U. professor receives grant for Puerto Rico archival project

Aldo Lauria-Santiago, a professor in the Departments of History and Latino and Caribbean Studies as well as the director of the Center for Latin American Studies, recently received a grant for a project about migration in the Puerto Rican community, according to a press release.

In an interview with The Daily Targum, Lauria-Santiago said that he is collaborating with Ismael García-Colón, a professor in the Departments of Anthropology and International Migration Studies at the College of Staten Island, on the project.

Prior to this project, Lauria-Santiago said he and García-Colón had been conducting research and publishing their findings in a series of online blogs until the director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College at the time removed them.

He said he wants to build a website similar to the initial blog series for his new collaboration with García-Colón. The platform would contain archival content, such as documents and letters, he said.

Lauria-Santiago said he and García-Colón received a grant for this current project from the U.S. Latino Digital Humanities Center of Arte Publico Press with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The framework of the project is to study and preserve Puerto Rican and Caribbean history for library use, he said.

"The preservation of letters from people, from regular folk to governors or directors, especially from the 1940s or ’50s or ‘60s is very rare," Lauria-Santiago said. "So, when you find that in an archive, it's absolutely wonderful material."

Lauria-Santiago and García-Colón’s work is part of a larger project titled "Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration," the former said. The project is a collaboration with governmental and higher education institutions in Puerto Rico to increase accessibility to archival and periodical publications, according to the project's website.

Lauria-Santiago said that his team funds students and recent graduates to work in the archives as well. He said that, when he started this work in 2022, he did not anticipate it to escalate in scope to such opportunities.

He also said that his colleagues in Puerto Rico and in Puerto Rican institutions are conducting research and archival work with insufficient resources due to budget cuts and federal deficits.

Throughout this process, Lauria-Santiago said that this project would not be possible without collaboration, particularly between professors and institutions who have worked together to gather resources.

Lauria-Santiago said that many people in Puerto Rico continue to face economic hardship due to the island's colonial status as a U.S. territory and events like Hurricane Maria, which caused destruction across the island in 2017.

"After (Hurricane Maria) destroyed a lot of things in Puerto Rico … A lot of us started asking the question of 'What could we do to help besides helping our relatives or sending money?'" he said. "And this is one of the pieces that came out of that question, to reconnect a little bit more professionally to the place that I came from and that I've always been in touch with."