Insights from the Road

In March 2025, the AHA began to manage the Mid-Atlantic and US Territories Region for the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) program, which allows us to provide grants of up to $25,000 to support educational programming for a range of audiences. Our region covers a breathtaking span, stretching from Delaware to North Carolina as well as American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. As we were getting started, an invitation arrived with fortuitous timing: Maritere Cardona Matos (Univ. of Puerto Rico–Humacao) was hosting a conference for her TPS project, PR-LEAPS, in which postsecondary experts worked with K–12 educators on enhancing critical thinking using all kinds of primary sources. Foothold established, I soon traveled to the island, both to witness the fruits of a previous TPS grant and to encourage new applicants to create educational projects rooted in the library’s vast troves.

During my trip, I took stock of my own relationship to primary sources and gained a personal insight. My primary source skills help me navigate more than the archive. They change how I approach new experiences in general. The same questions I ask of primary sources—about authorship and influence, origin and purpose, audience, interpretation, and bias (both my own and that of the source)—apply. And just as in a history classroom, if I want to build trust in my interpretations of evidence, I must engage broader contexts to make proper sense of those primary sources. (For this trip, I prepared with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s Island People [2016] and Jorell Meléndez-Badillo’s Puerto Rico: A National History [2024].)

In San Juan’s Ballajá, a 19th-century Spanish barracks remodeled as office space in the 1990s, I visited Humanidades PR and encountered La Boriqueña, a comic book about an Afro–Puerto Rican superheroine and defender of Puerto Rico. The comic’s cover alone is a rich text, beginning first with her name (the Hispanicized feminine form of “Boriken,” the Taino name for Puerto Rico). Her enrollment at Columbia University, New York City’s ivy jewel, is a nod to the Puerto Rican diaspora, which has led to nearly as many Puerto Ricans living in the states as in the territory. Her environmental science major comments on the challenges Puerto Rico faces from climate change and development while making knowledge of the climate crisis one of her powers.

My further explorations yielded other textured and evocative examples. In Ponce, Puerto Rico’s second-largest city, a crew of wonderful librarians from the Ponce Municipal Library took me to the city’s grandest sights, including the flamboyant Parque de Bombas, Puerto Rico’s first firehouse. Outside, its bold black-and-red Moorish design is preserved; inside is an evolving collection of fire department patches, most donated by firefighters from the states, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The patches reveal at once the different communities in which Puerto Rico holds membership and to whom its ties are constantly being renewed through the unceasing flow of tourists to its shores.

Geography, too, can be read like a primary source, and simply paying attention to place-names can reveal dimensions of the past in plain sight. Take Humacao, a town that sits on the perimeter of the Cordillera Central, Puerto Rico’s only mountain range. Five centuries ago, Taino leader Agüeybaná II led local chiefs, or caciques, including one named Humacao, to fight against early Spanish incursions before retreating to the mountains to preserve what was left of their devastated populations. Once the names reveal their origins, evidence of a vast Indigenous past—in cacique place-names like Arecibo, Daguao, Jayuya, Luquillo—is impossible to miss.

The TPS regional program has a special place in the constellation of humanities funding. It empowers local people by making connections, meaning, challenges, and addendums to the variety of official and competing narratives and sources (or the absence thereof) in institutions like the Library of Congress. The resulting education can shape not only how we interact with the world we know but how we encounter what we don’t know. In this way, the skills we teach with primary sources are essential to democracy. To me, that sounds like primary sources are a pretty big deal.