The Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) is honored to announce its newest tool, The Archives of Puerto Rican Slavery Map, a product of Black Puerto Rican Futures initiative at CENTRO.
Black Puerto Rican Futures is a three-year initiative at CENTRO that reclaims and restores Black Puerto Rican history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is an archival project that recovers the historical records of Black Puerto Ricans, enslaved and free, during the last decades under the Spanish Empire.
The Archives of Puerto Rican Slavery Map is a digital tool that expands access to primary sources related to the lives of enslaved and emancipated people in Puerto Rico. Drawing on knowledge developed over years of related research, this living tool brings together information about accessing collections related to the people subjected to slavery and its afterlives in Puerto Rico. Perfect for everyone from expert researchers to beginners, each pin on the map provides key details for using that archive.
This map is part of a broader suite of tools meant to support researchers’ ability to find, interpret, and ethically engage the archives of Puerto Rican slavery.
“Black Puerto Rican Futures at CENTRO has achieved an incredibly significant milestone with the interactive guide: Archives of Puerto Rican Slavery Map. This work beautifully dovetails with CENTRO’s mission of preserving and making accessible Puerto Rican history, but also expands the reach of our study resources for folks across disciplines and fields of study. We are honored to support, foment, and house work that facilitates new knowledge and promotes intellectual solidarities,” said Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, CENTRO’s Directora.
“This map would have saved me countless hours over the past decade of research about slavery and abolition in Puerto Rico,” said Dr. Daniel Morales-Armstrong, the CENTRO Rooted + Relational Black Puerto Rican Futures Researcher. “It is an honor to work on this project with the wonderful folks at Centro, who are opening the doors in so many ways for scholars of Black Puerto Rican histories.”
“I am grateful to CENTRO and to our director, Yomaira FIgueroa-Vásquez, for her leadership and for her support of this project. Both of us have dedicated our careers to the recovery of Black histories that have gone ignored and neglected: I’m so very happy Black Puerto Rican Futures has found a home here, building on her groundbreaking work of the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, Taller Entre Aguas, and the Rooted and Relational Initiative,” said Dr. Vanessa K Valdés, editor of CENTRO Press and author of Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.