Daniel Morales-Armstrong

Daniel Morales-Armstrong is a Black DiaspoRican educator and historian of Puerto Rican slavery and emancipation. Prior to joining Centro, Dr. Morales-Armstrong completed his joint PhD in History and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His scholarship, including his dissertation, focused on the ways formerly enslaved Puerto Ricans (“libertxs”) challenged the three-year forced labor mandate that followed emancipation in the colony, as well as the archival silences surrounding those acts of refusal. His scholarship has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, and now, Centro. Daniel’s “Libertos de Puerto Rico” (LPR) project focuses on the intersections of disability, gender, and post-emancipation labor exemptions in Puerto Rico. This bilingual project makes accessible to general Puerto Rican publics––in the archipelago and diaspora––textured information about libertxs’ experiences with the post-abolition forced labor contract mandate and maps the documentation of freedpersons’ noncompliance with the mandate. Responding to Francisco Scarano’s call to revisit the archives of Puerto Rican slavery to subvert the practice of focusing on “slavery but not the slaves,” the LPR project offers a retelling of Puerto Rican emancipation that places the libertos in their appropriate place at the center of the story.