The Context and Origins of the Rutgers/Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration, 2024
Aldo Lauria Santiago responding to John Chadwick’s questions (Assistant Director of Communications and Marketing at Rutgers University) about the origins of the PRAC
One of the driving reasons for your work organizing and directing the PRAC is the crisis that is affecting Puerto Rico’s public cultural and higher education institutions, which has been ongoing since 2005. Can you give a snapshot of how this crisis daily in Puerto Rican colleges and universities and how students and faculty experience it?
Puerto Rico has been a colonial unincorporated territory of the US since 1952, with significant self-rule. Still, since the destruction of its fiscal basis by Congress, it has experienced a series of human and natural catastrophes since 2005. The biggest parts have been the bankruptcy of the state and many public corporations and the imposition by Congress and President Obama of an all-powerful fiscal control board that remains a form of unelected shadow government for the country. The public university system and many other public cultural and educational institutions have been impacted by massive budget cuts in a politically motivated campaign to undercut one of the country’s autonomous entities. The reduction of college-age youth has also affected the system because of the migratory wave of the 2006-2019 period. On top of this, the massive hurricane that crossed the island and caused billions in damages and a weak local and federal response to this crisis, abetted by President trumps holding back of reconstruction funds, all have had a tremendous effect on the University of Puerto Rico and the Instituto de Cultura. Enrollment is down, faculty lost are not replaced, the very pension systems are in danger, personnel disappeared years ago, and tuition costs have doubled.
In the last few years, there has been a recovery mode with only marginal improvements for the institutions struggling to fulfill their mission, sometimes with stoic and persistent leadership.
How has the crisis affected knowledge production in the humanities, such as historical research?
These crises have damaged all institutions that produce advanced, specialized knowledge but especially in the areas of culture, history, social sciences, and humanities. Perhaps some context is necessary; during the 20th Century, Puerto Rico developed a robust educational system and a complex public sector dedicated, at least in theory, to promoting economic development and some degree of generalized social welfare. These goals have not always been met, as corruption, waste, overdevelopment, and colonial immobilism have limited the country’s ability to reach those goals consistently. Structurally, Puerto Rico has never caught up with the US except in the area of education, where its infrastructure and educational level placed it somewhere in the bottom half of US states.
In this crisis, the granting of advanced degrees has been reduced, and faculty in humanities and especially history have been reduced, with only one in three professors replaced at the UPR. Migration has always been part of Puerto Rico, but the crisis of local institutions has led more young people to seek degrees in the US and not have jobs to return to.
But the crisis discourse has to be framed carefully. Despite the problems, there are many people in Puerto Rico responding, persisting, struggling, and adjusting to these conditions in creative ways and often with the support or allies in the US (including the Puerto Rican diaspora).
Why did you decide to focus the work of PRAC on preserving and make accessible archival collections and periodical publications from Puerto Rico? Why is this area so critical?
After Maria struck, as part of the Puerto Rican Studies Association, then the leading entity in organizing research on Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, I organized a conference at Rutgers that focused significantly on the crisis and recovery work…as part of the diaspora community. We were looking for ways to help the islands and also to call out the disastrous policies that had contributed to the crisis and the mediocre recovery effort. I began conversations with two librarians at the UPR about how I could help. In one collection, that building was so badly damaged by the storm and the earthquakes that it still remains closed, and the collections I hoped to work with are inaccessible. At the Coleccion Puertorriquena of the UPR main campus librarian and director Javier Almeyda had been developing a digitization program, mostly on his own time, of periodicals and miscellanea held at the important collection of the UPR library. I asked him if he needed scanners…his reply was we have no labor. So when conditions allowed, with the intervention of COVID shutdowns, I decided to use my Rutgers research account, which had accumulated over two or three years, to pay for assistants to help him with the digitization work. I then approached Hilda Ayala, the director of the Puerto Rican General (national) Archive (AGPR), and we agreed to apply a similar model there, which extended the work to create guides for some of the more important collections.
I ended up with four interns, but as I learned of the possibilities, limitations, and conditions, I kept trying to find additional sources of funding and added a summer graduate student program that ran for two summers, mostly with self-funded graduate students, although we found support for a Rutgers graduate student to participate as well.
At some point, I ran out of funds and applied for some small external grants…and in that process, the Mellon Foundation learned of the work and invited me to apply. They have had a very strong presence in Puerto Rico, funding a variety of humanities and cultural programs since the recovery from Hurricane Maria began.
The grant calls for the hiring of some 30 interns who will work at a variety of institutions. Can you talk a little bit about what they will be doing and how this will help the institutions as well as aspiring scholars?
Right now, there are three components to the program. The first is the one we know how to do best, organizing collections with the leadership of local librarians and archivists. In some places, I have an established relationship with the principals, so I am very involved in developing discussions about the value of collections; in others, now more than a few, we have formal agreements on what collections the interns will be working with mostly based on the institution’s priorities. Nearly all of the hosts have done this sort of work; we are mostly aiding in their efforts with a consistent stream of work hours.
The second goal is digitization. At the Coleccion Puertorriquena, we simply helped boost the number of magazines and journals digitized and posted to dual digital libraries; from Rutgers, I also aided this process by setting up a digitizing lab with the help of work-study students and may inter-library loan requests…. At the General Archive, we received the support of the Puerto Rico Humanities Foundation. For the last year and a half, we have had four interns working on organizing five important collections, which are now being digitized.
The third goal, which is growing organically, is to form an intellectual community that promotes training, professional careers, discussion and debate, research, and publishing in Puerto Rican history. Again, the amazing thing is the number of persistent, talented, and well-trained youth that I have the privilege of meeting and recruiting. As it turns out, this is actually my strongest area of expertise…so I’m thinking through the possibilities and trying to have as many conversations as possible with friends and colleagues with far more experience in Puerto Rico than I about how this might proceed. I’ve realized that there is some work promoting generational continuity to be done, accessing and especially connecting potential researchers with sources. All the same, this is where all three components intersect…The interns get exposure to collections, inside access, and knowledge, which often helps them develop their own research goals. Some interns have moved on to degrees, and others have returned with degrees (our general manager, for example). Others have also benefited from the connections promoted by the program by moving from one sort of work to another position. But for me, the most valuable piece is that while the funding from Mellon has aided this work tremendously, so many of the pieces and efforts are already there.
The Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers began as a Program in Puerto Rican Studies and has grown and expanded into a full, research-rich department known for its interdisciplinary scholarship. How will this project contribute to the department’s stature? Will Rutgers students or faculty be involved?
I began this project with the visibility provided by also being director of the Center for Latin American Studies. With the competitive research grants, we have had two graduate students (history and geography) participate in the summer part of our program. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of graduate students from Puerto Rico interested in the humanities and social sciences at Rutgers.
Rutgers faculty have already been involved with the PRAC from my primary department (Latino & Caribbean Studies). Professor Dinzey Flores helped fund an intern for two years (she is now our manager). We also received some assistance from Professor Kathleen Lopez’s fund for research on Latinos. Now, with the expanded funding from the Mellon Foundation, we will fund graduates as interns in the coming summers (including some from Rutgers University). I have encouraged the coordinator of my other department’s (history) public history program, Prof. Kristin O’brassil, to find candidates interested in this sort of work. That is one of my major goals for this year. We now have funding for summer graduate student internships and look forward to working with Rutgers graduate students.
I also hope to develop a course that will include a spring break or summer internship.
Our digitization lab at Rutgers relies on work-study students coordinated by some amazingly talented undergraduates. They have produced a steady flow of PDFs for our digital library.
Between July and September we got the initial stage of the interns organized. Between the Mellon interns and the other sources of support I have secured, we have about 45 interns collaborating with eight or nine archival/library sites. This summer, we had one new graduate student from Rutgers (Lauria Rosa, Geography) participate in our Summer program. I will look to find ways to link the program to more Rutgers students.
You mention in your grant summary of your own personal commitment to Puerto Rico. Can you talk about your own background and what you have personally witnessed in terms of the toll of the ongoing crisis?
Most of my family is from Puerto Rico, and I grew up in the shadow of the University of Puerto Rico and the educational system, and in a larger sense, closely connected to the important public sector. My family had public school teachers, many workers and staff for the state-owned electrical company, a nurse in the public health system, and so forth. My mother was a research specialist at the education department (public instruction, it was called), and my father worked in social research and then as a professor at the University of Puerto Rico. I grew up, and I think this applies to my generation, which understands the importance of the public sector, public services, and education. My family held different opinions about Puerto Rico’s relationship with the US…but my parents were independentists and my father a militant in the Socialist Party. My formative years in the 1960s and 1970s were filled with activism over the UPR, the status question (colonialism), environmental struggles, government policing, and also from a strong labor movement.
The many vectors, global, colonial, and local, that have intersected in Puerto Rico have challenged and completely transformed Puerto Rico, which my family experienced in the 20th Century.
I lived most of my adult life in the US with a constant connection to “the islands” (it is actually an archipelago), social, political, and economic changes. It is also part of my work as a historian, despite spending over 30 years working on Central American and Mexican history. I knew that eventually, my professional work would turn towards Puerto Ricans in New York and soon enough to some of the questions that I had been following for decades. My father played an important role in all of this. He’s an Italian American from the Bronx who decided to visit Puerto Rico in 1957 and then got stuck in an intense relationship with its people and places, including its diaspora (and my mom, of course). At some point in his life, I am sure everyone forgot that he was not born in Puerto Rico. My mother’s relationship with Puerto Rico was far more organic than my father’s… she taught me how to see, listen, and respect the things that I did not necessarily agree with or understand. I mention all this because, without this background, I don’t think I would have been able to see the possibilities for this work.