In 2019, I participated in an archival conservation trip to preserve local African American descendant papers in Samaná. The project was conceptualized by CUNY Associate Professor Dr. Ryan Mann-Hamilton, a descendant of the historic African American immigrants who first arrived in Hispaniola in 1824. Together with CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Library’s Chief Librarian, Professor Sarah Aponte, and Librarian Jhensen Ortiz, the project acquired its funding from the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials, the Institute for Socio-Ecological Research, and The CUNY Center for the Humanities.

For this project, we traveled to the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and the St. Peter’s Evangelical Churches in Samaná, where we preserved over 500 documents, from Baptismal Records to Marriage Certifications, dating from the 1890s to 1970. Our post-custodial archiving method prioritizes improving the church’s capacity to preserve and provide access to its materials while granting new access to digital audiences. Our method never extracts; instead, it strengthens existing informal archives, ensuring their longevity. Zoila Henríquez Mejía, the Black Dominican wife of the priest, had safeguarded these crumbling papers in an old suitcase for decades, essentially acting as the church’s organic archivist. The documents helped local Samaneses prove their Dominican citizenship after the Constitutional Court’s 2013 ruling that only people born in the Dominican Republic to Dominican parents or legal residents were considered citizens. Without birthright citizenship, these informal archives are more than history; they are vital to African descendants’ current survival and possible futures.

Thanks to the labors of Dr. Aponte, Dr. Mann-Hamilton, Jhensen, and CCNY’s Digital Scholarship services, these documents are now available in the open-access “We Choose Freedom: Samaná, Dominican Republic” digital collection.