The Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College has announced the recipients of its inaugural Community Micro-Grants for the Rooted + Relational Micro-Grant 2024-2025 Program. CENTRO has awarded 12 grants, each up to $5,000, to non-institutionally affiliated community organizations, individuals, or projects for community-based programs. The inaugural theme of the Rooted + Relational Initiative is “Archives, Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico.” Applicants engaged in archives, memory work, public history, cultural preservation, and community initiatives within Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican Diaspora were invited to apply.
The chosen recipients are:
- Agro, Cultura y Arte: Preservando Nuestro Origen y Naturaleza
Caguas, Puerto Rico
Developed at the AgroInnova Demonstration Farm in Caguas, Puerto Rico, this project will offer the community a space for collaborative learning about cultural preservation and ancestral agroecological practices of Puerto Rico, through educational workshops, excursions, and artistic activities in connection with nature.
- Periodico Comunitario Urbe A Voz
Caguas, Puerto Rico
Urbe A Voz is a community newspaper that documents, amplifies, and disseminates our voices. It weaves a collective memory through ink and print to promote issues related to gender, race, class, harm reduction, and environmental sustainability. The newspaper has designed 36 editions, distributes 500 monthly copies, and showcases over one hundred authors from our community.
- Stories and Activism of the Air Bridge of Puerto Rican Harm Reductionists
Bronx, New York
The air bridge captures the stories of the activists connecting activism and public health practices across the Puerto Rican diaspora. The primary population of people who inject drugs (PWID) in The Bronx are first-generation migrants or continuous with multiple migrations to and from Puerto Rico. Bronx Móvil was founded as a direct-action response to address the significant gap in street-based Spanish language harm reduction support in The Bronx.
- Ancestral Herbal Narratives Oral History Project
Highland Park, New Jersey
In this oral history project, the Raíces Community History Program and Digital Archive team members will expand the “Ancestral Herbal Narratives” Oral History Collection, conducting oral history interviews with members of the Puerto Rican and diasporic communities related to herbal healing and other healing traditions.
- Archivo Histórico del Ballroom en Puerto Rico
San Juan, Puerto Rico
The creation of the “Historical Archive of Ballroom in Puerto Rico” will document, in digital and written form, the work and cultural-community impact of La Laboratoria Boricua de Vogue from 2018 to 2024. This archive will contain the first chapter of a history book, photos, videos, names of events and categories, names of winners, dates, important locations, member profiles, house profiles, interviews, costume documentation, etc.
- Dance is Life Archives: Preserving Puerto Rican Contributions to the Hustle Dance Movement
New York, NY
Led by Ahtoy Juliana, a distinguished dancer, choreographer, and educator within the Afro-Latinx dance community, this Dance is Life Archives project will research and activate the rich history of Puerto Rican diaspora influence within the Latin Hustle dance movement. Ahtoy will conduct archival research at CENTRO to explore artifacts, interviews, and other historical materials that document the Puerto Rican community’s pivotal role in the evolution of Latin Hustle as a cultural movement.
- Fiestas de Cruz
San Mateo de Cangrejos, Puerto Rico
Jose Cepeda will organize a Fiestas de Cruz celebration in San Mateo de Cangrejos, as his ancestors did, which will include traditional songs and other pastimes associated with this historic practice. Additionally, it will revive a nearly forgotten practice within this tradition called Baile de Capiado, and there will be a short film viewing.
- Recovering Hidden Narratives of Resistance to Colonization and Slavery
San Juan, Puerto Rico
This project seeks to uncover and preserve the history of freedom-seeking (cimarronaje) and resistance that will be community-driven, entails archival research and historical ethnographic methods, and will culminate in community-based recorridos (tours), panel discussions, online lessons/activities for students, a digital archive of works written on cimarronaje and resistance, and a map view of the location data in a data visualization software.
- Lugares Históricos: African Burial Grounds
Orlando, Florida
Led by the Puerto Rican Organization for the Performing Arts (PROPA), The African Burial Grounds (ABG) project will access archival materials including vital records such as death registrations, manumission receipts, burial records, newspaper articles, maps, or blueprints. While some of these are available through online resources, many are only available via in-person visits to government archives, libraries, or churches.
- Telling Our Stories: The History of Rumsey/Roberto Clemente Park
Grand Rapids, Michigan
The goal of this project is to support public history programming and archival collections as they work to apply for a state historical marker that tells the complex and more accurate histories of Rumsey/Roberto Clemente Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This park has been home to baseball games, family parties, reunions, and gatherings for Grand Rapids’ Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Black communities since the 1950s.
- Proyecto Kokobale: Lxs Pequeñxs Cimarronxs
San Juan, Puerto Rico
This project gives free kokobalé classes — the Afro-Puerto Rican martial art of stick fighting developed as a means of self-defense from the violence of slavery and colonialism — for children, and makes them especially accessible to children from vulnerable communities. This project maintains the generational relay of ancestral practices, ensuring that it does not become a privilege of those who can pay for the classes, but that they are accessible to the entire population, especially to the population of Puerto Rican communities, neighborhoods, and hamlets.
- Maui Puerto Rican Association Digital Archive
Maui, Hawaii
The project will rehouse and digitize 18 photo albums and 200 pages of documents from 1980 onward. The awarded funds will cover the purchase of archival storage materials, completion of scanning, and metadata-gathering with MPRA elders. Additionally, they will offer personal archiving services to members and collaborate with K-12 Puerto Rican teachers in Hawai’i to develop lesson plans using the archive. We also aim to share the archives with cities and institutions in Puerto Rico.
“The chosen twelve recipients of our first Rooted + Relational micro-grant program are doing exciting, necessary, and urgent work that CENTRO is proud to support,” said CENTRO Directora, Dr. Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez. “We had an unprecedented number of applications for this inaugural year of the program, making this selection incredibly difficult. This reflects the immense amount of work being done on the ground, outside of academic institutions, and directly with communities.”
Community Micro-Grant Recipients are non-academic/non-institutionally affiliated community organizers, artists, creatives, writers, farmers, activists, organizers, and cultural workers or groups residing in Puerto Rico or the USA who collaborate on projects with participants who identify as Puerto Ricans, are of Puerto Rican descent, or work on a community project related to Puerto Rican histories, legacies, or futures. Recipients will spend the year (November 2024-September 2025) in their communities of choice working on their proposed projects, events, or initiatives. They will be invited to share their work at a CENTRO event, attend three virtual meetings, and have their work highlighted and shared through CENTRO’s communications and media channels.