Afro-Puerto Rican Oral Histories: A Disruptive Collaboration

We are a Western people in the manner of our own roots. We are Americans of the United States and Americans of America and Westerners of the West. And we are all this as Puerto Ricans from Puerto Rico.

—Former Governor Luis Muñoz Marín, 1953

The contribution of the black race to Puerto Rico is irrelevant, it is a merely rhetorical addition.

—Former Governor Rafael Hernández Colón, 1988

Puerto Rico is a work in progress where the wealth of our history does not dictate our fate, the strength of our roots does not tie us to the past and the affirmation of our Hispanicity goes hand in hand with our participation in a nation [United States] whose multicultural vocation increases daily.

—Governor Luis Fortuño Burset, 2011

Testimonios afropuertorriqueños: Un proyecto de historia oral en el oeste de Puerto Rico (Afro-Puerto Rican testimonies: An oral history project in western Puerto Rico) is a collaborative research project launched in September 2006. Its purpose is recording the voices, memories, and histories of contemporary Afro-Puerto Ricans in order to fertilize debates about racial constructions and discourses in Puerto Rico and democratize the forum of discussion, representation, and analysis of Afro-Puerto Rican history and identities. In its first year the project was funded by the Otros Saberes Initiative of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), which supported five other Latin American collaborative research initiatives focused on either Afro-descendents or indigenous communities. During the course of that year we composed a diverse research collective of nearly two dozen members, including academics; community members from the western towns of Aguadilla and Hormigueros, where the oral history project was conducted; and students from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. At the onset of the project we were guided by the following objectives:

1. 1. To employ oral history to ignite profound and self-reflective discussions about contemporary Afro-Puerto Rican identity and experience.

2. 2. To carve out a space for the production and circulation of Afro-Puerto Rican self-representations.

3. 3. To debunk prevalent myths and stereotypes about Afro-Puerto Ricans and the "African heritage" in Puerto Rico.

4. 4. To challenge the circumscription of Afro-Puerto Rican culture, history, and experience to ever-shrinking regions in the east and south of Puerto Rico.

5. 5. To record the life stories of local actors in order to challenge the reduction of Afro-Puerto Rican history to chapters on eminent blacks or "mulattos" or on particular, marginal "communities" so as to demonstrate that this history is written, narrated, and constructed "from below" in everyday struggles to define, negotiate, and assert individual and collective identities.

6. 6. To develop a collaborative research methodology that contributes to building a diverse project community dedicated to research and education about the Afro-Puerto Rican experience in Puerto Rico.

By the end of the first year the project had generated an unprecedented Afro-Puerto Rican oral history collection that included thirty-three interviews and a parallel archive of photographic and video material. Thereafter a smaller but equally diverse collective has continued collaborating in the dissemination of the project in publications and presentations as well as in the analysis of the testimonial material collected. In this essay I reflect on the first year of the project, which I have coordinated since its inception, focusing primarily on its evolution in the town of Aguadilla, to argue that the collaborative oral history methodology employed forcefully disrupts the tenets of racial discourse in Puerto Rico as well as dominant saberes (lore) about contemporary Afro-Puerto Rican subjectivities.¹ To contextualize my argument I begin with a necessarily abridged discussion of race and identity in Puerto Rico, followed by a characterization of the field of Afro-Puerto Rican studies, which provided the point of departure for our project. Against these backdrops I discuss how the conjunction of intimacy and identity in the search for alternative saberes about Afro-Puerto Ricanness enabled our collaborative research project to transcend firmly entrenched confines in both social science research and race and identity discourses in Puerto...