Archives and Storytelling as Resistance was a thread throughout this year’s Schomburg Symposium at Taller Puertorriqueño
This year, the annual symposium focused on the roots of Pan-Africanism, the importance of rooting oneself in the histories, the value of representation in museums and a call to preserve culture through self-documentation.
By Vicky Díaz-Camacho. March 7, 2025.
For the past 29 years, Taller Puertorriqueño has organized a two-day event centered on African history, expertise and experiences across the various Latino diasporas. The Arturo Schomburg Symposium is named after Afro-Puerto Rican scholar, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.
Evelyne Laurent-Perrault translated some audience questions during the Q&A session. Photo: Vicky Díaz-Camacho | Inti Media.
The idea for the program emerged in 1996 with Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, the former bookstore director. Laurent-Perrault is an Afro-Latina born to Haitian parents in Venezuela, now an emerita assistant professor at the University of California Santa Barbara.
“I wanted to have a wider conversation about the contributions of Africa to Latin American and Latinx cultures, and histories and societies,” Laurent Perrault said.
She consulted with Johnny Irizarry, Taller Puertorriqueño’s former director, who suggested naming the symposium after Schomburg, who is regarded as a steward and leader in preserving and documenting Afro-Latino history.
Early in life, Schomburg was motivated to promote and support the pro-independence movements in Cuba and Puerto Rico, founding Las Dos Antillas, a political club. Later, with the little money he earned as a clerk on Wall Street, he purchased books, manuscripts and prints. Over the years, he served various roles as an organizer, curator and influential writer.
“Even though he didn't have a degree in library scholarship … he had already been running his own collection. So nowadays that is [The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture], a major research center in Harlem, New York,” Laurent-Perrault added. “He was in many ways a public intellectual and a self-taught scholar.”
The research center comprises nearly 11 million items, such as photographs, letters between the scholar and well-known sociologist and activist, and more dedicated to cementing the history of Black global culture. It has been nearly 100 years since the center opened.
Upon creating the event, Laurent-Perrault sought to expose more people to the little-known histories of Black Latinos, their historical significance and their presence throughout history.
Laura Quiñones Navarro, art historian at the Instituto Cultural Puertorriqueña, presented virtually, sharing works of art such as paintings, objects and prints significant to the Afro-Latino presence in the Caribbean. Photo: Vicky Díaz-Camacho | Inti Media.
Laura Quiñones Navarro, an art historian at the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, who presented this year, shared that sentiment.
“When I began working on this collection 25 years ago I was a young Black woman looking for my representation,” Quiñones Navarro said.
In Puerto Rico’s schools, the history of Black figures and their experiences has been distilled to one or two pages. She acknowledges that similar issues exist in cultural institutions and museums, rooted in issues with how museums categorize art created by artists of color versus European and Spanish art.
The art historian also recognized the pervasive perception of what qualifies as a work of art or primitive object.
“When we worked with research, we found there were two main myths associated with the Afro-descendants. [One], slavery was softer than any other place in America. I don’t know about you—’slavery’ and ‘soft’ cannot make sense. [The second] myth: forced labor barely allowed survival, much less creativity,” to which she contested, “We do have a history and we have creativity.”
Like Laurent-Perrault, she sees history as a key piece to building links between missing pieces in someone’s ancestry, and as a learning process of how to move forward in society.
“These pieces are reminders of what we should have accomplished and what we did not,” Quiñones Navarro said. “Artifacts are like a map that tell me and us as a society where we are coming from … and where we have to improve.”
During the Q&A session, Quiñones pleaded for support to reject Senate Bill 273, an effort by the Puerto Rican government to “transfer the responsibility” of the Instituto Cultural Puertorriqueño to the Department of Economic Development and Commerce. The 70-year-old institute is already fragile, facing severe staffing shortages imposed by budget cuts. Twenty-five years ago, they had more than 400 staff members. Today, the institute has just 85 employees.
The art historian says what is at stake are the archaeological sites, their historical collection and the collection, which includes the Afro-Latino collection she is beginning to build up.
“Don’t kill us. Maybe the institute is not the best, but it’s what we [Puerto Rico] has,” she added. “You cannot repair what you ignore, what is invisible to you.”
Half of the symposium was dedicated to discussion of the significance of categorizing African scholarship and art. The second half kicked off with a short sound healing session led by Malaika Hart Gilpin, a certified yoga instructor and multicultural educator.
Hart Gilpin played white frosted singing bowls and walked around the room with wooden twinkling chimes. Some took deep breaths, some snored, and others remained silent until she concluded the session with two taps on the steel gong.
During the symposium, attendees were invited to muse over what talks or themes resonated with them and write their feedback on oversized post-its along the mirrored wall. Scribbled in blue and black Sharpie, some people wrote about policy needs, multicultural education, unity and resistance.
Tukufu Zuberi reviewed issues of provenance in Western museums, and a lack of reverence with sacred or religious figures. Photo: Vicky Díaz-Camacho | Inti Media.
These themes continued in the final panel talk, moderated by Dr. Carmen Febo San Miguel, who once served as the center’s executive director for more than two decades. Speakers included Tukufu Zuberi, sociology and Africana studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania; Allan Edmunds, founder of Brandywine Workshop and Archives; Omar Eaton-Martinez, senior vice president for historic sites at the National Trust for Historic Preservation; and Amalia Daché, associate professor and gallery director of the W.E.B. DuBois College House.
Each panelist focused on the ways in which they preserve or amplify the histories and narratives of the African diaspora. Omar Eaton-Martinez, the first panelist, shared his own family’s story who migrated to the U.S. from Santurce, a neighborhood that was one of the first settlements for enslaved Africans in Puerto Rico.
“Material culture tells an incredible story of activism, of culture,” Eaton Martinez said.
Omar Eaton-Martinez kicks of his panel with images of a Young Lords Party pin that has the phrase, “Tengo Puerto Rico en Mi Corazon.” Photo: Vicky Díaz-Camacho | Inti Media.
Eaton-Martinez’s father is one of two Caribbean immigrants featured in the National Museum of African American History in the “Great Migration” section. His father, Marcelo Alfonso Eaton, was part of the first cohort to be recruited in Puerto Rico to NASA. He carries the story of his father and uses it as an example.
“Even the science people back then understood, at some level, the value of diversity,” he added. “[The curators] understood the power of that story in that context. The story is there, it’s pertinent and it’s powerful.”
Part of the consensus throughout the symposium was the need to broaden access and exposure to these histories. That is why Allan Edmunds has built partnerships with various organizations, some universities and other historical institutions, expanding Brandywine’s archives through its satellite formats. But preserving history can start at home, he said.
Alan Edmunds was persistent about the need for communities everywhere to collect, document and archive their own stories. “The stories of today are history tomorrow,” he said. Photo: Vicky Díaz-Camacho | Inti Media.
Edmunds urged attendees to be family and community archivists.
“In the sharing of histories and stories, you see the connection between people. … We have to not only do the work to go back and bring the histories forward, we have to document today. It’s so easy to erase it, like it was in 1968,” he said. “We need to resist by retelling our own stories and putting forth the effort to document today.”
At a time when the newest presidential administration orders target university curricula, diversity, equity and inclusion programs, the discussion gradually turned to questions of how to preserve certain histories as it becomes “illegal.”
Tukufu Zuberi used this word, referring to the university revising its guidance last week on what professors can or cannot teach.
“We are living in a time where a university is being transformed, which is opposed to the legacy of Africans as a diaspora group living outside of Africa,” Zuberi said. “Do you understand what I mean, they’ve made it illegal? They gave schools basically two weeks to whitewash history and ‘make history great again.’”
Adding: “They cannot grasp that who we are is more complicated than they realize. We need to change who we think we are. And change our organizing for our political voice and political power.”
Amalia Daché outlined several Cuban stars and identified the years they were exiled for speaking or singing out against political leaders. Photo: Vicky Díaz-Camacho | Inti Media.
Scholars like Daché have long been implementing the stories and experiences of Afro-Latinos in scholarship and in student spaces, such as the Amistad Art Gallery at W.E.B. DuBois College House. For the past several years, she has brought works that examine faith, music, activism and other tenets of the Latinx identity.
Her experiences as an Afro-Cuban refugee motivates her dedication to making the work accessible and visible.
“In a way, we do diversity inclusive work without saying it’s ‘diversity or inclusive’ in the title. We are going to continue to do this work and I’m not changing the name of it,” Daché said. “I hope if they come get me y’all will have my back.”
When asked how to continue efforts of preservation and documentation, she added:
“We have to find our humanity again. Cook together. Be together. There is a lot of fear, perhaps internal fear. … We need to find our connection to each other again.”
