Our Founders
Miriam Esther Jiménez Román
(1951 - 2020)
Miriam E. Jiménez Román, the Puerto Rican archivist, social theorist, scholar, lecturer, writer, editor, and invaluable mentor to generations of young academics, activists, and artists exploring the African diaspora in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, passed away in her home in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico on August 6th, 2020. She was 69.
Obituary
Jiménez Román was known widely for her volume The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Duke University Press, 2010), which she co-edited with her long-time collaborator, interlocutor, and partner, the late Dr. Juan Flores, a faculty member at New York University at the time of his passing. Jiménez Román’s contributions to the documentation and the public’s education of Latin@s in the United States, Latin@s of African descent transnationally, and the politics of race in empire began in El Barrio....
Juan Flores
(1951 - 2014)
Juan Flores (born John Martin Flores; September 29, 1943 – December 2, 2014) was a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and director of Latino Studies at New York University. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Queens College in New York, and both his Masters and Ph.D from Yale University in German Literature. Flores' major areas of interest include social and cultural theory, Latino and Puerto Rican studies, popular music, theory of diaspora and transnational communities and AfroLatin@ culture.
Obituary
We are indebted to Juan Flores’s teaching and mentoring, to his widely quoted books Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity (1992) or From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (2000). We owe much to his untiring efforts, delving into archives, libraries and sound recordings, and into the vast storehouse of the memory of friends and collaborators. We admire the ways he delineated and at times defiantly transformed the contours of what we know today as diasporic and Latino cultural studies...
