Conversation

Afternoon Tertulia — Decolonizing Solidarity: Black and Puerto Rican History in Action

Wed, Oct 27, 2021

5:00 PM–6:00 PM

This event will take place online via Zoom. Please register below. This event will be Interpreted in English and Spanish and PRSL

Grab your snacks and join Centro for another Afternoon Tertulia on October 27th at 5PM EST! October 27th, 1974 marks a historical event at Madison Square Garden between the African American community and the Puerto Rican community in support of decolonizing Puerto Rico. These communities have worked together in the past and continue to work together today in their collective struggles against oppression and colonization.

Join Juan Gonzalez, Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, James Early, and Centro Directora Yarimar Bonilla to celebrate this anniversary & in continuing the discussion that started in the 70s.

Click here to register for this event and access to the Zoom link.

*This event will be closed captioned and interpreted in PRSL, with live Spanish and English translation available. Please reach out to [email protected] for accommodation requests, questions or concerns.

This event is put on in partnership with Friends of Puerto Rico & Boricuas Unidos en La Diaspora.

James Counts Early, Consultant/Social Justice Organizing, Cultural Democracy and Statecraft Heritage Policy in Capitalist and Socialist movements and countries, The African Diapora. Former Smithsonian Institution: Assistant Secretary for Education and Public Service; Director Cultural Heritage Policy Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage; Interim Director of the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum (Prototype of the American Neighborhood Museum). Puerto Rico D. C. Solidarity Chair and National Board Member; Past Chair and current Board Member Institute for Policy Studies; Artist, Intellectuals, Social Movements in Defense of Humanity; Advisor Regional Articulation of Afro Descendants Latin America and Caribbean;

Prior to work with the Smithsonian, James Early was a humanist administrator at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, DC; a producer, writer, and host of “Ten Minutes Left,” a weekly radio segment of cultural, educational, and political interviews and commentary at WHUR FM radio, Howard University; and a research associate for programs and documentation at the Howard University Institute for the Arts and humanities, Washington, DC.

Yarimar Bonilla is the Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. She is also a Professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College and in the Ph.D. Program in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015) co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (2019) and a founder of the Puerto Rico Syllabus Project. In addition, Yarimar is a prominent public intellectual and a leading voice in Caribbean and Latin-X politics. She writes a monthly column in the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día titled “En Vaivén,” is a regular contributor to publications such as The Washington Post, The Nation, Jacobin, and The New Yorker, and a frequent guest on National Public Radio and news programs such as Democracy Now! Her current research—for which she was named a 2018-2020 Carnegie Fellow —examines the politics of recovery in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and the forms of political and social trauma that the storm revealed.

This event is organized by The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, CUNY (Centro) and co-sponsored by the Puerto Rico Syllabus project led by Dr. Yarimar Bonilla as part of the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research from the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY.