The Puerto Rico Architectural Heritage Archive (PRAHA) is established as a collaborative exercise in archival administration which intends to build an ecology of intersection and relationality that interprets the archive as a pluriverse. Resources associated with architecture are not restricted to record groups which solely register the professional practices of architects and urban designers. In other words, they exceed the borders of the architectural archive conceived as a space for preserving a limited scope of specialization or disciplinary practice. Records registering or showing buildings, landscapes, sites, places, and urban or rural spaces are often inserted within multiple types of collections or record groups. The PRAHA is developing a collaborative digital repository that receives curated collections or record groups that are physically located in different repositories in Puerto Rico. The project focuses widely on architecture and spatial management or agency. As such, the PRAHA considers all resources associated to architecture, place-making, spatial occupation, dislodging, displacement, construction, and destruction as well as dwelling and vacating or expropriating.
The initial development and launch of the PRAHA’s platform has been possible due to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Luis Muñoz Marín Foundation leads the organization and administration of this effort.
The founding collaborators of this project are:
- Architecture and Construction Archive of the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR)
- General Archive of Puerto Rico (ICP)
- Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín (FLMM)
- State Historic Preservation Office (OECH)
- Para la Naturaleza (PLN)
- Puerto Rico Historic Building Drawing Society (PRHBDS)
- San Juan National Historic Site (NPS)
The PRAHA will facilitate access to multiple resources in digital format coming from these archives, conservation projects, and architectural documentation initiatives which share a commitment in supporting the Puerto Rican architectural heritage as far as buildings, records, projects, or sites. The academic and public institutions and not-for-profit organizations that support the PRAHA have systematically underscored the value of architecture as a fundamental piece of the history and culture of Puerto Rico from the technical, social, and humanistic standpoints. All of them, as well, recognize architecture as a common good.
Decolonizing the Archive
The history of architecture is full of omissions, ruptures, displacements, inaccuracies, and silences. Converging there are multiple biases from which the history of architecture and, by default, the archive, have underscored their complicity with the asymmetries of Power. Historically, archives have tended to preserve primarily the achievements of white powerful men while the work or contributions of others have been excluded or discounted as they were considered irrelevant, informal, primitive, or eccentric to the western/westernizing canon. While some archival practices and theories reproduce patters of inequality, erasure, silencing or homogenization inherited from colonialism, coloniality, or patriarchy, the introduction of subversion strategies that could revert or reframe these logics from epistemological models linked to the Souths, may facilitate the redefinition, readjustment, and even the prospective normalization of intersectional narratives or topics associated to architecture, occupation, displacement, or spatial management and agency.
At the PRAHA, the notion/process/project of decolonization is present in several ways. It is the theoretical framework that informs the construction of the archive. It is also the driving objective for the redefinition of what constitutes a record while proposing a situated archival practice in/for/from/about Puerto Rico. One important aspect of this project is our intention to define more fitting and reparative metadata elements while reframing or dismissing certain standardized authorities. We propose a readjustment of the scopes of both the architectural and archival praxis.
As part of its mission, the PRAHA wants to recontextualize the privileged voices within the archives while enabling “seeing” and “hearing” the achievements and struggles of historically marginalized communities and social groups. Racialization and racism, discourses and representations of ethnic “superiority/inferiority”, narratives framed by gender or class biases as well as the contexts of crises ‒such as colonialism, coloniality, impoverishment, and disasters‒, need to be refocused and renegotiated in order to make patent the contradictions that lie beneath the surface. The PRAHA wants to point users towards possible alternative readings of the records while underscoring counternarratives which will gain presence through metadata as well as through decolonizing outreach platforms.
The PRAHA’s vision is tightly linked to the idea of futuring as opposed to sustainability. Sustainability is often misinterpreted as a unidirectional process with a cap-point or tangible end. Futuring, on the other hand, refers to a process of sustainment that relies on constant design and redesign. This process may take different forms depending on who participates. For that reason, as part of its work methodology, the PRAHA adapts to an on-going process of construction, revision, adjustment, readjustment, and transformation. This way, the project delinks from the established paradigms and embraces and values, for instance, the hybridized, the collectively built, as well as the notion of indiscipline as a guiding principle. Indiscipline could be translated, in some instances, as a rejection of normalizing or standardizing practices in favor of located or situated archival solutions and proposals.
The PRAHA is and will always be an incomplete archive immersed in a process of constant construction, reconstruction, and transformation.
These are some of the concepts informing and driving our long-term efforts:
1. Inclusive access
By facilitating access to historical sources, the PRAHA aspires to serve diverse groups. In one hand, the project is committed to increase the visibility of historically underrepresented or undervalued groups within the records, particularly those associated with the production and interpretation of architecture.
By the same token, as a socially conscious project, the PRAHA looks forward to, eventually, be able to break all barriers and provide equal access to any user or researcher who wants to consult the collections. Furthermore, considering that the democratization of access implies as well, that represented groups be included in deciding how they want to be portrayed and which records are they willing to share, the PRAHA aspires to offer a sensible management model empathic and solidary with vulnerable subjects and to communities with specific cultural systems, preferences, and wishes.
In addition, we believe that democratic and egalitarian access to the archive concerns as well, the search for solutions for those who lack the proper infrastructure ‒technological or otherwise‒ or whose resources are precarious. This requires that we consider ways in which to facilitate access to our digital collections for those in impoverished spaces, with limited band speeds, or that inhabit in spaces of polycrises.
2. Puerto Rican Spanish and Espanglish
The PRAHA recognizes the fact that Puerto Rican Spanish developed from a history of colonialism filled with struggles, conflicts, translations, negotiations, and resistance. Even if a product of a history of domination, migration, mix, adaptation, and adoption, Puerto Rican Spanish is the primary linguistic system of the project because it plays a significant role in the construction of the world view of Puerto Ricans. Furthermore, the establishment of Puerto Rican Spanish as the default language for the PRAHA becomes a way to delink from the hegemonic presence of English as the supposed required or most acceptable language for academic o digital humanities’ initiatives.
However, from our intention to situate and represent the current reality of Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora ‒resulting from our political ties to the United States‒, the metadata elements for the records included display the information in Spanish, English or both. Hence, the metadata will switch linguistic codes depending on who provided the descriptive information. In that sense, we point to code switching as the projection of a situated register for Puerto Ricanness or a way to showcase a located consciousness about ourselves.
3. (Re)description
Normative archival description has reproduced social asymmetries and stereotyping practices. In many cases, it has devalued or dismissed knowledges that “dissociate” from the imposed canonical logics. To decolonize description by way of sensible and reparatory redescription is a way to reframe historical prejudices from critical and post-critical stances. It opens an opportunity to develop archival methodologies which recognize, point to, and transform the multiple omissions, deformations, silencing mechanisms, and erasures. In Phase II of the project, PRAHA created guidelines for reparative descriptions. In Phase III, PRAHA will focus on increasing reparative descriptions in the repository. As such, we strive to work within a framework of social justice that observes intersectional factors embedded within the records. For instance, race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, physical appearance, religion, different abilities, and others.
4. Identify and Educate about Offensive or Traumatic Content
A sensible and just description/redescription is not only about the substitution of violent, prejudiced, or offensive terms. Dismantling structures of power requires unlearning and relearning as processes that must be included into archival practice. Content identified as offensive, violent, disturbing, or unacceptable must be pointed out and annotated appropriately. The PRAHA respects the historicity of the records and of archival practices. For this reason we will not eliminate terms historically registered but we will suggests others that seem more acceptable. At times, we will simply educate about the offensive notions and the records’ contents that may be considered traumatic, insensible, or problematic. In the long term, the PRAHA will include context notes when racist, colonialist, prejudiced, or stereotyping language, terms, or notions describe othered or subalternized groups or communities. In Phase II of the project our main objective was to produce a dictionary of decolonial and decolonizing terms in Spanish that may be used by other initiatives with similar concerns as those of the PRAHA
5. (Co)authorship and the Reparation of Erasures
The notion of co-authorship opposes the canonic idea of the single creator usually attributed in the case of architecture to an architect, firm, or photographer. The PRAHA prefers the term “people associated to the resource”. It recognizes in this way that architecture, occupations, spatial and archival management are collective practices. For the PRAHA, the field element that typically describes the creator(s) will be named "collaborators" and will register all those participants in the production, management, or transformation of a work represented and in the production of the records themselves. IIn addition to architects and engineers, these may include contractors, plumbers, electricians, clients, laborers, among others.
This field element is particularly important for rescuing and recognizing women, construction workers, or dwellers; groups which typically have been excluded from orthodox description practices. In the case of the women, we want to identify them by their maiden names as their identities have been commonly partially erased or subedited to those of their husbands. Identifying the construction workers and the dwellers who appear in photographs tends to be a more difficult task. In those cases, if there is no information available, the PRAHA will include a note underscoring workers and dwellers as collaborators.
6. Indiscipline and Creativity
Indiscipline, or challenging authority, is a fundamental concept of decolonial theory and border thinking. In terms of the professional or academic disciplines, it implies, in the one hand, questioning the norms and canons where they are cemented, which often tend to the mimesis of European or North American structures. On the other hand, it drives to delinking from the preeminent anchorage to theories produced by the Global North which may lead to the homogenization and devaluation of what is ours or native.
In the PRAHA, indiscipline aligns with the agency encouraged by thinkers, activists, and epistemological and cultural models based in an integrative ecology of knowledges which in turn, value the productions from/by/of the Global South. The work of Puerto Rican thinkers, along those of Latin American, African, Australian, and indigenous origins guide our project. We have been inspired, as well, by like-minded archival or digital humanities initiatives.
Our conception of an undisciplined archival agency is sustained by creativity as an exercise that may assist us in designing (an)other archive. Indiscipline promotes the condition of liberty that incites us to project and create an archival space that is ours.