About this data hub coffee hour
The Center for Puerto Rican Studies invites you to a cafecito seminar showcasing current research by Centro’s data lab team. Dr. Yarimar Bonilla (Centro Director), Dr. Isar Godreau (UPR researcher) and Damayra Figueroa-Lazu (research assistant) will highlight some key findings from the newly released 2020 Decennial Census data for legislative redistricting including: racial identification shift from ‘whiteness’ to ‘some other race’ and increased identification with more than one race. Changes in racial identification will be further analyzed at the county level.
The event will conclude with an open discussion with the audience. Some questions to be discussed:
1) What is driving Puerto Rico's identity shift and embrace of mixed race identity?,
2) How has this been impacted by changes in the ways the census organizes and codes its information?
3)
Which municipalities and barrios experienced the most change in terms
of racial identification? Feel free to bring your questions to the
cafecito!
Our data lab team will also guide you through our interactive report
that contains visualization and web mapping tools of changes in race,
population, and housing at the municipal and barrio level.
Click here to Register
and join us for an in-depth conversation and analysis via Zoom. *This
event will be interpreted in PRSL, Spanish and English. Please reach out
to [email protected] for accommodation requests, questions or concerns.
SPEAKER BIOS:
Yarimar Bonilla is the Director of the
Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. She is also a
Professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino
Studies at Hunter College and in the Ph.D. Program in Anthropology at
the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the
author of Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake
of Disenchantment (2015) co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm
(2019) and a founder of the Puerto Rico Syllabus Project. In addition,
Yarimar is a prominent public intellectual and a leading voice in
Caribbean and Latin-X politics. She writes a monthly column in the
Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día titled “En Vaivén,” is a regular
contributor to publications such as The Washington Post, The Nation,
Jacobin, and The New Yorker, and a frequent guest on National Public
Radio and news programs such as Democracy Now! Her current research—for
which she was named a 2018-2020 Carnegie Fellow —examines the politics
of recovery in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and the forms of
political and social trauma that the storm revealed.
Damayra Figueroa-Lazu is a Research Assistant at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at CUNY Hunter College. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice and a Master of Arts in Sociology from St. John’s University. Her role as a research assistant is to prepare, collect, and analyze aggregate data along with assisting in the development of the GIS platform on any subject related to Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in the U.S. In her current position, she assists with the collection of data related to the damages of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico; has prepared, manipulated, and monitored extensive databases; has performed secondary research to inform results; and, performed statistical analyses using STATA, Tableau or Excel. Her research interests include socioeconomic disparities, coloniality, raceand ethnicity, social stratification, and social movements.
Isar Godreau is a researcher at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey where she directs various institution-wide level research initiatives and her own research projects. Her publications explore issues of “race”, racism and identity in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. She has published on hair, racial terminology, the folklorization of blackness, census racial categories, the effects of racism in Puerto Rican schools, and more recently on the status of higher education in the aftermath of Hurricane María. She is the author of Arrancando mitos de raíz: guía para la enseñanza antirracista de la herencia africana en Puerto Rico (2013) and Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism and US Colonialism in Puerto Rico (2015 by University of Illinois Press and winner of the Frank Bonilla best book award). Dr. Isar Godreau studied at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras and later obtained her Ph.D in cultural anthropology from the University of California Santa Cruz (1999).
This event is co-organized and presented by The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, CUNY (Centro) and Third World Newsreel, and is co-sponsored by the Puerto Rico Syllabus project led by Dr. Yarimar Bonilla as part of the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research from the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
