Yale has no formal undergraduate program that takes the Caribbean seriously as a region of study.

The Caribbean was the first center of sustained European colonial rule in the Americas, a central crucible of Atlantic slavery and the plantation economy, the birthplace of the Haitian Revolution, and today the site of some of the most acute expressions of ongoing U.S. colonial power — visible in Puerto Rico's continuing colonial condition, in PROMESA's federal oversight regime and the enduring doctrine of the Insular Cases. Its thinkers — C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, Sidney Mintz, Kamau Brathwaite — produced scholarship foundational to the global intellectual disciplines.

The Caribbean cannot be folded into Latin America. It is Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, Dutch-speaking, Creole-speaking, and diasporic all at once — and it extends into New York, New Haven, Miami, London, and Paris. At Yale it is nonetheless absorbed into Latin American Studies, a framework whose Spanish or Portuguese language requirement erases most of the region outright.

This is not a resource problem. Yale already teaches more than thirty eligible courses, documented in the full proposal. It has faculty whose research centers the Caribbean across History, Black Studies, French, ER&M, Theater and Performance Studies, History of Science and Medicine, and the School of the Environment. It has substantial Caribbean archival collections at the Beinecke. What is missing is the pathway and the credentials behind them.

We are not asking Yale to build a field from scratch. We are asking Yale to recognize and organize a field that already exists here.

This is not a new request. Despierta Boricua has been asking since 1973, when CENTRO founding director Frank Bonilla wrote to President Kingman Brewster in support of Puerto Rican Studies at Yale. A full major proposal followed in 1974. In 1982, a Chicano/Boricua Studies concentration was announced as the first in the Ivy League — then went unresourced and quietly dissolved. In the late 1980s, DB students wrote their own course proposals and recruited alumni to teach seminars for free.

Brown has a Latin American and Caribbean Studies concentration. Columbia has a Greater Caribbean Studies program. The University of Miami has Hemispheric Caribbean Studies.

In 2011, Professor Hazel Carby said at Yale that the Caribbean was an area Yale didn't know where it was. Fifteen years later, there is still no formal answer.

What we are calling for

We call on Yale University to:

1. Authorize a Certificate in Caribbean Studies: Archipelagos, Seas, and Diasporas, for launch in the 2027–28 academic year;
2. Establish a standing faculty advisory committee to oversee it;
3. Designate the MacMillan Center / CLAIS as its administrative home, co-sponsored by Black Studies, RITM, and ER&M.

Various courses across four thematic areas, drawn from courses Yale already offers.

Who we are

Despierta Boricua, the Dominican Students Association, the Cuban American Undergraduate Student Association, the Caribbean Students Organization, the Haitian Students Association — with the support of CENTRO (Hunter/CUNY), the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, the CUNY Haitian Studies Institute, UConn's Puerto Rican Studies Initiative, and the Rutgers Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration.

Addressed to: the Yale College Committee on Majors, the Office of the President, and the Office of the Provost.

You can read the full proposal here: Yale Caribbean Certificate Proposal & complete survey here: Course History and Interest