By Alejandro de la Fuente, Susana Matute, Judith Morrison, and Roberto Rojas Dávila

Harvard’s Hiphop Archive & Research Institute is part production studio, part classroom and part research lab. It’s something of a museum for hip-hop history. Vintage Nike sneakers, boomboxes and Run-DMC records from hip-hop's heyday in the '80s decorate the walls. For the past year, producer Pablo D. Herrera Veitia has been spending his days and nights here, making a place for Afro-Cuban hip-hop in the archive.