CENTRO, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, has received a $2 million grant renewal from the Mellon Foundation to fund the projects of The Diaspora Solidarities Lab, which is moving to CENTRO.
The lab is a Black feminist digital humanities initiative led by CENTRO Directora Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez and historian Jessica Marie Johnson of Johns Hopkins University.
“I am honored to have the opportunity to continue the work of the DSL through the support of this Higher Learning Grant from the Mellon Foundation,” said Figueroa-Vásquez. “Over the past three years, we have developed and nurtured a broad array of transdisciplinary humanities projects that have been community-informed and anchored in ethical practices. Bringing this inspiring project to CENTRO is auspicious because CENTRO’s research mission is deeply rooted in a history of community care, activism, and advocacy.”
During the first phase of the grant, from 2022 to 2024, the DSL developed 12 “microlabs.” The labs supported more than 40 research fellows and more than 26 community fellows with $5,000 grants. The labs engaged with three community partners: Yarumo Taller de Imagenes Experimentales in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico; the Black School in New Orleans, La.; and The Avery Center for Black Research in Charleston, S.C.
The lab also supported seven early career scholars through the DSL Writers & Manuscript Workshops and held three symposia and more than 35 public and private events.
The Open Boat Lab, comprised of six research labs, directed by Figueroa-Vásquez, will move from Michigan State University to CENTRO. The OBL supports curation, storytelling, and community organizing through digital archives, museum and gallery exhibits, and community workshops. At CENTRO, the DSL micro-labs renewed for 2025-27 are:
- The Survival of a People, a digital and material oral history archive of the first Puerto Rican diaspora photodocumentary project led by the late photographer and activist Frank Espada from 1979-1982. The archive transcribed and translated more than 130 oral histories recorded by Espada. In the renewal period, it will produce two traveling museum and gallery exhibitions; a five-episode podcast highlighting these histories; and an ArcGIS Storymaps project. The Center for Puerto Rican Studies Archive of the Puerto Rican Diaspora will steward the projects.
- The Afro-Latinx Lab, which supports curation, storytelling, and popular education across the Black Latinx diaspora with a focus on activism on femicide and intimate gender violence. The researchers have curated exhibitions of Afro-Latinx art and gathered stories for a digital femicide archive on gender-based violence. The lab is produced in collaboration with community partners in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and their diasporas.
- The Kitsimba Project, which is developing a digital archive for Dr. M. Jacqui Alexander, a Black feminist writer, scholar, and elder, in collaboration with the Tobago Spirit Center. The lab will develop a site that will document Professor Alexander’s writings and work on Kitsimba, a guiding ancestor of Alexander’s writing and projects.
Three other microlabs will remain under Johnson’s Community Knowledge Lab at Johns Hopkins: The Black Louisiana History Incubators, The Black Testimony Project, and The Translation Lab.
The other six micro labs will transition to new institutions using seed-funding from the renewal grant.
About CENTRO
Founded in 1973 by a coalition of students, faculty, and activists, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College is the largest and oldest university-based research institute, library, and archive dedicated to the Puerto Rican experience in the United States. It provides support to students, scholars, artists, and members of the community at large across and beyond New York. Additionally, it produces original research, films, books, and educational tools and is the home of Centro Journal—the premiere academic journal of Puerto Rican Studies. CENTRO’s aim is to create actionable and accessible scholarship to strengthen, broaden, and reimagine the field of Puerto Rican studies.
CENTRO is a treasured institution where researchers, academics, teachers, students, genealogists, filmmakers, and the community at large find primary (historical documents) and secondary sources about the history and culture of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. Most facilities, resources, and programs in the City University of New York system are limited to affiliates of the University. In the case of CENTRO’s Library and Archives, non-circulating materials and resources are open and available for use by the public at large, irrespective of CUNY affiliation. CENTRO’s programs and services are similarly open to the broader community in New York City and beyond. Since its inception, the institute has served as a site of encounter and collaboration between university affiliates and community members.
About Diaspora Solidarities Lab
The Diaspora Solidarities Lab is a multi-institutional Black feminist partnership that supports solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies conducted by undergraduates, graduate students, faculty members, and community partners who are committed to transformative justice and accountable to communities beyond the Western academy.
We sponsor both traditional analog and digital experimental scholarship to build knowledge communities across institutions and geographies, training participants in the practices and principles of radical media, ethics of Black feminist praxis, and decolonial and antiracist principles. We emphasize the literacies of the born-digital and in-person ethical collaboration. The lab comprises two research groupings that we characterize as archipelagos: the Open Boat Lab and the Community Knowledge Lab. The DSL is directed by Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez and Jessica Marie Johnson with financial support from the Mellon Foundation, Michigan State University, and Johns Hopkins University.
About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.