Water Proof/Olas de Memoria: The Black Puerto Rican Studies Special Issue of Centro: The Journal of Puerto Rican Studies
Join us TODAY as CENTRO Celebrates Latest Special Issue, edited by Taller Entre Aguas
“Water Proof”: Exploring the Spring 2025 CENTRO Journal on Afro-Puerto Ricans
In a moment when histories of marginalized peoples are being deliberately erased—alongside the ongoing erasure of Black Puerto Ricans—this webinar dives into a special issue of the CENTRO Journal offering a multidisciplinary approach to thinking about Black Puerto Rican pasts, presents, and futures.
Join moderator Sarah Bruno, and panelists Daniel Morales-Armstrong, Milagros Denis-Rosario, and Isar Godreau, as we dive into the Spring 2025 CENTRO Journal Water Proof: Olas de Memoria, guest edited by members of the Black Puerto Rican collective Taller Entre Aguas,
Water Proof: Olas de Memoria elevates and invites scholars of Afro-Puerto Rican history and memory to remind readers that we are part of a Black intellectual tradition of cimarronaje (marronage) and world-making. Throughout this collection, we expand on “Black Rican studies” as a subfield that adjoins Puerto Rican studies to broader discourses in Africana (Black studies in the US and in the larger diaspora) and Caribbean studies.
Image Credit: Cuánto aguanta una columna, Nitzayra Leonor, 2023, Digital Collage and X-Ray
Join us TODAY for a conversation exploring the special issue, moderated by TEA member and Co-Editor Dr. Essah Diaz, and with Dr. Daniel Morales-Armstrong (TEA, Co-Editor) and Dr. Isar Godreau, one of the contributors.
Free Event - Click here for tickets
CENTRO JOURNAL
SPRING 2025 • VOLUME XXXVII • NUMBER 1
WATER PROOF: OLAS DE MEMORIA
GUEST EDITORS: Sarah Bruno, Essah Díaz, Daniel Morales-Armstrong, and Jessica Marie Johnson
Introduction: Entre aguas/Between the Waters
Sarah Bruno, Essah Díaz, Daniel Morales-Armstrong, and Jessica Marie Johnson
Recuerdo: Blackness, Memory, and the Racial Contract in Puerto Rico
Shantee Rosado
Colorismo en la educación: colonialidad y blanqueamiento en textos escolares
Isar Godreau, Mariluz Franco Ortiz, Gabriela Ortiz Laureano, Andrea M. Texidor Cintrón, and Rafael Capó
Pioneers in Their Own Right: Afro-Puerto Ricans at Tuskegee Normal School and Howard University
Milagros Denis-Rosario
Cimarrones, Rebels, and Plaintiffs: Strategies Enslaved Africans and their Descendants Used to Resist Slavery in Puerto Rico (Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries)
Daniel Morales-Armstrong
Forging Afro-Diasporic Bonds: Black Feminist Worldmaking After the Storm in the Greater Caribbean (1965-2017)
Kiana González Cedeño, Lauren Prince, Anais Couvertier, and Teona Williams
Lessons in the Water: Late Nineteenth Century Afro-Puerto Rican Survival and Ancestral Memory
Ashley Coleman Taylor
Painting Rematriation: Reflections from Year Ten in Borikén
Yasmín Hernández
BOOK REVIEWS
Invisibility and Influence: A Literary History of AfroLatinidades, by Regina Marie Mills
Reviewed by Rebeca L. Hey-Colón
La otra Julia, by Mayra Santos Febres
Reviewed by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario
The Story of What Is Broken Is Whole: An Aurora Levins Morales Reader, by Aurora Levins Morales
Reviewed by Jessica N. Pabón-Colón
Raising the Living Dead: Rehabilitative Corrections in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, by Alberto Ortiz Díaz
Reviewed by Caroline Parker
Taller Entre Aguas is a seeding microlab of the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, part of the LifexCode ecosystem. Learn more at dslprojects.org.