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The Long Road to a Successful Puerto Rican Studies Conference at HCC and STCC

by MANUEL FRAU RAMOS The three-day national 2022 Puerto Rican Studies Association Biennial Conference (PRSA) took place on the campuses of Holyoke Community College (HCC) and Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) between October 14 and 16, 2022. The theme adopted for the 2022 Puerto Rican Studies Association conference was Moriviví: Activating Puerto Rican Futures. “Thinking through the diverse ecologies of human and non-human resistance that surround us, we offer the moriviví as a metaphor for imagining Puerto Rican futures thriving in the diaspora and on the archipelago,” the PRSA states in its conference information materials. The conference, focusing on a wide range of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans topics, gathered more than 200 participants, among them academicians, students, artists, and community members on the campus of Holyoke Community College. The Conference took place four years after the PRSA Conference “Navigating Insecurity: Crisis, Power, and Protest in Puerto Rican Communities,” at Rutgers University that was held October 26-28, 2018. No PRSA Conference was held in 2020. On the evening of Saturday, October 15, STCC hosted the PRSA commencement dinner and gala. Around 120 attendees packed the conference hall to listen to keynote speaker Dr. Bárbara Abadía-Rexach, professor of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. During the gala event two members of the PRSA were recognized for their professional work. Hilda Lloréns was presented with the Frank Bonilla Book Award in honor of Frank Bonilla, founder and longtime director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Centro) at Hunter College and one of the most distinguished and pioneer figures in the field of Puerto Rican Studies. Sara Camille Awartani received the Virginia Sánchez Korrol Dissertation Award. This award is named in honor of Virginia Sánchez Korrol, a historian and professor emerita in the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College, and one of the founding members of Puerto Rican Studies in the City University of New York as well as the PRSA. The success of this conference took dedication, hard work, commitment, creativity, time, and a considerable team-work. In addition, a significant amount of political negotiations with key Puerto Rican stakeholders was needed in order to make the conference a reality. I would like to share with our readers some of work that took place behind the scenes as we moved forward and shaped this important conference. On August 2018, Dr. Carlos Santiago, at that time Massachusetts Commissioner of Higher Education, Dr. John Cook, President of STCC and myself (Dr. Manuel Frau Ramos) met during the Latino Scholarship Fund Annual event held in Holyoke. During our conversation I expressed to Dr. Santiago my desire to once again, organize and bring the biannual PRSA Conference to Western Massachusetts. The 2020 Conference would commemorate the 20th anniversary of the PRSA conference that was held at the UMass Amherst campus 20 years earlier. In 2000, the PRSA held the 4th Conference of the Puerto Rican Studies, ¡Bregando! Negotiating Borders and Boundaries: Puerto Ricans in the Emerging Global Communities of the 21st Century at UMass Amherst. This conference, co-chaired by Dr. Carmen Rolón and Dr. Manuel Frau-Ramos, resulted in one of the most attended and financially successful biannual conferences in the history of the PRSA. It also contributed to a considerable growth in membership for, reaching approximately 500 members. At the time, Dr. Carlos Santiago and Dr. Edna Acosta Belén were president and vice-president of the organization, respectively. Shortly after my conversation with Dr. Santiago and Dr. Cook, I reached out to my colleague, Dr. Arleen Rodríguez, and invited her to be co-chair of the hosting committee. I then proceeded to contact Dr. Christina Royal, HCC President to invite her to be part of this 2 education institution proposal. She accepted out invitation to have HCC act as co-host of the Conference with STCC. A proposal was then submitted to the PRSA Executive Council. It stated that HCC would host the academic component of the conference, and STCC would host the commencement dinner and gala event. The proposal also stated that the Holyoke Public Library/The Puerto Rican Cultural Project, and the Hispanic American Library in Springfield would be partnering with the 2 educational institutions. What made this initiative different was that traditionally, the biannual conferences were held at four-year colleges or research university institutions, and this time we were asking two community colleges to share the venue for the conference. The rationale for this unprecedented decision in selecting these two community colleges to act as hosts was based on the fact that as of 2016 Massachusetts has the fifth largest Puerto Rican population in the United States. Holyoke has the largest Puerto Rican population, per capita, of any city in the United States outside Puerto Rico, and Hampden County, where Holyoke and Springfield are located, has the largest Puerto Rican population in Massachusetts with 90,000. Springfield is recognized as the base of the Puerto Rican political and economic power within the Commonwealth. In addition, the rapidly changing demographics in this region due to the increase of Puerto Ricans has helped Holyoke Community College (HCC) and Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) become two of the newest Hispanic-Serving Institutions in the nation. On September 2019, after more than a year of negotiations between the local hosting committee and the Puerto Rican Studies Association

PRSA Executive Council, (l-R) Marisol Lebrón, Jessica Pabón-Colón, Karrieann Soto-Vega, Joaquín Villanueva, Michael Staudenmaier, Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, Mónica Jiménez and Shakti Castro

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