Garifuna Ancestral Memory in Diaspora is a panel dialogue on how Black Indigenous communities such as Garifuna New Yorkers engage multiple forms of ancestral memory-making as embodied archives of Black Indigenous life in the Americas.

This event will be moderated by Pablo José López Oro, this academic year’s Miriam Jiménez Román Fellow.

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Panelists

Nicole Ramsey is an interdisciplinary scholar from Los Angeles, California whose research examines formations of blackness, identity, and nation in Latin America and the Caribbean. As a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies, she is currently working on her first book, a transnational study of Black articulations of Belizean identity through post-colonial performances of national commemoration, visual culture, migration, and popular culture.

Siria Alvarez is an entrepreneur and founder of The Garifuna Market, a digital community and brand that serves as a platform for the representation of Garifuna culture. Alvarez was born in Honduras and grew up in the Bronx, NY. Her work with The Garifuna Market has allowed her to bridge connections between different generations of Garinagu people, online and in person, with a goal to increase and maintain cultural pride and awareness of the unique heritage. Press publications have included NBC News, Vogue, Remezcla, Pop Sugar and others. Siria is currently attaining her Business degree with a concentration in Business Law and International Business at Lehman College.

Janel Martinez is a writer and the founder of award-winning blog, Ain't I Latina?, an online destination celebrating Afro-Latinx womanhood. The Bronx, NY native is a frequent public speaker discussing media, culture and identity, as well as diversity at conferences and events for Bloomberg, NBCU, SXSW, Harvard University and more. She’s appeared as a featured guest on national shows and outlets, such as BuzzFeed, ESSENCE, NPR and Sirius XM, and her work has appeared in Adweek, Univision Communications, Oprah Daily, Remezcla and The New York Times. Martinez was awarded the Afro-Latino Festival of New York's Digital Empowerment Award and, in 2018, was recognized at City Hall by the New York City Council, the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus and the Bronx Delegation to the NYC Council for her contributions as a woman of Garifuna descent. Her work is featured in the YA anthology, Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed, published by Flatiron Books.

Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer, teacher, and scholar from Hoboken, NJ. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and her B.A. in English, Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is Associate Professor of Afro-Diaspora Studies at Michigan State University and the author of Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern, 2020). Her forthcoming book, Archive of Disappearances: Afterimages of Afro-Puerto Ricans at the Edges of Empire, examines the disappearances and excesses of Afro-Puerto Rican island and diasporic peoples through the study of archival histories, photography, visual art, and film from the late 19th century to the present.