Our next event in New York City will be a unique panel discussion featuring scholars Vanessa Péres-Rosario, Sandy Plácido, and Vanessa K. Valdés and moderated by novelist (and Freya reader) Stephanie Jimenez.
The conversation will focus on the panelists’ work on overlooked or misrepresented Puerto Rican historical figures. We believe their work ties in to a larger contemporary discussion about who gets to tell their own stories, and which stories our society chooses to center when looking at our history — themes which The Freya Project aims to dissect, analyze, and reshape in all the work we do.
We are honored to host these amazing women and can't wait for what will be a fascinating discussion.
IN HONOR OF LATINX HISTORY MONTH, ALL PROCEEDS FROM THIS EVENT WILL SUPPORT AL OTRO LADO.
Al Otro Lado is a bi-national, direct legal services organization founded by Nora Phillips and Esmerelda Flores. This organization offers a multitude of immigration-based services to indigent deportees, migrants, and refugees in Tijuana, Mexico.
Al Otro Lado coordinates with attorneys and non-legal professionals in family law, labor law, criminal law (particularly post-conviction relief), and employment law. The organization also assists families with aspects of reunification in Mexico, and works with deported parents to ensure their rights are protected in the United States family court system.
Meet the Panelists
Vanessa Pérez-Rosario is associate professor and chairperson of the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She is the author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon (2014).
Sandy Plácido is an assistant professor in the History Department at Queens College, and a researcher at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. She received her Ph.D. from the American Studies Program at Harvard University. Her research and teaching examine social movements in the Americas, with a special focus on the contributions of women and people of African and Caribbean descent. She is currently working on a book about Dr. Ana Livia Cordero and the Puerto Rican Liberation Struggle, in which she emphasizes the influential role of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in anti-imperialist movements during the Cold War.
Born and raised in New York City to Black Puerto Rican parents, Vanessa K. Valdés is a a graduate of Yale and Vanderbilt Universities and currently serves as the director of the Black Studies Program at The City College of New York. She is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese, and her research focuses on the cultural production of peoples of African descent throughout the Americas, including the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. She is the author of Oshun's Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017). Finally, she is the series editor of Afro-Latinx Futures, a book series dedicated to centering Blackness as a frame in monographs and edited collections in the humanities and social sciences.
Stephanie Jimenez (event moderator) is the author of They Could Have Named Her Anything, a novel set in New York City about race, class, and girlhood, and which was published in August of this year. She is a former graduate of Scripps College and in 2012, she traveled to Medellin, Colombia as a Fulbright recipient. She contributed to Routledge Press's anthology Latina Outsiders Remaking Identity which was also published earlier this year. She is proud to have been raised in Queens, New York, where she currently still lives.