CUNY Exhibition Documents Lives of Black Africans in Early Dominican RepublicPosted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, United States on 2015-07-14 20:42Z by Steven |
CUNY Exhibition Documents Lives of Black Africans in Early Dominican Republic
The New York Times
2015-07-13
Scholars at the City University of New York are using clues left in 16th-century manuscripts and Spanish records to track the lives of the earliest black Africans in the Dominican Republic.
An exhibition now on view of letters and other documents from the archives of CUNY’s Dominican Studies Institute and the General Archives of the Indies in Seville, Spain, provides a window onto the lives of the often ignored black Africans of La Española, the island of Hispaniola.
In the exhibition, “16th-Century La Española: Glimpses of the First Blacks in the Early Colonial Americas,” 25 panels display photos of an original letter or record, along with an English translation, that explain or question situations involving formerly enslaved Africans on the island.
When searching the archives, Anthony Stevens-Acevedo, the assistant director of the Dominican Studies Institute, focused on keywords like “mulatto,” “negro” and “negra,” he said.
Read the entire article here.