Testimonios AfroPuertorriqueños successfully completed its Spring “tour”!

(from J. A. Géliga Vargas)

AfroPuerto Rican Testimonies: An Oral History Project in Western Massachusetts (a.k.a. Testimonios AfroPuertorriqueños) is an ongoing research project that began in September 2006 as a collaboration between faculty members Jocelyn A. Géliga Vargas and José Irizarry, community leaders from Aguadilla and Hormigueros, and UPRM students from the English and Social Sciences departments. After 18 months of collective organization, training, research and dissemination activities, we received many invitations to present the preliminary results of our inquiry into contemporary AfroPuerto Rican identities this Spring.

On March 1, MAEE student Irmaris Rosas, community leaders Tania Delgado and Luis Soto and I presented our project at a special session of the College English Association-Caribbean Chapter Conference, held at UPR-Arecibo. On March 12, MAEE student Fabiola Barrera, community leaders Alfredo González, Tania Delgado and Brunilda Rosa and I co-presented our project in a two-hour session of the weeklong event Literacy and Community, organized the Department of English at UPR-Aguadilla. The following day Irmaris, Fabiola, Social Sciences student Luis Daniel Cruz, community leaders Brunilda Rosa and Carlos Delgado and I offered an hour-long presentation at UPR-Mayagüez in the context of the Semana de la afropuertorriqueñidad, organized by the Humanities Department’s Agenda Cultural initiative. On April 30, Irmaris, Fabiola, Luis Daniel and I joined community leaders Alfredo González, Brunilda Rosa and Luis Soto in a two-hour presentation offered at a well-attended and stimulating community forum in Aguadilla.

Our project has caught the attention of campus, regional and national media. In December 2007 it was featured in the first issue of the UPRM research publication Sin Límites and in the weekly newspaper Claridad. An op/ed column about our project, authored by Carlos Delgado, was published in El Nuevo Día on February 3, 2008; an extended and collectively written version of this article was requested by co-editors Miriam Jiménez and Juan Flores for publication in their forthcoming reader about Afrolatin@s (Duke University Press). More recently, our project was featured on the UPRM website (March 14-21, 2008), the weekly regional newspaper La Estrella (April 3, 2008), and El Nuevo Día (Revista Oeste, April 30, 2008).

My paper titled “El incierto proyecto del ‘cine nacional’ puertorriqueño ante el colonialismo y la globalización” was published in the latest edition of the journal Atenea (vol. XXVII, no. 2). At the request of the editor of the Caribbean Studies journal Sargasso, I recently submitted the article “Testimonios Afropuertorriqueños: Using Oral History to (Re)Write Race in Contemporary Puerto Rico,” co-authored by Irmaris Rosas and Tania Delgado, for a forthcoming issue on “Alternative Identities: Belonging and Resistance.”