Vanessa K. Valdés
No, ra-san-blaj in Kreyòl.
n. assembly, compilation, enlisting, regrouping (of ideas, things, people, spirits; for example, fè yon rasanblaj, do a gathering, a ceremony, a protest).
—Gina Athena Ulysse
I.
In memory of
Robert Valdés Jr.
Iris Delia Valdés
I’ve become a writer multiple times throughout my life. There was never one specific moment, no click, no aha! Rather, it was a gradual understanding that I had done this for most of my life, often without even realizing it.
I was blessed enough to grow up in a house with a library, one that collected all the books that my parents had read, separately and together. Robert Ludlum, Malcolm X, Susan Brownmiller, Gabriel García Márquez, Elaine Showalter, Lerone Bennett Jr., Mark Twain. They read broadly and widely.
My mother was always in motion when I was a child, taking care of us. But sometimes on Saturday mornings, I would see my father lying in bed on his side, reading his latest tome. This was after breakfast and before the games he would watch on television. He almost always had a book on his nightstand. Before I could read, I understood that this was an object that would call all of his attention. I thought it magical, to be that still, to stay in place such that even the very molecules in the air didn’t move.
Whereas Daddy was magic, Mommy was beauty in action. It was she who taught me how to read: literacy sets for toddlers and early readers from Grolier that presaged the purchase of the encyclopedia; sounding out the words, practicing penmanship. If my father was weekend mornings, my mother was daily exercise. I learned to stay still, if only for a little while.
The more I read, the more I was placed in advanced reading groups. From kindergarten, when I read while classmates played, to primary school, where, beginning in fourth grade, those of us who read more were given a different set of textbooks. Vocabulary lists, grammar exercises, memorizing lists of prepositions, reciting “The Owl and the Pussycat,” all of this I practiced with my mother. More than Mrs. O’Brien or Ms. Harten, or even my favorite, Mrs. Tucker, my mother was my first teacher. She was language itself.
It was at this time, around second or third grade, that my mother gifted me my first diary: a hot pink notebook that declared “My First Diary” on its cover. I wrote intermittently but really had nothing to say. Yet.
Journaling didn’t become a daily exercise for me until years later: after Daddy had died, after Mommy was hospitalized, having suffered a cardiac arrest in the primary school from which my siblings and I had graduated. Years after we, her children, had moved on, she remained, serving as a parent aid to kindergarten students. She always was a magnificent teacher. Her heart attack took place in October, 6 weeks into my first semester in graduate school. She had just moved me to this new city in August. I dropped the term, returning from the city of my birth only after she was well on her way to recovery. I began the new millennium broken, I thought. An elephant sitting on my chest, I was unable to move, except to drag myself to walk to campus for seminar. I was 21 years old. Within weeks it became clear nothing was getting easier. I didn’t know if I was ever going to know happiness again, but somewhere within, I knew I wanted to try.
I knew therapy would be the solution; daily journaling commenced shortly thereafter. Pages and pages and pages in a three-inch-thick small spiral notebook, 6 inches × 8 inches, with a black cardboard cover. I wrote about wanting to get through this, wanting to learn all of the lessons I needed to learn already, wanting to be better, wanting to be happy. I vowed to create the family I needed, the family who would love me as I was, bookworm and all. Every ache, every impatience, every dream, every desire, I wrote.
When people ask about the acquisition of an academic voice, I think back to that journal. It was one of the first places I learned to write. I cultivated my voice. Nothing I write should ever sound distant from who I am. If you’ve heard me speak—a Google search may be in order for some of you—chances are you’ll be able to hear my inflections, the tones I use, even here.
***
For most of my youth, I thought I would grow up to be a pediatrician. I liked children and loved biology. No one in my family had graduated from college, and like many first-gen college students, I thought the paths of success for my family lay in the options of “lawyer” and “doctor.” Note: I thought this. I would honor their love by going down one of these two paths. My parents never asked this of us, never made such demands of their children. They asked us to go to college. Both of them were denied the opportunity, both working from young ages, helping the families into which they were born, then marrying in their early 20s, having children, their first marriages ending. All they wanted for their children was to go to college and for us to be happy. What an incredible blessing, to be born to these two people who wanted nothing from me but my happiness.
In my senior year of high school, on my way to scoring a 5 on my Advanced Placement Biology exam, it occurred to me I wasn’t going to be a doctor. I had enjoyed biology, greatly—thank you, Mrs. G.—and even physics stayed with me, equal and opposite reactions and all—thank you, Mr. Pritchard. But chemistry had eluded me. To say that our teacher was bad would be to mischaracterize what she did at the blackboard as “teaching.” She is the only instructor whose name I have forgotten. Looking at the requirements to be a premed student, I saw “organic chemistry” on the list, after “general chemistry.” In an instant, my dreams of being a pediatrician vanished. I had thought I would be premed and an English major: as one career path evaporated, the other remained. I would read, I thought. And I’d figure it out. And I’ll be of service. “Serviam” had been our elementary school’s logo; “Veritas” was the badge I wore over my heart in high school. I want to be of service, I thought, I pledged. A prayer from my 17-year-old self.
***
The day I graduated from college, I placed my degree in the newly bought frame and presented it to my mother. “Here. This is for you and Daddy both. Everything I do from this point onward is for me.”
***
Every semester in graduate school I thought I would leave—except I knew nowhere else I could go. Where else would I be paid to read and write, to think, to learn? I was 20 years old when I began the Spanish PhD program; I graduated at 28, having dropped a semester, with more degrees than I had anticipated and a new language. For recruiting me while he was a visiting professor at my college, I thank William Luis. For the love and kindness they showed me as I struggled along, I thank in particular Elena Olazagasti-Segovia and Earl E. Fitz. For getting me through the finish line once it became clear I could, in fact, move through the finish line, I thank Benigno Trigo. I thank that era’s faculty of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese for their patience with me. I thank the university’s Graduate Student Council, its Women’s Center, and its Divinity School: members of all of those spaces showed me needed love and gave me the encouragement to keep moving forward.II.
If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
—Toni Morrison
In college I remember attending a student event marked “Caribbean,” and when I arrived, there was nothing from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic or Cuba.
Whose Caribbean? I asked myself.
Later, in graduate school, I vowed that one day I would write a textbook bringing together the region’s history. I had gotten frustrated plugging in the holes of dates as I learned the imperial histories, layer by layer. I was a comparatist even before I realized it.
The closest I’ve gotten thus far to creating a holistic sense of Caribbean cultural production within an academic enterprise was when I served as book review editor for sx salon, the digital imprint of David Scott’s Small Axe. Prior to my arrival, its focus had been the anglophone Caribbean, but upon my volunteering for the position, I asked then-editor Kelly Baker Josephs if I could expand the books reviewed to include the Dutch, francophone, and hispanophone worlds. She agreed.
***
Words were, and are, important. As I began my career as a scholar of literature, of words, I began noticing that “African diaspora” normally referred to the United States and only some of the Caribbean—again, almost never the hispanophone in any part of the Americas, certainly not Mexico or any place south of this country. Interesting. As if we—Black Americans, Black Spanish-speakers—as if we don’t exist. As if we haven’t existed for centuries now.
It was a deliberate decision, therefore, to use that phrase in the first two books that appear with my name on the cover. I convened a 3-day conference in April 2010 with the title Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys Through the African Diaspora, fully intending to publish the conference proceedings with the State University of New York Press. Cambridge Scholars Publishing saw the program of the conference online and invited me to submit a manuscript for an edited volume. The impetus behind the conference was simple: I wanted to be in conversation with colleagues. I had landed within the largest urban university system in the country and yet knew no one in my field. My first 3 years on the tenure track were marked by loneliness.
The conference was an invitation to be in dialogue with each other.
***
“Make sure to get a book out of this,” advised my dean at the time. “Never do anything without it going into print.” Every time I read dynamic conference programs, I wonder how many of those papers are doing to make it into print.
The process of putting a conference together was new to me. I had organized a series of talks in graduate school, with the assistance of colleagues, a series that lasted 2 years. I had never coordinated a conference. Yet a family member encouraged me to do so, and so I did.
I had never organized a conference proceedings or an edited volume, but the desire to get to know people and to do right by those who had trusted me with their work by making sure those publications emerged—that impulse outweighed the fear of not knowing what I was doing. Between the conference and the proceedings, participants would have two separate entries on their CVs. Those whom I invited to be a part of the edited volume would have three entries, including two publications.
The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies, the edited volume, was published in Leap Year 2012. The conference proceedings, which shared its name with the conference, was released 4 months later.
***
I had no desire to publish my dissertation as a monograph. I hear some of you recoil in horror, as others are fascinated because you’ve never been presented that option. A dissertation is a specific academic exercise to fulfill a degree requirement. No more, no less. Let it serve that purpose, I write as someone who has attained the rank of full professor. What many of my colleagues in this profession don’t acknowledge or understand is the emotional toll a dissertation takes on someone and the possible effects of dragging that writing into the new chapter of your life that is a post doc or a visiting assistant professorship or a lectureship or even a tenure-track position.
Perhaps this is only me: I work best on projects that interest me, that keep my attention. It doesn’t have to be painful, the process of writing. In the best-case scenario, you write something you love, and the process of its creation is marked by love.
When you hold any of my books, or see them on a screen, please know they are each created in love.
***III.
Schomburgitis – n. the desire and impulse to remain in the archive to cull the stories that yearn to be told. Pronounced as a Spanish word [Schom-burg-EE-tees], it is also understood in English [Schom-burg-EYE-tis]
In college, I learned to think of literature as a cultural product reflective of a particular historical context. I understood this instantly: historical events as the fertile soul that allowed for the artifacts that subsequently bloomed.
History is narrative; it’s how you tell the story.
In addition to centering the life of Arturo Schomburg (1874–1938), Diasporic Blackness features profiles of Dr. Ramón Emeterio Betances (1827–1898), Eugenio María de Hostos (1839–1903), Lola Rodríguez de Tió (1843–1924), Rafael Serra (1858–1909), José Martí (1853–1895), José Julián Acosta (1825–1891), Salvador Brau (1842–1912), “Plácido,” Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (1809–1844) and Evaristo Estenoz (1872–1912).
And then there are the breadcrumbs, the invitations for the readers to continue along their own paths of research. These include references to José Campeche (1751–1809), Rafael Cordero (1790–1868), John Edward Bruce (1856–1924), John Wesley Cromwell (1846–1927), Maria Stewart (1803–1879), Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), Ida B. Well-Barnett (1862–1931), Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954), Pauli Murray (1910–1985), Prince Hall (c. 1735–1807), Alexander Crummell (1819–1898), W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), Alain L. Locke (1885–1954), Charles S. Johnson (1893–1956), Langston Hughes (1901–1967), Countee Cullen (1903–1946), Eric Walrond (1898–1966), Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), Franz Boas (1858–1942), Melville Herskovits (1895–1963), Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969), Lawrence Reddick (1910–1995), Jean Blackwell Hutson (1914–1998), Ernestine Rose (1880–1961), James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), Hubert Harrison (1883–1927), Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961), Claude McKay (1890–1948), Jean Toomer (1894–1967), L. S. Alexander Gumby (1885–1961), Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883), Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), James Latimer Allen (1907–1977), Tato Laviera (1950–2013) and Pura Belpré (1899–1982).
***
After Diasporic Blackness, I have written on Dantès Bellegarde (1877–1966), Pedro Albizu Campos (1893–1965), Juan de Pareja (c. 1608–1670) and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908).
An acute case of Schomburgitis, I write, my tongue firmly in my cheek.
***
I’ve already written more than I had originally intended to write. I have been allotted more space, but in my writing, like in my conference appearances, I try not to ever use up all of the time and space provided. A note for the conference presenters: people always think of you as generous when you finish a few minutes early. They like when you respect their time and your own.
I thank Gina Athena Ulysse for the invitation to contribute to this special issue and the opportunity to present a personal rendering of a rasanblaj, as it were. I thank Maria Vesperi for the time and energy she has devoted to this anniversary celebration of a term that has changed scholarship, as it were.
This was never meant to be a comprehensive essay, but it was meant to be a documentation of some of the thinking behind how I create and why. I’ve not gone into all the other iterations of me, past (book reviewer, book review editor) or present (series editor), because one must not show all the things all the time.
Though several of the people I mention in this essay live, the vast majority are dead. I honor them by writing their names. I invoke their memories and carry their love for me. Energy is neither created nor destroyed; it is how I understand the passing of my loved ones.
I write and edit to make space for those who come behind, who walk beside, and even for some of you who started before me and are further down the road.
***
There is always more to any one of us than anyone else can perceive at any given time.
Notes on contributor
Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés is a writer and scholar whose work focuses on the literatures, visual arts and histories of Black peoples throughout the Western hemisphere. She worked as a professor and administrator at the City University of New York from 2007 to 2024, earning the rank of full professor. She is author of Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014), Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017) and, with David Pullins, Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velázquez (2023). Together, she and Dr. Pullins cocurated Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is editor of Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys Through the African Diaspora (2012), The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012), Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean (2020) and, with Earl E. Fitz, Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas (2024). She is series editor of Afro-Latinx Futures at State University of New York Press and series coeditor of Global Black Writers in Translation at Vanderbilt University Press. In addition to her long-standing relationship with the Schomburg Center, Dr. Valdés has collaborated with Ballet Hispánico for its dance, “Buscando a Juan,” and Lincoln Center for the Legacies of San Juan Hill series. She currently serves on the Advisory Committee of the Schomburg Center Centennial Celebration, taking place from May 2025 to May 2026; she also serves on the Advisory Boards of CENTRO Press and the Harlem Chamber Players and is a volunteer for the Harlem Opera Theater. As of the fall of 2025, Dr. Valdés serves as the Editor of CENTRO Press, the book-making arm of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College.
Contact Vanessa Valdés drvkv23@gmail.com
© 2026 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC