Arturo Alfonso Schomburg’s Legacy of Alternative Narratives in Contemporary Diasporican Lilliam Rivera’s “Never Look Back”

• Kiara Meléndez Rivera, English, University of Puerto Rico

• Laura Helton, English, University of Delaware

The purpose of this paper is to examine the presence of Black Puerto Rican Arturo Alfonso Schomburg’s philosophy on the power of alternative narratives of history to dismantle systems of oppression and validate the experiences of marginalized peoples’ like Afro Puerto Ricans and Afro Dominicans in Lilliam Rivera’s young adult fiction novel Never Look Back. Rivera incorporates Afro Caribbean magical realism in her retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, thus creating a distinctly diasporic atmosphere in which to implement Schomburg’s ideologies. These act as a call to action to the oppressed, encouraging them to seek out the stories of resilience, triumph and self love that a society ruled by white supremacist thought attempts to hide and erase from them. Only through educating oneself and others on the past, believed Schomburg, can we build a better future where these narratives become the standard rather than afterthoughts. After analyzing one of the 20th century bibliophile and collector’s most renowned quotes from his essay The Negro Digs Up His Past, “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future… History must restore what slavery took away”, and identifying how the characters in Never Look Back modernize and diversify this belief by applying it to their particular struggles as AfroLatinx youth in the 21st century, I propose that Schomburg’s legacy is prevalent and crucial in the contemporary works of Diasporicans (Puerto Ricans from the diaspora), the very people whose excellence he strove to showcase in his revolutionary collection.