We talked to Santos Rivera-Cardona about his experience as an intern with the Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration, and this is what he shared with us.
How did you end up working with the PRAC?
In 2017, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. At the time, I was an undergraduate student at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus. When the university resumed operations, I witnessed firsthand the damage that months without electricity had caused to the archives of the Puerto Rican Collection at UPRM. Seeing this deterioration left a lasting impression on me and sparked an ongoing commitment to thinking about how to preserve Puerto Rico's history better.
After graduating from the University of Puerto Rico with a bachelor’s degree in political science and international relations, I began my doctoral studies at Rutgers University. While at Rutgers, I met Professor Aldo Lauria Santiago, a fellow Puerto Rican scholar and Professor in the Departments of Latino and Caribbean Studies and History. In our conversations, Professor Lauria Santiago encouraged me to apply to the Rutgers/Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration (PRAC) program he directs. He saw it as an opportunity for me to gain hands-on experience working in an archive while conducting research relevant to my dissertation. I applied and was accepted to intern at the General Archive of Puerto Rico in the summer of 2025.
Tell us a little about your experience and findings at the General Archive of Puerto Rico
At the end of June 2025, I traveled from New Jersey to Puerto Rico to begin my work at the General Archive. My primary responsibility was to work with the Fondo Fortaleza, specifically the Sub-Fondo Governor Luis A. Ferré (1969–1972). However, the program also allowed interns time to explore their own research interests while organizing Ferré’s collection.
With the assistance of AGPR archivist Pedro Roig, I located several already cataloged boxes related to my interests. In the process, I came across a box containing dozens of documents on the “no flag” issue in Puerto Rico, dating back to the 1930s. This discovery led me to write a blog post challenging the conventional view that debates over the flag were solely matters of national or internal politics. The blog post, titled “Early Transnationalization of Civil Society: The Flag of ‘Porto-Rico’,” was published on the Rutgers PRAC website.
This experience provided me not only with hands-on training in archival research, digitization, and preservation, but also with a meaningful opportunity to help safeguard the history of my country. I worked alongside graduate students equally committed to this mission, as well as archivists and staff who have dedicated their lives to preserving Puerto Rico’s historical record. For that, I will always be deeply grateful.
About Santos
Santos is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His primary fields of study are Comparative Politics, Interpretive Methods, and American Politics. Before beginning his doctoral studies at Rutgers, Santos earned a B.A. in Political Science and a minor in International Relations from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez.
Santos’ research interests include (1) identity politics; (2) civil society, social movements, and protest politics; and (3) the relationship between politics and culture. His dissertation examines how competing versions of national symbols are created, displayed, and interpreted to express divergent conceptions of national identity and the shape of the political system. Regionally, his work focuses on Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Eastern and Southern Europe.
Find more about Santos’ work: here