I am a historian, educator, and digital humanist specializing in Puerto Rican slavery and emancipation. My work focuses on the innovative ways that Black people, enslaved and free, in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico shaped their worlds. My scholarship and public history projects reimagine how we think, do research, and write about the everyday people, under and beyond the condition of their enslavement, whose actions shaped the very meaning of freedom in the colony.

In that vein, my manuscript-in-progress, Because We Are Now Free: Refusal and Freedom in Post-Emancipation Puerto Rico, examines how formerly enslaved people in Puerto Rico (known as “libertos”) actively redefined the meaning of freedom in response to the repressive abolition law in the then-Spanish colony in 1873, putting the freedpeople at the center of the abolition story. The project interrogates the silences around their innovative world-making practices in national and regional narratives, and how their actions shaped abolitionist discourse on the Atlantic stage to influence legislative debates in Cuba and Brazil.

In addition to the manuscript and other related publications (Scholarship), I have taught Latin American, Afro-Latin American, and Black and Latinx history at the university and secondary levels (Teaching). My educational and digital humanities projects center Black Latin American histories, in Puerto Rico and beyond, through expanding access to the archival record and engaging communities beyond the academy in sharing our stories (Projects). Since 2011, I have successfully secured nearly $1.1 million in competitive grant funds for my research, educational programs, and public history projects.