Research Archive

Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Centro)

Centro holds the largest archive of Puerto Rican history in the United States at Hunter College, documenting the diaspora, the urban-renewal displacements that scattered New York's Puerto Rican communities, and the organizing record that emerged in response.

Location
New York, NY
Founded
1973
Website
https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/

The Center for Puerto Rican Studies, known as Centro, opened at Hunter College of the City University of New York in 1973. Puerto Rican students, faculty, and community organizers pressed CUNY to create the institution after the 1969 City College open-admissions fight and the broader Puerto Rican movement’s demand for institutional recognition of the diaspora’s history and ongoing presence.

Centro houses the Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, which holds personal papers, organizational records, photographs, and oral histories documenting the Puerto Rican experience across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The collection includes the papers of community organizations that fought urban renewal in San Juan Hill, East Harlem, and the Lower East Side, and the records of the Young Lords, ASPIRA, and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.

The Afterlives of San Juan Hill exhibition and research program traced the scattering of the San Juan Hill community across the city after the Lincoln Square clearance of the 1950s and 1960s, and it produced a model for reconstructing a dispersed community’s record through descendant interviews, tax photographs, and federal relocation files. The framework travels to present-day displacement research.

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