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Ciudad de Historias / City of Stories CUNY Chancellor Matos Rodríguez Pays Homage to Storied Archivist Idilio Gracia Peña
Ciudad de Historias / City of Stories
HOLYOKE, MA | HOLYOKE PUBLIC LIBRARY | March 22, 2022 -The Holyoke History Room of the Holyoke Public Library has received a $15,600 grant from the Expand Mass Stories initiative of Mass Humanities, with funding made possible by the Mass Cultural Council. It is one of 22 organizations across the state to receive a grant under the new program, which supports projects aimed at creating more inclusive histories of the people and ideas that shape the Commonwealth. The History Room will use the grant to re-design and expand a set of virtual walking tours that it piloted during the pandemic to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Holyoke Public Library. The new set of tours, entitled Ciudad de Historias /City of Stories, aims to combine traditional features of a virtual walking tour—capsule histories of selected historic buildings—with stories from residents of the three selected neighborhoods: The Flats, South Holyoke, and Downtown/Churchill. Each neighborhood walk will feature sites significant in Holyoke’s early history alongside sites and stories related to the local Puerto Rican diaspora. Project Coordinator Alex Santiago, who relocated to Holyoke after Hurricane María and became the first student to graduate from HCC’s Latinx Studies program, will be gathering some of these stories and translating text. She is particularly interested in stories of everyday life and community life in Holyoke. Anyone interested in finding out more about participating should use the email or contact form listed below. The project will also draw on the Library’s historical collections for images, news items, and family history materials collected during the History Room’s Nuestros Senderos project. The final tours will be viewable on mobile devices and will contain still images, bilingual text, audio, and video. A supplementary grant from Holyoke’s Local Cultural Council will provide for QR code signage for the tours. In preparation for the story-sharing part of the project, the History Room has invited scholar-activist Diana Sierra Becerra of UMass/Amherst to lead an April workshop on community history and resonant listening. The workshop will be open to existing and new participants in the project. The History Room is collaborating with Holyoke Media for technical support and with Nueva Esperanza, which also received a MassHumanities grant to further develop its El Corazón/Heart of Holyoke walking tours. The Ciudad de Historias/City of Stories tours will begin to roll out in the fall of 2022. Anyone interested in participating or finding out more should use the interest form at: http://www.holyokelibrary.org/historycityofstories.asp or call Alex Santiago or Eileen Crosby at the Holyoke History Room (413) 420-8107 or email ciudadhistorias@holyokelibrary.org Follow the project’s progress on Instagram @ciudadhistoriasholyoke
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NEW YORK, NY | CUNY Dominican Studies Institute | February 28, 2022 - In an emotional surprise visit to the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute at The City College of New York, CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez paid homage to prominent archivist and longtime colleague Idilio Gracia Peña, who is winding down his storied career with his retirement in April. The legendary New York City historian, who is affectionately known as “Don Idilio,” has been the founding and chief archivist of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute for the past 20 years. That was only his latest service to the community, capping a career in which he also served three decades as the city’s chief archivist, chief public records officer and chief librarian and for seven years as chief archivist at CUNY’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Centro). Over nearly six decades, he has played a quiet but outsized role in preserving and expanding New York City’s heritage. During the visit last Thursday, Chancellor Matos Rodríguez toured the voluminous stacks of the CUNY DSI Archives and reminisced with Gracia Peña about the days in the early 2000s, when they worked together at Centro. “It is impossible to overstate the magnitude of the work that Don Idilio has done to help us understand the history of our city and its communities that had been previously overlooked. He is a master and an inspiration for us all,” said Chancellor Matos Rodríguez. “Don Idilio overcame cultural, educational and racial barriers to elevate the role of the archivist and make his people more visible. His work as director of the Municipal Archives was transformational. He turned an inefficient warehouse for old papers into a first-rate academic institution that provided a more granular understanding of the city and its diversity. Later on, he poured his vast knowledge and skills into the creation and growth of treasured repositories of knowledge of the Puerto Rican and Dominican diaspora.” Don Idilio is stepping down to spend time with his wife Mary, two sons and two grandchildren, but his colleagues at CUNY will sorely miss him, and his contributions will not soon be forgotten. “His imprint is everywhere,” said Ramona Hernández, CUNY DSI founder and director, who recalled that while he started as a volunteer, Gracia Peña
Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez and archivist Idilio Gracia Peña
El Sol Latino April 2022 CUNY Chancellor Matos Rodríguez Pays Homage to Storied Archivist Idilio Gracia Peña continued from page 5
oversaw every aspect of the then-fledgling institution. He drew the blueprints for the archives, raised funds for their construction, created disaster emergency plans and built the climate-controlled environment to preserve documents. “Without his advice, I would not have been able to do it,” added Hernández. “I’m just a sociologist!” He also introduced an inventive work-study program that allowed high school and college students to do some of the archives’ legwork. That program was not only crucial for organizing the collection on a very limited budget, but also formed and inspired generations of would-be archivists through a quiet but intense labor of mentoring. Four of those students paid tribute to their mentor over video chat during the chancellor’s visit and recounted the invaluable experiences they had while working under his guidance. In 2007, the Dominican Archives were awarded the Debra E. Bernhardt Annual Archives Award for Excellence in Documenting New York’s History, by the Board of Regents and The New York State Archives. “The first gift that he gave us, to the Dominican people, was that he told me that it was important to archive, to preserve, the legacy not only of those people who were famous or known, or that had created an enormous amount of paper in their life,” Hernández said. “Don Idilio taught us to make space for those less-known people who have contributed to the building of our community, to make us who we are, people whose contributions may be only known to us in the community.”
His Own History of Struggle
Don Idilio — whose name somewhat fittingly translates to “idyll” or “love affair,” and first surname means “grace” — was born in the small coastal town of Arroyo, Puerto Rico, in 1939. The son of a homemaker and sharecropper, he briefly studied engineering at the University of Puerto Rico and moved to New York City in 1960 in search of job opportunities. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and was deployed to the Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, where he was assigned to work in the library. In 1964, back in New York City, he used that experience to find a job at the Municipal Archives and Records Center, then a branch of the New York Public Library, even though he did not have a Library degree. In the three decades that followed, Gracia Peña would completely overhaul the institution, but not without overcoming steep barriers. He lodged a labor dispute to get his job title re-classified after discovering that he was listed as clerk, a classification that paid a fraction of what “laborers” earned for doing the same work. He was briefly laid off during the municipal budget cuts of the mid-1970s, but months later he was readmitted as “Archivist-inCharge.” By then, he had completed a degree in American history from City College, where he had taken night classes for five years. This history of struggle may explain Gracia Peña’s legendary resourcefulness: Stories abound of the personal contacts he established with construction contractors, who called him any time they saw documents in danger of being destroyed. Using station wagons and trucks, he personally salvaged troves of priceless records from being dumped in the trash, a practice that won him the nickname “the Lone Ranger.” Hernández partly attributes this tireless drive to “the fact that Don Idilio is a Black man. Because we have to remember that he is puertorriqueño but also Black, and imagine that in a society 50 years ago. It is not a pretty picture today, and it was way worse then,” she said. Their conversations often touched on the feelings he had when he realized that the archives were meant only for people who had name recognition, and that he felt his people and their experiences were not valued. “I think that his experience helped him develop the discipline and vision he has with regards to disenfranchised people,” Hernández added. “He always saw us from a larger perspective; saw the good in us; and valued us.”
Drove Expansion of Archives
When Gracia Peña was named director of the Municipal Archives in 1978, they were precariously stored at 23 Park Row over a pizza parlor that once caught fire, jeopardizing the entire collection. In 1983, he moved the archives to their current location in a secure, climate-controlled space in the historical, Beaux Arts style Surrogate’s Court building at 31 Chambers St. Under his tenure, the archives grew multifold from 16,500 to 100,000 cubic feet, incorporating such treasures as 1,500 drawings of the design plans for Central Park and 8,000 architectural records of the Brooklyn Bridge. To do so, he had to lock horns with the Whitney Museum, which held valuable original Brooklyn Bridge drawings on a permanent loan. The massive expansion heralded a golden age for the archives, which added millions of documents dating back three centuries — from criminal court records to photographic images and real estate documents — and became an invaluable resource for historians. Dr. Mike Wallace, distinguished professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and founder of the Gotham Center for New York City History at the CUNY Graduate Center, once lauded Gracia Peña and his protégé and successor, Kenneth R. Cobb, as “secular civic saints.” From 1990 to 1995, Don Idilio served as commissioner of the city Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS), advising the mayor, City Council and borough presidents on archival matters and library and records management. He was also a member of several state and local government agencies, and served on the boards of numerous academic, professional and community organizations. But he was far from done.
At CUNY for Second Act
After he officially retired from DORIS, ending three decades of service in the city archives, he devoted his accumulated knowledge and expertise to documenting the Caribbean Diaspora. From 1997 to 2004, as project archivist for Hunter College’s Centro, he oversaw the Puerto Rican Migration Processing Project. It was during these years that he worked with Chancellor Matos Rodríguez, who served as the Centro director from 2000 to 2005. Later on, he transformed the Dominican Archives into reality from a dream. “I have built several archives…an archive is permanent – the preservation of any group,” Gracia Peña said as he surveyed the legacy of his efforts at CUNY DSI last Thursday. “I do not like to work on something that I know is not going to last. This place took longer than any of the others, took me about 14 years, but I know it’s going to continue. Among the many honors he has received for his decades of service, former Mayor Bill de Blasio proclaimed April 6, 2018 as “Idilio Gracia Peña Day” in New York City. “I don’t think I ever saw him angry,” Hernández said, fondly recalling his rigorous discipline, gentle manners and booming laughter, all of which endeared him to colleagues, students and the donors he personally courted, sometimes greeting them at an improvised table before they had proper facilities. The CUNY DSI founder likened Gracia Peña to another Puerto Rican Historical figure: Eugenio María de Hostos, who worked for the betterment of his sister nation, the Dominican Republic, while maintaining his own national identity. “There is a history in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and in the whole Latin American area, from the very beginning, of people looking out for the other: A vision of compañerismo, of hermandad,” she said, using the Spanish words for fellowship and brotherhood. “And bringing in Don Idilio to teach us to preserve our history here is linked to that tradition that is not new. We may have forgotten it, but it’s an old tradition.”
