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Assistant Professor and Program Director of Africana Studies Paul Joseph López Oro has written a chapter for a new New York City curriculum that will be taught in 7th through 12th grade public school classrooms in all five boroughs of the city starting this fall. The curriculum, titled , is part of the Hidden Voices project that seeks to highlight and honor the people who have shaped and continue to shape the country's history and identity, but are often “hidden” from traditional history books.  

Invited by a colleague at Baruch College working with the New York City Department of Education to make their curriculum culturally responsive and social justice-oriented, López Oro wrote a piece on Dionisia Amaya-Bonilla or "Mama Nicha," a political and cultural activist in the Black Central American community in New York. Amaya-Bonilla formed one of the first education cultural preservation organizations in Brooklyn for the Garifuna community, a Black Indigenous community from the Caribbean coast of Central America that uses language, music, dance, and folklore to keep their culture preserved throughout generations. 

"I'm really interested in how we transfer academic knowledge to the public sphere. And how we get non-academics into knowledge making and knowledge production. This is a really important way to tap in. I also think about the large Garifuna Central American community in New York that could really benefit from having their own history reflected back to them in their curriculum," says López Oro, who was excited to work on this project and make his research on Black history accessible to public school students.  

"I'm also thinking about students at ����Ӱ��ý when I'm doing this kind of work. Because part of what the Africana Studies program is doing at ����Ӱ��ý is trying to make Africana Studies a living thing. We want to be able to show how Africana Studies is connected to both intellectual community and public community," he adds. 

López Oro is currently finalizing the manuscript for his first book entitled Indigenous Blackness: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York, a transdisciplinary ethnographic study analyzing oral histories, performances, social media, film, literary texts and visual cultures to unearth the political, intellectual, cultural and spiritual genealogies of Garifuna women and subaltern geographies of Garifuna LGBTQ+ folks at the forefront of Garifuna transnational movements in New York City. The book will be released in Spring 2026 by Columbia University Press.