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.