I am a high school teacher, based in New Haven, Connecticut. I teach AP U.S. Government and Politics, Black and Latine Studies, and Digital Humanities. In addition to my work as a Social Studies teacher, I am a research historian specializing in public history, biopolitical critique, and radical social movements, emphasizing local and community narratives. A lot of my classroom curriculum is informed by my scholarly research, and through this examination, I found major disparities in the ways that Latin American people are represented in traditional libraries and archives- especially in academic and nonprofit historical institutions. Most sources dating back to the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries fail to represent Latine identities humanely. This was the beginning of my inquiry, as I wanted to investigate the beauty of, and challenges to, Puerto Rican identity in the face of an Anglo-dominant system. While ethnically I am Greek-American, Puerto Rican culture was a large part of my upbringing growing up in Hartford County, Connecticut, in the 1990s and 2000s. Archival resources provided from the modern era are much more comprehensive and feature rich oral histories from ordinary people’s lived experiences; however, there are still major gaps to fill.
This modern transformation of what are considered primary sources is the anchor to my research question: How did the Puerto Rican diaspora in the Northeast utilize “organic” intellectualism, oral traditions, and spatial and cultural production to resist colonial marginalization and construct a distinct national identity? The notion of an ‘organic intellectual’ was illuminated by Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, who asserted that intellectual space was part of the hegemonic strata, and that ordinary people and their lived experiences should not be ignored as a wealth of knowledge. [1] This unit will illustrate how Puerto Ricans in the Northeast challenged their treatment as a marginalized labor class into a potent political and cultural movement by acting as active agents of change. From the tobacco fields to grassroots activism, these communities challenged colonial limitations of their Commonwealth status to remap the American cultural landscape. Their efforts throughout the twentieth century prove that historical truth and Borinquen resilience are preserved through community memory, working-class political activism, and cultural preservation- specifically through music, oral storytelling, and folk arts. This cultural safeguard relies on the conservation of traditional music, community festivals, and linguistic identity against colonial erasure.
Another crucial element of this work that I’ve been focusing on is prioritizing the movement away from damage-centered research and towards survivance and desire-based frameworks. Coined by Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor, survivance is defined as Indigenous remembrance and traditions that are intertwined with a resistance narrative. Native survivance is the active presence of an ancestral lineage, as well as the continuation of their stories. “Survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, detractions, obtrusions, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry. Survivance is the heritable right of succession or reversion of an estate and, in the course of international declarations of human rights, is a narrative estate of native survivance.” [2] According to Indigenous Studies Researcher Eve Tuck, damage-centered research describes narratives that portray groups as depleted, ruined, and hopeless by only emphasizing their victimhood and oppression. While this can be effective for leveraging reparations and resources for marginalized people, this framework is ultimately harmful as it is one-dimensional and insinuates a fixed state of dispossession. Ultimately, this approach is pathologizing and defines a community by its oppression. Instead, Tuck recommends a historical framework that disrupts the binary narrative structure, providing a more nuanced understanding of power and resistance. Desire-based narratives identify people's experiences through an amalgamation of both subversive and dominant ideas, which “complicates our understanding of human agency, complicity, and resistance.” To accurately describe the Puerto Rican experience, one must recognize the contradictions of personhood and the multiplicity of life’s choices. To center these paradoxes in survivance means to explore narratives of survival and resistance. [3] As a result, this research and curriculum will be focused on ordinary working-class people, rooted in their ancestral and cultural traditions, and their search for a better life- whatever that means in a neo-colonial capitalist machine.
