A people dispersed.
A story still being told.
Diaspo Rico is a living archive of Boricua migration, memory, and the stories of a people still finding their way home.
Puerto Rico became “the site of one of the most massive emigration flows of this century.”
- Franciso L. Rivera-Batíz and Carlos E. Santiago, Island Paradox: Puerto Rico in the 1990s
From the 1920s through the 1970s, political persecution, workers displacement, and the concentration of wealth funneled into US corporations pushed Boricuas north in waves. Communities rebuilt themselves in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Hartford. A whole culture redesigned and adapted to survive under a flag that was never theirs to carry.
That exodus never stopped. It was never meant to. A manufactured debt crisis, political corruption, and disaster capitalism have forced native Puerto Ricans off the island again in numbers not seen since the great migration of the 1950s. And today, as mass deportation reaches the shores of the archipelago itself, the island where our people were once forced to leave is now being used to expel our Caribbean neighbors. A people who know displacement have a responsibility to name it. In all its forms. For all our neighbors.
This is what colonialism looks like over a century. Not just the first departure. The ongoing one. Diaspo Rico exists in this moment. Between the leaving and the returning. Between what was taken and what we refuse to lose.
What Is Diaspo Rico
Diaspo Rico is a transmedia archive built from audio portraits, video documentation, photo portraiture, and community submissions. It documents the lives of Diasporicans — the latest generation of Puerto Ricans navigating migration, repatriation, and what it means to belong to a place you were never fully allowed to stay.
The project lives across four forms: an Audio Portrait Series capturing intimate first-person testimonies, a documentary series tracing intergenerational diaspora through the Puerto Rican communities of the United States, a community engagement platform where Diasporicans submit their own stories to the archive, and a growing body of exhibitions and installations bringing the work off the screen and into the room.
But this project is about more than documentation. It is about repair. When a people have been scattered, assimilated, and told their history is a footnote, the act of being seen — fully, honestly, on your own terms — is itself a form of healing. Every portrait, every testimony, every story added to this archive is an act of reclamation. Proof that we were here. Proof that we remain.
This is not extraction. Every story gathered here belongs to the people who lived it. The archive grows because the community feeds it.
What is the common wealth for people with identity in two lands, and how does the sharing of these stories help a people find place and see themselves in each other?
This project begins and returns to one question.
Diaspo Rico is not a project waiting to happen. It is already in the room.
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A growing series of intimate first-person testimonies from Diasporicans navigating migration, repatriation, and identity. Listen at diaspori.co/episodes.
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Diaspo Rico is part of the Mellon Foundation-funded Bridging the Divides initiative, co-housed at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CENTRO) and the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University. A collaborative program uniting researchers, writers, and artists from across Puerto Rico and its diaspora to imagine a brighter future.
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A residency series in Santurce, Puerto Rico bringing Diaspo Rico to life as an immersive community experience through exhibitions, workshops, oral history, and live programming.
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Diaspo Rico has shown in New York as part of one of the most important documentary photography festivals in the Americas, bringing the archive back to the diaspora communities that built it.
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Community submissions are open. The project grows because the people feed it. Submit your story at diaspori.co/submit.
About the creator.
I am a Brooklyn-born, second-generation Nuyorican transmedia storyteller, photographer, and filmmaker. I grew up between two worlds — and for most of my life, I pointed the camera at everyone else's story.
For over two decades I have built creative spaces, community platforms, and media projects rooted in diasporic identity and cultural resistance. From co-founding FRESTHETIC, a boutique gallery and streetwear shop in Los Sures, Brooklyn, to serving as Producer and Editor on East WillyB— a satirical web series about a Brooklyn community fighting gentrification and holding onto its culture — to co-creating the Defend Puerto Rico Transmedia Project, to shaping digital media and storytelling strategy for cultural institutions across New York — my work has always lived at the intersection of community, memory, and media.
A few years ago I came back to Puerto Rico. Not just to visit. To stay. To live the question that Diaspo Rico has always been asking. That repatriation changed everything — how I move, how I make work, and why this archive matters to me personally, not just politically.
I am now based in Santurce. Diaspo Rico is the project I was always building toward. It is the first time I have let the story be ours completely.
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