“What skills can I contribute as a humanities scholar?” —Aldo Lauria-Santiago
Aldo Lauria-Santiago started the Rutgers/Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration and recently received funding from the Mellon Foundation. Aldo Lauria-Santiago has come full circle.
The Rutgers University professor grew up in Puerto Rico, deeply rooted in the public institutions that dominated the fabric of everyday life. His father was a professor at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), and his mother was a researcher in the commonwealth’s department of education.
“My family had public school teachers, many workers for the state-owned electrical company, and a nurse in the public health system,” says Lauria-Santiago, a professor of history and Latino and Caribbean studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, and the director of the Center for Latin American Studies.
He went on to an academic career in the U.S., specializing in topics ranging from peasant coffee production in Mexico to revolution in El Salvador.
But in the wake of 2017's Hurricane Maria, Lauria-Santiago has turned his attention to his native Puerto Rico, forging a bold, new direction in his career. He is summoning all his expertise as a humanities scholar to help financially-devastated libraries and archives carry out their mission of preserving and interpreting Puerto Rico's history.
In 2022, he formed the Rutgers/Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration (PRAC) to help preserve historical materials held by the commonwealth’s principal archive, the Archivo General de Puerto Rico, as well as by UPR libraries and other repositories.
This year he is expanding those efforts under a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation that is allowing him to recruit, train, and provide stipends to some 50 interns who will organize, catalogue, and digitize collections in Puerto Rico.
In the interview below, Lauria-Santiago discusses why the project is critical to preserving Puerto Rico’s history, and why it hits home in a personal way for him.
How has the crisis in Puerto Rico affected the public higher education system?
The public university system has been devastated for some time by massive budget cuts, a shrinking number of college age students due to emigration, and the hurricanes that have caused billions in damages. Enrollment is down, faculty are not often replaced, the pension systems are in danger, and tuition costs have more than doubled.
In addition, the granting of advanced degrees has been reduced while faculty in humanities and especially history have been reduced, with only one in three exiting professors replaced at the UPR’s main campus.
Despite the problems, it’s important to note there are people in Puerto Rico responding, persisting, struggling, and adjusting to these conditions in creative ways.
How did you come up with the idea of preserving archival collections?
Interns organizing old and new periodical collections in the basement area of the University of Puerto Rico's noted Puerto Rican Collection.After Hurricane Maria struck, I sent donations. I sent portable generators to friends and relatives. But at some point the question became personal: What skills do I have as a historian, as a humanities scholar, that I can contribute?
I began conversations with two librarians at the UPR about how I could help. The librarian overseeing the prominent Puerto Rican Collection had been developing a digitization program on his own time. I asked him if he needed document scanners and he replied: ‘we need more staff.’ So, I used my research funds at Rutgers to provide assistants to digitize and organize materials.
I then approached the director of the General Archive of Puerto Rico and we applied a similar model there. The Mellon Foundation learned of this work and invited me to apply for a larger grant. They have had a very strong presence in Puerto Rico, funding humanities and cultural programs since the recovery from Hurricane Maria began.
Why is digitizing so important?
Much of the material we are focusing on documents the history of the 20th century in Puerto Rico, as told through its government institutions. Puerto Rico has long had a very robust public sector with important public interventions, similar to a persistent New Deal model. The archive has all these publications, many of which don’t exist anymore, and they document an era of expanding public housing, public education, public infrastructure, and transportation. The history is all there, in magnificent detail.
It’s essentially a form of rapid preservation and dissemination in the absence of a lot of resources. And it’s important to remember that many researchers are not in Puerto Rico. As soon as UPR started posting these historic materials, the pdfs get downloaded hundreds of times by people worldwide.
Interns were offered a workshop on archival document handling and preservation.
Can you discuss the impact of the project on young humanities students and scholars in Puerto Rico?
There are so many underemployed young scholars in Puerto Rico, and it’s inspiring how much they persist in doing whatever it takes to achieve their dreams. I have 50 interns ranging from undergraduates to recent graduates to not-so-recent graduates. One student is finishing a master’s degree while working at Best Buy. Another student drives an Uber. These are young people who yearn for employment in academia, cultural management, museums, and archives. This project nurtures their energy and talent and provides them with support, training, contacts, ideas, and hope.
How does this project resonate with your own upbringing in Puerto Rico?
I grew up in the shadow of the University of Puerto Rico and the educational system, and in a larger sense closely connected to the public sector. I went to the University High School and I was raised in a political and social research milieu in which the university was ascendant. My generation came of age with an understanding of the importance of public services and the public education system. With the many crises that have hurt Puerto Rico, and its ongoing colonial relationship with the U.S., we have lost so much of what allowed leaders to produce the common good.