Cimarronas: A Black Women’s Archive of Ayiti-Quisqueya is a digital platform for the narration of the histories of ten Black women across colonial Ayiti, the island that is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Using digital mapping tools, post-custodial archiving, animations, biographical narrations, and site-visits, the Cimarronas platform will be a trilingual resource to researchers in Caribbean Studies, Geography, and Gender Studies, while remaining an accessible teaching platform for college-level educators. Beyond a transnational framework, Cimarronas moves scholars toward an understanding of the shared history of the island, particularly in the 16th through 19th centuries. The platform is currently under development with support from the ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant and the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective. 

Meet the Cimarronas team

This platform will make available a repository of resources that trace the intellectualism of Black women who were rarely literate yet authored enduring legacies in circum-Caribbean spaces. The platform crafts a genealogy of how organic intellectuals in the first colony of the Americas resisted, accommodated, and endured during the colonial period (1492-1844). From the La Negra del Hospital (circa 1502), the first recorded Black woman of the Americas who established an infirmary in the same locality as the first European hospital of the Americas, Hospital San Nicolás de Bari, to Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley (1793-1870), one of the largest property owners of the Haitian-Dominican unification era, users will gain access to primary source materials, translations, and critical commentaries that position these women within larger currents of Caribbean social and political thought. Cimarronas asks users to expand what constitutes intellectualism in Caribbean history? It shows us how digital resources help us better accredit Caribbean actors for the rich intellectual production that abounded beyond the realm of letters.

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Guerilla Archiving in Samaná.

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Black Dominican Studies Mentorship