CUNY Centro, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies

Founded in 1973 by a coalition of students, faculty, and activists, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CENTRO) is the largest university-based research institute, library, and archive dedicated to the Puerto Rican experience in the United States. We provide support to students, scholars, artists, and members of the community at large across and beyond New York. We produce original research, films, books, and educational tools and are the home of The Centro Journal—the premiere academic journal of Puerto Rican Studies. Our aim is to create actionable and accessible scholarship to strengthen, broaden, and reimagine the field of Puerto Rican studies.

Centro’s Library and Archives sustains all our work, it is the most comprehensive repository of our histories, accomplishments, challenges, and culture available anywhere and an embodiment of the collective memory of the Puerto Rican diasporic experience. True to Centro’s commitment, we work hard to make it accessible to researchers, academics, teachers, students, genealogists, filmmakers, and the community at large.

Today Centro has become a bedrock encouraging and sustaining the ongoing dialogue between Puerto Rican Communities, scholars, allies, and elected officials. We continue to work closely with a network of education, research, archival, advocacy and community-based partners and continue to aggressively produce and disseminate relevant interdisciplinary research. True to the social struggles that created the conditions for CENTRO we seek to link scholarship to social action and policy debates and to contribute to the betterment of our community and enrichment of Puerto Rican Studies.