S.4, ep4 - Latinx NYC: In the Community, The Archives with Joseph Caceres

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RR: Bienvenidos! This is a podcast that explores Latinx media and culture in its many forms. I am Dr. Rojo Robles.

RS: And I am Dr. Rebecca L Salois.

And we are Latinx and Latin American Studies professors at Baruch College in New York City. In this podcast, we will analyze Latinx films, television, literature, art, and cultures.

RR: We will consider how these works are perceived, analyze them, and investigate the real-world reflections and implications of that work on Latinx cultures in the US and beyond.

RS: Welcome to Latinx Visions!

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RR: Bienvenidos, bienvenidas, bienvenides!

RS: Welcome to our season four finale episode. Today we're going to be sharing a conversation that we had with writer, researcher, BLS colleague and PhD candidate, Joseph Caceres. But before we get into that, we're going to provide a little background on who he is and his work, but we're also going to take the time to define what an archive is.”

RR: During the conversation, we asked Joseph about his experiences with archives and archival research, as specifically as it relates to his current work. Finally, we'll wrap up with a brief discussion on our own experiences with archives and some recommendations for archives we have worked with in the past.

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RS: Joseph Caceres is a queer Puerto Rican writer from the South Bronx. His work has been published in Slice, Cosmonauts Avenue, CURA, and Emerge: 2019 Lambda Fellows Anthology. An alumnus of the Yale Writers Workshop, Joseph is also the recipient of the Bronx Council of the Arts, Bronx Recognizes Its Own, or BRIO, Grant for Fiction, and Lambda Literary Writers Residency for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.

RR: He's an English PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center where he studies queer US. American artists of African and Caribbean descent. Joseph has received three Lost and Found CUNY Poetics Document Initiative archival research grants. CUNY's Archival Research in African-American and African Diaspora Studies Awards, the Center for Place, Culture and Politics Dissertation Award, and the Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Doctoral Fellowship for his work with the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe Founders Archive Project.

RS: He, along with Lois Elaine Griffith, one of the last surviving founders of the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe, co-edited an anthology memorializing the life and work of the cafe's founder, Miguel Algarin. Memorias de Miguel: The Hard Work of Love, which was published by NYU's Hemispheric Institute in 2022. Joseph is currently working on several projects revolving around the unpublished works of the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe's queer founders. So again, before we get to the interview, we want to talk about what an archive is. So Rojo, tell us, what is an archive?”

RR: Yeah, so I'm gonna bring a very relevant definition by French philosopher Jacques Derrida from his book Archive Fever. This is a seminal work in archival studies that explore the archive concept as a cultural and political phenomenon. The following are the three main arguments put forward by Derrida in his work. The first point or argument is that the archive is not a neutral repository of historical records, but a constructed and selective collections of documents that reflect the interests and biases of those who create and maintain it, los arcontes. Derrida argues that archives are consistently imbued with power relations and that archiving itself is a political act that shapes our understanding of the past.

RS: In his second point, Derrida refers to the idea that archives are always incomplete and fragmented and that documents they contain are always subject to interpretation and reinterpretation. Derrida argues that the archive is haunted by the possibility of what it has excluded or forgotten and that this ghostly presence shapes our understanding of the past. The archive is also subject to what Derrida calls archive fever, right? This is the third point. A term that refers to the desire to accumulate and preserve documents for posterity. Derrida argues that this desire is driven by a fear of mortality and a need for immortality and that it leads to a fetishization of the archive as a repository of knowledge and power. However, he also suggests that this desire for the archive is essential to our understanding of history and culture and is a critical element of our human experience.

RR: Of course, these descriptions are reductive. There's a lot more to unpack and discuss from Derrida's work. For example, his engagement with Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. But these are some general thoughts that can help us contextualize our interview with Joseph.

RS: Let's talk specifically about Latine archives, though. How can we dig into that a little bit?

RR: So a little bit on the Latinx archives. During the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, Latino, Latina, Latinx activists began to recognize the importance of preserving their history and culture. The lack of representation of a Latino in mainstream archives and the historical exclusion of their voices from dominant narratives sparked a movement to create Latino specific archives and ethnic studies program as well.

RR: One of the first and most significant Latino archives was the Chicano Research Collection, established in 1969 at Arizona State University. The Chicano Research Collection was created to preserve the history and culture of Mexican Americans, a group that had been largely excluded from mainstream archives.

RS: The establishment of the Chicano Research Collection inspired other Latinx activists to create similar archives across the country, including the National Hispanic Cultural Center Archives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the Latino Cultural Center Archives in Dallas, Texas. In addition to the emergence of Latino archives on the West Coast, there was a growing movement to establish Puerto Rican archives on the East Coast during the civil rights era.

RR: Yeah, one of the most significant Puerto Rican archives established during this time was the Centro de Estudios Puerto Ricanos, Center for Puerto Rican Studies, which was founded in 1973 at Hunter College in New York City. The center was created to address the lack of research on the Puerto Rican experience and to promote the study of Puerto Rican history, culture and politics. El Centro de Estudios Puerto Ricanos not only collect and preserve materials related to Puerto Rican history and culture, but also support research on the Puerto Rican experience and disseminate information through publication and educational programming.

RS: I think that completes our mention of a CUNY school in every episode this season. These archives not only provided a platform for Latinx to document their own history and culture, but also served as a means of challenging dominant narratives and representations of Latinx in US. American history. They provided a space for community members to engage with and contribute to the preservation of their own cultural heritage, and in doing so, helped to shape a more accurate and inclusive historical record of the Latinx experience in the United States. So with that background information, we're now going to lead you into our interview and conversation with Joseph.

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RS: Bienvenidos, bienvenidas, bienvenides! I'm stealing your line this week, Rojo. Today we are welcoming Joseph Caceres, here to talk to us about archives and archival research and all of that stuff. So welcome Joseph.

JC: Hey, thanks for having me.

RR: Welcome, Joseph. It's really great to be in conversation with you. This year we have been in a couple of panels together, but this is a great opportunity to expand on many of the things that we have covering this panel and beyond, of course. We would like to start the conversation with a direct question about archives and how do you understand them. So the question is, what is your definition of an archive and how can archives serve as a community exploration tool?

JC: Oh, well, I guess I'll start with the first part.

RS: We only do loaded questions here.

JC: So I guess for me an archive is like a repository of information, and I want to say with that one, because it's also a collection of documents, materials, etc. But I like the term repository of information because I like to think of archives not only as ephemera documents, but also community, people, and their work, poetry, art, thinking about community exploration. So I guess I could be real specific since I'm working with the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe Founders' Archive Project,

RR: Yes, please do.

JC: Which was started by one of the last surviving founders of the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe, Lois Elaine Griffith.She is an Afro-Caribbean woman at a Boricua space, and she has been erased because, I think, because of her background, but she's been so central to the cafe, its aesthetic, and has been collecting material for the archive, their specific archive since 1973, 74. And so just working with her and seeing her archive and seeing it expand in the last, just like the recent few months, it has expanded from about 50 boxes to I think about 200 to 300 boxes of material. What is in those boxes is very indicative of the cultural work that Lois and the cafe and the people involved with the cafe were doing within the community. And not just specifically Loisada, but the community of the diaspora at large. I'm currently working on three Lost and Found issues. Lost and Found is the CUNY Poetics Initiative document.I think I said that right.

RR: The documents initiative.

JC: The documents initiative. And I'm doing three Lost and Founds on Lois's archive. Well, actually, no, I'm doing one issue on her archive. The first issue is called Speaking from the Underground, which is looking at Lois's poetics. Another issue is Faces in the Dark, I think, and that's looking at her visual artwork. And the last one is Home and is looking at her as an archivist and a cultural worker. And then looking in through these three, working on these three Lost and Founds and working with Lois in the last two years plus, seeing those connections between the cafe and like, Día Boricua, which is not in the Lower East Side, but is a cultural art space in El Barrio, in Spanish Harlem. What else was we looking at? But also looking at Lois's work with people from the Village Voice, looking at her work with Toni Glieton, who's a photographer who was documenting stuff in the, well, documenting the black experience in the Midwest, the West and Central and South America, and expanding really what a community might mean locally and expanding nationally and then globally.

RS: One of the things that you mentioned was the erasure of someone like Lois in terms of her archives. Are there any other struggles that you've faced when seeking to explore the archives, hers in particular or just in general, either way?

JC: I think, well, Lois has been really open with me in sharing her archive. But I think in terms of thinking about women in general in these spaces, Lois has shared and I won't share what she's shared with me because it's personal, but I can talk about it in general of some people she knew who were in other parties like the Black Panthers parties, for example. And these women were physically assaulted, sexually assaulted, and the idea was we must push the race. We must move forward with the movement and so be quiet. So it happened to you, people knew it, but don't say anything because we need to progress during the Civil Rights Movement. So there's a lot of that that undergirds a lot of these movements. And I think now because of Me Too, but just recently women are, specifically these stories are coming out and resurfacing. And Lois is at this moment taking advantage of that moment in the history to feel free to say what wasn't said before. And I think this for me was really interesting for Lois. I think Miguel wrote something in one of the anthologies, Miguel getting that Lois was a spirit of the cafe. And I think of like a spirit as a ghost. But she was so central and was moving with all these other men. And I think that is for her to having, to kind of answer your question a little deeper, I guess, or thinking of Lois having, this being so long, it's taking so long for Lois to get to this moment of recognition, which slowly we're getting there. But I often think, and we often have conversations, if she was a man, her archive would have been sold. She would be, there would be all these documents on her.

There would be scholarship on her, et cetera. So I think in that term of access to her as a person, I think like misogyny and misogynoir is, again, this is how I think and how I feel working with her. One of the obstacles that we have to face is getting her just seen and visible.

RS: It sounds like there's also some like emotional struggles that you have to deal with in processing some of this information that you're uncovering as well, either from Lois and her stories or from the documentation itself, right? And so you're talking about sort of a way to unerase Lois. I don't know. But beyond her or even maybe a little bit more about her, how do you think that archives can be in the service of preserving and amplifying the voices and the histories of marginalized communities in New York City? Our podcast season is centered around New York City this year, but particularly also those that intersect with the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. So, if you want to talk more about Lois, that's great if there's anything else.

JC: One of the things Lois and I always talk about is, where do you start? Lois just had an event like Caridad de la Luz Abruja, who is the current director of the cafe. She had an event this past Wednesday that celebrated Lois along with Iris Morales and Rena Valentin. And Lois said something that just struck me. She's like, where do you start? Where do you begin? And that's a good way of thinking of like, telling a story about us as in the diaspora and telling the story of the Americas. And starting with, I guess, starting with Lois, for me is a shift in thinking about the diaspora and thinking of the Nuyorican diaspora. I'll take that back. Thinking about the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe specifically and how we think about it as being this male-dominated space and very Latinx. When, yes, the aesthetic is Boricua, but the people who are involved in it, everyone was involved in it. You had Italian American, Jewish American, Black American, Afro-Caribbean, Chicano, Asian Americans, you name it, everyone was involved. And I think that keeping the central thought, a central line of the Boricua aesthetic doesn't go away when we think and talk about the people who were involved in doing this work, because they're not trying to change the aesthetic. They're enlightening it, they're pushing it. And I just think that's just, it enriches it. And I think thinking about how artists, and specifically are always in communion with each other and doing work that is resisting kinds of like colonial narratives, et cetera. And that's just really, to me, a joy. And things, and in terms of thinking about what we do look at in the archive, what we do find, because it can be traumatic, a little disheartening. But when you think about the work that these people did, and the work that was collected by people like Lois, and in the work I'm doing right now, I'm also finding that Lois isn't the only one collecting stuff. So there's other people within the, just in Loisada in general, but also not just in Loisada, in the diasporiquen and community have been holding on to their papers and preserving a history that, you know, archives are not made, archive with a capital A, is it's meant to, you know, control history in a language, but specifically a narrative that justifies who is considered a human being, a citizen, et cetera. And these counter narratives that are being reproduced through this preservation of these smaller, I don't want to say smaller, yeah, smaller capital, lowercase a archives are doing that work of the erasures.

RS: There's something to be said about balancing out the contents of archive through this, you know, as you said, archive capital A, archive lowercase a, so that you get a fuller picture of the histories, yeah?

RR: Yeah. Thinking about like the different collectors, yeah, and the different people creating this like lowercase archives, yeah, how can the centering, the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe, provide a more comprehensive understanding of the Lower East Side and Puerto Rican diasporic spaces in New York?

JC: I don't, I know what you mean, but I think like, I want to stay with censoring it.

RR:Tell us about that.

JC: I want to censor it because I think just, I think if we think about what the founders and the people who were involved with the cafe were doing, but on any of these spaces, it's just so interesting. The other day I was walking through Loisada and I walked from the Graduate Center there, which is a pretty far walk, but it was like a total cultural shift. Like the landscape changed for me. And then I saw something different. And you see everyone's there. There's African-Americans, there's black, every cultural name is there. And there are neighborhoods in New York City that are like that. But I guess when you're walking from like Midtown, corporate-ized America, and then you walk into a neighborhood that has all this history of just community organization, it just felt like a different world I had walked into. And then I was going to this event at White Box, which is an art gallery on, I think it's at East 3rd in Houston, Avenue B.

And it was a exhibition of work from Tayed Boricua. And just sitting in that space, and actually Lois was there to do a reading along with Papaleto Melendez was there as well, the other surviving founder of the cafe. And just listening to the people who were involved, who are still alive, thank God, talk about what they were doing and what they had done as cultural work in the beginnings, as the 70s and the 80s, and realizing like, holy shit, this neighborhood has a very strong grassroots history and I guess through line that has not diminished in that sense. But so to answer the question about decentering, I want to kind of like push back because when we look at it in that lens and see how the cafe is not a central place, it's like a point on a map that connects it with like, white box, there's, what else is, charras, Tayer Boricua, you can think of those. Thinking about the archive of the cafe specifically because Lois is known as the keeper of the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe archive and looking through her papers, seeing that, just these global, local, national, but also global connections to it, I think then, I guess at some point to kind of push back but also just to make this kind of complicated, contradictory and discursive.

JC:In centering it, you wind up decentering, in a sense, because then you see that it wasn't the only place doing this work. It was in communion with other spaces. I think, I'm not going to remember his name, but Miguel Algarin went to school, I believe, with a Japanese man. And he would, I think he had sent Miguel and a few of them over to Japan to do like some, a talk or like this cultural thing to read the poetry. Long story short, this man translated Miguel's Time Is Now Just Sample into Japanese. So there's actually like a book where it's like, because Miguel Algarin's book is, one side is in English, the other side is translated into Spanish, and this man then translated it into Japanese. And he would give the cafe about $1,000, $2,000 a year for them to set up for a grant for someone. They could have a competition, a poet, an artist, whatever, to have that money and just have $2,000. But thinking in that sense, there are these other actors that are engaged within these, that are engaged within the cafe, but also like everybody else. Everyone's working with each other. So in a sense, it's decentered, but also putting it in conversation with the other cultural sites that are doing all this work within their specific communities. I guess that when I think about the cafe, I often think like everyone's doing something and they're always like, that's like a jumping point.

RR: I think it's pretty interesting also to think about the lower East Side, Lois Side, also like literally from the streets. For example, you can think about someone like Jorge Brandon and Coco Que Habla and his constant walk with El Carrito and performing poetry literally in the corners. We can think about like Algarín's apartment and everything that happened there. And we can think also about thinking about Papoleto and what he's recently proposing like the fire-skate poetics and the rooftop poetics that are very particular to Pinero and others, right? So there's also this idea that what is actually happening beyond the institution is as important as this center, right?

JC: Yeah, because it's supposed to be from the street to the stage, but I think we should, you're right, thinking a little more about the actual street.

RR:Yeah, there's a lot of activity happening on the street, directly on the streets, yeah. I'm also thinking about a recent memorial for Steve Cannon and the carnival that was performed directly also on the Loisada streets. So we're talking about poetics that take seriously the street.

JC: And also thinking about the Golden Age, as Lois said, of the cafe, it's gone. And that idea of the street to the stage, I think it's getting a little revival now with what's going on, but the cafe is going to shut down for two years for renovations. So that would be interesting to see.

And then there was a pandemic, and then there's all the gentrification going on. So thinking about spaces where people can actually, from the streets to the stage. But I don't know.

RR: We have a question. We were interested in your views about gentrification. Because we have been celebrating that cultural vibrancy of Loisada, but we have to also acknowledge the stream gentrification in the area. And this stream gentrification is not new. It's something that has been happening for decades now. But it's definitely in a very dangerous moment because it implies the erasure of that history. Yeah. So how these neighborhood dynamics are affecting, impacting the cultural context that led to the creation of these different spaces, but definitely also to the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe and to the street's poetry that we have been talking about.

JC: Yeah. So thinking about what Miguel Algarin said in the opening poem of Love is Hard Work and thinking about poetry as a site of memorialization, I like to think about gentrification specifically to Loisada and what Miguel wrote in that poem and thinking about the landscape as the site of memory and thinking about although this place will be gone, poetry will have to be the place where we have to hold our memories. So thinking again as poetry as archives, I think that's one way to kind of resist it.

RR: I've been listening some important approaches, lenses that you have been bringing and putting forth. In a specific, yeah, to think your work, thinking about Boricua poetics through a larger framework of Caribbean poetics and definitely thinking about Boricua poetics and Nuyorican poetics through also through the larger frame of blackness. If you can talk about that, how that is one of your concerns and your interests and how you're working with those aspects.

JC: Yeah, I think so because I've switched my dissertation three times. I'm now focusing on Lois' poetics, her visual artwork and her cultural work. But just thinking of like, I know we want to descent to the cafe, but coming back to the cafe and thinking about who was there and thinking about the Nuyorican arts movement being in concert with the black arts movement and thinking about someone, a figure like Amiri Baraka, who basically, Tracy Morris had a, the poet Tracy Morris had a talk at the Graduate Center last Thursday, and I was sharing with her that Lois is actually going to be at Harlem Stage next week, May 19th, May 20th, for the black arts movement talk, and she's going to be on a panel, and Lois has been thinking about part of the reason, let me jump back, one part of the reason Lois really started the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe Founders' Archive Project was she was invited to go to a talk about poetics in the Lower East Side, and she sat through it, they gave her a book, she looked through the book, So, in the book, she's like, okay, she went to the index, she saw Nuyorican, and there was only two pages, and in those pages was two sentences, and it was Bob Holdman, who's also, he's a white man, but he's also very important to the cafe, but he was the one who was central to that discussion about the cafe. And so she was very upset, and she said, this is interesting, because you have figures like Allen Ginsberg, who's coming, and the Beats are coming to the cafe to do their work. You had Amir Baraka and Ishmael Reed. She's like, no one is publishing or producing Ishmael Reed's and Amir Baraka, specifically Amir Baraka's plays, except for At the Cafe. So, and then I was sharing with Tracy Morris last week. It's like, oh, they invited Lois to be on this panel on Black Arts, and Lois is really excited about that. Tracy Morris shared with me, right, like, cause you know, Amir Baraka practically lived in the cafe. So thinking about those connections and thinking about kind of just like the aesthetic too. Like there's Lois in the bedroom and everyone's in the conversation with the kind of theoretical, aesthetical, aesthetic things that they're, the African Americans have been doing for centuries. They're also tapping into that as well. I don't know. So in that sense, that's why I'm thinking like, it needs to have a, not a shift, but heavy focus needs to look at how blacky, black, black the cafe and the artists are. Because literally the central to the Boricua aesthetic is Yoruba cultural practices. And one of the reasons why Lois really got involved with the cafe, because she is from the Caribbean, it was the drumming, the tambourines. And she say her mother was an Obeya woman. And those things from West Africa, those West African traditions, the oral tradition is so ingrained within the poetics and the performance and everything aspect of it. I mean, people are doing work on that, but I think that should be like, let's start there first. And then I think it'd be more interesting in that lens. If we start from it being something that was tremendously ingrained within Afro-centricity, and then we can include it. I don't think any of this diminishes anything Latinx anything. I think it only enriches.

RS:You're talking about kind of going through these archives with Lois and looking for someone to sell the archives to, right? That was something you had mentioned earlier on is like finding a buyer for the archives, yes?

JC: Yeah.

RS:So what future do you see for the archives that you're exploring right now?

JC:Oh, well, this specific one, Lois is really interested in it being possibly purchased by the Schomburg, but she wants to have it expanded. So I'm working with her doing like oral histories of people because a lot of the people who were part of the founding and initiated the cafe, they're old, they're elderly, they're ill. We are doing work last minute, literally. Literally, there is a sense of urgency in the work we do, but part of Lois' specifically for this specific archive that I'm working with, it's realizing that it has to continue to expand and archives can't be totally complete. There will always be gaps in them, but part of what she wants to do is have some sort of someone rich, if someone's listening was rich, kind of give compensation for those who want to include within the archive. So, there are some people who are poets and artists who were involved with the cafe who saved their papers. That's important. I always think these archives should be in conversation with each other and someone should have millions or billions of dollars to do this really cool digital archive project that just scans or puts conversations with one archive with another. I would say, for example, Miguel Alguerrin's archive. There are no correspondences in that archive. And if they don't speak to the life he had, like you ran this cafe, you were a Shakespearean scholar and professor and you wrote and published five, six books of poetry. You had these conversations, so you had to have written to people, you were in conversations with whatever. But there's also drama around the acquisition of that archive. But in any event, I know for certain that there are other Lower East Side poets who have letters of Miguel's. Just as an example, if someone could scan those and make that, so if you click on the Nuyorican Poets Cafe archive, click, and it takes you to another institution. But I'm just being real utopian and ridiculous.

RS:That's all right.

JC:But that would be-

RS:This is the space for that.”

JC:That would be a really great way of thinking about, but institutions have their own gatekeeping and they're like, well, no, we have the intellectual property of this. So I know it's all about making money and money and who's in control of specific histories, narratives, et cetera, et cetera. But I think that for me would be a really wonderful thing in terms of thinking of expanding the archive. Yeah, I think just to have those people include that in there and have it expanded in that sense that it's always growing. Because just because the cafe was started out of Miguel's apartment and if it continues to, if we're here in the next 25, 50 years, it's because of global warming. If that building doesn't exist, doesn't mean that the work and memory of people who did that work there shouldn't no longer exist. So preserving that and we won't get everyone with our oral histories, but people should be like, hey, I was part of this and it needs to be contributed because that's the part of the work of undoing archives with a capital A in history that's responsible for the violence, the colonial violence that, you know, all of our, that's responsible for all of our turmoil.

RS:Yeah, yeah, yeah. One thing I wanna go back to is earlier you were talking about the Lost and Found Fellows and archival research projects that you're working on and how one of them was centered around Lois in particular. Is there anything else that you can tell us about that program that the projects in general and sort of your experience with that?

JC:So I guess I can, I think like thinking about, I think it was my first year of the semester and realizing like, oh, I knew these spaces, academia and higher ed, were very white, but I didn't think how bad it would be. And then Miguel Alguerin died and then, I mean, I didn't come in as a Nuyorican scholar or a poetic scholar, I came in as an Americanist, a Caribbeanist, just studying African American and queer American artists of African and Caribbean descent work. And then he died and then I was told I was being ridiculous, but I was like, well, the New York Times took too long to print his obituary and they were like, it takes a while. I was like, hmm, usually like when Sidney Poitier died, immediately he had the, not to like say that anyone's life is worth more than another, but just as one of my thinking, Miguel was huge in our community. And so in any event, Amiel Alcala at the graduate center who runs Lost and Found sent this beautiful email through the listserv commemorating and memorializing Miguel and I got in touch and I just thanked him for it. And then he was like, wait, do you want to work? And I was like, sure, and so that was November 30th, 2020, when Miguel died. So March of 2021, I started working with Lois at the height of the pandemic. We were just having Zooms and being on the phone and we got to know each other.  And one of the things that Lois had said to me was, I want to learn from you, you learn from me. And so we established this kind of relationship where trust and respect was built. And so I don't really, so I stayed in her, I was in her home, I think for a whole year and her archive is, it's in the living room. I never looked in any of the boxes. So she was just talking to me. I was learning. She's giving me her side of the story. I was recording and learning things. She'll share some, she has an extensive library. Miguel Alguerrin had a library in his home, but he got sick towards the end of his life and a lot of his papers were just destroyed or lost. He had given her, gifted her a couple of his books. So she has a really extensive library in her house. She's like, you can read these stuff here, they never leave. And so just looking at that work and getting to know her as an artist and as a person and then her sharing, eventually after like a year, we went through her boxes and I understood it. I think if I had gone in before then, I wouldn't have understood how tremendous and valuable this work was. So she kind of gave me a lay of the land. And if you meet Lois, she is the archive, she's a library. She'll just start naming people. And I'm like, I don't know who you're talking about. But eventually you start, it starts to stick. And at this point, I can kind of finish her sentences when she tells her story.

RS: So it sounds like, you know, getting involved with this project, you know, after reaching out sort of that is the catalyst for where you are today with your archival work. And I love the way you explain it as a developing relationship. You know, there was community communication, trust, and all of these things were built. And now it's like, you weren't just going in there to take. And I think it sounds very much like she perceived that in you. And that's part of what established that trust. So I'm glad you had that sort of inlet to get to seeing and engaging with those archives that you might not have had otherwise. Yeah.

JC: And I think the level of care and I think that's like now, you know, going to all these conferences, these panels, people are like, there must be more care. It's true. More level and care and love and respect for people. I think that Lois isn't, she always hates being an object of inquiry. I'm like, get over it a little bit. But on some level, what she did, her work, it needs to be studied. She just feels weird about that. I kind of get it. But thinking about the archive in itself, and I wouldn't have valued the kinds of relationships I discovered in the archive and her archival material, if I had not established that relationship with her firsthand.So for example, she has Tony Gleaton, who's a photographer I mentioned earlier. He had her, she wrote an essay for the opening of one of his exhibitions. And it's like, what? And he gifted her some of the pictures, some of his pictures. So she has that in her archive and making that connection between her, the cafe and this man who's, wait, he's not even on the East Coast. Thinking about Arlene Gottfried, who isn't, she isn't Boricua, she isn't Latina. A Jewish woman who is the brother of Gilbert Gottfried, who played Iago in the Latin, who plays Iago in the Latin.Among other things.

RS: Your millennial is showing.

JC: What people really remember him for. But she had documented the African American and Latino diaspora in New York City. So in her work, and Lois wrote a poem for her and it's featured in Arlene's book, Fireworks and Cuchifritos, I think that's the name of the book. In any event, those are examples. Then another that I'm just so super excited about, just discovering Marcel Christian, who was one of the founders or a godfather of the New York City ballroom scene. So he had done some costume designs for the cafe's theater in the late 90s, early 2000s.

He passed away, but he had trusted Lois with his unpublished manuscript. And so she has that in her archive. So these are some of the things I'm highlighting in these Lost and Founds.

Thinking about the different connections that Lois has, these relationships Lois has just established, being in this space and being an artist and her engagement with other people. I mean, and Marcel for me is one of the queer people involved with the cafe, that his story I think has been totally erased and forgotten. And he was so super vital to a part of the cafe's history.”

RS: I'm creating a visual in my mind, you know, everything is connected, but it also because these branches and these roots are kind of being exposed and growing now that new things are starting to emerge from them, right? You're saying some of these individuals, you know, have been erased, and now is the time to bring them back and bring attention to them, right?

JC:It's only, I think, because no one has paid attention to Lois. Or really listened to her or sat down or taking her. I mean, people have, like you walk in the street with Lois, like in Lower East Side, for example, and everybody who's anybody will stop her because they know who she is. But I think in terms of the Academy, no. And I think that's, it's the scholarship, not that it's lacking, I think the scholarship is wonderful, but I think it can be enriched by having a discussion with Lois and an interaction with her and her archive and her work. Because I'm finding all of these interesting connections that had never been made before, that will just make the scholarship now more enriching.”

RS: Joseph, thank you so much for being here with us today. We like, I think this has been really helpful and will be helpful for our students in terms of understanding what archives are, how they work and this particular archive and what experiences you can encounter based on your connections and trying to dig into your community. But is there anything else that you would like to share with us before we wrap up? Anything that maybe we missed and didn't ask about or even just where people might be able to get in contact with you?

JC: Well, in working with Lois' archive and doing this, these Lost and Founds, I'm also doing the Lost and Found, Amigo Algarins, unpublished manuscript, Dirty Beauty. Which is over a thousand pages that I've gone through. And that's also important. We're also trying to get that work published. And yeah, I just think a lot of this work, there's a lot of unpublished manuscripts by the founders. Rojo knows, because he works with Pedro Beatriz's papers. Lois has a lot of Pedro's pamphlets and stuff. It's just a lot of work that has been just sitting in boxes that needs to not sit in boxes anymore. I think that because we are in New York City, I never learned anything about the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe or any kind of Nuyorican or Puerto Rican art. And I think the value of the work I'm doing is pushing that into people learning it. And when you did hear about it, it was like, well, that's ghetto. That's negative. And it's like, wait, wow, these people, one, were not. I mean, from the street, they could be ghetto, but ghetto people could be avant-garde. And the work was avant-garde. It was experimental. It was these people were well-read, well-read. And they did this work that was phenomenal. And it needs to be studied more. That work needs to be published. And I think for me on my end, that's the one goal that I want to do. The work that's really important to me is the actual book that needs to be published. That object that can be of inquiry and study is really valuable to me. So yeah, that's the thing I didn't say. Yeah, you can reach out to me on Twitter. I'm Joseph A. And then I have a website, josephacaceres.com. So yeah.

RR: Muchas gracias, Joseph.

JC:Thank you.

RS:Yes, thank you.

(Music Fade)

RR: So, Rebecca, what do you think about the conversation with Joseph?

RS: I really liked hearing about his work in general, but with Lois in particular, because his experiences with her and her archives really reflect the idea that what an archive is is complicated, right? It's not just one thing. It could be papers or conversations, right?

He mentioned sitting down and just talking to her and listening and recording what she was saying, what she remembers. But also, in the case of Lois' collection in particular, it can be hundreds of boxes of just like, basically treasure to sort of have to sort through.”

RR:Yeah, I appreciated thinking with Joseph about the silences in the archive and the system of oppressions behind those silences. For instance, misogynoir violence and how we should aim for an expansive understanding of what an archive can be beyond its institutional setting or reductive notions of who belongs in it.

RS:Yeah, and I think maybe now we should talk about our own experiences with the archives. You know, what our experiences in archival situations or archival research has been like. So I'm gonna talk about my experience with the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami in Florida. And I've been there several times, twice on my own and once when I received the Goizeta Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship, which was fantastic because it gave me funding to be there for a whole month doing research on a daily basis. Honestly, it was a phenomenal opportunity and it exposed me to research that I honestly couldn't find anywhere else. You know, sometimes it's easy to default your research to just Googling it, but once you've had an archival experience, I think it really changes your perspective or at least it did for me. You know, I just, there's so much more personal material that you have access to than when you're just scrolling online, right? But there are often rules about archives. You know, at the CHC, we could use our computers and we could take pictures of most of the documents as long as it was for our personal research, right? Some collections did have restrictions, but they were marked. They're really good at cataloging their archives at the CHC. I could read and request items to study in the archival room at the library, but certainly, unlike a regular library, you can't just take this material home.

RR:Yeah.

RS: What about you? What's your experience been like with archives?

RR: Yeah, so since 2017, I have been visiting and doing research on and off at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies Archive at Hunter College. As we mentioned at the beginning of the episode, the Centro is dedicated to collecting documents and objects connected to diasporic writers, political figures and organization. But in particular, I have been joyfully exploring the Pedro Pietri papers. These are like 70 or 80 boxes by now. It keeps growing. So the Pedro Pietri papers have been like working and reading and investigating it. And it's definitely, I have noticed that this is definitely an indispensable source to see the scope of this Nuyorican artist's interdisciplinary work. Mainly because most of his production remains unpublished. Yeah, except for General Anthology published by City Lies.His published books are out of print right now. So the archive is essential to learn about him.

RS:Yeah, it's the only place you can get his stuff, right?

RR:Precisely. Pietri also has a lot of work in the archives connected to artifacts. So it's not only papers, right? So there's a lot of materials connected to his performances and gallery presentations. And I will argue that to understand the complexity of his work, you need to be in contact with these objects. At the Central Archive, you can take pictures, as you mentioned, of documents and objects for your research. Still, as you mentioned, you cannot put this information in the open on social media or in publications without the different states' permissions.

RS: Yeah, very fair, very fair. So we wanted to recommend a few archives that we have engaged with. And because many of our listeners are from the New York area, we thought we'd start with some archives here in New York City that students or other researchers could engage with. First, we have the Schomburg Center, which is part of the New York Public Library that's up in Harlem. And they put on fantastic events, but they also have a lot of great archival research to dig into. Then there's the New York Public Library for Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. I know I do a lot of research with theater and they house a lot of Latinx theater collections there. Of course, and this is true for people who often come to this next one as tourists, but it's actually a very in-depth library, has a good number of collections here as well. The New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman building, you know, that's the one with the lions. And you mentioned the Centro for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, but there is also the Dominican Archives, which is housed at the City College of New York.

RR: Yeah, so beyond New York, we can mention, for example, the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami in Florida, El Archivo Historic de Puerto Rico, which is a great place to research on slave Africans and Afro-descendants in Puerto Rico during the colonial period under the Spanish Empire. I'm actually currently using some documents from this collection about cimarrones, maroons, to write a poetry collection.

RS: Wow We're looking forward to that. But for those of you who are either not in New York or might have trouble getting to some of these other archives, there are a number of Latin American Studies archives online, and just a couple that I've engaged in is the Latin American Comics Archive, which is housed at Carnegie Mellon, but again, it's a digital archive. And the Cuban Theatre Digital Archive, which is also part of University of Miami, but an online digital archive.”

RR: Also Centro has some of the materials from the archives are digitalized and you can have access to them online. Most archives are doing that type of work these days.

RS: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. That's the kind of world we live in, and it also, it opens up access to these materials while maintaining or while continuing to preserve the physical artifacts themselves.

RR:Thanks for joining us for this episode. Before we sign off, we want to share some feedback comments we got from listener on our previous episode. Yeah, on Helen Cevallos, La Entrevista con Helen. The first one is from Natalie Visono on the notion of performing citizenship in Helen Cevallos' work in a specific, her texts, performance, gallery, installation, Ceresas por Papeles. So Natalie says, performing citizenship can also be known as a skill one must acquire to survive and blend into the crowd of a new country. Cevallos first had to perform when she arrived in Puerto Rico. Her family will stay there and secure her stay on the island. Meanwhile, they were going to, quote unquote, rent the US American citizenship of a Puerto Rican girl. The requirements for this documentation pushed Cevallos to assimilate Puerto Rican qualities. Once older, Cevallos gained experience performing in theater and she related these experiences to her immigration tales. Performing citizenship wherever she went required the erasure or secrecy of her native background to fully acquire the essence of the people from the host country so that she could pass by unnoticed and unbothered, blend into the crowd as best as possible while doing all sorts of odd jobs. An example will be Cevallos' time in Argentina where she was advised to speak in the local language, likely to accommodate Argentinians used to their accent. If you speak how you speak, no one is going to understand you. You have to camouflage. This word camouflage accurately describes Cevallos' efforts throughout her life. Most immigrants know the need to camouflage, blending in with their surroundings as chameleons do in self-defense to avoid trouble when they're only working on having a better life than the one available back in their native land.

RS: Yeah, we have a second comment from Rosario Perez on the topic of women's empowerment in Helen Cevallos' work. She says, throughout her piece, Helen Cevallos shares some of the intergenerational knowledge she has gained from women in her family. As Cevallos mentioned during class, many of her memories are unclear and there are gaps within them. To fill in those gaps, she has had conversations with the women in her family that have helped her understand more. The process of acquiring this knowledge makes the piece not only about Cevallos, but also about all the women in her family. She shares different anecdotes her mother recites in a specific section. These are dichos in Spanish and are often passed down from generation to generation. These dichos are just another form of knowledge passed down by the women in Cevallos' family, returning to the grandmother she never met. Furthermore, this passing down of knowledge reflects the theme of women's empowerment. Throughout her piece, Cevallos has highlighted her experiences and struggles and those of her mother and aunt. Their stories show that one generation can overcome hardships and can empower the next by sharing their experiences.

RR: Thanks for those messages, Rosari and Natalie. We appreciate your comments. And remember, you too, our audience, listeners, you can share your thoughts with us. You can always reach out to us on social media or by email. So follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagrams at Latinx Visions. Our email address is latinexvisions@gmail.com.

RS: Be sure to subscribe to us on Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Share us with your friends and family. Subscribe and leave a five-star review on both Apple and Spotify. It really helps us get more listeners.

RR: Estamos a la escucha que disfruten el verano!

RS: Dale! Until next season.”