Decades of work documenting Rochester's Puerto Rican community, arts collaborations and bilingual education are now preserved in a University of Rochester archive.
The collection belongs to Henry Ignacio Padrón-Morales, a longtime activist, educator, musician and poet who moved to Rochester as a teenager in the late 1960s and became a leader in Rochester's Latino community.
"I have grown more accepting of the fact that Rochester is my home," Padrón-Morales said. "I'm from here. I am from here. I've given this place a chunk of my life, and that is important in and of itself to have had that growth because I'll talk to people and you know they're from here, they're everywhere, but after being here this long, I consider Rochester as my home."
Over the years, Padrón-Morales has worn many different hats in Rochester, working as an educator in the Rochester City School District, a community advocate, and most recently co-owner of Hipocampo Children's Bookstore.
His work documenting the city's Puerto Rican community and its cultural and educational history is now in the care of the University of Rochester's Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation. The university acquired his documents for its archives, cataloging them as the "Henry I. Padrón-Morales papers."
The collection documents Padrón-Morales' work as an activist, organizer, artist, collaborator, volunteer and advocate for Puerto Rico and Rochester's Latino community.
He said parting with his personal documents was not easy.
"I was like gripping it, like you know, not out of total distrust, but out of some distrust in what would happen with it. How would it be treated? And not today, as I've seen, it's in a good beginning stage, and in good hands," Padrón-Morales told WXXI News.
Conversations about archiving his work began in 2025 when Molly Ball, associate professor of history at the University of Rochester, applied for a historic preservation grant through the Rochester Area Community Foundation.
Ball said she approached Padrón-Morales after an event at Visual Studies Workshop last November to gauge his interest in donating a collection of his documents to the university.
Students in Ball's Immigration and the Americas course helped sort through Padrón-Morales' collection, as did the archival team at the university.
Ball described Padrón-Morales as an institution in the community.
"I think he is a point person for so many people," Ball said. "He has this ability to bring different types of people together from the suburbs, from the city center, from charter schools, from public schools, from private schools. I think he's a spark that gets things done, that makes people feel welcome, and that actually creates community."
The collection also includes administrative documentation of Padrón-Morales' work as a bilingual kindergarten teacher and administrator in the Rochester City School District. The documents include proposals and curricula around professional development, teaching Puerto Rican and broader Latine history in schools, and bilingual and dual language educational practices.
Padrón-Morales hopes the collection will inspire younger generations to ask themselves: Where did I come from?
"I'm not going to be around in 25 years, in 50 years, in 100 years. This archive is here and will be here," Padrón-Morales said. "So to know that there is now a piece that will live way beyond anything that I could imagine-it's pretty powerful. It's pretty humbling, and it's pretty cool."
The collection is available for public viewing by appointment through the University of Rochester's Rare Books, Special Collection and Preservation website.
