Shakti Castro is a Bronx-born Boricua, historian, and mother. She is a PhD student in History at Columbia University where her research is focused on drug use, harm reduction, and activism in New York City’s Puerto Rican and Latinx communities.

My dissertation project engages the history of illicit drug use, syringe exchange programs, and AIDS activism in Puerto Rican and Latinx communities in the United States and the archipelago in the late twentieth century. Using archives, oral history, ethnography, and material culture, I examine the movement for drug user rights and safety as a way to assert bio-citizenship, claim racial equity, and engage anti-colonial protest. I use material culture methods to situate syringes, wound care kits, narcan kits, glassine baggies, and more as part of this protest and an example of the resourcefulness and ingenuity of drug users and allies. This work reframes how the public views drug users and allies and the ways this community engages the politics of space and place.