The Migrations of Arturo Schomburg: On Being Antillano, Negro,
and Puerto Rican in New York 1891–1938
JESSE HOFFNUNG-GARSKOF
HISTORIANS REMEMBER Arturo Alfonso Schomburg principally
for his magnificent collection of books and documentary materials about
black history and culture. In 1926 he sold the collection, originally
stored and catalogued in his home in Brooklyn, to the New York Public
Library, laying the foundation for one of the world's richest archives for
the study of black culture. Schomburg was also a visible public figure in
Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, collaborating with elite black intellectuals
such as W.E.B. Dubois, Alain Locke, and Charles S. Johnson and
serving as a mentor to Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and other
young writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Unfortunately, the first half
of Schomburg's biography is less well remembered. He was, in the
language of the day, a foreign Negro, born in the Spanish colony of
Puerto Rico in 1874 to a black West Indian mother and a father of
German immigrant stock. Schomburg migrated to New York in 1891
where he found his way into a small Puerto Rican enclave in the burgeoning
Cuban community of radical cigar workers and nationalist intellectuals.
In his late teens and early twenties he helped to found a
revolutionary nationalist club named for Cuba and Puerto Rico, "Las
Dos Antillas."
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