Placemaking Through and Beyond the Ivory Towers and Decolonial Curricular Possibilities for Diasporican Futurities

• In Event: Curriculum, Memory, and the Puerto Rican Diaspora: Creating Futures Beyond Erasure

Abstract

This paper recognizes the possibilities for sites – university, school, communities – to connect diasporic subjects, strengthen relational frameworks and provide spaces for (un)forgetting and linking decolonizing diasporic histories and knowledge. It identifies the possibilities of these sites to yield emancipatory fruit; one such site, a public research center, has long served as a place of resistance and community-based scholarship, fostering the development of an innovative curriculum rooted in diasporic memory. This paper is influenced by the work of scholar, Yomaira Figueroa Vasquez (2020),who in mapping critical cartographies of Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone literary figures in exile and diaspora pays attention to relational frameworks to make visible insurgent world views and the ways in which the diaspora can “offer meditations on futurities or worlds/otherwise (p. 7).”

The public research center in question was founded in the 1970s by a coalition of traditionally minoritized community members, academics, and students who were galvanized by the Civil Rights Movement to demand access to equitable educational opportunities and curricular offerings that reflected their history, culture and lived experiences. The mission of this institution, borne out of community struggle, has remained consistent: researching, preserving, and sharing the Puerto Rican experience, creating accessible programming and actionable research for Puerto Rican studies and communities, and developing educational resources. There is a decolonizing force undergriding the work of the research center in keeping with the approach identified by Tuhiwai Smith (2010):

The decolonization project in research engages in multiple layers of struggle across multiple sites. It involves the unmasking and deconstruction of imperialism, and its aspect of colonialism, in its old and new formations alongside a search for sovereignty; for reclamation of knowledge, language and culture; and for the social transformation of the colonial relations between the native and the settler (pp. 97-98).

This research center exemplifies how we can create generative spaces in academia. Of note is the creation of a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, culturally-sustaining curriculum that is immersive, content-rich and arises from archival sources that (un)forget cultural productions of the Puerto Rican diaspora including art, music, literature, scholarship, oral histories, and personal and public communications.

Sites are integral elements for (un)forgetting and for creating emancipatory futurities. Attention to creating cartographies of such spaces for fostering synergistic research, policy, curricular and educational outcomes conducive for radical imagings is possible. Institutions such as this research center have borne fruit; other examples include Freedom Schools (Payne & Strickland, 2008), and programs across the nation in Ethnic Studies, Black and Puerto Rican Studies, Mexican American Studies, Haitian, Dominican, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and other programs of study illuminating diverse epistemologies, histories and cultures. Once these spaces are created, it is important to actively disrupt the ivory tower’s disposition towards elevating traditional scholar(s)/ship. By centering collaboration, diasporic and community-based knowledge(s), archives, histories, and cultural productions, we engage in (re)membering and meaning making to animate liberatory futurities for traditionally minoritized groups.

Author

• Daicy Diaz-Granados, Center for Puerto Rican Studies