CBH Talk | Puerto Rico at a Crossroads

As Puerto Rico confronts mounting economic pressures, climate vulnerability, migration, and renewed debates over sovereignty and self-determination, questions about the island’s political future have taken on new urgency. In the wake of the most recent election cycle, what paths lie ahead for Puerto Rico and how are activists, intellectuals, artists, and everyday Puerto Ricans imagining the island’s future?

Join us as renowned scholar of Puerto Rican social and political movements José A. Laguarta Ramírez moderates a conversation about the competing visions shaping Puerto Rico today with Ed Morales, author of Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico and Natalia Viera Salgado, whose curatorial work engages decolonial practice, environmental justice, and contemporary art. 

Together they examine the island’s colonial relationship to the United States, the role of the Puerto Rican diaspora, the social, cultural, environmental stakes embedded in these debates, and how these questions are being wrestled with through contemporary art and cultural practice as Puerto Rico’s creative community responds to issues of colonialism, displacement, environmental crisis, identity, and resistance.

Participants

José A. Laguarta Ramírez is a transdisciplinary scholar trained in Political Science, Anthropology, and Law. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, José is a lifelong student of Puerto Rican social and political movements. He currently teaches in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York.

Ed Morales is an author and journalist who has written for The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and the Guardian. He was staff writer at The Village Voice and columnist at Newsday. He is the author of Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico, Latinx: The New Force in Politics and Culture, The Latin Beat, and Living in Spanglish. In 2022-24 he was a Bridging the Divides Fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies and Princeton. He is currently a lecturer at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and John Jay College of Criminal Justice.  He is a board member of NYU’s Latinx Project and Boricuas Unidos en la Diaspora, which advocates for Puerto Rican independence.

Natalia Viera Salgado is a Puerto Rican curator based in New York City. She is also the founder of :Pública Espacio Cultural, an independent art space in Alto del Cabro, Santurce Puerto Rico. Her art historical research focuses on contemporary art concerning decolonial practices, architecture, social and environmental justice, and new media with a keen interest in hybrid and interdisciplinary projects. She has worked at the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (ICP), El Museo del Barrio, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, and Americas Society. Viera is currently the Associate Curator at the National Academy of Design and a curatorial Resident at the Abrons Arts Center, under the program La Residencia. Along with Iberia Pérez she is the co-editor of River Rail Puerto Rico Issue, a publication with around 20 contributors which focuses on Puerto Rico’s water issues from a decolonial perspective.  Photo by Mara Corsino.