Adriana Rodriguez is a junior concentrating in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Political Science from Teaneck, New Jersey. Her academic interests include the history of U.S. intervention and imperialism of Latin America and the Caribbean, a reimagination of postcolonial futures, and community organizing. She is active with Brown with the Center for Students of Color, as co-President of Dominican Students @ Brown, and as a past participant and facilitator of the Third World Transition Program. Last fall, she participated in the Consortium for Advanced Studies Abroad program in Havana, Cuba, where I had the opportunity to learn from some of the most incredible Cuban scholars she has ever met, and experience some of the most beautiful art she ever saw. Her Royce project, which also doubles as her thesis, will explore how colonialism has created both diasporic and island pasts and how it can contribute to their futures, as well. Adriana's research question relates to how movements based in community care both materially and ideologically disrupt colonial constructs, and to what extent liberation can exist in a world tainted by colonial legacy. She will focus on Puerto Rican care activism in the diaspora, as executed by the Young Lords’ Party in the 1960s, and on the island, through different community organizations that took charge during institutional failures post-Hurricane Maria. Through these examples, she will connect the colonial project imposed by the United States with discrepancies in care for Puerto Ricans, and subsequently, the birth of their own community-based organizing that aimed to mitigate these discrepancies. Adriana will call on historical archives, theory put forth by scholars like Franz Fanon and Roberto Fernández Retamar, as well as interviews with diaspora and island community leaders, in order to convey the role of grassroots organizing in achieving liberation.