AREPR

AREPR is a collaborative digital humanities project led by Christina Boyles at Indiana University, Mirerza González Vélez and Nadjah Ríos Villarini at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras (UPRRP), and Ricia Anne Chansky at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez (UPRM). Funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation (2020-2023), AREPR employs the decolonial practice of post-custodial archiving to record stories of mutual aid organizations and individuals surviving and responding creatively to stratified disasters that have impacted the Puerto Rican archipelago in the last five years, including hurricanes, earthquakes, and the global pandemic of COVID-19. We define post-custodial archiving as a model in which the concept of the “archive” is deeply rooted in that of memory as heritage. As such, data in the form of digital artifacts is preserved in a manner that allows “creators to maintain control of their archival records while archivists provide management support.” Our reliance on post-custodial archiving practices in building the digital repository allows us to engage a strategy in which community partners and narrators cocreate research frameworks and participate in designing project outputs and their dissemination.

Over the course of two weeks in September 2017, Puerto Rico was successively impacted by two category 5 hurricanes, Hurricanes Irma and María. The disaster, however, was not simply the hurricanes but also the events that followed. Notably, the disaster-response methods used—prioritization of urban centers, slow distribution of resources, and limited communication with those in need—placed the cultural legacy of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean under duress by leaving most Puerto Ricans to fend for themselves. Local residents were left to pick up the pieces on their own; as a result, the island largely depended upon community-based groups and their use of local traditions, oral knowledge, and community organizing.

While the items in this collection focus on Puerto Rico, they also bring attention to how disasters are weaponized and leveraged by those in power and how similar crises are increasingly frequent as the effects of climate change worsen. The innovative knowledge shared by AREPR’s community partners offer us new ways of relating to the pending climate catastrophe by foregrounding stories previously neglected and by implementing project design strategies that elicit, encourage, and exhibit these stories. Although these stories offer insight into the lived experiences of those living in climate hot spots, they also ask us to shift our notions of the ethical and humane by laying bare the injustices of colonial policies.

Institutional Partners

The University of Puerto Rico and Indiana University are uniquely positioned to collaborate on this project. Nadjah Ríos and Mirerza Gonzalez Velez, both at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras are experts in developing community-engaged archives in Puerto Rico. Their projects, the Caribbean Diaspora Project and the Culebra Digital Community Archive, emphasize a deep commitment to Puerto Rican communities and culture. Ricia Chansky and Christina Boyles, at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez and Indiana University respectively, are practiced oral historians with ongoing projects focused on life in Puerto Rico during and after Hurricane María. Chansky’s Mí María project demonstrates how large-scale public humanities projects can and do offer opportunities for responding to disaster. The combined efforts of these four scholars make it possible to provide training; partner with community organizations; and collect and preserve physical, born-digital, and interview materials from across Puerto Rico.

Additionally, the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) was and is integral to our shared collaboration through the Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico by providing community, conversation, and models of decolonial praxis in the Caribbean. According to Linda Tuhiwai Smith, decolonizing projects require “revolutionary thinking about the roles that knowledge, knowledge production, knowledge hierarchies and knowledge institutions play in decolonization and social transformation.” dLOC models these values by freely sharing multilingual materials without claiming ownership of Caribbean artifacts or knowledges and by sharing sound-based artifacts with and from across the Caribbean, and their work serves as a model for AREPR.