{"id":7465,"date":"2026-05-12T09:33:35","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T13:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.trincoll.edu\/reporter\/?page_id=7465"},"modified":"2026-05-12T09:33:35","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T13:33:35","slug":"connecting-with-puerto-rican-culture","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.trincoll.edu\/reporter\/fall-2021\/features\/connecting-with-puerto-rican-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Connecting with Puerto Rican Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Kathy Andrews<\/p>\n
A trained anthropological archaeologist focused on Puerto Rican history and culture, Amanda Guzm\u00e1n specializes in museum anthropology, describing her field as \u201ca bit of detective work on museum collections\u2014reconstructing the histories of how objects came to be at museums.\u201d<\/p>\nAmanda Guzm\u00e1n, assistant professor of anthropology<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
When the newly named assistant professor of anthropology set out to develop a course to examine traditional and contemporary views of Puerto Rican culture, her goals were to introduce students to a wide breadth of Puerto Rican scholarship, to weave in the story of Hartford\u2019s Puerto Rican diaspora, and to include ways for students to engage with the community. Also, because she planned to teach the class remotely, she envisioned a live, virtual speaker series featuring historians, archeologists, and museum curators and educators. Each lecture would be recorded and then posted online to create what she describes as \u201can archive of Puerto Rican thought.\u201d<\/p>\n
Guzm\u00e1n\u2019s spring 2021 Community Learning course, \u201cBeyond Traditional: Contemporary Understandings of Puerto Rican Culture,\u201d met all of her goals. The online archive showcases guest lecturers of wide-ranging expertise, including from Smithsonian Institution museums and from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The recorded talks have an intimate feel; since the speakers represented many institutions that were closed due to the pandemic, they Zoomed in from home offices. Each talk was followed by Q&A, though only the lecture portion was recorded.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I always attempt to do in my classes is empower students to not only learn but also to teach and to be active participants in their learning and in the learning of others,\u201d says Guzm\u00e1n.<\/p>\n
Among students enrolled in the class were several who grew up as Connecticut residents and were surprised to learn that their home state has the largest percentage of Puerto Rican residents of any U.S. state. They wondered why that aspect of Connecticut history had never been mentioned in their high school classes. Enter historian and Hartford native Elena Rosario, one of nine guest speakers who brought Puerto Rican history and culture to life and described different waves of migration, from the 1950s to those of more recent years, including after Hurricane Maria.<\/p>\nRay Alvarez-Adorno \u201923, right, works with historian and Hartford native Elena Rosario and Jasmin Agosto \u201910, education and community outreach manager at the Hartford History Center at the Hartford Public Library (HPL), in the center. Photo by Nick Caito.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Rosario discussed her research, which focuses on post-World War II Puerto Rican migration and settlement in Hartford, capturing students\u2019 attention with archival photographs, newspaper reports, and other documentation. A Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan, Rosario detailed how Operation Bootstrap, an economic strategy in 1950s\u20131960s Puerto Rico, led to the mass migration of Puerto Ricans, with thousands eventually settling in Connecticut.\u00a0As the island\u2019s traditional farming economy shifted to manufacturing, many male heads of households were recruited for agricultural work in Connecticut, particularly at tobacco farms. While permanent settlement was not intended originally, Rosario says, community networks and cultural events such as the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade grew over time and remain strong in Hartford today.<\/p>\n
Neuroscience major Alicia Camuy \u201922 says the course, and Rosario\u2019s talk in particular, made an impact on her. Camuy, who is from Chicago, was inspired by the class discussion to ask her great-aunts about her family\u2019s roots in Puerto Rico. She says she was amazed to learn that her grandfather, when he migrated to the U.S. mainland, came first to Hartford, living and doing agricultural work in the area before eventually settling in Chicago. \u201cBefore taking this class, I had no idea of my family connection here,\u201d says Camuy. \u201cIt\u2019s given me a sort of window, walking through my grandfather\u2019s footsteps, trying to figure out what his life was like in Hartford during the 1970s.\u201d<\/p>\n
Family stories like Camuy\u2019s are an important part of Rosario\u2019s research. \u201cStories of Puerto Ricans rarely make it into the archives,\u201d says Rosario. \u201cWho better to tell those stories than the people who lived those experiences?\u201d Rosario, as well as the other guest speakers, talked with students about a key course theme, the idea of a scholar\u2019s positionality, essentially the stance of the researcher or the student in relation to the subject of study. She notes that her own positionality as a Puerto Rican woman in Connecticut \u201cshapes the relationships that I build in the field, the questions that I pose, the way that I read my sources, and so on.\u201d<\/p>\nPoster by Carolina Villasenor \u201922<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Guzm\u00e1n, who joined the Trinity faculty in 2020 as Ann Plato Fellow in Anthropology and American Studies, says she was excited to hear of the extensive work that alumna Jasmin Agosto \u201910, education and community outreach manager at the Hartford History Center at the Hartford Public Library (HPL), has done to gather and share stories of Hartford\u2019s Puerto Rican community, including oral history interviews of historical changemakers of the Puerto Rican diaspora. In fall 2020, Guzm\u00e1n began meeting with Agosto to learn more about the Hartford community and Agosto\u2019s work. A new HPL community archiving initiative that Agosto described seemed a perfect opportunity for collaboration\u2014student involvement would enhance the \u201cBeyond Traditional\u201d course as well as advance the HPL initiative.<\/p>\n
The community archiving initiative was planned to launch in conjunction with the opening of the Park Street Library @ the Lyric, a new state-of-the-art building that was set to open in early fall 2021 at Park and Broad Streets. Agosto says plans for the new HPL location, which replaces a longtime Park Street storefront branch, include \u201ca memory booth, where people can tell their stories within this neighborhood and share their visions for the future.\u201d\u00a0In addition to audio-recording stories, people can bring photographs to be captured digitally. Says Guzm\u00e1n, \u201cCollaborating on this project allowed us both to leverage parallels in our work\u2014Jasmin with oral history interviews and me with my interest in digital humanities for research and teaching contexts for this first iteration of the course.\u201d<\/p>\nPoster by Chris Cooper \u201923<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Members of Guzm\u00e1n\u2019s class, for their final projects, were tasked with creating a portfolio of community engagement documents for the HPL staff\u2019s review and potential use. Students chose from different final assignment options, including drafting survey questions to be posed to community members and designing promotional ads to promote the memory booth via social media.<\/p>\n
During the summer, three Trinity students made further contributions to the project. Ray Alvarez-Adorno \u201923, who was part of the \u201cBeyond Traditional\u201d class, extended his work on the community archiving initiative as a participant in Trinity\u2019s Public Humanities Collaborative. Kendall Alexander \u201922 and Isabelle Sayas \u201923 served as anthropology research assistants. With Guzm\u00e1n as faculty partner and Agosto and Rosario as community partners, the three students were involved in various ways, including researching local sites of interest for potential inclusion in the project and exploring different digital storytelling platforms for use in the initiative.<\/p>\nRay Alvarez-Adorno \u201923, a student in the \u201cBeyond Traditional: Contemporary Understandings of Puerto Rican Culture\u201d\u2028course. Photo by Nick Caito.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Guzm\u00e1n notes that a key lesson for students in the course was understanding that in studying Puerto Rico, \u201cyou\u2019re really studying an unfolding history of multiple places because the diaspora is such a big part of cultural production and because Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, which people don\u2019t often learn stateside. It was really important to recognize that history of connection into our present, because after Hurricane Maria, there was significant migration from Puerto Rico to the U.S. mainland, and so we were studying both a historical migration as well as a contemporary migration defined by renewed diasporic mobilization in more recent years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Guzm\u00e1n says that when she next teaches the course again in spring 2022, when Trinity\u2019s classes should be fully in person, she still would like to invite at least some new speakers to participate via Zoom. \u201cIt actually made me realize how connected we can be, even while apart. And the biggest feedback I got from the speakers was that they were just so impressed with the students.\u201d<\/p>\n
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