Growing Up Bronx

• In Event: Archiving Art as a Legacy to Preserve Pasts/Futures

Abstract

In this offering, poet, artist, and scholar Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz reflects on her forthcoming book, Growing Up Bronx, as a powerful archive of personal and collective memory, which is conceptualized as a poetic excavation of place, identity, and the enduring wisdom embedded in the geographies that raise us. Through poetry and personal narrative, Sealey-Ruiz invites us to consider how the intimate terrain of our lives (the streets we walked, the language we spoke, the love and rupture we experienced) become methodologies for unforgetting. Her work underscores how poetry is not merely a mode of artistic expression, but a justice-making practice: a way to re/member and future simultaneously. In a global social context structurally shaped by histories of erasure and displacement (both at the micro-level of the individual and meso-level of cultural communities), Sealey-Ruiz offers an artistic model for scholars to see their lives as poetry, particularly vessels for resistance and radical (pedagogical) possibility. By leveraging the poetics of lived experience, this offering asks: How can we mine the lyricism of our past to (re)vision education for liberation? How do the places that made us allow us to become and to imagine otherwise?

Author

• Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Teachers College, Columbia University