A community newspaper in Caguas, Puerto Rico. A local history project in Grand Rapids, Mich. A digital archive in Maui, Hawaii.
These are three of the 12 community institutions receiving micro-grants from CENTRO, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, in the inaugural round of its Rooted + Relational initiative. The grants, each up to $5,000, are going to non-institutionally affiliated community organizations, individuals, or projects for community-based programs furthering the theme of “Archives, Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico.”
The grants exemplify Hunter College’s commitment to fulfilling its role as an anchor institution for New York City’s Puerto Rican community and beyond – CENTRO’s Library and Archives serve as a research and cultural hub in East Harlem. Applicants engaged in archives, memory work, public history, cultural preservation, and community initiatives in Puerto Rico and its diaspora were invited to apply. And they did apply – in droves – including community organizers, artists, creatives, writers, farmers, activists, organizers, and cultural workers and groups in Puerto Rico and across America.
“The chosen 12 recipients of our first Rooted + Relational micro-grant program are doing exciting, necessary, and urgent work that CENTRO is proud to support,” said CENTRO Directora Dr. Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez. “We had an unprecedented number of applications for this inaugural year of the program, making this selection incredibly difficult. This reflects the immense amount of work being done on the ground, outside of academic institutions, and directly with communities.”
The grant recipients are:
- Agro Cultura y Arte: Preservando Nuestro Origen y Naturaleza (Caguas, Puerto Rico), a learning space for traditional agricultural practices at a demonstration farm.
- Periodico Comunitario Urbe Avoz (Caguas, Puerto Rico), a community newspaper.
- Stories and Activism of the Air Bridge of Puerto Rican Harm Reductionists (Bronx, N.Y.), a documentary project on public-health activism for intravenous-drug users.
- Ancestral Herbal Narratives Oral History Project (Highland Park, N.J.), on healing traditions.
- Archivo Histórico del Ballroom en Puerto Rico (San Juan, Puerto Rico), an archive documenting popular dance and its impact.
- Dance is Life Archives: Preserving Puerto Rican Contributions to the Hustle Dance Movement (Princeton, N.J.), on a mainland dance style.
- Fiestas de Cruz (San Mateo de Cangrejos, Puerto Rico), a celebration of traditional songs and dance.
- Recovering Hidden Narratives of Resistance to Colonization and Slavery (Washington, D.C.), a community driven archival-research project on freedom-seeking.
- Lugares Históricos: African Burial Grounds (Orlando, Fla.), a project gathering funerary records and other historical materials.
- Telling Our Stories: The History of Rumsey/Roberto Clemente Park (Grand Rapids, Mich.), supporting public-history programming and archival collections as a site applies for a state historical marker.
- Proyecto Kokobale: Lxs Pequeñxs Cimarronxs (San Juan, Puerto Rico), a project giving children free classes on kokobalé — the Afro-Puerto Rican martial art of stick fighting for self-defense.
- Maui Puerto Rican Association Digital Archive (Maui, Hawaii), rehousing and digitizing 18 photo albums and 200 pages of documents from 1980 onward.
Recipients will be invited to share their work at a CENTRO event next fall, attend three virtual meetings, and have their work highlighted and shared through CENTRO’s communications and media channels.
About Rooted + Relational
Rooted + Relational is a five-year research initiative at CENTRO, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, funded by the Mellon Foundation. It seeks to reimagine the research agenda and scholarly and community impact of CENTRO in the United States and beyond. The initiative aims to make CENTRO a public-facing, horizontal, decolonial feminist institute that opens new paths in academia and expands community-driven research beyond the academy. By strategically linking the CENTRO’s research agenda, data-hub projects, media, arts, and culture output, scholarly mentoring initiatives, and community partnerships, it addresses pressing social, political, and economic issues facing Puerto Rico and the Diaspora. The goal is to create a unifying higher-learning community at CENTRO that tends to the intellectual and cultural needs of our committed and diverse public.
