Archives and Afro-Referentiality: A Roundtable
In Spanish
This roundtable brings together the voices of academics, artists, and activists to explore strategies for achieving visibility and a sense of belonging for people of African descent in two regions of the North Atlantic. Namely, we will be joined by Yeison García López (Activist and Director, Espacio Afro), Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez (Professor at HUNTER-CUNY and Director, CENTRO), and Diana Berruezo-Sánchez (Professor at UAB and Director, BADEMS). Yeison, Yomaira, and Diana will establish a transatlantic dialogue that fosters the comparative study of the struggles for the visibility of people of African descent, both in academic curricula and in the artistic cartography of the North Atlantic. Panelists will address the issue of Black archives, emphasizing their availability, accessibility and use in rewriting Afro-referentiality (in both Iberia and the United States) and explore strategies for reconstructing Afro-referentiality in the United States and Spain, focusing on the management of the archive and its impact on literary and museum-based creation, the reaffirmation of African identity, and a sense of belonging.
This hybrid roundtable will be held in Spanish and is free and open to all (WashU members and beyond!).
Interested in joining us in-person? We have good news. All in-person attendees that register their participation via this from before October 28, 2026, will be provided lunch!
Want to join us virtually? Please use this form to register. Once you submit your registration you will receive an email with your access link and credentials to this event.
About the panelists:
Yeison F. García López is a political scientist and anti-racist researcher and activist. He is co-cordinator of Laboratorio Afrodiaspórico and Laboratorio Madrid Negro, Director of the Espacio Afro Cultural Center, and former Commissioner of the Afro Consciousness Festival (2016 to 2019). Yeison received an honorable mention in the Culture category at the 2022 National Youth Awards and was a finalist for the 2022 Mandarache Awards in the poetry category. Espacio Afro, the first hub of African-Spanish culture in Spain, is a cultural and political space devoted to supporting academic, cultural, and social initiatives on everything related to the African-Spanish and African/African diaspora community in Spain. Through a broad cultural programing with a post-colonial perspective, Espacio Afro celebrates Black, African, and Afro-diasporic cultures in Spain. Programs include artists residencies, theater, comedy shows, workshops, conferences, courses, urban youth camps, and more.
Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez i an artists, curator, scholar, writer and Professor. A native of Vega Baja and Caguas, Puerto Rico, Yomaira was born and raised in Hoboken, NJ and is a first-generation high school and college graduate. She is Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at CUNY and Professor in the department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies (Hunter), the Program in Black Race and Ethnic Studies (Grad Center). She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and her B.A. in English, Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Douglass College). Prior to joining the faculty at CUNY she was Associate Professor of Global Afro-Diaspora Studies in the department of English at Michigan State University. She co-leads the Diaspora Solidarities Lab and the author of two monographs, Decolonizing Diasporas (Northwestern UP, 2020) and The Survival of a People (Duke UP, forthcoming).
Diana Berruezo-Sánchez is the Principal Investigator of a European Research Council funded project, The Cultural History of the Black African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (BADEMS), and PI of a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, The Making of Blackness. she has pioneered a line of research on the cultural legacy of the sub-Saharan diaspora in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, earning recognition from international institutions and publishing her findings with leading academic presses and journals. Her works include the monograph Black Voices in Early Modern Spanish Literature, 1500–1750 (Oxford UP, 2024) and the co-edited volume Iberia Negra (Routledge, 2024). She has led groups and projects on this subject, such as The Making of Blackness (2022–2025) and the research workshops Black Iberia (2022) and Black Africans’ Agency (2020).