The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CENTRO) has announced the fellows selected for the inaugural year of the “Rooted + Relational” research initiative: Dr. Alberto Ortiz Díaz, Dr. Amanda J. Guzmán, Dr. Cristina Pérez Jiménez, Dr. Daniel Morales-Armstrong, Dr. Emma Amador, Dr. Joaquín Villanueva, Dr. Karrieann Soto Vega, Dr. Katsí Yarí Rodríguez Velázquez, Dr. Keishla Rivera-López, Dr. Lorraine Torres Colón, Nayda Collazo-Llorens, Shakti Castro, and Xenia Rubinos. The inaugural theme is “Archives, Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico,” which reflects on the material and theoretical importance of the archive in contemporary scholarship and research practices while opening a space to engage with archival contestation, historical reckoning, the state of our archival facilities, accessibility, and forms of archival refusal.
“Archives, Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico” invites researchers to engage with archives and memory work concepts, practices, and theories within Puerto Rican Studies and Puerto Rican and Diasporican history. The selected fellows chose to focus their project on one of the following topics: archival silences, memory and preservation, Afro-Boricua and Afro-Indigenous archives, feminist archives, archival practices, queer archives, community archives, family archives, oral histories, and metadata and algorithms, among other possible interventions.
“Expanding the research cohort at CENTRO was one of my primary goals and the support from the Mellon Foundation has allowed us to increase our research cohort from four to thirteen scholars, independent researchers, and artists,” said CENTRO Directora, Dr. Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez. “This year’s theme aims to reinvigorate discourses and debates in Puerto Rican Studies through a sustained engagement with material, affective, and public archives. I am thrilled that CENTRO will be hosting this dynamic group of scholars who are committed to the mission of CENTRO and, most importantly, to the legacy and future of Puerto Rican studies.”
Throughout the year, fellows will meet weekly at The Center for Puerto Rican Studies for seminars, workshops, and events. Dr. Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, Professor of Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at the CUNY Graduate Center, will be the CUNY faculty presider for the year, offering mentorship and support for the cohort. The fellowship will culminate in a symposium in Spring 2025 accompanied by an edited volume published by CENTRO Press.
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ABOUT THE FELLOWS + THEIR WORK
Dr. Alberto Ortiz Díaz is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas, Arlington. He is an interdisciplinary scholar and historian of the Caribbean whose project, “Incarceration, Reentry, and Afro-Puerto Rican Worlds” centers the histories of incarcerated Puerto Ricans of color in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly the 1940s and 1950s. Using multiple sources, including inmate files and parole records, the project documents key features of the lives of Black prisoners who navigated Puerto Rico’s criminal-legal and parole systems and those who ended up in different corners of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. In so doing, the project informs the racial fluidity-rigidity debate that has long marked Puerto Rican Studies.
Dr. Amanda J. Guzmán is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the co-director of the Center for Caribbean Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She plans to develop several writing projects including a book proposal tentatively titled, From Island to Museum: Materializing Puerto Rican Object Itineraries. This manuscript employs a comparative approach towards diverse institutional assemblages to trace the history of North American museum collecting in and representation of Puerto Rico. Through the analysis of object collections and associated archival records, the work reassembles individual acquisition narratives and the larger contexts of the rise of museums and the field of anthropology.
Dr. Cristina Pérez Jiménez is an Associate Professor of English at Manhattan College developing an ongoing Digital Humanities project, “The Latino Catskills.” This public-facing digital humanities project re-situates the Catskills region, 100 miles northwest of NYC, as a generative space of Latinx culture and identity. Through multimedia exhibits and an interactive digital map, the project documents little-known stories about the countless Spaniards, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and others of Latin American descent who lived in or vacationed in the region. The study challenges the tendency to make urban environments the dominant context for understanding New York Puerto Rican experiences and in doing so, reclaims recreation in the lives of Northeast Latinx populations.
Dr. Daniel Morales-Armstrong is a Black DiaspoRican educator and historian of Puerto Rican slavery and emancipation. His project, “Libertos de Puerto Rico” (LPR), focuses on the intersections of disability, gender, and post-emancipation labor exemptions in Puerto Rico. This bilingual project makes accessible to the general Puerto Rican public––in the archipelago and diaspora––textured information about libertos’ experiences with the post-abolition forced labor contract mandate and maps the documentation of freedpersons’ noncompliance with the mandate. Responding to Francisco Scarano’s call to revisit the archives of Puerto Rican slavery, the LPR project offers a retelling of Puerto Rican emancipation that places libertos in their appropriate place at the center of Puerto Rican historical narratives.
Dr. Emma Amador is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Connecticut and is completing her second book, Bright Futures: Antonia Pantoja and the Practice of Ethnic Studies, a biography of Afro-Puerto Rican civil rights activist Antonia Pantoja. This book introduces readers to Pantoja’s life and examines her political work and contributions to the history of education in the United States. Bright Futures examines how Pantoja’s work agitating for bilingual education and Puerto Rican Studies resulted in significant changes to educational policy and the forging of new educational institutions, which have been foundational to contemporary demands for Ethnic Studies within and beyond academia.
Dr. Joaquín Villanueva is a Professor of Geography at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota. Drawing from the archival research conducted for his current book project, Making Space for Empire: Colonial Elites, Whiteness, and the Planning of Modern Puerto Rico, 1930-1960, he develops a methodological guideline to help confront the archive of puertorriqueñidad. Understanding the silences, power dynamics, and dominant ideologies that have shaped official archives by and about Puerto Rico, Making Space for Empire seeks to develop a critical methodological approach to help current and future researchers wishing to develop alternative and critical histories of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in the archipelago and the diaspora.
Dr. Karrieann Soto Vega is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Rhetoric in the Department of English at the Pennsylvania State University. Her project, Rhetorics of Defiance: Lolita Lebrón’s Anticolonial Action, Representation, and Reverberation, traces a rhetorical history of Lolita Lebrón—a Puerto Rican revolutionary—to craft a social movement theory around “rhetorics of defiance” against empire and colonialism. Connecting Lebrón’s genealogy as a Puerto Rican nationalist/Third World woman, attending to divergent representations of her as terrorist and freedom fighter, and extending Lebrón’s story to contemporary struggles against colonial debt, the book argues that rhetorics of defiance have the capacity to endure as long as oppressive structures impact colonized communities.
Dr. Katsí Yarí Rodríguez Velázquez has worked as a mentor and professor in various institutions of higher learning in Puerto Rico and Latin America. She specializes in Black feminism, Black women’s expression and thought, and race and gender relations in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Katsí holds an M.A. in Cultural Action and Management from the University of Puerto Rico and an M.A. and Ph.D.in Africana Studies from Brown University. Her project highlights the profound decolonial practices found in Black Puerto Rican writers’ work and confronts their silencing through the development of courageous reading practices that create new memories about these women.
Dr. Keishla Rivera-López is a literary and cultural studies scholar, writer, and poet. She will be completing her first book, Boricua Projects: Puerto Ricans Rewriting Culture, Motherhood, and Memory Beyond Archives during the fellowship year. Boricua Projects examines and showcases how alternative ways of knowing and remembering are used to reconcile with erasure and marginalization. She focuses on Puerto Rican and diasporican authors and artists and their works which challenges the narratives of the Puerto Rican experience told to us by museums, textbooks, and archives, which often omit diverse experiences of Puerto Ricanness.
Dr. Lorraine Torres Colón is a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Latino Social Science Pipeline Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. Her project focuses on data sovereignty and the structural challenges researchers face when engaging with colonial logics embedded in data collection, ownership, localization, and accessibility in Puerto Rico. The work will broadly involve collecting thematic interviews with social science researchers with the goal of unmasking the ways in which colonial logics prevent systematic research, distort analyses and findings, and obscure the ways that colonial regimes govern, through the production of ignorance. The project is derived from the challenges in accessing data within Puerto Rico’s judicial system and mental health services.
Nayda Collazo-Llorens is a visual artist who works in various media, including drawing, video, installations, and site-specific works. She earned an MFA from New York University and a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, The Mattress Factory, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Museo Universitario del Chopo, and more. During the fellowship Nayda will investigate diasporic dislocations through a new installation with found maps. She aims to explore the potential of the archive and cartographic data as malleable materials able to be remapped and remixed to generate new connections.
Shakti Castro is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University. Her dissertation, “Agenda of Survival: Puerto Ricans, Public Health, and the Politics of Harm Reduction, 1965-2000” examines the Puerto Rican history of needle exchange programs and AIDS activism in New York City and the archipelago. Through archival, ethnographic, and material culture-based research, she explores how medical and legal policy, United States empire, and labor and health-based migration shaped the political subjectivity of Puerto Ricans. Shakti argues that Puerto Ricans with substance-use issues and those living with HIV/AIDS engaged in harm reduction and anticolonial activism, simultaneously, to assert both their bodily autonomy and political sovereignty.
Xenia Rubinos is a NY-based vocalist, composer, and performing artist who is working on “Círculo de Voces”, which reimagines the choir as a public service, a community resource, and gives voice to memory, new futures, and a living vocal archive. Through research, talleres, and performances, she will question what an embodied archival process looks like in a collective voicing practice, personal artistic work, and the Boricua community. To expose archival silences, “Círculo de Voces” centers historically excluded voices of Puerto Rican women, queer, non-binary people, and Afro-Boricuas. Circulos will be recorded in an audio and written archive. This collective exploration will inform a new album and performance by Xenia Rubinos.