Welcome.
I'm Angélica a graduate student and environmental social scientist. Briefly put, my research stems from a deep curiosity about the connections between traditional ecological knowledges (TEKs) among Afro and Indigenous communities in the so-called US territories and climate adpatation/sustainability infrastructure (technical, political, economic, and otherwise) that supports equitable health outcomes.
This site is a digital research project about conservation, culture, and climate change in the archipelago of Borinkén (also called the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico). I desgined and deployed this site as part of the Cultural Heritage Informatics (CHI) Initiative..
The map-story on this site highlights a small handful of contempoary conservation practices and initiatives on the big island that support autonomy for local peoples, including women and Afro- and Indigenous descendant communities. This map is not exahustive, as there are many more examples of local and traditional ecological work across the big and smaller islas of Borinkén. This map is not a tour-guide, as the exact addresses of some sites are either unavailable or intentionally obscured. This map is part of a growing effort to situate Borinkén in larger discussions about climate change, energy equity, and other environmetnal discussions including in scholarly articles and scientific inquiry.
Importantly, this map-story lives in conversation with contemporary unmapping and counter mapping projects throughout the US and the Caribbean which highlight rich legacies of survivance in the wake of interconnected forces: climate change and (settler) colonialism. This project is a work-in-progress that engages conversations about the limitations of settler conservation (a lá John Muir) and amplifies the enduring eco-cultural (ecological and cultural) kinship of care Afro- and Indigenous- Caribbean peoples continue to maintain with the (is)land(s). This caring kinship is key to climate justice, energy equity, and to building good futures in Borinkén and across all the islands that repeat where the Caribbean and the Atlantic meet.
I offer this project with gratitude for all those who make this work possible, with respect to all which this project may connect, and humility to accept any errors here as my own.
This project is made up of several digital and non-digital components. I'll start with the digital components first and then get to the non-digtial ones. Let's get into it.
Primary digital components include: (1) a GitHub respository, (2) HTML and CSS code needed to construct a website and it's correspinding pages, (3) a story map and map style, (4) a website host, and (5) blog posts.
To create the story map and website I first neeed to create a digital work space. For this, our fellowship cohort was encouraged to use GitHub. Learning to collaborate and work independently in Git has been a blessing.
After establishing my workspace in a GitHub respository, I engineered the website (back-end and user-interface) by programming them using HTML and CSS coding languages. I first experimented with programming and designing the website and map using R, an open source software typically used for statistical analysis. However, after some difficulty finding R-friendly HTML & CSS tutorials (i.e. Bootstrap), I opted to code using Visual Studio Code (VSCode). VSCode is a free HTML-centric application which for which there are many user-friendly tutorials. I completed all coding using VSCode to create the website and my MapBox story map. MapBox is an open source mapping platform compatible with GitHub. After designing a map and a website, I deployed these two digital components through Netlify and host them through Github.
Primary non-digital components include: (1) a lifetime of longing to learn from tand be with the land of my father's people, (2) conversations with friends and family about what it means to do "environmental and climate work" from afuera (aka the diaspora), (3) achival documents detailing the process of making land into a state or national forest reserve (4) technical support from colleagues and ....ChatGPT, (5) Prof. Ethan Watrall's Friday lectures, (6) scholarship and white papers about the relationship between culture, climate change adaptation, and conservation, and (7) all my teachers.
For more, email me @ dejesu16@msu.edu.