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Archives can be rich sources of information, yet they are also very often built within the violent processes of empire‐building, setting the stage for how knowledge about colonised places are constructed, disrupted, and how their histories are understood. Archives often tell us more about power and the kinds of knowledge that were important to imperial powers than the people and places disrupted by empire. This necessitates careful consideration of the archive itself, and not simply the information it contains. The relationship between the visual aspects of the archive and the ways that we come to know about colonised sites is the focus of this paper. Focusing on photos of rural Puerto Rico taken after The Depression (circa 1941–1942), this paper builds an understanding of archives as sites that can be transformed into conceptual or imaginary space that exists outside of the original purposes of the archives. This space is reliant on the willingness of those who encounter archives to read beyond what they are presented with. This in turn allows for careful reading of the traces and possibilities inside archives that subvert their seemingly totalising narrative. The relationship between the visual aspects of the archive and the ways that we come to know about colonised sites is the focus of this paper. Focusing on photos of rural Puerto Rico taken after The Depression (circa 1941–1942), this paper builds an understanding of archives as sites that can be transformed into conceptual or imaginary space that exists outside the original purposes of the archives. This space is reliant on the willingness of those who encounter archives to read beyond what they are presented with. This in turn allows for careful reading of the traces and possibilities inside archives that subvert their seemingly totalising narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the 1930 student insurrection at the Instituto Politėcnico, an icon of Americanization established by Protestant missionaries in Puerto Rico in 1912. Students' militant direct action, including occupation, engendered heated interventions by both insular nationalists and supporters of Americanization. The paper argues that these events represented dynamics particular to the third decade of U.S. occupation, including resistance to Americanization and the increased political power of pro-Americanizing Puerto Ricans. Demonstrating the contingency of colonizing relations, it argues the need for carefully historicizing Americanization and responses to it, for it was a fluid, contested, contradictory process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, the indigenous groups, labeled Tainos by historians and archaeologists, inhabited Puerto Rico and other parts of the Greater Antilles. For more than three hundred years the traditional historiography has claimed that these groups and their culture became "extinct" within a few decades of European colonization. In the past fifty years, however, an indigenous revival movement that has been called Neo-Tainos has developed, calling into question the claims of cultural and biological extinction. These claims have triggered a multilateral and unresolved debate between members of the Neo- Taino movement, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists that has spread to the general public and popular culture of the Island. This paper presents a historical review of the debate, the main positions in favor of or against the claims of Taino descendancy in Puerto Rican communities both in the Island and in the continent, and discusses several issues that need to be considered and addressed to gain a better understanding of the controversy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]