Barrio Dreams, Diaspora Memories

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Puerto Ricans have forged an extensive diaspora throughout the United States. One anchor of this diaspora has been, at least since the 1950s, the Chicagoland metropolitan area in the United States Midwest. A growing body of scholarship has begun to document and analyze important historical, political, social, and cultural aspects of Puerto Rican life in this region. However, much remains to be told. This interdisciplinary panel explores several understudied topics and themes: suburban community formation, climate politics and displacement, and politics of solidarity. With a sensitivity to space, politics, and history, panelists will expand scholarly knowledge on Puerto Rican diasporic communities and their struggles. Moreover, they will illustrate the importance of multimethod forms of research and community-engaged scholarship.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• El Barrio en Suburbia: A Diasporic History of Puerto Ricans in Elgin - Daniel M Strom, University of Illinois Chicago

• Mapping Humboldt Park: Climate Displacement of the Puerto Rican Diaspora of Chicago - Anissa Camacho, University of California Berkeley

• Barrio Histories: Recovering Forgotten Voices From Puerto Rican Chicago’s Fight for Vieques - Angelica Hernandez, Puerto Rican Cultural Center

Comment

• Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, University of California, Berkeley

Biographical Information

Daniel Strom is a graduate student in the Latin American and Latino Studies program at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He received his bachelor's in history and politics and government from North Park University. His research interests include labor rights, community and labor organizing strategies, diaspora studies, and histories of migration. To dates, Daniel has conducted research on the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York City after WWII and the history of immigration to Elgin.

Anissa Camacho is a second year graduate student in Latin American and Latino Studies with a concentration in Black Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Her research and interests focus on climate change, urban ecologies, Puerto Rican studies, and ethnographic, spatial, and archival methods. She is also a researcher at Puerto Rican Cultural Center’s Digitizing the Barrio archival project in Chicago.

Angélica Hernández is the lead archivist for the Digitizing the Barrio archive project, an initiative of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. She received her Masters in Library and Information Science with a certificate in Archives and Cultural Heritage Resources and Services from Dominican University in 2022. Hernández is deeply passionate about community engagement, equitable access to information, and participatory archival practices.

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on race and the politics of knowledge, primarily in Latinx communities and movements. His award-winning book, Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change (Princeton University Press, 2021), explores the political production and mobilization of ethnoracial demographic projections. His work has also appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Du Bois Review, American Behavioral Scientist, among other outlets. Along with several collaborative projects, Michael is immersed in an oral history book project on the afterlives of anticolonial resistance and political repression in Puerto Rican Chicago. He also co-leads Digitizing the Barrio, an archival project of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago.