The Letter That Sparked the Vision

1975 — A Diasporic Conversation Begins

Institutions do not always begin with buildings.

Sometimes they begin with a question.
Sometimes with a moment of recognition.

And sometimes they begin with a letter.

In 1975, while conducting research for her doctoral dissertation, Marta Moreno Vega encountered a small archival artifact that would quietly shape the trajectory of her life and the future of Caribbean cultural scholarship in New York City.

The letter was written by Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, the Afro-Puerto Rican historian whose relentless archival work helped establish the intellectual foundations of Black studies in the United States.

Schomburg was writing to his friend, the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén.

In the letter, Schomburg asked Guillén to welcome another brother of the diaspora arriving in Cuba: Langston Hughes.

On the surface, it was a simple gesture of hospitality between friends. But within that exchange lived something much deeper. It revealed a network of intellectual and cultural relationships stretching across the African diaspora—relationships that had existed long before universities or institutions began studying them.

A Puerto Rican archivist writing to a Cuban poet about an African American writer.

Three thinkers.
Three cultural geographies.
One shared diasporic imagination.

For Dr. Vega, this moment illuminated a profound truth. The African diaspora had never existed in isolation. Across the Caribbean and the Americas, artists, scholars, and spiritual leaders had long been exchanging ideas, stories, and cultural practices.

These conversations were happening through music, poetry, religious traditions, and community organizing. Yet the institutions responsible for documenting culture rarely recognized those connections.

The dominant academic narrative separated the histories of Black people in the United States from those of the Caribbean and Latin America. The result was a fragmented understanding of the African diaspora.

Dr. Vega saw something else entirely.

She saw a living intellectual network.

She saw a diaspora already in conversation with itself.

What did not yet exist was a space dedicated to studying those connections.

A place where the cultural, artistic, and spiritual traditions of the African diaspora across the Caribbean could be examined together. A place where scholars, artists, and community members could gather not simply to preserve history but to actively interpret it.

From that moment of discovery emerged a vision.

Within a year, that vision would begin to take institutional form through the creation of a small research initiative that would later become the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute.

But the origin story matters because it reveals something fundamental about CCCADI.

This institution did not begin with funding.

It did not begin with a building.

It began with archival inquiry.

From the very beginning, CCCADI’s work has been rooted in the belief that archives are not passive collections of the past. They are living spaces where hidden connections can be uncovered and new frameworks of understanding can emerge.

The letter between Schomburg and Guillén was not simply a historical curiosity. It was evidence of a larger intellectual ecosystem.

An ecosystem that stretched from Harlem to Havana.
From Puerto Rico to the broader Caribbean.
From poetry to political thought.

That recognition would shape CCCADI’s mission for decades to come.

Today, nearly fifty years later, the Community Archive Lab for Culture and Justice continues that work. The archive is not simply a repository of documents. It is a place where the cultural memory of the African diaspora can be examined through new lenses.

Every photograph, flyer, recording, and handwritten note contains a story waiting to be re-contextualized.

And sometimes the most transformative discoveries begin with something small.

A piece of paper.
A conversation between friends.
A letter crossing the waters of the Caribbean.

From the Archive

Artifacts connected to this story:

• Archival references to correspondence between Arturo Schomburg and Nicolás Guillén
• Early research materials connected to Dr. Marta Moreno Vega’s dissertation work
• Early CCCADI conceptual notes and founding documentation