Digitizing the Barrio (DTB) is an archival project of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. DTB is supported by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant program is made possible by funding from the Mellon Foundation.
Mission Statement
The mission of the PRCC Archive is to help build decolonial futures by preserving local Puerto Rican barrio and transnational histories of resistance, solidarity, and community-building in the Humboldt Park/ West Town area of Chicago.
To this end, the archive works to:
• preserve the rich, intergenerational, and largely undocumented history of our community as it confronts the growing existential threat of gentrification;
• harness our history and memory to address contemporary colonial conditions and articulate alternative possibilities.
• build relationships with other community archives in Chicago, across the Puerto Rican diaspora, and in the archipelago of Puerto Rico;
• provide open access to all interested in the Puerto Rican community of Chicago and/or Puerto Rico.
The DTB Archive Team
Leadership
Angélica Hernández, Lead Archivist
Angélica Hernández is the lead archivist for the Puerto Rican Cultural Center’s Digitizing The Barrio archive project. She received her Masters in Library and Information Science from Dominican University in 2022, and a BA in Art History from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. She also volunteers with Liberation Library, a Chicago-based prison abolition organization that provides books and youth-led magazines to incarcerated young people in Illinois including all five state-run youth facilities and over six county juvenile detention centers. Her areas of interest are community engagement, critical cataloging, and decolonial archival practices.
Dr. Margaret Power, Co-Director
Margaret Power is co-director of Digitizing the Barrio and president of the Board of Directors of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. She is also co-chair of Historians for Peace and Democracy. She is a professor emeritus of History at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She has authored or co-authored seven books, including Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-imperialism and Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle Against Allende.
Dr. Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, Co-Director
Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is co-director of Digitizing the Barrio and a member of the Board of Directors of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. He has worked with the PRCC for nearly 30 years and cofounded several PRCC projects and initiatives, including La Voz del Paseo Boricua newspaper, Batey Urbano, and the Humboldt Park Participatory Democracy Project. Michael is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the award-winning book, Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change. His current research explores the afterlives of anticolonial resistance and political repression in Puerto Rican Chicago.
PRCC Board Advisors
Luis Alejandro Molina
Luis Alejandro Molina is the Treasurer of the PRCC’s Board of Directors. He currently works with its Digital Presence Initiative and Fiscal Departments. Luis Alejandro has worked at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center (PRCC) for almost 50 years, beginning by volunteering as a math tutor at Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School.
Luis Alejandro has organized support for the defense of human rights and the release of Puerto Rican Political Prisoners in the Puerto Rican communities of New York, Hartford, San Francisco, and Chicago. A former editor of Libertad, the official organ of the National Committee to Free Puerto Rican Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War, he also served on the Advisory board of BORICUA and La Patria Radical newspapers. He produced “Cada Guaraguao tiene su Pitirre” and “USA on Trial” parts 1 and 2 with co-producer Carla Leshne. He is the editor of “USA on Trial”, based on the San Francisco Tribunal of Indigenous Peoples and Oppressed Nationalities counter-celebrating the quicentennial.
He also serves as President of the Board of Directors of Youth Connections Charter School (YCCS), which serves 2500 at-risk students in Chicago. Presently, he is working on the digital archives project with Board Member Dr. Ann Peterson-Kemp.
At the Hispanic Information Telecommunications Network, he recently won an Emmy Award as Executive Producer of the short “Ramon and Irmgard” and also serves as Executive Producer of the “Puerto Rican Heritage” series, since its inception.
Lastly, he curates the Digital Archive component of the PRCC Archive.
Ann Peterson-Kemp
Ann Peterson-Kemp is Associate Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences. She lives in Sequim, Washington and works as a research and project consultant, with expertise in community informatics and youth. For more than two decades, Ann has collaborated with extraordinary grassroots community organizations devoted to social justice, from whom she continues to learn participatory and emancipatory approaches to discovery, learning, and action. Her partners include SisterNet, Illinois Public Radio, the Don Moyers Boys and Girls Club, Booker T. Washington Elementary School, and El Centro (Champaign-Urbana, Illinois); the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School, and Batey Urbano (Chicago); and the Seattle Public Library, Horn of Africa Services, and Northwest Communities of Burma (Seattle). She also has international experience in the form of two Fulbright appointments (Finland and Brazil). Inspired by the Community Inquiry theory and practice of Jane Addams and John Dewey, Ann is familiar with building innovative and inter-institutional collaborations that cross-industry, university, and community boundaries. Ann is the Co-Founder of Prairienet Community Network, founding Director of the SOAR after-school program for Spanish-speaking immigrant children, and Director of the Community Informatics Initiative at the University of Illinois. She served as a research consultant with Dr. Karen Fisher’s InfoMe program, which uses teen collaborative design to understand the information helping the behavior of immigrant and refugee youth. Ann’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services. Ann also advises the Digital Archive component of the PRCC Archive.
Staff
Kaitlyn Griffith, Archives Assistant
Kaitlyn Griffith, MLIS, is a multimedia archivist and memory worker. She has developed archival collections for communities of color, the queer community, religious orders, and universities. When not working on Digitizing el Barrio, Kaitlyn loves to read and play with her dog.
Anissa Camacho, Research Assistant
Anissa Camacho is an MA student in Latin American and Latino Studies, with a concentration in Black Studies, at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Her research and interests focus on climate change, urban ecologies, Afro-Latinidad, Puerto Rican studies, and ethnographic, spatial, and archival methods.
Daniel Strom, Research Assistant
Daniel Strom is an MA student in the Latin American and Latino Studies program at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He received his bachelor’s in history, politics, and government from North Park University. His research interests include labor rights, community and labor organizing strategies, diaspora studies, and histories of migration.
Current Volunteers
Wilfredo Santana, Jocelyn Rodriguez, Ryan Dong, and Jeannette Bruno.
Current Collections
Collection on Juan Antonio and Consuelo Lee Corretjer
The Puerto Rican Cultural Center (PRCC) carries the name of Juan Antonio Corretjer, an important historical figure considered the national poet of Puerto Rico. His wife, Consuelo Lee, was an educator and author. The Corretjers maintained a close relationship with the PRCC and Chicago’s Puerto Rican community from the mid-1970s until their respective deaths in the early 1980s. Items in this collection include personal correspondence, written speeches and essays, poetry books, rare photographs, and funeral programs.
Collection on Puerto Rican Cultural Center and its Programs
The Chicago-based Puerto Rican Cultural Center (PRCC) was established in 1973, in the wake of the 1966 Division Street Riots, the first urban riot in the Puerto Rican diaspora. Over its nearly fifty years, the PRCC has amassed a large collection of documents and other primary materials that provide a valuable account of the organization and the community’s development and struggles related to human rights, health, education, economic development, arts, and culture. This collection contains barrio newspapers, videos and photographs of community festivals, event fliers, recruitment materials, meeting minutes, and artifacts (e.g., festival t-shirts and artisanry).
Collection on Solidarity, Political Movements, and Campaigns
The third collection contains materials on political and human rights movements and campaigns directed by PRCC leaders and community activists, such as the campaigns to free Puerto Rican political prisoners and to end the military testing on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, as well as solidarity and coalitional work on immigration and criminal justice reform. It also contains materials related to international liberation movements in Palestine, El Salvador, and South Africa, among many others. Materials include audio and audiovisual recordings of mobilizations, newsletters and pamphlets, drafts of speeches and essays, political education curricula, photographs, artifacts (e.g., protest signs), and movement ephemera, such as event programs, posters, and fliers.
