Cumbre Afro at CENTRO looks to unite cultures from Puerto Rico to Harlem

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This year, the University of Puerto Rico’s Cumbre Afro is headed to Harlem. “CENTRO x Cumbre — Sites of Black Memory: Our Ancestors, Archives, and Arts,” the fourth annual Cumbre Afro, or Afro Summit, will conclude with events at East Harlem’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College.

On Mar. 21, beginning at 6 p.m., CENTRO will host a discussion between its director, Dr. Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez; Joy Bivins, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and Professor Vanessa Valdés, author of the book “Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.”

Throughout the day on Mar. 22, CENTRO will host panel discussions that look at the intimate, labor-intensive work of photographing, documenting, and archiving history –– particularly Black diasporic history –– and understanding how it helps define us.

Bringing the Cumbre to Harlem honors the legacy of Afro Puerto Rican writer and historian Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, said poet/novelist Mayra Santos Febres, coordinator of the Racial and AfroDiasporic Studies Program at the University of Puerto Rico (PRAFRO). It’s part of a retracing of the steps Schomburg took as he worked to document and embrace Black history.

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At age 17, Schomburg moved from Puerto Rico to New York City. He adapted to the city’s daily grind but also maintained his personal goals of connecting with New York’s diverse Black community and preserving AfroDiasporic records. Schomburg even contributed occasional articles to the New York Amsterdam News. “The whole Cumbre is dedicated to Schomburg because we know that Schomburg was the founder of AfroDiasporic studies,” Santos Febres told the AmNews.

This year’s conference theme is in recognition of Schomburg’s detailed compilation of information about historical Black communities. “That is really important for us because sometimes Schomburg is thought of only in terms of his research on African American studies, but actually, we know that Schomburg was a great connector,” said Santos Febres. “He connected [the Jamaican-American writer] Claude McKay to [the Cuban poet] Nicolás Guillén. He did studies on the Callejón de los Negros in Spain. He found this figure that was long-forgotten — the work of Juan Latino, who was a professor in the 16th century at the University of Granada.”

Schomburg’s archival work was purchased by the New York Public Library and is now the basis for Harlem’s Schomburg Center.

Schomburg’s Caribbean heritage guided his concentration on the importance of African diasporic roots. “He was particularly adamant about what the scholar Jerome Branche has termed ‘malungaje,’ or our supranational identity as Black people in the global African context,” Santos Febres said. “That is why we are dedicating our Cumbre to Schomburg: We believe, like he did, that we cannot fully understand race, racialization, and the history and culture of people of African descent without incorporating a diasporic theme into what has been produced.”

The Cumbre Afro’s four days of programming in Puerto Rico have featured speakers

from Zimbabwe, Senegal, Ivory Coast, the U.S.A., the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. CENTRO’s opportunity to host the Cumbre Afro in New York City will help it strengthen its “connections with the University of Puerto Rico and its program in Afro-Descendencia y Racialidad (PRAFRO),” said Figueroa-Vásquez: “This gathering represents an incredible opportunity for us to enrich our community connections, working alongside NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. We are excited to host a collective of scholars, artists, writers, and musicians to share insights on hemispheric Black histories.”

In New York, some of the events will feature talks from archivists at the Schomburg Center, CENTRO, CUNY’s Dominican Studies Institute, and Brooklyn College’s Haitian Studies Institute. Representatives of cultural institutions such as East Harlem’s Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) and Orlando, Fla.’s Puerto Rican Organization for the Performing Arts (PROPA) will talk about preserving history while trying to survive in gentrifying neighborhoods. Santos-Febres will give a talk about her latest work, “La otra Julia (The Other Julia),” a book that reimagines the life of Julia de Burgos, one of Puerto Rico’s most well-known poets.

Burgos, who was a poet, journalist, and supporter of the Puerto Rican independence movement, is iconic on the archipelago, but even though she was biracial, she tends to be depicted with a bleached-out face –– her African heritage is rarely acknowledged.

“I try to rescue Juliá specifically from that whitening,” Santos Febres said. “Puerto Rican identity has defined her as ‘la novia del nacionalismo’ (nationalism’s girlfriend), or this romanticized idea, when Juliá was an incredible political leader, and she was an Afrodescendant. The most important part of Julia is how her life is a summary of the life of all Puerto Ricans and Caribbeans –– and also of all women public intellectuals.”

Juliá de Burgos may have been the Caribbean’s first public intellectual of African descent, Santos Febres contends, but her role is often downplayed, as is her Black heritage. Although people who knew her, like the writer and former president of the Dominican Republic, Juan Bosch, described her as a dark-skinned woman with curvy hair, “In the photographs, she looks too white and it’s weird …That was the technique at the time: Photos of the ’20s and so on had people who were dark all of a sudden becoming white,” Santos Febres said. “And that happens in many other documents — historical documents at the beginning of the 20th century and the end of the 19th century. But I think that to read thoroughly about who and what was the life of Juliá would make you understand the incredible ‘rompimientos,’ the vanguard ways of thinking and writing that Juliá practiced. She’s an incredible model.

“She migrated from rural Carolina down to the city, and then to New York City. She was one of the editors of “Pueblos Hispanos,” and a cultural journalist — she won a prize for that. She was the general secretary of the female-led branch of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, so she was much more than a romantic poet. However, this is the way that people tell us that Juliá is being taught at school, so I wrote this novel based on her life to try to restore the importance of Juliá de Burgos in Latin America as a public woman intellectual of African descent in the Caribbean.”

CENTRO x Cumbre will take place at 695 Park Avenue in Manhattan. Some of CENTRO x Cumbre’s free events will also be available online for those who cannot attend in person. Visit https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/event/centro-x-cumbresites-of-black-memory-our-ancestors-archives-and-arts/?mc_cid=b5f4113454&mc_eid=4006f7692b.