Statement of Values

AREPR is committed to decolonial archiving praxis—building reciprocal, mutually beneficial relationships with and for our communities. This is particularly crucial for community-based archiving work, which has historically been intimately tied to colonialism and the violence of extraction—the taking of people, resources, goods, and ideas from the colonized in order to serve the needs (real or imagined) of the colonizing power. To counter these harmful practices, AREPR upholds and builds upon Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s assertion that "the intellectual project of decolonizing has to set out ways to proceed through a colonizing world. It needs a radical compassion that reaches out, that seeks collaboration, and that is open to possibilities that can only be imagined as other things fall into place." ¹

AREPR embodies decolonial values in a myriad of ways: 

• Postcustodial archiving: embracing archiving practices in which participants retain the rights to their contributions;
• Trauma-informed interviewing: creating safe interviewing environments that do not ask participants to share their trauma and providing mental health resources to participants;
• Lived experience as expertise: acknowledging the expertise of Puerto Ricans and highlighting their lived experiences through oral histories;
• Participatory design: partnering with community members and community organizations to determine who, what, where, when, and how stories will be shared as well as how tools for display and dissemination will be designed; 
• Custom vocabulary: working with community partners to determine how items will be described and what terms best represent their materials;
• Bilingual materials: representing all content—metadata, transcripts, website text, and resources—in both Spanish and English; and 
• Horizontal project structure: building a collaborative framework to recognize that each member of our team has unique expertise to contribute to our collective knowledge building.

Each of these strategies embodies decolonial practice by rejecting extractive notions of knowledge production, upending colonial notions of power and expertise, and refusing the erasure of the lived experiences of Puerto Ricans. Decolonial models such as these are increasingly necessary in this moment of cultural reckoning and climate crisis.

¹ Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2012), xii.