Colectivo PerlArte

Colectivo PerlArte is a community arts center administrated by community organizer Lorel Denisse Cubano Santiago who helped to found it after Hurricane María. Located in La Perla, San Juan, it is a space for creation, memory, and resistance against displacement and inequality.

Lorel was first interviewed by Ricia Chansky and Marci Denesiuk in 2018 for the mass-listening project Mi María: Puerto Rico after the Hurricane, and her narrative appears in the Voice of Witness book, Mi María: Surviving the Storm, Voices from Puerto Rico.

Later, through a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, Colectivo PerlArte and the OHL collaborated on the community storytelling and archiving project, Speaking into Silences: Building Community Archives across the Puerto Rican Archipelago. In this project, members of PerlArte received training from the OHL in order to conduct interviews with residents about the neighborhood in order to resist the disaster capitalism maneuvers of gentrification and population displacement.

PerlArte Artist in Residence, Yadianis Umpierre Sánchez, painted a mural on the side of the community arts center containing elements from the oral histories recorded in this project, including a QRC linking to the digital archive. The creation of this mural is documented in the film, La Perla en que vivimos… Members of the OHL were able to share data from the PerlArte project with our colleagues on the Solar Oasis Team at El Centro Hemisférico de Cooperación en Investigación y Educación en Ingeniería y Ciencia Aplicada resulting in the arts center receiving a solar hub. During the blackout caused by Hurricane Erin, PerlArte was able to use their solar energy to serve as a breast milk preservation center.

Lorel later joined members of the OHL on a panel at the 2025 Latin American Studies Puerto Rico Section Conference, “This Land is Ours.” This presentation framed a transarchipelagic conversation about land rights in Puerto Rico that included resistance to urban gentrification and population displacement, and rural, Indigenous land back movements. This conversation between leaders at PerlArte and the CAMJI Lares Pueblo is the focus of our forthcoming documentary film, Veredas de libertá, and an essay, “Form and Function: Oral History as Mutual Aid.”

This discussion of land rights has expanded from a transarchipelagic to a translocal conversation with the inclusion of the HAL team organized by the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field School at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee led by Arijit Sen. The OHL was proud to welcome members of the Milwaukee team to both PerlArte and the CAMJI Lares Pueblo in 2026, and to visit the urban community gardens of Milwaukee. We are currently editing a video of reflections from this exchange and looking for ways to continue building this connection between La Perla, Lares, and Milwaukee.

Lorel and members of PerlArte will participate in an upcoming project sponsored by HAL that focuses on a group of faculty, students, and community partners who have worked together in a research and climate justice collaborative since the rapid-succession landfall of Hurricanes Irma and María in 2017, “Research, Solidarity, Friendship.”

Come Colegial

Come Colegial is a student-led initiative at UPR-Mayagüez that fights food insecurity by providing free nonperishable food, hot meals, and fresh produce to students in need. Founded in 2014, its mission is to ensure that no student has to choose between hunger and education, supporting them until they reach food stability.

Members of the OHL collaborated with Come Colegial long before there was a lab. When the Sheltered in Place crisis oral history project began in 2020, Come Colegial was the main focus. Ricia Chansky and four Graduate Research Fellows—Gabrielle Armstrong Velázquez, Natalia Betancourt Malavé, Aleyshka Estevez Quinones, and Yarelis Marcial Acevedo—interviewed Come Colegial’s cofounder and advisor, Lucy Serrano Gastón. The focus of this project was to study mutual aid organizations addressing food insecurity that began or significantly scaled up their work after Hurricane María and then adapted it for the new needs of COVID-19.

This interview and four others became the foundation of our work with the Archivo de Respuestas de Emergencias de Puerto Rico, a collaborative project between UPR-Mayagüez, UPR-Río Piedras, Michigan State University, and the Digital Library of the Caribbean. This project is a digital archive and exhibition on the Omeka S platform that preserves materials related to mutual aid organizations working to mitigate stratified disasters in the archipelago.

Lucy, and other narrators from this project, are also featured in the OHL documentary, Our Piece of Land.

In the second phase of the AREPR project, a team led by OHL Librarian, Natalia Hernández Mejías, digitized and preserved over 500 products related to Come Colegial’s ten years of service to the UPR-Mayagüez community for an Omeka S subsite on the AREPR website, including a TimelineJS data visualization tool built by Aleyshka Estevez.

Currently, Come Colegial is the topic of a series of interviews being conducted by Natalia Betancourt related to how university mutual aid organizations sustain their work over the necessary changes in leadership that happen when members of a directive graduate. These interviews are framed within the context of chronic crises that cause organizations to scale up and adapt when presented with new needs.

Come Colegial is also the focus of our OHL work with social media campaigns that curate excerpts of oral history collections for engagement with climate justice issues.

Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez

In March 2025, OHL director Ricia Chansky interviewed graphic novelist Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez at the opening of his exhibit, Arte de la Borinqueña, displayed at Humanidades Puerto Rico in San Juan. They discussed how his lived experiences in Puerto Rico shaped his creation of the superhero La Borinqueña and her commitment to environmental and climate justice. The OHL later commissioned him to illustrate his interview as part of their work to create public-facing outputs linked to their digital archive.

The result was an illustration (shown in part in this image) that is the inspiration for a mural to be installed in the General Library at UPR-Mayagüez outside of the OHL in commemoration of the lab’s fifth anniversary. A version of this illustration has also been made into a mural in the new Puerto Rican Cultural District in Holyoke, MA. The mural “celebrates Puerto Rican heritage and the power of storytelling.”

A year after the initial interview, the OHL team met with Miranda-Rodriguez to learn about the process of making the illustration and reflect on his experiences working with the OHL. The OHL will be unveiling the mural and sharing a video of this conversation with Miranda-Rodriguez about his creative process in February 2027 at the celebration of the five-year anniversary of the lab.

Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez also spoke at a Library Week event in April 2025, which was organized by the OHL, the UPRM General Library and the UPRM English Department in collaboration with PSCA – RUM, EDSA RUM, and RUM Linguists.

Artwork ©2026, Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez, illustrated by Mike Hawthorne with colors by Eliana Falcón. No further reproduction or distribution is permitted without the permission of the owner.

Fundación de Culebra

Fundación de Culebra is a nonprofit organization founded in 1994 that focuses on conserving, protecting, and promoting the arts, environment, and history of the island municipality of Culebra. Their mission is rooted in education and social values to foster community self-worth and self-management.

When Ricia Chansky and Marci Denesiuk were working on the Mi María: Puerto Rico after the Hurricane project, they traveled to Culebra to interview the Fundación’s director, Luz Rivera Cantwell, who also facilitated interviews with several other residents. Interviews with culebrenses Belle Marie Torres Velázquez, M.D. and Neysha Irizarry Ortiz can be found in the book, Mi María: Surviving the Storm, Voices from Puerto Rico.

The OHL continued working with the Fundación on the community storytelling and archiving project, Speaking into Silences: Building Community Archives across the Puerto Rican Archipelago, funded by the American Council of Learned Societies. In this project, Luz and Doug Lang, working with Culebra’s Musicá Pa’ Culebra program, helped preserve life stories of local musicians, members of the youth orchestra, parents, and community members. These oral histories inspired the creation of a playlist, which showcases the long tradition of music in Culebra and brings awareness to the challenges Culebra faces, such as the lack of a living wage, a shortage of affordable housing, and gentrification.

Members of the Fundación will be working with the OHL team again in 2026 to create a documentary film about the role of the youth orchestra in building community, environmental protections for the island, and working together for successful disaster preparation and response. The children in the orchestra will be featured in the film’s soundtrack.