Estefanía Vallejo Santiago is a Puerto Rican art historian and PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Florida State University. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Puerto Rican art, with particular attention to muralism, site-specific practices, and the politics of space. Grounded in decolonial theory, Caribbean feminist thought, and critical race methodologies, her work examines how visual culture becomes a tool for place-making, resistance, and the assertion of communal identities in both Puerto Rico and its diaspora.

Her dissertation, Puerto Rican Muralism: A Critical History of Place, Communal Identity, and Politics, traces how murals have operated as forms of visual resistance and spatial intervention from the 1940s to the present. Through archival research, site analysis, and oral histories, she explores how artists use public walls as platforms to contest colonial structures, assert Afro-Caribbean presence, and foster collective memory. The project also considers how muralism intersects with broader debates around urban space, migration, and cultural sovereignty in Puerto Rican communities across the archipelago and New York City.

Beyond her dissertation, Vallejo Santiago’s research extends to the study of Creole architecture, print culture, and contemporary art practices that engage questions of Blackness, belonging, and spatial memory. She is also an active co-founder of the Ancestral Landscapes Lab (ALL), a collaborative project that documents and maps Afro-Puerto Rican histories of place and storytelling. Through her academic work, teaching, and community engagement, she is committed to fostering more inclusive, interdisciplinary approaches to art history that center the experiences and cultural production of marginalized communities.

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Email: [email protected]

In the Bronx, there’s a photograph that feels less like it was taken and more like it was found. Captured by photographer David Gonzalez, the image shows two Afro-Latino dancers, possibly Puerto Rican, moving together in the middle of a city street. No stage. No spotlight. Just a shared rhythm as brick buildings, hanging flags, and everyday life blur into the background.

This photograph isn’t about spectacle — it’s about presence. It captures Black and Brown joy without performance, intimacy without explanation, and love that exists openly in a public space. The street becomes a dance floor. Time slows. And for one brief moment, the city makes room for tenderness.

In this episode of Learn Something New Today, we unpack what this image teaches us about culture, migration, memory, and identity in the Bronx. We explore how Afro-Latino life, particularly Puerto Rican life in New York City, has long turned ordinary spaces into sites of creativity and resistance — and how joy itself can be historical.

Because history isn’t only written in protests, policies, or pain. Sometimes, it lives in the quiet confidence of two people choosing each other — right there in the street — reminding us that survival, too, can look like a dance.

This conversation was recorded before the capture of Nicolás Maduro, at a moment when Venezuela stood in deep uncertainty, but also quiet hope. In this episode, I sit down with Venezuelan historian Amanda Arroyo to talk about her country—not as a headline or a political chessboard, but as a place filled with people, memories, contradictions, and dreams.

Amanda shares what it feels like to watch Venezuela from both inside and outside its borders, reflecting on the daily realities Venezuelans live with, the historical forces that shaped the present, and the futures many still imagine despite everything. We talk about grief, resilience, misinformation, and what it means to hold love for a country that has been consistently misunderstood, exploited, or spoken over.

Some details may feel rooted in a moment that has since shifted, but that is precisely why this conversation matters. It captures Venezuelan thought and feeling before events were reframed by power, propaganda, or outside intervention. Above all, this episode is about listening—to Venezuelans, to their fears, and to their enduring hope for dignity, self-determination, and a future on their own terms.

Venezuelan voices matter. This episode makes space for them.

New York has always been a city built on hope.
From immigrants crossing oceans, to Black families moving north during the Great Migration, to Puerto Rican communities building new lives—this city has long been a place where people come searching for possibility.

In this episode, recorded live during Zoran Mamdani’s inauguration and block party, we talk directly to New Yorkers about what hope means to them right now. What they want to see change. Who they want the city to work for. And whether New York still feels like a place where anything is possible.

This isn’t punditry. It’s voices from the street—capturing a city in motion, at a moment that feels bigger than politics.

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Mental Health gone wrong

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Marcus Wesson was an evil man.

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