Register Now for City Lore’s Somos Boricuas NEH Summer Institute

City Lore, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, is pleased to join with partners, the Bronx Music Heritage Center and Brooklyn College, to announce Somos Boricuas, a two-week summer institute for K-12 educators, and Museum Educators  from across the country.

The institute will be held in New York City from July 14 – 27, 2024.  

Through a series of lectures, hands-on workshops, and local field trips, teacher participants explore enduring questions in American immigration history, such as who belongs and who gets to decide? What rights is a citizen entitled to and what obligations does citizenship carry with it? What roles do cultural traditions and expressive arts play in how migrant and immigrant communities forge identities in their new homes and maintain cultural connections to their places of birth?  It also offers strategies to engage students in exploring their own ethnic and race-determined immigrant histories, and the many ways in which their families might have confronted and coped with questions of belonging, identity, rights, and community as newcomers in a strange land. Somos Boricuas focuses on the arts – music, dance, poetry, printmaking, festival arts, and vernacular architecture – because these art forms have enabled Latinos to build community in the U.S., stay connected to their homelands, and tell their migration story to themselves and others from the inside.

Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, this institute will offer K-12 school and museum educators learning tools, resources, lesson ideas, and historical and social content for teaching about immigration and migration experience of first- and second generation- Latin Americans, with a special focus on Puerto Rico. It will also offer insights and classroom applications that summer scholars can adapt to their teaching of other recent migrant/immigrant cultures. 

Participants will receive a stipend of $2,200. 

The application deadline is March 5, 2024.

Learn more and access the application.

If you have questions, contact Project Director Elena Martínez at emartinez@citylore.org, 917-557-2354.