BORIKÉN

Exploring the history, culture and unfolding story of Borikén

Research Resources

  • War Against All Puerto Ricans

    War Against All Puerto Ricans tells an undiscovered story: the violent and shocking history, of Puerto Rico–US relations for the past 118 years.

    Meticulously sourced with over 700 footnotes and dozens of photographs, the book is, in the words of one reviewer, “not just history. It’s history on fire.” It documents how the U.S. government invaded Puerto Rico in 1898 and, for over a century, quietly but systematically drained the island and its inhabitants through exploitation, repression and cultural death.

  • The Quickening of Albizu Campos: How Fenianism Galvanized the Last American Liberator

    Two bills have been introduced to the US Congress that hope to resolve the contentious status of Puerto Rico. Will either settle the question of annexation to the United States? According to Ausubo Press’ latest book about Albizu Campos, what was breached cannot be restored by ill-suited bills.

    While the Puerto Rican leader, Pedro Albizu Campos, studied in the United States between 1912 and 1921 his milieu was colored primarily with people, events, and ideas with one thing in common: a free Ireland. During those years much of Irish America was preoccupied with Ireland’s struggle for independence from Britain, and Albizu Campos was in the perfect spot–Cambridge, Massachusetts — to immerse himself in the history of the struggling Celtic island and the dreams of her revolutionary patriots. In this brilliant retelling of Albizu’s formative years in Harvard and beyond, the author sheds new light on the insurgent education he received from Irish nationalists known as Fenians, and how it seeded the nationalist revolution against the US occupation of Puerto Rico. If you ever wonder why Puerto Rico is not yet a state, this is the book to read.

  • Latina/o Studies Commons

    The Digital Commons Network provides free access to full-text scholarly articles and other research from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, this dynamic research tool includes peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.

  • Center for Puerto Rican Studies

    Centro is a research institute that is dedicated to the study and interpretation of the Puerto Rican experience in the United States and that produces and disseminates relevant interdisciplinary research. Centro also collects, preserves, and provides access to library resources documenting Puerto Rican history and culture. We seek to link scholarship to social action and policy debates and to contribute to the betterment of our community and enrichment of Puerto Rican studies.

  • Center for Puerto Rican Studies YouTube Channel

    Centro is a research institute that is dedicated to the study and interpretation of the Puerto Rican experience in the United States and that produces and disseminates relevant interdisciplinary research. Centro also collects, preserves, and provides access to library resources documenting Puerto Rican history and culture. We seek to link scholarship to social action and policy debates and to contribute to the betterment of our community and enrichment of Puerto Rican studies.

  • The Internet Archive

    The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.

  • Ancestry.com

    Requires a paid subscription. Ancestry® currently manages about 10,000 terabytes of data, including records detailing births, marriages, deaths, military service, immigration and much more.

  • Family Search

    Record searches include, slave registers, births, deaths, churches, etc.

Colonization

Labor Movement

Military

Religion / Spirituality

Stories / Narratives

Sugar Cane

Taíno

Vieques

Women

Podcasts

Genealogy

Borikén (Puerto Rico): Periods

This is an image of a petroglyph, or rock carving in Ceiba, Puerto Rico. It sits beside the shore of Ensenada Honda (Deep Cove).

The United Confederation of Taíno People

The United Confederation of Taíno People (UCTP) is an indigenous…
November 18, 2025/by Gingie

The Sweetest Sounds

In this episode, Roberto looks at what we know about the Taíno language, the limitations that exist in our knowledge, and its impact on how we speak today.
November 15, 2025/by Gingie

Puerto Ricans Continue Protests Against US Militarism and War Threats

This is an article by Brett Wilkins published on November 12, 2025, highlighting the continued protests in Puerto Rico against military intervention and action against fishing vessels.
November 13, 2025/by Gingie

La Historia Boricua: The Peopling of Puerto Rico

In this episode, Roberto looks at the information available about the evolution of the Indigenous peoples who first populated Puerto Rico, based on the most recent evidence, as well as their contribution to Taíno culture and, eventually, to our Puerto Rican identity.
November 7, 2025/by Gingie

Reconsidering the lives of the earliest Puerto Ricans: Mortuary Archaeology and bioarchaeology of the Ortiz site

We possess rather little detailed information on the lives of the first inhabitants of Puerto Rico—the so-called “Archaic” or “Pre-Arawak” people—despite more than a century of archeological research.
November 7, 2025/by Gingie
This is an image of a petroglyph, or rock carving in Ceiba, Puerto Rico. It sits beside the shore of Ensenada Honda (Deep Cove).

Current Perspectives in the Precolonial Archaeology of Puerto Rico

During the past two decades, many of the traditional conceptions…
November 7, 2025/by Gingie

How Is Colonialism a Sociostructural Determinant of Health in Puerto Rico?

Puerto Rico has been experiencing a public health crisis since the 1990s, driven by limited resource allocation for preventive health care for residents of Puerto Rico, austerity policies in response to a massive debt crisis, and primary care privatization.
June 29, 2022/by Gingie

Disrupters: Three Women of Color Tell Their Stories

This essay is an amplified version of the presentation we made at the 7th Biennial Seneca Falls Dialogues. Our aim is to story back into the world our first experiences and motivations for investing in suffrage and democratic activism.
June 29, 2022/by Gingie

Puerto Rico and PROMESA: Reaffirming Colonialism

With this dramatic announcement, Governor Alejandro García Padilla transformed the island nation’s long-simmering debt overhang problem into an international spectacle.
June 29, 2022/by Gingie

In Puerto Rico, Women Won the Vote in a Bittersweet Game of Colonial Politics

Puertorriqueñas’ fight for suffrage shaped by class, colonialism and racism—but even today, island residents cannot vote for president
June 12, 2022/by Gingie
This is an image of a petroglyph, or rock carving in Ceiba, Puerto Rico. It sits beside the shore of Ensenada Honda (Deep Cove).

What Became of the Taíno?

Robert M. Poole October 2011



The Indians who greeted Columbus…
June 10, 2022/by Gingie

Women and the Puerto Rican Labor Movement

MILAGROS DENIS AND RACHEL POOLEY



In December 1898, at the…
June 10, 2022/by Gingie

Puerto Rican Labor Movement: Magazine, Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt, "Puerto Rican Labor Movement: Magazine," 1934, Children and Youth in History
June 10, 2022/by Gingie

Whose Legacy?: Voicing Women’s Rights from the 1870s to the 1930s

In 1990 I interviewed Puerto Rican women--feminist critics, sociologists, and writers--for a project on Caribbean women's discourse.
June 10, 2022/by Gingie

The Dark History of Forced Sterilization of Latina Women

Between the 1930s and the 1970s, approximately one-third of the female population of Puerto Rico was sterilized, making it highest rate of sterilization in the world.
June 10, 2022/by Gingie

Colonial Citizens of a Modern Empire: War, Illiteracy, and Physical Education in Puerto Rico, 1917-1930

The year 1917 marked a critical moment in the relationship between the United States and its Puerto Rican colony.
June 10, 2022/by Gingie

From Sugar Plantations to Military Bases: The U.S. Navy‘s Expropriations in Vieques, Puerto Rico, 1940–45

During World War II the U.S. Federal Government took over approximately 26,000 acres out of a total of 33,000 in the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, to build military installations.
June 10, 2022/by Gingie

Puerto Rican Needle Workers and Colonial Migrations: Deindustrialization as Pathways Lost

The dominant narrative of U.S. deindustrialization opens with the Northeast as the definitive starting point for industry followed by a direct linear relocation to the South and then the Global South. I
June 10, 2022/by Gingie

Hacienda Mercedita

Hacienda Mercedita was a 300-acre (120 ha) sugarcane plantation in Ponce, Puerto Rico, founded in 1861, by Juan Serrallés Colón.
June 10, 2022/by Gingie

Central Sugar Mills

The central sugar mill concept began in Puerto Rico with the establishment of Central San Vicente in 1873.
June 10, 2022/by Gingie

Give Them Christ: Native Agency in the Evangelization of Puerto Rico, 1900 to 1917

The scholarship on the history of Protestant missions to Puerto Rico after the Spanish American War of 1898 emphasizes the Americanizing tendencies of the missionaries in the construction of the new Puerto Rican.
June 10, 2022/by Gingie

The Culture History of a Puerto Rican Sugar Cane Plantation 1876-1949

The present article is an attempt to combine the analysis of historical documents with the use of data from aged informants for purposes of historical reconstruction.
June 10, 2022/by Gingie

Bound to History: Leoncia Lasalle’s Slave Narrative from Moca, Puerto Rico, 1945

by Ellen Fernandez-Sacco, Independent Scholar, Tampa, FL 33618,…
June 10, 2022/by Gingie
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