Rosa Emilia Cordero Cruz, History PhD student at Rutgers University, and Laura Quiñones Navarro, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, present their Black Puerto Rican Colección Project: A Guide to Afro-Caribbean History Through the Objects and Artifacts Found in the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña’s Fine Arts Collection.
On September 22, 2023, Cruz's interdisciplinary group, the Caribbean Working Group at Rutgers, organized a hybrid archival tour of the Fine Arts Program of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (ICP)’s National Collection. The event was conducted with the guidance of the collection’s director, María Del Mar Caragol Rivera, and the Afro-Puerto Rican ICP Auxiliary Registrar, Laura Quiñones. This wonderful presentation displayed artifacts, artworks, and sources illuminating Puerto Rico’s slaveholding, slave-trafficking, and anti-black past while simultaneously explaining the richness, depth, and cultural importance of Black Puerto Rican Culture and History in the U.S. territory.
Together, Cruz and Rivera discussed how these visual sources are more than materials displayed around museums or hidden away for preservation. They reveal enslaved and post-slavery Black Puerto Ricans' brutal lives in the archipelago while also serving as reminders of the cultural worlds they built. The event aimed to expose those in attendance to the existing research possibilities in Puerto Rico, and it accomplished its purpose while simultaneously encouraging Director Caragol Rivera, Laura Quiñones, and Rosa Emilia Cordero to brainstorm how they might continue their collaborative relationship. This collaboration was eventually made possible because of Rutgers’s Digital Humanities Initiative’s Seed Grant.
Thanks to the sponsorship provided by Rutgers DHI, Cruz and Quiñones, with the support of Director Caragol Rivera, created a virtual guide (publication pending) of two of the ICP’s National Collection’s many sub-collections: the Colección de Artes Populares (Collection of Popular Arts) and the Colección de Muebles y Objetos (Collection of Furniture and Objects). Quiñones, as Auxiliary Registrar of this archive, had observed over her many years in the ICP how visitors would often neglect to consult these collections and instead would spend their research time focusing on more obvious divisions of the archive, such as its collections on paintings and sculptures. This would result in the accidental omission of Black Puerto Rican knowledge productions and histories from their studies since many artifacts, musical instruments, and slaveholding technologies were stored under the two aforementioned collections. Her worry over the visibility of these objects inspired her and Cruz to create a project that exclusively highlights the sources found under these categories. Consequently, with the eventual publication of this digital guide, the authors hope to encourage contributions to Black Puerto Rican studies, facilitate scholars of Black Puerto Rico’s research findings, and provide Puerto Rican afrodescendants with a more accessible digital archive of objects relating to their own familial and community histories.