Rosa Emilia Cordero Cruz (ella/elle) is a Puerto Rican history Ph.D. candidate specializing in Latin American and Caribbean and Women’s and Gender History at Rutgers University. Her dissertation titled Beyond Sugar: Gender, Slavery, and Emancipation in Nineteenth Century Northwestern Puerto Rico focuses on the Black women and girls that labored in the Puerto Rican districts of Arecibo and Aguadilla during the archipelago’s nineteenth century period of “second slavery,” emancipation, and abolition. Before beginning her Ph.D. at Rutgers, Rosa received a B.A. in Caribbean History and a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and in the university’s Honor’s Program. At Rutgers, Rosa co-founded the Interdisciplinary Caribbean Working Group and worked as a research assistant of the Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration directed by the Center for Latin American Studies at Rutgers University and the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration at Yale University.
During her time as a graduate student, Rosa has also defined herself as a public and digital humanities scholar. She joined the Diaspora Solidarities Lab (DSL)’s Taller Entry Aguas (TEA), where she contributed The Criadas Project (view here), a digital humanities project focusing on twentieth century Black Puerto Rican domestic workers. Rosa’s experiences with event coordination and digital and public humanities projects eventually inspired her to build her own digital humanities project, The Black Puerto Rican Colección Project (publication pending), which digitally organizes all artifacts housed in the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña’s Colección Nacional relating to Black Puerto Rican history or culture. The digital guide was constructed with the intention to encourage contributions to Black Puerto Rican studies by facilitating scholars of Black Puerto Rico’s research findings and providing Puerto Rican afrodescendants with a more accessible digital archive of objects relating to their own familial and community histories.