Our goal is to promote readership of texts by Puerto Rican
authors and support a greater integration of Puerto Rican
topics into American humanities courses and teacher education
courses.
This website offers access to information developed by
scholars associated with the City University of New York
(CUNY) and archival resources held at the Centro de Estudios
Puertorriqueños (a CUNY research institute) on three
Puerto Rican writers who migrated to the United States in
the early twentieth century.
All three of these authors published stateside and in English.
All three were fully bilingual and among their papers are
essays and letters in Spanish and in some cases their books
have been translated into Spanish.
These writers were chosen from a small group of writers
who have donated their papers to the Centro de Estudios
Puertorriqueños at Hunter College/City University
of New York. Our goal is to present information on Puerto
Rican writers together with access to some of the archival
sources that they left behind. The use of archival sources
gives students access to new insights into the lives of
these writers and to the historical reality they lived through.

The central pedagogical goal of this project is to promote
the use of primary sources in college level literature,
history and education classes and high school English and
Social Studies classes. Some of the teaching strategies
we present are collected from the field and some we are
suggesting to the field.
Using primary sources in classes encourages students to
see the ways in which interpretations of literature are
built, as well as the construction of social and cultural
historical narratives and invites them into that process.
Using web-based archival resources on U.S. Latinos has been
a difficult task for educators up until this time as the
vast majority of digitized classroom resources currently
available on the web refer to the histories of Americans
of European descent. Increasingly, important archival resources
are going up on the web that speak to African American experiences.
Very little material exists on the web about Latinos of
any descent, and within the narrow area of archival resources,
this may be one of the earlier sites to make a collection
of materials available. The accessibility to digitized primary
sources held by Centro’s archives and the ability
to use these images both in classes will advance the agenda
of incorporating new technologies into humanities and teacher
education courses.