I came to my research the way many of us come to our life’s work — through rupture. In 2017, the back-to-back hurricanes Irma and María devastated Puerto Rico and forced me to leave my home and transfer my education to Texas. What began as a survival decision evolved into a life-long intellectual inquiry into the enduring afterlives of colonialism, racial capitalism, and slavery in the Caribbean. My research is driven by a central question: How has race — particularly Blackness — been imagined, constructed, and deployed in the Iberian world from the 16th century to the present, and how do those ideas continue to echo in modern Caribbean literature and cultural production?

I explore the long arc of racial thought through literature, law, and memory, with a specific focus on late 19th- and early 20th-century Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Brazilian literatures. I am particularly interested in how writers and thinkers in the Caribbean grappled with the transition from slavery to legal freedom — how Black subjects were represented, erased, or reimagined as legal and cultural frameworks shifted. My work traces the rhetorical strategies, aesthetic forms, and silences that mark this transition, paying close attention to the political stakes of narration, authorship, and archive.

My scholarship intertwines together several correlated strands. I examine the invention and evolution of racial categories in the Iberian world during the colonial period and follow their legacy into the post-abolition era, especially as they are transformed or reproduced in Caribbean texts. I study the dynamics of cultural memory and historical silences, with a particular focus on how literature and education either preserve or suppress the realities of slavery and colonial violence. I am also committed to understanding the formation of Black subjectivity in literature, paying close attention to how gender, genre, and performance shape those portrayals.

What sets my work apart is its bridge between early modern racial thought and modern Afro-Caribbean literature—an approach few scholars pursue with equal attention. My methodology is interdisciplinary, blending critical race theory, archival research, history, and literary analysis to center Afro-diasporic voices. 

I currently have several forthcoming articles that examine portrayals of race across Brazil, Spain, and Cuba in the late 19th century, questioning the authors’ intentions when writing racialized characters — whether they intend critique, comedic effect, exoticism, or reinforcement of colonial norms. These projects allow me to trace how racial discourse moves between metropole and periphery, and how genre, tone, and audience affect literary representation. In parallel, I am developing several syllabi that explore these themes in the classroom: courses on the visualization of race in Iberian art, the resistance through music and performance, the transition from slavery to freedom, and the long shadow of colonial legacies in modern times. By integrating readings, archival materials, digital art, and musical texts, these syllabi make my research pedagogically vibrant and accessible.

Ultimately, I see my research as a contribution to rethinking how the past lives in the present — how old scripts of race and power are challenged, transformed, or reinscribed in new contexts. In telling these stories, I aim not just to critique the archive, but to expand it — making room for voices, memories, and imaginaries that disrupt the colonial legacy and offer new ways of being.