Digital Solidarities: Archiving Caribbean Lives in the Face of Empire

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

In this round table focused on digital humanities, the After the Storm Collective, Taller Entre Aguas, and Cuidado Colectivo PR, will come together and discuss their data, methods, and mapping projects that aim to lift the veil on American empire, while highlighting solidarity across the Caribbean. In this conversation, faculty members, graduate students, and independent scholars come together to discuss their projects and methods that respond to the need to name empire and resist the ways it aims to erase Black diasporic life. Focused on geographies across the Greater Caribbean, these projects engage the growing field of digital humanities to create digital archives, StoryMaps, and exhibitions that focus Black and Afro-descendant communities across Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Black South. As we talk about our projects, we hope to engage the audience in a critical discussion on climate catastrophes, which affect the ways we preserve and archive data, as well as race, gender, Caribbean geographies, empire, and more. We also hope to dream together, and think about the futurities of our projects, and in community think of ways of resisting and defying emergent forms of imperial power.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Kiana Gonzalez-Cedeno, Texas Christian University

Panelists

• Rosa Ficek, University of Puerto Rico-Cayey

• Natalia Hernández Mejías, University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras

• Natalia Betancourt Malave

• Anais Couvertier Garay

• Lauren Prince, Brown University

Comment

• Sarah Bruno, Michigan State University

Biographical Information

Rosa E. Ficek (rosa.ficek@upr.edu) is an anthropologist at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey. Her research, teaching and publications explore the relationships between technology, infrastructure, and environmental change. This work has taken Rosa to sites across Latin America and the Caribbean, from studying deforestation in Panama to her current project on disasters in Puerto Rico. Collective Care documents community-led responses to hurricane María and other emergencies in Puerto Rico. This collaborative project works with community-based organizations to record oral histories, curate photographs and other materials, build a digital archive, and share these stories through public scholarship. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California-Santa Cruz and a B.A. in Anthropology and Spanish from Cornell University.

Natalia Hernández Mejías (natalia.hernandez2@upr.edu) has experience working in the fields of information services and research. She has a Master's degree in History, which she obtained from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus (UPR-RP). Her thesis dissertation follows an oral history design that explores the relationship between Puerto Rico Nationalist Party leaders in Cayey and their communities. In 2016, she obtained her Master's in Librarianship and Information Sciences from UPR-RP. Her interests in the field include access to information, cataloging, and metadata. Since 2020, she works as project manager for the Mellon Foundation’s digitization initiative at the General Archives of Puerto Rico, where she helps with metadata design and the establishment of repository functionality and relationships, while also supporting all the different steps of the digitization process. Recently, she joined the library team at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez as a metadata specialist, where she works on the organization of information for the institution’s Oral History Lab.

Natalia M. Betancourt Malavé (natalia.betancourt2@upr.edu) is committed to developing alternative forms of education which incorporate academia as a source of mutual aid in community with local organizations. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English with a focus on literature and a minor in writing and communications. Recently, she completed her Master of Arts degree in English Education with a minor in teaching English as a second language while working as a graduate research assistant with the OHL at URPM. Alongside Dr. Chansky, she translated curated quotes for the Mi María Project and created profiles for the narrators. In the first phase of the AREPR project, she conducted multiple long form interviews about food insecurity in the face of the COVID-19 Pandemic and other disasters experienced in Puerto Rico over the last decade. Throughout the second phase of AREPR, she developed Omeka S sites for two community partners and oversaw the collaboration with Come Colegial which showcased 10 years of the student-led organization.

Anais Couvertier Garay (anais.couvertier@upr.edu) is a dedicated educator who has recently earned a Bachelor of Arts in Elementary Education from the University of Puerto Rico in Cayey. She also completed a minor in Gender Studies. Anais is presently engaged in research with the Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias at UPR Cayey, where she is exploring the representation of black history in fourth-grade educational texts and how this history is depicted through visual imagery. As a Solidarity Fellow in the Mellon Diaspora Solidarities Lab, she is passionate about the role of black womenfolk in community restoration and the illumination of their impactful contributions. Her broader research interests within the lab encompass the dynamics of colonialism in the context of restoration and the evolving concept of the Greater Caribbean. Anais’ academic pursuits revolve around various research areas, including black Puerto Rican history and black feminist ecology. Concurrently, she is actively engaged in shaping young minds as a fourth-grade teacher.

Lauren Prince (lsprince486@gmail.com) is a scholar and student with ancestral roots in St. John, USVI. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Black feminist geographies, Black ecologies, and (de)colonial studies. She graduated with the highest distinction from the University of Virginia, double majoring in Political & Social Thought and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a minor in Global Sustainability, where she completed her distinguished thesis titled “With a Vengeance”: An Examination of How Black Women of the U.S. Virgin Islands Weather Disasters. In the fall, she will be attending Brown University to pursue her PhD in Africana Studies.

Sarah Bruno (brunosar@msu.edu) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University. 2022-2023 postdoctoral fellow in Latinx Art, Cultures, and Religions in the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. Her research and art lie at the intersections of ethnography, performance, diaspora, and digitality. She is currently writing her first manuscript, Black Rican Dexterity where she uses the Afro-Puerto Rican genre of bomba as a site and method in constructing a cartography of Black Puerto Rican femme feeling throughout history. Dr. Bruno was a Mellon ACLS Dissertation Fellow in 2020-2021 and the 2020 awardee of the Association of Black Anthropologists Vera Green Prize for Public Anthropology. Bruno was the 2021-2022 ACLS Emerging Voices Race and Digital Technologies postdoctoral fellow at the Franklin Humanities Institute and in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is a member of the Black Latinas Know Collective and is one of the lab leads of Taller Entre Aguas, micro lab within the Diasporas Solidarity Lab, that focuses on Black Puerto Rican digital spaces, data, and lives beyond and against the archives. She charges herself to continue to write with care about the never-ending process of enduring, imagining, thriving, and healing in Puerto Rico and its diaspora.

Chair- Kiana González Cedeño (k.gonzalezcedeno@tcu.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University. Her work utilizes lamentation as a theoretical framework to expose and elevate un(der)told histories of Puerto Rico. She looks at popular culture as a corpus that demonstrates the ways Black Puerto Ricans have refused and rebelled against colonial empire since the start of modernity. She also co-leads the After the Storm Collective. You can find her writing in Centro Journal.