A research tip for NY-based grad students who are interested in the Caribbean and Latin America: check out the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at Lenox Avenue and 135th Street. The center houses some incredibly important collections that are relevant for Caribbeanists. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (a Puerto Rican), after whom the center is named, amassed a collection of rare books, slave testimonies, art, etc having to do with Black history, which included (of course) the Caribbean.
Here's a gem in the collection that seems like fecund ground for a NY-based research project: the meeting minutes and bylaws of Las Dos Antillas Political Club. This was an organization that Schomburg himself helped begin in the last decade of the 1800s. It worked to raise money, medicine, and munitions for the independence movements in two of the Antilles ("Antillas" in Spanish)--as the islands of the Caribbean were known. The two Antilles were Puerto Rico and Cuba and it'd be fascinating to unravel a bit of how those revolutionary movements were supplied and shaped from the exterior. Las Dos Antillas Political Club was dissolved in 1898 (which coincided with the Spanish-American War, fought, in part, over control of these two islands).
Where did this club meet? What's become of those meeting places? I suspect a lot of the Cuban membership in the club lived in New Jersey, even at the end of the 19th century. Is that the case?
Here's a gem in the collection that seems like fecund ground for a NY-based research project: the meeting minutes and bylaws of Las Dos Antillas Political Club. This was an organization that Schomburg himself helped begin in the last decade of the 1800s. It worked to raise money, medicine, and munitions for the independence movements in two of the Antilles ("Antillas" in Spanish)--as the islands of the Caribbean were known. The two Antilles were Puerto Rico and Cuba and it'd be fascinating to unravel a bit of how those revolutionary movements were supplied and shaped from the exterior. Las Dos Antillas Political Club was dissolved in 1898 (which coincided with the Spanish-American War, fought, in part, over control of these two islands).
Where did this club meet? What's become of those meeting places? I suspect a lot of the Cuban membership in the club lived in New Jersey, even at the end of the 19th century. Is that the case?
One Response to On the trail of 19th century Cuban revolutionaries: Researching in Harlem's Schomburg Collection
Some research on this should also include Ybor City, near Tampa, Florida.
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