Story By Angélica Hernández and Margaret Powers
Scholars, community organizers, and memory workers came together among the redwoods of the University of California, Santa Cruz for the Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA) biennial conference on August 23rd. Established in 1992, the PRSA continues to be an interdisciplinary academic force that promotes the development and dissemination of knowledge about Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, told from the diverse perspectives of those from the archipelago and the Diaspora. With its founding rooted in the struggle for ethnic studies in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, the PRSA continues to advocate for education and scholarship told from these complex and interconnected experiences.
The theme of this year’s conference, Scales of Solidarity, was heavily motivated by the genocide in Gaza, the many struggles against U.S. colonial rule and colonialism, and the role Puerto Rico has played at both the center of and as an ally to many international solidarity campaigns. The program included panels, workshops, film screenings, performances, a bombazo, and an exhibition focused on Puerto Rican communities in California. Speakers presented on a wide range of issues, including transnational social movements, self-determination and decolonial struggles, climate justice, and feminist organizing. Moving between the regional, the national, and the global, speakers never lost focus on the ways that building community and solidarity bridges these struggles for justice and freedom.
On the first day of the conference, the Digitizing the Barrio team highlighted Chicago’s Puerto Rican community and its rich history of radical anticolonial politics during their panel, Mining the Archives: Radical Histories in Chicago’s Digitizing the Barrio Project. Digitizing the Barrio holds materials spanning The Puerto Rican Cultural Center’s five decades of existence and offers insight into community struggles and institutional building, diasporic linkages, freedom and human rights campaigns, and national liberation and anti-imperialist movements. Angélica Hernández, the project’s lead archivist, discussed the formation of Digitizing the Barrio. Latin American/ Latinx Studies Graduate student Anissa Camacho revisited The Puerto Rican Cultural Center’s involvement in the struggle to rid Vieques, Puerto Rico, of the U.S. military. Sociologist Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz explored memories of political repression against barrio pro-independence activists and organizations. Historian Margaret Power shared insights into the gaps in Digitizing the Barrio’s archival collections and our responsibility and commitment to include Chicago’s Puerto Rican women in the historical record through, among other efforts, conducting oral histories.
Power also won the 2024 Frank Bonilla Book Award Honorable Mention for her book, Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-imperialism. She joined two other scholars whose books also won awards and three students who won dissertation awards. Marisol Lebrón, PRSA president, and Maura Toro- Morn, incoming PRSA president, presented the various awards at a reception on the Santa Cruz campus.
