Dr. Athanasopoulos Awarded Global Engagement Grant (Puerto Rico, 2023)

Dr. Athanasopoulos has been awarded a Global Engagement Fund grant by Gonzaga University’s International Education Council to travel to Puerto Rico. His research will focus on the legacy of slavery on the island. Using the method of auto/ethnography, Dr. Athanasopoulos will be researching his own family’s history as Afro-Puerto Rican sugar cane plantation laborers in late 19th/early 20th century Aguirre, Salinas, Puerto Rico. This personal research is placed alongside important Puerto Rican histories, monuments, and theories. In doing so, this research project meditates on the prominent cultural discourses of Blanqueamiento (racial whitening) and Mestizaje (racial hybridity) and on-going debates over the Black Lives Matter movement in Puerto Rico. Analyzing these various materials offers a way to examine and wrestle with the enduring legacy of slavery in Puerto Rico.