Miriam E. Jiménez Román was an Afro Puerto Rican activist, scholar, lecturer, writer, and editor, who spent her life studying the African diaspora in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. Born in Aguadilla and spending her first years of life in San Sebastián, Puerto Rico, Jiménez Román’s curiosity about the topic she would devote her life to was born out of her family’s working-class migrant experience. When they moved to New York City in 1952, they experienced racial discrimination, sexism, and classism, so years later in the 1970’s she decided to move back to Puerto Rico. While there, she realized that the anti-Black sentiments she experienced growing up in NY were also present on her native island. But, influenced by the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Nuyorican Movements, she took matters into her own hands by co-founding Encuentro Mujeres – a feminist collective – and she celebrated Afro-Latinidad by creating coalitions with African Americans. Miriam returned to the mainland U.S. in the 1980s where she completed her PhD in sociology from Binghamton University. She wrote dozens of publications on race, Taino revivalism, and the U.S. Census. In 1987, she was hired at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where she worked for a decade on exhibits and special programs. It was at Schomburg where she met her husband, Juan Flores. Together, they edited the award-winning book, The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States. She also helped organize the Black Latinas Know Collective in 2019 to promote and mentor Afro Latina intellectuals who study Blackness and Latinidad. Jimenez Roman passed away in 2020, at age 69, but she leaves behind a legacy of work honoring the pioneering history of Afro Latinos across the Americas.

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