A two-day symposium in Chicago this month will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School and the broader work of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center.
Laura Ruth Johnson, a co-organizer of the event, expects academic scholars, community leaders, activists, cultural workers, students, youth and more will attend and participate in reflective conversations.
Scheduled Friday, Sept. 23, and Saturday, Sept. 24, the conference builds on a collaboration begun more than a decade ago to learn from – and with – Humboldt Park’s multilayered Paseo Boricua neighborhood.
“In the mid- to late-2000s, a group from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed a relationship with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center (PRCC) and actually started offering classes in the community,” says Johnson, an associate professor in the NIU Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment.
“From some ongoing work and discussions came this idea of a Community as Intellectual Space Symposium that would acknowledge the role of communities not just as sites of knowledge and resources,” she says, “but also as theorizers of their own realities that generate meaningful theories, knowledge and practices related to issues in their lives.”
Holding the event in Humboldt Park – it took place there for many years, Johnson says, but has not been convened in nearly a decade – enhances the organic and genuine nature of the content.
“We acknowledge that communities are not monolithic spaces,” Johnson says, “and that they include all sorts of people with firsthand knowledge on the issues relevant to their communities as well as theories about how best to address those pressing problems and meaningful issues.”
The conference, sponsored by the Spencer Foundation through a small conference grant and co-sponsored by the PRCC, is free and open to NIU faculty, students and staff. Registration is available online for each day.
Day One will include a community tour and workshops on topics such as health; housing; education; business and economic development; and arts and culture.
More is planned for Day Two, including a plenary session and panels of scholars and community leaders addressing issues such as building sustainable communities, decolonizing education and rethinking community-university partnerships.
Johnson and conference co-organizer Jonathan Rosa, associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, will officially open the symposium with an overview.
Neighborhood tours and workshops “will be led by community folks – people who run the programs – and, for some, there might be some funding folks there and then also the participants,” Johnson says.
For example, she says, Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School’s principal, teachers, staff and students will lead a workshop in their building on West Division Street that includes visits to classrooms that reflect ideologies and accomplishments.
Meanwhile, the glimpse into business and economic development will take place less than two blocks away in the community’s business incubation center, where many of those shops and restaurants are born on paper and nurtured into thriving operations.
Incubator staff will present a case study of one business that accomplished just that, Johnson says, before the audience is encouraged to explore.
“People will be able to go around to the stalls and actually talk to people and try the food, arts and culture,” she says.
“There’s a new project along Division Street that is involved in creating these more open, airy spaces that are kind of meeting places and have a lot of public art in them,” she adds. “There are some structures and murals on the ground. The muralist who was involved in the development of that will be talking about some of the art initiatives, and participants will get to paint a mural.”
Saturday’s schedule is more traditional, including panel discussions.
Antonia Darder, professor emeritus at Loyola Marymount University’s Department of Educational Leadership and Administration, and Yarimar Bonilla, director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, will deliver the plenary presentation moderated by Rosa.
“They’ll be connecting some of the work in the scholarship and initiatives that they’ve been involved in and also commenting on some of the things we observe in Day One,” Johnson says.
Johnson will moderate Saturday’s panel discussion on university-community partnerships.
“We’re going to have some people who’ve been involved in this work related to the Paseo Boricua for many years, some who might be a bit newer to this work and some who have done research on it and published articles and some who have been really involved as a director of an organization and now work in other fields but are still connected,” she says.
Closing the day are Jose E. Lopez, executive director of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, and Jessie L. Fuentes, the PRCC’s director of Policy & Youth Advocacy and co-chair of the Puerto Rican Agenda of Chicago.
“They represent different generations,” Johnson says. “We want to talk about the legacy of the work in Paseo Boricua.”
She and Rosa plan to extend the event’s legacy by publishing journal articles or book chapters on the symposium and the conversations between a residential community of people with various backgrounds, interests and roles.
Johnson is a member of that group.
She has conducted work in Humboldt Park since 1993, when she served as director of a family literacy program, and has lived there since 2002.
After years of bringing NIU graduate students there to practice community-based research, she is familiar with the progression of their reactions.
“Teaching that class has revealed that a lot of people had stereotypes or stigma about the community – ‘Oh, I don’t want to go to Humboldt Park. Is it going to be safe there?’ – and what they usually end up leaving with is this great joyfulness about all the amazing things that are going on,” she says. “They see it as an intellectual space, as a vibrant cultural space, as a space of dialogue and as a welcoming space.”
Humboldt Park residents demonstrate that to her daily when she walks along Division Street, seeing friendly and familiar faces and taking in the vibrant murals and various cultural spaces and new businesses.
She credits the community as “pivotal, integral and profound” in her development as a scholar, professor and writer.
“The way you approach a community is very important, and for me, I’ve always been open and humble and wanted to learn from the community. If you come in willing to learn, you’re going to gain so much in terms of knowledge about the history of the community, the experiences of the people and the individuals doing meaningful work.”
Her experiences in the community in the early- to mid-1990s actually inspired her to attend graduate school – and she returned to the community in 2002 to conduct research for her dissertation.
“I was working with young parents at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center and was just so inspired by their knowledge and their exuberance, and the way they were confronting all sorts of challenges in their lives,” she says.
“They have all this knowledge and stories and cultural practices and lived experiences; it didn’t mean that they didn’t need support or that they couldn’t benefit from certain instruction, but it needed to be rooted their lived experiences, their own generational knowledge and family storytelling and community narratives.”
She hopes participants in the symposium will discover and walk away with the same motivation.
“I’m always inspired by what I see there, and I just want them to be inspired – and maybe to think of ways that they can continue to be involved,” she says.
“A lot of this about having an appreciation for another community – an acknowledgement and awareness of this other community – and some of the work that they do, so that they tell others about the community, all the rich, cultural resources available there, some of the amazing models and, maybe, get ideas for implementation in their own communities and organizations,” she says. “The goal is really to have dialogue among participants so that this doesn’t end here.”
For more information on the free symposium, email lrjohnson@niu.edu.
