Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and the Recovery of African Diaspora History

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874-1938) was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, to a Black laundress from St. Croix and a German-born merchant. His life's work — recovering and preserving the history of the African diaspora — was born from a colonial wound: as a child in Puerto Rico, a teacher told him that Black people had no history.

Schomburg dedicated his life to proving that teacher wrong.

Migration and Activism: Schomburg migrated to New York in 1891. He became active in both the Puerto Rican independence movement — co-founding the revolutionary club Las Dos Antillas with José Martí's support — and the African American civil rights movement.

The Collection: Over decades, Schomburg amassed one of the world's most important collections of materials documenting the African diaspora:
- Over 5,000 books
- 3,000 manuscripts
- 2,000 etchings and paintings
- Thousands of pamphlets and ephemera
- Materials in multiple languages spanning centuries and continents

In 1926, the Carnegie Corporation purchased Schomburg's collection and donated it to the New York Public Library's 135th Street branch in Harlem. Schomburg himself was appointed curator in 1932.

Legacy: The collection became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, now one of the world's leading research facilities devoted to the African diaspora. It holds over 11 million items.

Schomburg's significance to Puerto Rican history is profound:
- He demonstrates the inseparability of Puerto Rican and African diasporic identity
- His work challenges the erasure of Blackness from Puerto Rican national narratives
- His dual activism — for Puerto Rican independence and Black liberation — models the intersectionality of colonial resistance
- He proved that the colonized can recover and preserve their own history, even when the colonizer seeks to erase it

Schomburg wrote: "The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future... History must restore what slavery took away." This imperative applies equally to the colonial project of El Archivo de Borinquen itself.