The Criadas Project is one of the projects in the lab Taller Entre Aguas. Taller Entre Aguas is a collaborative lab that focuses on amplifying Black memory and data in efforts to make Afro-Puerto Rican history more accessible and visible. Using data, community engaged programming, and editorial opportunities Taller Entre Aguas has been able to open channels across academic discourses to those who are invested and passionate about Puerto Rican memory. The Criadas Project is joined by The Registro Project and The Libertos Project in the intellectual ecosystem that makes up Taller Entre Aguas (TEA). 

The Criadas Project began in 2021 in it’s first iteration as the Picó Papers as a part of LifeXCode at John Hopkins University. Under the direction of Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson, the project matured and refined its focus and purpose and became what is it today when Taller Entre Aguas was formed in 2022 as a part of the Community Knowledge Lab (housed at John Hopkins University) within the Mellon funded project, the Diaspora Solidarities Lab. Taller Entre Aguas was able to expand its teams and project aims while strengthening their digital humanities toolkit. 

In addition to receiving funding from LifexCode, John Hopkins University, the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, the Mellon Foundation, and Michigan State University upon Dr. Sarah Bruno’s position there, the Criadas Project also received support from the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective (CDSC). As a part of the larger CDSC network, The Criadas Project was able to collaborate with Performant Software and continue to think critically about the how to care about Black life in the digital realm as a means of connecting the diaspora.

The Criadas Project Team 

Dr. Sarah Bruno is an Assistant Professor of Afro-Caribbean of Performance and Culture in the Departments of English and African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. She received her doctorate Cultural Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2021 and held an ACLS postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University and a Latinx Studies postdoctoral fellowship at Rice University. Her research centers on Black popular music and dance, empire, affect, and Puerto Rico. She is working on her first book-length manuscript which is tentatively titled, Black Rican Refusal: Decolonial Postures, Dexterity, and Bomba Puertorriqueña. 

Rosa Cordero Cruz is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers University. Originally from Puerto Rico, her research interests are Black women, slavery, and emancipation in the Arecibo District of Puerto Rico during the nineteenth century. 

Abigail Rosario-Vasquez is a PhD Student in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland- Baltimore County. She is earning two graduate certificates in Digital Humanities and in Latinx/Caribbean Studies. Her current project uses Black Feminist Praxis and Black Digital Studies to explore how Bomba and Plena, Afro-Puerto Rican genres, function as a form of Black Technological Creativity and resistance, through the form of protest, political discourse in non-political spaces, and Black Joy.