Public Historian · Equity Practitioner · Community-Engaged Researcher
Co-creating history through place, memory, and community.
This is me
I am a Puerto Rican woman, public historian, and storyteller, deeply shaped by family, memory, and the women who connect me to where I come from. Doña Cayo, the matriarch of my Puerto Rican family, anchors my roots in rural Puerto Rico, while my grandmother Grayce connects me to my Irish ancestry.
Researching these two branches of my family made me deeply aware of presence and absence in the archive. I could trace generations of my Irish ancestry through a rich documentary record, while researching my Puerto Rican family history meant encountering gaps and silences—and turning to family memory, oral history, and knowledge carried across generations.
That duality—between Puerto Ricanness and whiteness, presence and absence in the archive, and what institutions record versus what families remember—has shaped the historian I have become. It taught me to ask: Who gets documented? Whose knowledge counts as evidence? Whose stories are preserved?
Oral History Archival Research
Historic Preservation Storytelling
Cultural Resources Public History
Interpretation Anti-Racist Practice
Equity & Belonging
I co-create public history that prioritizes inclusion through community-centered research, creative initiatives, and collective innovation.
Grounded in anti-racist, Black feminist, decolonial, and equity-centered practice, I work alongside Latine, Black, Asian, Indigenous, and other historically marginalized communities to document histories that racism and systemic exclusion have too often kept out of the historical record. My work is about more than filling gaps—it is about recognizing community knowledge as historical knowledge and creating space for communities to shape how their own histories are told.
Oral history is at the heart of that practice. I believe people are the experts in their own lives and communities. Through first-person narratives, lived experience becomes part of the historical record—not simply as a supplement to the archive, but as historical knowledge in its own right.
The work does not end with an interview or transcript. I collaborate with communities to transform oral histories and research into zines, interpretation, exhibits, videos, and multimedia storytelling that bring history into public life. By integrating storytelling into public history, I transform abstract concepts into tangible, relatable narratives—making history more accessible, human, and urgent.
