If you’re looking for a class to fill your summer schedule, The City University of New York’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies, or CENTRO, has a unique option.
A free, online Diasporican Educational Program teaches Puerto Rican history beyond the island’s borders, including the populations of Puerto Ricans who settled on the mainland U.S. in places like Hartford. The name of the program is a play on words combining ‘diaspora’ and ‘Puerto Rican’ to describe the unique group of U.S. citizens who reside outside of their ancestral homeland.
CENTRO Education Director Daicy Diaz-Granados has family in Connecticut, and she made sure to feature the state with the largest proportion of Boricuas in the course curriculum.
“It includes a lesson called ‘Where are Puerto Ricans outside of New York City, and how do they build enclaves in Connecticut, Illinois and Massachusetts?’” Diaz-Granados said. “So we try to incorporate a look at different Diasporican enclaves across the U.S.”
That lesson includes guiding questions like “Why is there a Puerto Rican family monument in Hartford, Connecticut?” and “Why are there so many Puerto Rican flags in the U.S.?”
In response, students are encouraged to check out the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History’s ¡Que Bonita Bandera!: The Puerto Rican Flag in Folk Art archival collection online.
A look inside the course
The Diasporican Educational Program launched last fall and immediately saw a few thousand people sign up online. The material includes a self-guided course option and an adaptable curriculum for high school and college classrooms.
Diaz-Granados used to be a high school teacher and was thrilled to hear about how CENTRO’s curriculum could work with Connecticut’s Black and Latino studies mandate. Legislation signed by Gov. Ned Lamont in 2019 required that the state offer public high school courses on African American, Black, Puerto Rican and Latino studies starting in 2022, and the state worked with stakeholder groups to develop a curriculum offered to social studies teachers.
“With Connecticut, and with the mandatory offering of Black and Puerto Rican studies and the scope and sequence of that course, it aligns beautifully with what we have,” Diaz-Granados said.
CENTRO’s curriculum, which took three years to build, is called “Reframing Puerto Rican Diasporas.” It is funded through a federal grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
Diaz-Granados said both beginners and history buffs can get something from the course that covers Puerto Rican identity related to language, U.S. citizenship and race. CENTRO’s curriculum tries to add what they feel is needed context to the island’s history that has been so often told from the perspective of its colonizers: Spain and then the U.S.
“We see it as a decolonizing force, and this is to kind of change the narrative or seize the narrative,” Diaz-Granados said, “drawing on our research and our vast archives to challenge limiting understandings about community and belonging, and Puerto Rican history and culture.”
The class begins with a primer on how to use and understand primary sources and, from there, splits into five units that can be taken in any order:
- Rethinking Puerto Rican Identity and Language
- Untangling the Complexities of the American Citizenship for Puerto Ricans
- Reimagining the Community and the Great Puerto Rican Family
- Reinterpreting Puerto Rican Signs
- Reconfiguring Puerto Rico’s cultural and geographic borders
Note that Unit 4 is the one with a more Hartford-focused lesson. The unit overall showcases the ways Diaporicans have taken cultural identity signs, like the light blue version of the Puerto Rican flag, and national symbols of “racial harmony, migration and linguistic purity” and reworked them into things like a Connecticut state license plate holder.
Diaz-Granados said the primer and Unit 5 — which has lessons like “Could ‘real’ Puerto Ricans be born and raised in the U.S., the Moon, or another galaxy?” — have the highest completion rate with more than 40% of students going through each lesson and activity. And they seem to be retaining the information, as Diaz-Granados reported an 86% pass rate on the quizzes.
Learn more
Currently, the Diasporican Educational Program is offered in English, but CENTRO is in the process of translating the course materials into Spanish.
You can take the class yourself — for free — at diasporicaneddot.org.
