El Boletín

De la Silla de Coaliciones

Familia, welcome back!

To our first-years beginning a brand-new chapter at Yale, to everyone returning to campus, and to all of you who continue to follow and support Despierta Boricua: welcome to a new year.

We took a long, much-needed summer break, but we were far from quiet. Behind the scenes, we've been working on some of our biggest ambitions yet, building new relationships, and imagining what DB can become.

Now campus is alive again, and so are we.

Something… huge is in the air.

The Puerto Rican Futurity ConferenceLa constelación

This summer, one of our biggest ideas stopped being just an idea.

The conference has a home and a date. Put it in your calendar now: May 2027, at CENTRO — Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter College, the premier research institution for Puerto Rican Studies, in partnership with the NEA's 20+ campuses.

And over the summer, we completely rebuilt the conference itself.

The conference will be organized around a constellation of related issues that focus on the youth: different areas of work happening at the same time, speaking to one another, and refusing the idea that we have to wait our turn.

It will revolve around four major clusters.

• EducaciónCluster I

  The future of Puerto Rican education: the cuts facing UPR, higher-education access, student organizing, brain drain, and what it would actually take for more young Puerto Ricans to stay, return, and build lives on the archipelago.

• PractitionersCluster II

  People doing the work directly. Organizers, researchers, engineers, workers, and experts in energy, water, food sovereignty, climate, infrastructure, and housing.

• MultigeneracionalCluster III

  Real conversations between generations. Not an elder giving a keynote while students listen quietly, but organizers from the '70s, '80s, and '90s sitting across from students today and asking each other what has changed, what has not, and what comes next.

• ImaginaciónCluster IV

  Puerto Ricans — especially the youth — have become extremely good at explaining everything that is wrong. Colonialism. Debt. Displacement. Corruption. Austerity. Brain drain. Climate vulnerability. We know the vocabulary of crisis very well. But what would it look like to become as serious about imagining what could be right? What kind of Puerto Rico are we actually trying to build? What institutions would it need? What would education look like? Energy? Housing? Culture? Community? What would have to exist for the next generation not simply to inherit the same problems with better language for describing them?

That is the question behind the conference. And now we get to build it.

Caribbean StudiesArchipiélagos, Mares y Diásporas

This summer, we found something in Yale's archives that made this project feel a little different.

Yale has been asked for Caribbean Studies before, in variations.

In 1973, CENTRO's founding director Frank Bonilla wrote directly to Yale President Kingman Brewster supporting Despierta Boricua's push for Puerto Rican Studies. A full proposal followed in 1974. Later came a Chicano/Boricua Studies concentration (1982), seminars, individual courses, and decades of students trying to build pieces of an education that Yale never quite institutionalized.

De los archivos · Sterling Memorial Library, 1973

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Download the full correspondence (PDF)

Fifty-two years later, we are asking again. Slide through the pages, or swipe on your phone.

Fifty-two years later, we are asking again — and this time we are asking with larger support.

Our argument is bigger than simply saying Yale should offer more Caribbean classes.

The Caribbean is not a subsection of Latin America.

A framework centered on Spanish and Portuguese cannot adequately contain Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, Curaçao, or the wider Anglophone, Francophone, and Dutch Caribbean. And separating Puerto Rico into one department, Haiti into another, Cuba into another, and Jamaica somewhere else obscures the histories that connect them: slavery and emancipation, colonialism, migration, language, race, revolution, environment, diaspora, and the sea itself.

Even more importantly: the Caribbean is too often taught as the object of someone else's history. Haiti becomes a story about France or U.S. intervention. Cuba becomes a Cold War story. Puerto Rico becomes a problem of U.S. territorial policy.

We want students to encounter the Caribbean as a subject — with its own thinkers, political traditions, intellectual debates, scientific questions, literatures, communities, and ways of understanding the world.

Caribbean futurity is being shaped in laboratories, clinics, coastlines, farms, archives, and classrooms: climate science, public health, energy, food sovereignty, environmental justice, migration, history, literature, and political thought all belong in the same conversation. Yale already has much of this work. What it lacks is the undergraduate structure connecting it.

We are working with faculty and student groups in preparing to submit the Certificate in Caribbean Studies: Archipelagos, Seas, and Diasporas to Yale's Committee on Majors this December.

The groundwork is increasingly real: Kaiama Glover and Alex Gil Fuentes as proposed co-directors; a faculty advisory board spanning multiple departments; more than a dozen doctoral students involved; partnerships with CENTRO, the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, the CUNY Haitian Studies Institute, and UConn's Puerto Rican Studies Initiative; and more than two dozen eligible Yale courses already on the books.

In other words:

• The faculty exist.
• The courses exist.
• The archives exist.
• The students exist.

What does not yet exist is the name, structure, and permanence. That is what we are asking Yale to provide.

A certificate puts Caribbean Studies into the catalog, onto transcripts, into advising, and eventually into the institutional memory of the university. DB graduates. Students graduate. A curriculum can outlive us.

And after fifty-two years, we think Yale has had enough time.

El PeabodyLo que Yale tiene

This project has moved further than we were ready to publicly say even a few months ago.

Over the summer, DB worked to understand the scale of Yale's Puerto Rican archaeological collections, including material collected through expeditions led by Froelich Rainey in 1934 and Irving Rouse in 1936 and 1938 across Puerto Rico, Vieques, and Mona.

And Yale has now confirmed something fundamental: the Peabody holds Taíno-affiliated ancestral human remains.

They are fragmentary remains, not a complete individual, but that distinction does not change the ethical question in front of us.

There is also now a clearer path forward, after many caveats.

There is also now a clearer path forward, after many caveats.

Puerto Rico falls outside the legislative geographic reach of NAGPRA; the federal repatriation process available to federally recognized Native nations does not automatically apply here. Recognition alone cannot fix that; the problem is written into the statute's jurisdiction.

But that does not mean Yale is powerless to act.

The Peabody can pursue a voluntary, non-NAGPRA repatriation through its own human-remains and repatriation process. Yale has indicated that it can consider a return once an appropriate request is brought forward — and that consultation could potentially include support for travel, examination of the collection, community consultation, and ultimately the transportation of ancestors or belongings.

So the question has changed. We are no longer asking only: "Can repatriation happen?" We are now asking: "Who should rightfully participate in deciding how it happens, and where should the ancestors go?"

There is no single organization that can simply declare itself the representative of all Taíno people. As Jeannie Karaya has emphasized throughout these conversations, legitimacy has to come from relationships, consultation, and process — not from pretending that one organization speaks for everyone.

The work now is toward a narrow Taíno consultation and repatriation body capable of bringing multiple voices into that process, including organizers and representatives connected to ¡Taíno Vive!, Higüayagua, UCTP, Borikén, and the diaspora, alongside scholars and others with relevant knowledge.

DB is not the community of descent. We are not trying to become the authority here. Our role is to research, connect people, use our access to Yale, and help create the conditions in which the people who should have authority can exercise it.

Despierta Boricua

And there is a bigger issue underneath all of this: Taíno people were declared extinct for generations while their ancestors were excavated, catalogued, studied, and stored in institutions far from the Caribbean. They were treated as a disappeared people precisely while museums accumulated the material evidence of their existence.

Repatriation cannot undo that history, but Yale does have a choice about whether it continues it.

For us, this is not simply about museum policy. It is about dignity, burial, historical responsibility, and the right of living communities to participate in deciding what happens to their ancestors.

The legal pathway may be complicated; the moral question is much simpler.

La Casa at 50

La Casa Cultural de Julia de Burgos turns 50.

Five decades of Puerto Rican and Latino students building community, making culture, organizing, arguing, dancing, studying, and creating a home inside Yale.

For DB, that anniversary is not just about looking backward. It is also a challenge: what should the next fifty years of La Casa look like?

We want to honor the people who built this space before us while also expanding what it can be — a cultural home, an intellectual home, a place for political education, a center for coalition-building, and a space where Latino and Caribbean students can actually imagine projects together.

So naturally, we have plans.

The Sneak PeekLo que se cocina este semestre

We have a lot cooking this semester: some cultural, some political, some academic, and some just meant to bring people together.

Cultura, arte y memoria

Política, historia y conversación

DB goes to CENTRO

La Casa, open doors

Caribbean Student Mixer

The Caribbean makes more sense when we stop studying, organizing, and existing as islands unto ourselves.

Esencia No VaWhat we learned from Cabo Rojo

Earlier this semester, DB hosted a stop on the 2026 Puerto Rico Solidarity Tour, welcoming filmmaker and community organizer Gabo Ramos of Defiende a Cabo Rojo for a screening and conversation about the fight against Project Esencia.

The event went incredibly well — but we walked away from it much more alarmed than we entered.

Because Esencia is not simply "another luxury hotel." It is a proposed multi-billion-dollar luxury enclave spanning more than 1,500 acres in Cabo Rojo — hundreds of hotel rooms, roughly a thousand residences, golf, shops, spas — sited in an ecologically sensitive stretch of southwestern Puerto Rico, between major protected areas and near habitats for endangered species. The area also holds numerous documented archaeological sites.

And then there is the water. The project's own environmental documents estimate demand at around 1.5 million gallons per day, in a region that already experiences scarcity. In recent Senate hearings, the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority acknowledged it currently lacks the capacity to supply that demand, and the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority has opposed the project as designed.

But what struck us most during the screening was that Esencia is not only an environmental story. It is a story about land, displacement, inequality, and who Puerto Rico is increasingly being built for. Ultra-luxury development does not exist separately from rising property values, privatization pressure, and the growing difficulty working Puerto Ricans face in remaining in their own communities. That is why the opposition has grown from environmental organizations into a broad movement of community groups, scientists, cultural organizations, and Puerto Ricans across the diaspora — thousands marched in Cabo Rojo again in August.

Pay attention to Cabo Rojo.

Project Esencia is a local fight, but the questions underneath it are national ones: Who gets Puerto Rico's land? Who gets its water? Who bears the environmental cost of development? And development for whom?

We are extremely grateful to Gabo Ramos, Defiende a Cabo Rojo, and the Puerto Rico Solidarity Tour for bringing that conversation directly into our space.

Esencia No Va.

Nueva merchTodavía en el taller

You've seen the 2026 design. You've asked about it. Here's where it stands.

Apoya el movimiento

Everything in this edition — a conference at CENTRO, a certificate proposal, archival research, a museum consultation, a semester of programming for Yale and New Haven — is being built by students with a student budget. Calle Corona showed us what this community can do when it decides to show up. Your support is what lets us keep setting the precedent.

Mantente conectadoAll lines open

We're everywhere, and we want you in the mix.

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