico

Adrianna Ríos | Forgotten Novels, Enduring Questions: Marriage, Violence, and Domesticity in Early Puerto Rican Women’s Fiction

Alex Sastre-Rivera | Rooted and Relational: Global Solidarity against Settler Colonialism in “Lo Que le Pasó a Hawaiii” by Bad Bunny and “Mundi” by Chuwi 

Andres Olan-Vazquez |Trazando Líneas: The Making of ¡Wepa! Puerto Ricans in the World of Comics

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5:00 PM | Rooted Histories and Shared Futures Keynote: A Conversation with Dr. Yomaira Figueroa Vasquez, Iris Morales, and Sharayna Christmas 

This keynote conversation brings together an intergenerational reflection on relationality across activism, scholarship, and community praxis. Grounded in memory, and community care, this dialogue explores how Puerto Rican histories of struggle, migration, and cultural production are deeply entangled with Black, Latinx, and global liberation movements. Across generations, the speakers will reflect on their work building solidarities, navigating conflicts, and sustaining communities within and beyond institutional spaces. Together, they will consider how relational praxis can inform both intellectual and collective action.

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Image Credit: People smiling and wearing leis, Blase Camacho Souza Papers, CENTRO Archives

This event is made possible thanks to the Mellon funded Rooted + Relational Initiative.