Rooted + Relational: Boricuas in Relation
Location: CENTRO en El Barrio
Cost: Free
May 1 @ 5:00 pm – May 2 @ 8:30 pm EDT
The 2025-2026 theme, “Boricuas in Relation,” invited researchers to engage with the phenomenon of Boricua archipelagic and diasporic community formation with other racial and ethnic groups. Boricuas have long developed and sustained political, social, kinship, creative, labor, and spiritual practices with multiple communities across the United States and beyond. One example to consider is the multi-generational relationships Puerto Ricans in Hawaii have created with Kānaka Maoli, Filipino, Japanese, Black, and Portuguese communities after over 100 years of colonization and cohabitation.
Join CENTRO’s Rooted + Relational research associates as they present their research examining the experience and impact of migration, language, assimilation, cultural and linguistic resilience, and the connections between Puerto Ricans and other racial and ethnic groups.
May 1, 2026 | 5 PM – 8 PM
Screening: Archiving, Movement, & Mapping Memory
This screening foregrounds 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 place when the archive is fragmented, incomplete, or silent? And how might creative practice become a method for tending to what history leaves behind?
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May 2, 2026 | 10 AM – 7 PM
11 AM | Panel 1: Diasporic Formations — Language, Race, and Archival Silence
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.
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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.
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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.