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Documenting the Narratives of Puerto Rican Migration, 1945-1980

PRAC Director Aldo Lauria Santiago and Professor Ismael García Colón (College of Staten Island & Graduate Center, CUNY) were awarded a grant for organizing and digitizing migration-related documents at the Archivo General de Puerto Rico. The funding received from the US Latino Digital Humanities Center of Arte Publico Press will support 18-20 weeks of work recovering the stories and documentation of Puerto Rican emigration held at the AGPR.  With the support of AGPR Director Hilda Ayala and senior archivist Pedro Roig, the work will produce a publicly accessible digital archive that will be reproduced in three repositories and various guides and aides to the materials. It will also help with the ongoing PRAC work of helping the AGPR identify and minimally catalog collections for public use.

We placed two paid interns who will be at work between May and December 2024 to process and digitize materials drawn from three collections held at the AGPR. These collections contain extensive materials relating to the migration process between World War II and the 1980s, including long letters written by migrants and their families to Puerto Rican government officials. These materials include:

  • Requests and other correspondence relating to Puerto Rican migrant workers (including seasonal contract farm laborers) in the US held within the records of Puerto Rico’s Department of Labor
  • Reports and other data on the migration process produced by the Migration Division of Puerto Rico’s Department of Labor
  • Correspondence and other records relating to the internal discussions, debates, commissions, committees, and policies relating to migration produced by the Governor’s Office, the Labor Department, Fomento Economico, and other agencies, 1940-1980

Based on the practices, access, and collaborations established through the PRAC, we recruited two interns in Puerto Rico, drawn from the talent already recruited as part of the Rutgers/Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration in various projects. They are currently at work with the Labor Department, Fomento, and Governor’s collections, which include materials on migration and US communities. Professors Lauria Santiago and  García Colón have identified hundreds of boxes for digitization through their own research and the new collection guides prepared by the PRAC interns since 2022.

Interns Victoria Arredondo and Iuliana Rosario have worked digitizing these materials with an overhead document camera capable of producing high-resolution images (at least 300DPI) and presenting them in proper form with minimal metadata for collection origin and other basic characteristics.

Prof. Lauria Santiago will complete the processing of images and post the digital materials to an Omeka-based website in 2025 as part of the Rutgers Latino Studies Research Initiative (LSRI). These LSRI projects include the Archive of the Department of Puerto Rican Studies, the Companion to a forthcoming Rutgers University Press book on Latina/os in New Jersey (co-edited by Prof. Lauria Santiago), and the oral histories of Latinos in New Jersey developed by Professors Lilia Fernandez and Kathleen Lopez. The AGPR will also include this collection within its in-development public-facing digital archive.