Chapters overview

We start the book with lessons from the syllabus designed by Rosalía Reyes Simon, who takes this project further by questioning who can contribute to the archive. In our peer-mentoring sessions, she invited us to think of the archive as a living laboratory and the students as active producers of archives. We see her chapter as the beginning of a new stage in this project. The following chapters by Tania Avilés Vergara and Ricardo Martín Coloma share scaffolded written assignments based on archival content and manuscripts. The former introduces us to the origins of Afro-Latinx history through stories of racial and linguistic oppression documented at the Dominican Studies Institute of CUNY; the latter, meanwhile, takes advantage of audiovisual materials from the CUNY Latino archives to emphasize the teaching of different types of writing essays. Lastly, Andrea Ariza and Anthony J. Harb present two final projects that use archival resources as objects of reflection. All these teaching materials offer new and insightful ways to engage with archival resources, most of them unknown for our students but closely related to their social and cultural experiences.

I am deeply thankful to Rosalía Reyes Simon, Ricardo Martín Coloma, Andrea Ariza García, and Anthony J. Harb, co-workers, co-authors and co-friends, for joining me in this linguistic and pedagogical experience!