CENTRO’s Library & Archives is a treasured place where researchers, academics, teachers, students, genealogists, filmmakers, and the community at large find primary (historical documents) and secondary sources about the history and culture of the Puerto Rican diaspora. Visitors can gain access to books, photographs, documents, artifacts, art, maps, oral histories, moving image and audio clips, and digitized or born digital material pertaining to stateside Puerto Ricans via our Library Catalog, Archival Database, and Digital Collections.
CENTRO'S Data Hub generates robust research and analysis using publicly available data, like the U.S. Census Bureau and other federal agencies to provide information to scholars, policy makers and the general public. Our interactive reports use data visualization tools and web maps to illustrate major changes within the Puerto Rican population. In recent years, the data hub has extended research priorities to Puerto Rico's ongoing economic crisis and post-disaster recovery. Our Hub offers a unique opportunity to connect and collaborate with outside researchers on investigations, publications, and events.
Rooted + Relational is a five year research initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation which seeks to reimagine the research agenda and scholarly and community impact of 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.
Black Puerto Rican Futures is a three-year initiative 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, and retrieves the books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles written by Black Puerto Ricans as they actively participated in the fight for Puerto Rico’s future during the first decades under the United States.
