Center for Puerto Rican Studies-Centro

Applications are now open for the CENTRO Youth Collective Fall 2026 program, an 8-week Saturday series for middle and high school students in grades 6–11.

Hosted at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College in East Harlem, the program brings together young scholars to study Puerto Rican history, culture and social movements through archival research, creative writing and community discussion.

Topics include identity, migration, race, gender, climate change and youth activism, all grounded in the Puerto Rican experience.

Sessions run September through December.
The application deadline is May 31, 2026. Accepted students will be notified by early June.

Click here to apply! → https://ow.ly/Ugqy50YBSi0

Mark your calendar!

CENTRO’s second annual Rooted + Relational Research Symposium takes place May 1–2, 2026

Over two days, researchers, students and artists will examine how Puerto Rican communities have formed, sustained and imagined relationships across racial, ethnic and geographic lines. From New York City to Utah, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Palestine, South Korea, and beyond.

This year’s theme, “Boricuas in Relation,” brings together researchers, artists and students to explore Puerto Rican community formation across diaspora, archipelago and global geographies. The program includes film screenings, three panels and presentations spanning archival practice, solidarity networks, language, literature and cultural production.

The symposium opens on May 1 with an evening of experimental and documentary film screenings exploring urban memory, movement and the incomplete archive. Panels on May 2 will explore diasporic identity and archival silence, Caribbean and transpacific solidarities and Boricua cultural production from early women’s fiction to contemporary music and comics.

Click here to RSVP! → https://ow.ly/mUex50YLjLJ

Applications due this Thursday!

, April 27, 1971, the FBI “ended” its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). However, the government continued its espionage for years afterward, planting bugs and intercepting personal mail. Today, the impact of COINTELPRO's operations against Puerto Rican independence movement continues to shape the historical understanding of state surveillance and suppression.

COINTELPRO was a covert campaign to infiltrate, monitor, and disrupt political groups. This included organizations such as the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the Puerto Rican pro-independence movement. The FBI's tactics ranged from surveillance and disinformation to the planting of informants and agent provocateurs within these groups in order to disrupt their operations and thwart their objectives.

One of COINTELPRO's main goals was to discredit and weaken Puerto Rico's independence movement by associating it with violence and by promoting internal divisions. The program sought to neutralize the growing call for Puerto Rican self-determination during the 1960s and 1970s, when international attention to Puerto Rico's colonial status was intensifying in the midst of the anti-colonial movement.

While COINTELPRO may have formally ended, its repercussions contributed to the criminalization and marginalization of legitimate political movements advocating for independence and justice.

Its covert operations ended shortly after the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, on March 8, 1971, and exposed the program. While COINTELPRO may have formally ended, its repercussions contributed to the criminalization and marginalization of legitimate political movements advocating for independence and justice.

Though our old 2003 website, which highlighted the 120,000 FBI papers, is no longer active, you are more than welcome to schedule an appointment to view the papers in person. You can also view the papers digitally on the FBI’s website. Stay tuned for more developments as we have projects focused on the FBI files in the works at our Library & Archives.

Click here to visit the CENTRO Archive https://ow.ly/4mCI50YLfnE
FBI Records: The Vault
https://ow.ly/K7gA50YLfnC

📸 Courtesy of the FBI Vault

New in Rican Writings! 🖊️

In “Archiving the Intangible,” archivist Herbert Durán reflects on his encounter with the Víctor Fernández Fragoso Papers— letters, photographs, and cassette tapes that together reveal the man behind the work. The essay appears in “Ser Islas / Being Islands.”

Click here to get your copy! → https://ow.ly/FZgA50YLnlU
Read the full article → https://ow.ly/y0WU50YLnlV

New in RicanWritings! 🖋️

In September 1981, students at UPR Río Piedras launched the longest uninterrupted strike in the university’s history, four and a half months, to oppose the first across-the-board tuition increase in decades.

A new article by José A. Laguarta Ramírez traces how the strike, led by student council president Roberto Alejandro and a coalition of leftist and Christian student organizations, marked a turning point. For the first time, UPR students organized around economic demands rather than nationalist or anti-war causes. That shift would shape student resistance for the next four decades.

Click here to read the full article! → https://ow.ly/Zb1N50YECnh

📸 José A. Laguarta Ramírez (2017)

Our April featured artist is Lionel Cruet! Based in New York and San Juan, Cruet is a multidisciplinary artist who has their finger on the pulse of migrant identities and climate-consciousness. Cruet depicts unique perspectives of the diaspora through vibrantly colored photographs and multimedia pieces, featured in installations across the Americas and Europe. His focus on using light and heat as imagery in his work represents rapidly-changing ecology and its connection to colonial histories.

Set in lightboxes at the 42 St-Bryant Park station, Lionel Cruet’s recent photographic installation " " commissioned by MTA Art Design, presented a series of highly saturated, tinted images that recede toward a vanishing point. The title references digital culture—specifically the moment when a message or image is marked as “seen” —and explores how images are mediated, circulated, and perceived. Beginning with a black-and-white photograph of the artist’s hand holding a shell found along the Puerto Rican shoreline, the sequence progresses and incorporates public domain visuals from NASA and NOAA archives, including satellite imagery and oceanic heat maps. The result is a meditation on perception, environment, and the evolving role of photography in shaping how we think about place. The exhibition was generously sponsored by Griffin Editions and DotWorks with installation support by OUTFRONT Media.

📸 Artist headshot: Photograph documentation by Zayira Ray
📸 Artwork images: Photograph documentation by the artist, Jason Mandella, Xavier Ojeda

, April 22, 1969, the City College of New York (CCNY) was taken over by a student strike that led to the occupation of its South Campus. The protest, spearheaded by the Black and Puerto Rican Student Caucus, was driven by “Five Demands” — key issues addressing racial equality and educational access at CCNY.

The demands included the establishment of a separate school for Black and Puerto Rican studies, a dedicated orientation for Black and Puerto Rican students, and measures to ensure the racial composition of student bodies reflected New York City’s demographics. These demands were a response to the proposed budget cuts that threatened critical programs for underrepresented students, including the SEEK Program.

Despite initial resistance from the administration, the protests highlighted systemic inequalities and paved the way for future reforms. Notably, within the next year, City College introduced a Spanish-language requirement for education majors and incorporated Black and Puerto Rican history into the curriculum. However, in response to the protests, New York State enacted the Henderson Act “mandating that educational institutions establish plans for maintaining order in the event of student unrest” (The New School Archives).

As we look back on this historic event that eventually resulted in the creation of key centers and institutions like CENTRO, we recognize and uplift the legacy of student activism as a catalyst for necessary social change and the importance of protecting free speech and academic freedom of students and faculty.

Learn more on this topic and explore other key historical events in New York City in Nueva York Chronicles: https://historias.nyc/nueva-york-chronicles/topic/city-college-of-new-york-ccny-student-takeover/

The Nueva York Chronicles (NY.C.), created by The Clemente, is the digital cornerstone at the heart of Historias - a growing chronotope that maps Latinx presence across time, space, and public life in New York City. More than an archive, NY.C. is a time-map that frames place as a connective tissue between memory and movement. Instead of organizing stories by individual biography, it charts collective action–linking movements, sites, rituals, and events across boroughs and generations.