In reflecting on my work with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center over the past ten weeks, I am struck by a dual sense of accomplishment coupled with an intense awareness of the vast amount of work ahead for the Community Archive. As a team, working very much “from scratch” with only a preliminary sense of…
Community Archiving as Building New Models
One aspect of community archiving that has been at the forefront of my mind while working with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center this summer is the contrast between our project’s “starting from scratch” reality, and the “typical” structure of an archive that is based in an institution. Even a small organization, historic site, or business…
History, Archives, Silences, Power, and Community
While my research and work focus this summer has tended to lean towards the much more practical realities of founding an archive, I have tried to keep the “community archive” aspect of the project in the forefront of my readings and resources. It is essential, while working in a community with whom I cannot personally…
A Layout of the Field
My work and research at the PRCC this summer encompasses a wide variety of “fields,” as the term is sometimes used “to describe a set of organizations linked together as competitors and collaborators within a social space devoted to a particular type of action.”[1] Importantly, as discussed in my last post, there is the field…
Rights to Cities, Networks of Support and Action
In the context of what I’ve been learning about the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, there are two important but distinct ways that the organization considers their own “Right to the City,” as discussed in David Harvey’s essay from New Left Review (2008). As I mentioned briefly in an earlier post, there is the “local” side…
Archiving at the PRCC
I want to take this post to dive further into the actual project that I am working on here in Chicago with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. Unlike most other GGFUP fellows who had more open-ended plans within their local organizations, I have known some of the structure and goals of my “research” from the…
A very brief historical introduction to the Puerto Rican Cultural Center
In my earlier research on the history of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center and the Humboldt Park neighborhood, I focused more on the migration of Puerto Ricans from the island to the city of Chicago, and then the community’s subsequent marginalization and displacement from multiple neighborhoods throughout the decades of the latter 20th century. Due…
