Collective Voices: Online Community Archives on Cuba and Its Diaspora

Date: 24 May 2023
Time: 6:30 pm ET
Location: Zoom
Presented by: The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion & Cultural Heritage at Rare Book School

Join the Cuban Heritage Collection and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion & Cultural Heritage at Rare Book School for a virtual panel discussion with community archivists working to document the diverse experiences of Cuba and its diaspora. Speakers will discuss their efforts to preserve the experiences of LGBTQ and Afro-Cuban communities, as well as documentation of post-revolution material culture on the island. The conversation will be moderated by Amanda T. Moreno (M.S.L.I.S./M.A.), Interim Esperanza Bravo de Varona Chair and Archivist of the Cuban Heritage Collection. The discussion will be followed by an audience Q&A session.

This event was held on Zoom on 24 May 2023. See below for a link to the recording.

Librada González Fernández is a researcher and archivist born in Cuba. In 2019, she created Archivo Cubanecuir in an effort to reclaim and preserve historical documents from the queer and trans Cuban community. Since its inception, the project has been presented at numerous venues such as the Museum of Latin American Art in Argentina, and featured in publications such as El Pais and Rialta. Archivo Cubanecuir now holds more than 500 documents, some dated as far back as the 1940s. Next month, González Fernández will be working with the New York Public Library Picture Collection.

Marley Pulido Vargas is a Cuban-born historian, community organizer, and archivist. Pulido Vargas grew up in El Cerro, Havana, a historically Black, poor, and working-class neighborhood, where his family has lived for more than seven generations. He graduated from the School of History at the University of Havana. Pulido Vargas’s community-organizing work is centered on issues affecting migrants, refugees, and Black working people. In 2019, he founded Historia Negra de Cuba, a multilingual digital archive and multimedia creative hub curating documents, videos, audio, and images to preserve and honor the Black Cuban historical memory of the island and the diaspora.

María A. Cabrera Arús (Ph.D., New School for Social Research) is a sociologist who studies the effects of fashion and domestic material culture on regime stability and legitimation, focusing on state socialist regimes and the Caribbean region during the Cold War. Her research has been published in mainstream journals, book anthologies, academic blogs, and magazines. Cabrera Arús is the author of the multi-awarded project of digital scholarship Archive of Cuban Socialism (ArchCuS), a digital archive of Cuban material culture from the Cold War era, and the blog Cuba Material, which she has maintained since 2012. She is also a collector of Cuban material culture, and a curator of the exhibitions Cuban Revolutionary Fashion (Brown University, 2019); Pioneros: Building Cuba’s Socialist Childhood (Parsons School of Design, 2015); and Cuban Finotype and Its Materiality (Cabinet magazine, 2015). Cabrera Arús has lectured on material culture, fashion, archives and collections, civil society, and state socialist regimes in the United States and Europe. She teaches at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

Amanda T. Moreno (M.S.L.I.S./M.A.) is the Interim Esperanza Bravo de Varona Chair and Archivist of the Cuban Heritage Collection (CHC). As the Archivist for the CHC, Moreno manages and processes historical collections related to Cuba and its diaspora, while also providing reference and instruction services for students, faculty, and independent researchers. She graduated from the M.A./M.S.L.I.S. dual-degree program in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Library and Information Science from New York University and Long Island University. In 2020, Moreno was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion & Cultural Heritage at Rare Book School.

Click here to learn more about the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion & Cultural Heritage at Rare Book School.

You are invited to watch the May 2023 recording of the event here via the University of Miami’s MediaSpace video portal.