The New York Émigré Community as Arturo Alfonso Schomburg’s Community of Memory

Afro-Puerto Rican historian Arturo Alfonso Schomburg’s early experiences within the New York émigré community influenced his perspectives on education and knowledge dissemination throughout his later life as a pan-Africanist intellectual. The artisans, particularly the cigar makers, were the backbone of the Antillean independence movement against colonial Spain. This article identifies the influence of the intellectuals of separatism, their Antilleanism(s), the artisans’ views on education, and their mode of intellectual resistance, known as parejería, in Schomburg’s worldview. It argues that Schomburg’s collection of essays constitutes a mnemonic space of literature where the traces of parejería and Antilleanism(s) are transformed and (re)imagined as recurring movements, tensions, and eruptions, through which the Afro-Puerto Rican (re)constructs the Black diasporic heritage. Inhabiting the in-between spaces in his narratives, Schomburg’s critical reflections laid the groundwork for an alternative counterhegemonic and anti-racist pedagogy.