DiaspoFuturism through the Puerto Rican Archives: Unforgetting the Past to Build Alternative Futures in Education

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

Abstract

This paper examines the complexities of curricular (un)forgetfulness and the significance of bringing a critical lens to teaching about the past experiences of Puerto Ricans in the United States. These experiences serve as the building blocks for imagining alternative futures or “worlds/otherwise” (Figueroa-Vásquez, 2020). By unforgetting, we refer to a pedagogical process of undoing the erasure of subjects and communities within the Puerto Rican diaspora, who have courageously reimagined the Puerto Rican identity and culture in a new context, oftentimes adverse to them. Inspired by the concept of Afrofuturism (Dery, 1994), which posits “the very act of daring to imagine an impossible future, such as freedom or even humanity for an enslaved African” (Nkeramihigo, 2025), this pedagogical undoing implies an orientation toward a decolonized diasporic future that might never be (Grosfoguel, 2003). Still, it compels subjects—in this case, students—to continue working towards their decolonization and sovereignty, like many Puerto Ricans in the diaspora have done and continue to do today.

To achieve this, we have developed a new curriculum that highlights how the diaspora has fought against ethnic and cultural invisibilization and oppression while building their communities anew (Hall, 1990). We accomplish this through lessons that critically examine the archives that hold the visible, audible, and other sensible signs of Puerto Rican presence on the mainland. Moreover, this curriculum reframes their experience of displacement and survival as an alternative form of being in the world (Butler, 2001). Each of the five units and twenty lessons of this curriculum demonstrates how Puerto Ricans have reworked conventional definitions of identity tied to language, citizenship, family, national signs, and borders to build their communities and maintain their culture outside of Puerto Rico. Through the exemplary cases of Puerto Ricans, such as Arturo Schomburg, Pura Belpré, and Antonia Pantoja, we teach students about what was imagined and made possible in the past so that they can envision an alternative future for themselves and their communities.

We drew on critical pedagogy, discourse-centered approaches to culture, and archival ethnography. Critical pedagogy considers learners’ being, their interactions with the world, their preoccupations, and their hopes of what they can become (Freire, 1970; Lado & Quijano, 2020). It empowers students to develop a critical consciousness, enabling them to identify and address social injustices. A central proposition of discourse-centered approaches is that “culture is localized in concrete publicly accessible signs [...]” (Urban, 1991, p. 1). This idea has had significant methodological implications in the preparation of our lessons, which have an ethnographic focus on socio-historical situated signs. Archival ethnography is also an approach that combines these methods and sensibilities to examine archival materials. It goes beyond simply using archives as repositories of historical facts—instead, it treats archives as cultural instantiations that are embedded in power relations, social practices, and epistemologies (Stoler, 2010).

This curriculum highlights the importance of centering diasporic experiences in Ethnic Studies, Puerto Rican Studies, Social Studies, and U.S. History, ultimately advocating for an inclusive framework that reflects diverse cultural realities and different ways of belonging.

Author

• Carmin Quijano, Hunter College