Rooted + Relational

Rooted + Relational is a five year research initiative at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies funded by the Mellon Foundation which seeks to reimagine the research agenda and scholarly and community impact of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) in the US and beyond. This series of projects aims to make CENTRO a public facing, horizontal, decolonial feminist institute that opens new paths in academia and expands community-driven research that expands beyond the walls of the academy. This proposed project strategically links the center’s research agenda, data hub projects, media, arts and culture output, scholarly mentoring initiatives, and community partnerships by creating annual thematic structures that will address some of the most pressing social, political, and economic issues facing Puerto Rico and the diaspora. The goal is to create a unifying higher learning community at CENTRO that tends to the intellectual and cultural needs of our committed and diverse public.

2024-2025: Archives, Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico

What is the state of Puerto Rican archives, archival theory, and archival practices? What are the roots of Puerto Rican studies and how can we best tend to its past and futures? How is our field engaging with contestation, archival reckoning, accessibility, quotidian interventions, and forms of archival refusal?

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2025-2026: Boricuas in Relation

What can we learn from the complex and overlapping relationships that Puerto Ricans have across global geographies and specific cities, sites and communities? What do we owe one another as we strive for political and cultural decolonization, self-determination and liberation, and anti-racism in our communities?

2026-2027: Black Cuerpas: Race, Body Politics & Culture

How do race, sex, gender, and body politics shape the histories and lived experiences of Boricuas? What happens when we put race and Blackness at the center of a field of study that has, for too long, championed color-blindness and racial democracy to avoid questions of racism, complicity, and erasure?

2027-2028: LGBTQ Activism, Pleasure & World Making

How do acts of queer pleasure shape the very contours of Puerto Rican social and political life through appropriations and disidentifications in popular culture, politics, and resistance? How have queer Ricans challenged colonialism, capitalism, nationalism, and the ways that modernity has organized Puerto Rican life?

2028-2029: Land, Ecologies & Environmental Futures

What are the links between land and land rights, housing and displacement, ecological disasters and climate catastrophe? How does climate change, energy access, and displacement impact housing, agriculture, food sovereignty movements, and gentrification?