This curriculum unit, designed by Eve Galanis, a Social Studies teacher, historian, and artist based in New Haven, Connecticut, explores the complex history of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the Northeast. This unit emphasizes challenging traditional notions of historiography, and encourages students to examine primary sources such as oral histories, music, performance, and poetry. Originally created for a Black and Latine Studies course, this curriculum unit has been intentionally designed to be broad enough to adapt for a variety of high school topic areas including, but not limited to, U.S. history, World history, ethnic studies, or language arts/English courses.
Shifting the narrative away from passive migration, this unit frames Boricua communities as active agents of historical memory and resistance. Across its design, the unit accomplishes multiple objectives for student understanding. Firstly, it moves students beyond traditional repositories, to consider how their community members are living archives. Students will explore both their own lived experience, as well as examples of working-class activism, and cultural expressions such as Bomba music, media, and visual art. Next, the unit grounds global and national migration patterns across Connecticut and New York, highlighting labor histories, community-building and political transformation in urban/suburban spaces. The unit explores how working-class organizations and grassroots organizers challenged state-sanctioned silences, colonial displacement, and systemic marginalization. Lastly, rather than solely relying on teacher-led instruction, it positions students as historical auditors through hands-on primary source analysis. This teaches students to identify archival silences and construct their own evidence-based counter-narratives.
(Developed for Black and Latine Studies, grades 11-12; recommended for Black and Latine Studies, U.S. History, World History, and Ethnic Studies, grades 9-12)
