Facing historical suffering: My experience discovering the Hispanic Reading Room’s Pamphlet Collection

The following is a post by Katia Pereira Feliciano, 2025 Junior Fellow, Hispanic Reading Room, Latin American, Caribbean, and European Division. Except where noted, all photographs were taken by the author.

In his book Las tribulaciones de Jonás (The Tribulations of Jonas), Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá chronicles the wake of the first elected Puerto Rican governor, Luis Muñoz Marín. Rodríguez Juliá shares a quote from a radio host who was narrating what he saw in the multitude of crowds: “Ladies and gentlemen…what is happening here is indescribable…people are having a historical attack” (Rodríguez Juliá, 1981, p. 83, my translation). The radio host immediately corrects himself, reiterating that he meant to say a hysterical attack. Patricia Gherovici, in her book The Puerto Rican Syndrome, combines the words hysteria and history into hystory, concluding that those who suffer from hysteria suffer from “wandering stories”. (Gherovici, 2003, p. 49) I read these fragments in the weeks before my departure from Puerto Rico to Washington D.C. where I would work as a Junior Fellow in the Hispanic Reading Room, engaging and processing the pamphlet collections of three countries throughout the summer of 2025. 

As antiquated and problematic as the word hysteria has become, it seems I packed that idea with me as I frantically prepared my suitcase for the longest period I had ever been away from home. Throughout the internship, the discoveries I made have developed this idea of suffering from history into a question: What do you do with the history you suffer?    

My time here has taught me that one possible answer is simple: keep it, archive it, catalog it, preserve it, and share it via the many tools and pathways available for public access to collective memory. I consider that creating space for collective memory, be it a physical or digital one, is more a social necessity than a point of interest to a handful of academics.    

For my Junior Fellows project titled “Online Inventory of Hispanic Reading Room Pamphlet Collections,” I worked on the pamphlet collection of Puerto Rico, Guyana, and Nicaragua, three countries I selected along with my project mentors Henry Widener and Joseph Torres–González. Many of the pamphlets I worked with date from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, an era defined in Latin America by revolutions, uprisings, dictatorships, and their overthrows. However, steeped in these collections brimming with hardship, I realized that historical suffering implies the existence of a remedy. For me, discovering the voices of Latin American women—many of whom were young college students—along with their poetry and valiant actions, has served to remedy the pain of my own journey within history. I will briefly share a glimpse into the figures whose presence in the pamphlet collections have nurtured my experience this summer.

In the Puerto Rico Pamphlet Collection, I found an issue of the literary magazine Guajana from 1978. Dedicated to the memory of Marina Arzola, a poet from Guayanilla who had passed away two years prior, this issue presents a compilation of some of her poetry. The introduction, written by Guajana’s editorial team, shares anecdotes of Arzola, a vibrant and whimsical student at the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras campus, during the late 50s and early 60s. They describe how she would often dress head to toe in green and would dance across the hallways, the same hallways that I walk through today.

Both the introduction and the conclusion, written by Luis Hernández Aquino in this issue, stresses how complicated Arzola’s poetry was. Intrigued, I braved her poetry and lived to tell you that it is, indeed, very complicated. Through invented words and phrases, Arzola gave birth to a very particular, abstract world. The frustration that I had not discovered Arzola’s world sooner quickly gave way to an appreciation that Box 4 of the Puerto Rican pamphlet collection had introduced me to a schoolmate. I received the gift of knowledge of Arzola’s story. 

When the time came to work with the boxes of Nicaragua, the first pamphlet I grabbed was a transcribed speech by Tomás Borge from 1982 titled La mujer y la revolución nicaragüense (Women and the Nicaraguan Revolution, my translation). Speaking to a roaring crowd, Borge remembers the fallen guerrilleras of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), or Sandinista National Liberation Front: “Luisa Amanda Espinoza shed her blood and guerrilla Arlen Siu let her last song be heard” (Borge, 1983, p, 18, my translation). Later, I learned that Luisa Amanda Espinoza gave name to the Asociación de mujeres nicaraguenses Luisa Amanda Espinoza (AMNLAE) or The Luisa Amanda Espinoza Association of Nicaraguan Women, a selection of whose publications are present in the Nicaragua pamphlet collection. Through pictures and written work shared by the association, I discovered the efforts of Nicaraguan women towards the liberation of both their country and their gender.

Poetry was also at the core of guerrilleras within the AMNLAE. Seen in their book La mujer en Nicaragua (Women in Nicaragua, my translation), the organization participated in poetry workshops in the Indigenous community of Morimbó in the western city of Masaya and in other workshops by the Sandinista Air Force. The legacy of poetry of guerrilleras is immortalized with Arlen Siu, the Chinese–Nicaraguan poet and singer–songwriter who died in combat at the age of 20. 

The Guyana pamphlet collection gives further proof of poetry’s vital role during social upheaval. Written from 1945 to 1971, Rajkumari Singh Collection of Poems webs her world as a second-generation Indo–Guyanese woman amidst the political and violent struggles of Guyana for independence from the British empire. Poetry and Philosophy in Drama, a compilation of extracts of by Norman E. Cameron, shares literary works also written during this period. In his introduction, Cameron laments the economic constraints that affect authors who wish to publish their works, adding a note “The more I think of the subject, the more I feel that one should hope for a comprehensive work as envisaged” (Cameron, 1973, p, 40). 

The introduction to the pamphlet Guajana mentions that Marina Arzola’s poetry “poetry is not ‘understood’ it is perceived” (p. 2, my translation). In other words, Arzola’s poetry was meant to be seen. My internship has allowed me to see the women involved in the histories of their countries, and in turn to see myself. During my internship, I often remarked to friends and family back home on how much can happen to someone in one summer. In a beautiful paradox, seeing roughly 546 pamphlets pass by my desk, has taught me that a lot of history can happen in one summer, too. Making the pamphlet collection accessible so that other people can truly see like I have seen has been a great honor. 

Discovering the stories present in the Hispanic Reading Room’s pamphlet collections on Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, and Guyana has contributed greatly to the idea of historical suffering that I had packed in my suitcase. If suffering from history has symptoms, writing poetry and becoming guerrilleras are most certainly some of them. I was wrong, however, in assuming that such historical suffering has a remedy. To cure historical suffering would imply and end to history. Through my work with the Hispanic Reading Room’s Pamphlet Collections, I have learned that suffering can be transformed into knowledge, which we can use to create a path forward.