Haciendo Patria: The Puerto Rican Flag in the Art of Juan Sánchez

Michelle Joan Wilkinson

uerto Rico is an island adrift in the predominantly postcolonial sphere that is its topographic equivalent. Lying between the North and the Nuestras Américas, epitomizes the historical reality of a “divided nation”: nearly one-halfP of the Puerto Rican population lives on the US mainland.¹ Some scholars have used the phrases “commuter nation” and “translocal nation” to illuminate the transit of bodies on fl ights between San Juan and cities such as , Miami, and Chicago.² Th ese terms—divided nation, commuter nation, translocal nation—affi x paradigms of nationality, albeit a transitory nationality, onto the people of this nonsovereign nation. Puerto Rican nationality is thus rendered vis-à-vis the dynamics of Puerto Rican migra- tion and, specifi cally, migration to the US mainland. As such, Puerto Rican nationality and nationalism operate in relational modes that emphasize the self-positioning and

1. On “the divided nation” see Kal Wagenheim and Olga Jímenez de Wagenheim, eds., Th e : A Documentary History (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1994), 283. 2. On “the commuter nation” see Carlos Antonio Torre, Hugo Rodríguez-Vecchini, and William Burgos, eds. Th e Commuter Nation: Perspectives on Puerto Rican Migration (Río Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1994). On “translocal nation” see Mayra Santos-Febre quoted in Agustín Lao-Montes, “Islands at the Crossroads: Puerto Ricanness Travelling between the Translocal Nation and the Global City,” in Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking and Nationalism, ed. Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Ramón Grosfoguel (Minneapolis: University of Press, 1997), 177.

Small Axe 16, September 2004: pp. 61–83 ISSN 0799-0537

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 the multiple locations of the Puerto Rican subject within the diaspora. Migratory fl ow, then, functions as the defi nitive narrative of nation. As the anthropologist Jorge Duany notes in the title of his 2002 book, Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans are a “nation on the ssmallmall move.”³ aaxexe Just as discussions of the national question are part of daily life on the island, expres- sions of nationalism are de rigueur in mainland Puerto Rican communities. In , for example, the omnipresence of the Puerto Rican fl ag is striking given the city’s infi nitely international population. Puerto Rican fl ags decorate apartment win- dows in , hang from car rearview mirrors in , cling to backpacks in the Bronx, and fl ash on tattooed bodies striding down during the annual Puerto Rican Day parade. Th e fl ag miniatures are vestiges of the national emblem that have been re-sourced from and reinserted into the city’s landscape; they give viewing pleasure to the urban dwellers and passersby, many of whom regard the fl ags as visual affi rmations of cultural pride, if not physical demarcations of nation-space. Th is essay considers the ways the placing of and playing with Puerto Rican fl ags constitutes a visual praxis of “haciendo patria”—a term loosely translated here to mean nation building.⁴ Amid the rhetoric of a transitory nationality, the planting of the fl ag signals Puerto Rican rootedness and belonging within mainland communities, even as it evokes emotional connections to an island past. For outside of the communal, diasporic spaces maintained by mainland Puerto Ricans, the nation’s past, present, and future is something of a void—or something avoided.

HACIENDO PATRIA IN THE DIASPORA

Puerto Rico, the shining star, the great lap dog of the Caribbean. —Abraham Rodriguez, “Th e Boy Without a Flag”

A former Spanish colony, Puerto Rico became a protectorate of the of America in 1898, following the Spanish-American War. In 1917, under the Jones Act, Puerto Ricans on the island were granted US citizenship. Citizenship allowed Puerto

3. Jorge Duany, Th e Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 4. I borrow the term “haciendo patria” from the theme and title of a Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA) conference. Th e conference, and an accompanying art exhibition with the same title, was held in Chicago, Illinois, in October 2002. 6622

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Ricans to enlist in the US Army—a boon in 1917, as the United States entered World War I.⁵ In 1952, under the leadership of Luis Muñoz Marin and his Popular Dem- ocratic Party (Partido Popular Democrático), Puerto Rico became a “free associated state” (Estado Libre Asociado). As a commonwealth of the United States but not a state, MMichelleichelle JJoanoan Puerto Rico receives limited benefi ts in the form of federal assistance from its so-called WWilkinsonilkinson free association.⁶ In contrast to the neighboring Caribbean islands that produced revo- lutions or affi rmed themselves as republics or nation-states, Puerto Rico uses nonbind- ing polls, called plebiscites, to determine whether island residents prefer to pursue US statehood, independence, or maintain their commonwealth status. Since 1952 common- wealth supporters have outweighed the other groups, exposing the willingness of the Puerto Rican people to remain in between, to be “free” and “associated.”⁷ Indeed, Puerto Rico’s unique relationship with the United States, arguably a kind of exceptionalism, fuels the island’s exemption and erasure from the rest of the Americas. Consider, for example, the experience that the cultural scholar Jean Franco recounts. On a visit to a folk museum in São Paulo, Brazil, she observed “a huge relief map of America.”⁸ Stressing the point that the museum was housed within a complex erected as a tribute to “Latin American solidarity,” Franco recalls, As I walked alongside the map tracing the waterways, cities and mountains from the Tierra del Fuego to Cuba I noticed something odd about the Caribbean—Puerto Rico was missing. It was not on the map of . . . . Both in Latin America and the United States, Puerto Rico stands for something which cannot be assimilated.⁹ Th e cartographic exclusion of Puerto Rico pointedly captures its amorphous existence somewhere between the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Puerto Rican islanders do retain some level of autonomy. Islanders elect a local gov- ernor and a resident commissioner, who presents their interests to the US Congress. Yet these representatives are not allowed to vote—or to “represent”—Puerto Rican islanders

5. Referring to the connection between the bestowing of US citizenship to Puerto Ricans and their immediate entry into military service, Marimar Benítez notes, “It was no coincidence that until 1934 the Bureau of Insular Aff airs of the War Department was the agency charged with the island’s administration.” “Th e Special Case of Puerto Rico,” Th e Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920–1970 (New York: Th e Bronx Museum of the Arts in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 73. 6. For example, island residents do not pay US federal income tax; likewise, they are not permitted to vote in US presidential elections. 7. Th e rival portion of the island’s population wants to be a state—specifi cally, the fi fty-fi rst state. Advocates of independence represent only a small fraction of the island’s population; although there are many artists and intellectuals who support independence, the group often accounts for no more than 5 percent of the vote. 8. Jean Franco, foreword to Juan Flores, Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993), 9. 9. Ibid., 9. 6633

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 in the same way that elected offi cials from the Commonwealth of Virginia would repre- sent Virginians. On the other side of the equation, the United States benefi ts from the geopolitical value the island has aff orded US military and defense interests. Scholars like ssmallmall Ramon Grosfoguel note that “Puerto Rico’s geopolitical location was strategically impor- aaxexe tant for the U.S. government’s defense against possible European aggression against the Canal and the U.S. mainland.”¹⁰ Indeed, military bases occupy prime areas on the hundred-mile-long by thirty-fi ve-mile-wide main island, and US armed forces have conducted hazardous missile testing on the smaller surrounding islands of Culebra and Vieques. Th e unequal alignment between Puerto Rico and the United States relegates Puerto Rican islanders to the margins, just as the term “mainland” suggests their distance from the center. Th e same unwieldy positioning can be said to dislodge Puerto Rican visual art from the art historical axes that traditionally would frame it. Whether described as anomalous, ambiguous, or exceptional, Puerto Rico presents a “special case,” accord- ing to the art historian Marimar Benítez. In her foundational essay, titled “Th e Special Case of Puerto Rico,” Benítez comments that Puerto Ricans’ “resistance to Anglo-Saxon culture” and “constant movement back and forth between the mainland and the island” reinforce a sense of history and culture for US residents.¹¹ Yet for non–Puerto Ricans, the island and its art remain among the invisible and the unknown. Analogously, then, we might read Puerto Rico’s absence from the “huge” map of Latin America as akin to Puerto Rican art’s absence from the vast tomes of “Latin American art.” Mainland Puerto Rican art is likewise underrepresented in canonical histories of “American art,” a fact that mirrors the diminished representation of Puerto Rican communities in cul- tural histories of the United States.¹² In tidily removing Puerto Rico from its locus on the map, the architects of “Latin American solidarity” (described by Franco)—as well as the arbiters of US imperialism—casually erase the national identity that Puerto Ricans

10. Ramón Grosfoguel, “Th e Divorce of Nationalist Discourses from the Puerto Rican People: A Sociohistorical Perspective,” Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism, ed. Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Ramón Grosfoguel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 63. 11. Benítez, “Th e Special Case of Puerto Rico,” 72. 12. In the estimation of US arts administrator Luis R. Cancel, “Puerto Rican art and artists are unknown in this country due in large measure to the fact that their cultural activity is not considered part of American art history by North American scholars—they uniformly say it is part of Latin America—and Latin American art historians consider Puerto Rico as part of the United States and therefore none of their concern. Only the Colombian art critic Marta Traba attempted to situate Puerto Rican art in a Latin American context. Most critics and art historians, however, have ignored whatever took place in the visual arts on the island.” Introduction to Th e Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920–1970 (New York: Th e Bronx Museum of the Arts in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 10. 6644

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 have sought to defi ne despite the imposition of fi rst Spanish and then US colonial rule. In deference to these erasures, references to national identity and national culture are a perennial point of focus in Puerto Rican art and letters. For Puerto Rican artists who were not born or did not grow up on the island, Puerto MMichelleichelle JJoanoan Rico begins as an imagined “there”: conjured up in the stories a parent repeats; pictured WWilkinsonilkinson in television advertisements for vacationing Anglos; idealized in murals on the sides of brick buildings in El Barrio. Th is second generation of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora, or “DiaspoRicans” (to borrow a term popularized by the poet Mariposa), seek ways to reconnect with Puerto Rico.¹³ Particularly for the visual artists, the act of represent- ing Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans is a counterpoint to experiences of cartographic removal, geographic dispersal, and political invisibility. For as Benítez has written, “in Puerto Rico—but still in more dramatic fashion in New York—the identity confl ict transformed the artist into the creator of symbols for the community.”¹⁴ Th is essay aims to examine the symbolic languages through which nationality is made intelligible, the illustrative lens through which sovereignty is made legible. Th e term “haciendo patria” eff ectively describes eff orts to visualize the inassimilable but attributable marks of a Puerto Rican national and cultural identity. “Haciendo” literally means “making,” as in constructing or creating. “Patria” is the homeland, the location of national legiti- macy, origin, and history. By relying on a lexicon of national symbols like the Puerto Rican fl ag, artists in the diaspora are able to reconstruct and reconstitute what has been deemed a divided, even fractured, nation. Th e visual artist who has been most persistent in the process of “haciendo patria” is Juan Sánchez. Th rough his varied uses of la ban- dera puertorriqueña as the visual emblem of national identity, Sánchez evokes memories of homeland and provokes viewers, especially mainland Puerto Ricans, to travel with him between local neighborhoods and a translocal nationhood. While many Caribbean artists have used maps in their art to specify national or amplify continental identifi cations—consider Rafael Ferrer’s colorful Puerto Rican map prints or -born Frank Bowling’s radiant washes of and Africa— Juan Sánchez prefers to use the emblem of a nationality that is still in progress: the Puerto Rican fl ag. In a provocative essay on the symbolic languages of nationhood,

13. Mariposa (María Teresa Fernández), “Ode to the DiaspoRican,” Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 12, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 66. On “Diaspo-Rican,” see also Adam Pagan, quoted in Wilson Valentín- Escobar, “ ‘Nothing Connects Us All But Imagined Sounds’: Performing Trans-Boricua Memories, Identities, and Nationalisms Th rough the Death of Héctor Lavoe,” in Mambo Montage: Th e Latinization of New York, ed. Agustín Laó-Montes and Arlene Dávila (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 208. 14. Benítez, “Th e Special Case of Puerto Rico,” 100. 6655

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 scholar Patricia Mohammed argues that “coats of arms, crests, fl ags and other trappings are taken-for-granted symbols in the political life of new Caribbean states, as well as in the public performance of nationalisms.”¹⁵ Although this may be true for the Carib- ssmallmall bean states where independence was fought for and “taken,” this is not the case in the aaxexe island colony of Puerto Rico, where US citizenship was “granted” and where the Puerto Rican national fl ag fl ies in submission to the US fl ag. Keenly aware of these semiotics of submission, Sánchez envisions an alternate world of subversive signs. In contrast to island-based artists like María de Mater O’Neill and Antonio Martorell, both of whom, like Ferrer before them, have explored the possibilities of the cartographic reference, Sánchez skims past the nativism of mapmaking for the nationalism of fl ag making. He employs la bandera puertorriqueña to give evidence—that is, to produce visuality and visibility—of, for, and to the Puerto Rican nation.

JUAN SÁNCHEZ: HE’S GOT THE WHOLE PATRIA IN HIS HANDS

Sánchez is a bricoleur who has set out to repair his fractured cultures. —Coco Fusco

For more than twenty-fi ve years, Brooklyn-born Sánchez has created art about Puerto Rico, Puerto Ricans, nationalism, and cultural identity. In his formal approach to recon- struction—what he more aptly calls “Rican/Structions,” borrowing the term from salsa musician Ray Barretto—Sánchez functions as an architect of the collective conscious- ness, working to newly imagine, inscribe, engrave, and erect the nation. Sánchez’s multi- layered canvases and prints gesture toward a collage style in which oil and acrylic paints, photographs, newspaper clippings, spray paint, posters, and handwritten or pasted text from speeches, poems, and letters are meaningfully integrated into mixed media assem- blages. When critics discuss the formal properties of Sánchez’s work, they note the tra- ditions of Mexican muralists or US graffi ti artists—two schools with which Sánchez admits an affi nity. Yet much less has been said about Sánchez’s connection to the tradi- tion of nationalist art and graphic arts that exists on the island of Puerto Rico, exempli- fi ed by the works of Lorenzo Homar and Rafael Tufi ño, two masters of the famed fi fties generation of printmakers. Indeed, the relative absence of art historical scholarship on

15. Patricia Mohammed, “Taking Possession: Symbols of Empire and Nationhood,” Small Axe, no. 11 (March 2002): 31. 6666

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Puerto Rican art makes it less likely that anglophone critics can place Sánchez within this national framework.¹⁶ In Sánchez’s works viewers witness an engagement with the formative lessons he learned from many individuals, including his Afro–Puerto Rican parents, who carved MMichelleichelle JJoanoan religious altars and sewed dolls, to his activist art professors—he studied with Hans WWilkinsonilkinson Haacke at Cooper Union and Leon Golub at Rutgers University. Moreover, as a black Puerto Rican in New York City, Sánchez came of age with the Black Power and the Black Arts movements of the late 1960s and the burgeoning (New York Puerto Rican) movements in art, literature, and culture of the early 1970s. He continues to draw on both as points of departure for his work. Th e infl uence of the stateside Puerto Rican arts movements can be seen in Sánchez’s incorporation of Afro-Indio iconography—a subgenre of the visual aesthetics initiated by Nuyorican artists at Taller Boricua Puerto Rican Workshop in East . Taller Boricua artists employed a socially and culturally informed aesthetic that shaped Sán- chez’s artistic approach and confi rmed his vision of art as a political force within the Puerto Rican community. Members of Taller Boricua had maintained relationships with the Young Lords Party, the Puerto Rican revolutionary nationalist organization founded in the late 1960s that was infl uenced by the Black Panther Party of the same era. Writ- ing about Sánchez’s student works, art critic and performance artist Coco Fusco com- ments that many of his early compositions were “idealized portraits of Young Lords.”¹⁷ Sánchez’s idealization of the group is consistent with his political agenda. Th e Young Lords advocated a Th irteen-Point program, which included calls for “liberation on the island and in the United States.”¹⁸ By representing the group visually, Sánchez was able to present its causes and communicate its messages of civil liberty and independence. Sánchez’s paintings also share a context and meaning with the works of black collag- ists, printmakers, and painters. Th e collages of Romare Bearden are a fi tting prelude to the collaged canvases of Sánchez. Likewise, in his consistent use of fl ag imagery, Sánchez shares a formal connection to Faith Ringgold and David Hammons, both of whom have employed the US fl ag as a recurring trope in their work since the 1960s. Indeed, the infl uences of black activists and artists emerge not only in his works of art but also in the

16. Recent publications such as the bilingual Puerto Rico: Arte e Identidad (Puerto Rican: Art and Identity) should give anglophone scholars more access to the country’s distinguished artistic traditions. Hermandad de Artistas Gráfi cos de Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico: Arte e Identidad (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1998). 17. Coco Fusco, “Rican/Structions,” Art in America 78 (February 1990): 159. 18. For a list of all thirteen points, see Young Lords Party and Michael Abramson, Palante: Young Lords Party (New York: McGraw Hill, 1971), 150. 6677

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 shows Sánchez has curated over the years. In the exhibition catalogue for his 1982 show Ritual and Rhythm, Sánchez cites Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), the leading visionaries of the Black Arts movement. Neal’s writing on the function of ssmallmall ritual provides Sánchez with an epigraph, and Baraka’s praise poem “In the Tradition” aaxexe is excerpted for its musing on Afro- rhythms. In the same vein Sánchez’s painting for Ritual and Rhythm collapses contemporary icons with ancestral motifs of Puerto Rican nationality. Th e painting Afro-Jíbaro-Taino fuses the respective African, Span- ish, and Indian cultural heritages of Puerto Rico as it mixes in newspaper clippings of recent and past events. One clipping, for example, features a photograph of the Statue of Liberty with a Puerto Rican fl ag draped from her crown—the result of a takeover of the statue by a group of demonstrators. For this culturally unifi ed collage-like tableau, Sánchez explains that he also selected “images of Catholic infl uenced San Martín de Porres, crucifi xes, an archaeological motif from the indigenous Taino Indians, Black revolutionary Don Pedro Albizu Campos, [and an] El Vejigante mask.”¹⁹ Recognizing mestizaje as a prime force in the shaping of the island’s current popu- lation, most Puerto Ricans list three groups as part of their cultural root: the Taino Indians, who were the indigenous inhabitants of the island they called Borinquen; the Spanish explorers who settled the island and renamed it Puerto Rico; and the Africans who were brought to the island to work as slaves. Duany argues that within the triad, the Spanish elements have been overvalued, the Indian elements have been exaggerated, and the African elements have been underestimated.²⁰ Moreover, the triple root is often subsumed in the singular national icon of the jíbaro, the archetypal rural farm worker from the interior of the island. As cultural anthropologist Arlene Dávila explains, “the rural peasant (jíbaro) is represented as the embodiment of all three ancestral heritages in a single Puerto Rican culture”; he is portrayed as a Spanish-Indian , the hard- working backbone of a pre-industrial Puerto Rican economy.²¹ Notably, in choosing the straw-hatted jíbaro as the icon for his pro-commonwealth Partido Popular Democrático in 1952, then-governor Muñoz Marin capitalized on and promoted the mass identifi - cation of the Puerto Rican people with a whitened cultural mestizaje and a work ethic that, ironically, left the labor-intensive slave past out of a national imagining. Perhaps as a corrective, then, Sánchez’s painting Afro-Jíbaro-Taino explores and revises the mythic

19. Juan Sánchez, Ritual and Rhythm: Visual Forces for Survival (New York: Kenkeleba House, 1982). 20. Duany, Puerto Rican Nation, 280. 21. Arlene Dávila, Sponsored Identities: Cultural Politics in Puerto Rico (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 71. Dávila writes that the jíbaro is “usually portrayed as a white male whose main infl uence comes from his Spanish predecessors although he has a tinge of Indian heritage” (72). 6688

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 claims of Puerto Rican national identity based on this triad of transculturation. Th rough his choice of emblems, like the black saint San Martín, the black Puerto Rican leader Don Pedro Albizu Campos, and the African-derived Vejigante carnival mask, Sánchez privileges the “Afro” ancestry, corroborating not merely his appreciation for his own MMichelleichelle JJoanoan puertorriquenidad but compensating also for the erasures enacted upon the African roots WWilkinsonilkinson of the national t(h)ree. Like the marginal spaces allotted to Puerto Rican art in the thick textbooks, the space for a publicly recognized black puertorriquenidad lives within the deepest recesses of the imagined nation. Yet Sánchez grants access to it. Formally and metaphorically his project is reconstructive; he relinquishes the cartographic impulse for a formal prac- tice that is more akin to archaeological and architectural processes. Th ese processes are particularly appropriate, if Puerto Rico is as multilayered as scholar José Luis González hypothesized in his 1980 treatise El país de cuatro pisos (Puerto Rico: Th e Four-Storeyed Country).

Puerto Rico, for José Luis González, is a four-story building. Th e fi rst fl oor, constructed during four centuries of Spanish colonial rule and , is the Afro-Caribbean popular base of the national culture. Th e second story, composed of immigrants from South America and Europe, was added over the course of the nineteenth century. Construction of the third fl oor began with the North American occupation of the island in 1898. Th e fourth and top level, which we are still inhabiting in the present day, dates from the industrialization plan initiated in the 1940s.²²

Th rough the building metaphor, González works to identify the historical rela- tionships that have contributed to the island’s contemporary (late-twentieth-century) social and economic character. His framework has proven itself as a viable model from which other scholars can imagine alternate structural possibilities for theorizing Puerto Rican nationality. In “Th e Puerto Rico that José Luis González Built,” Juan Flores, a cultural scholar adept at excavating Puerto Rican history, summarizes and revises the arguments of El país de cuatro pisos. In his own attempt at “ricanstruction,” Flores sug- gests that González’s edifi ce needs buttressing at its base and requires an additional top level.²³ Th e renovated construction of national identity Flores proposes would include “the pre-Columbian, Taino heritage and the cultural experience of Puerto Ricans in the United States. Th ese two extremities, if they do not constitute fl oors of their own, at least warrant consideration as the basement and the attic of González’s building,” Flores

22. Juan Flores, Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993), 62. 23. Ibid. 6699

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 writes.²⁴ Flores’s thorough engagement with González’s building metaphor suggests the usefulness of fi gurative language in theorizing the Puerto Rican nation. And though González’s building refers to the island as a “country” (“país” in González’s original), the ssmallmall Puerto Rico of Flores’s essay is the territorial “patria” of the nation—a translocal nation aaxexe that extends from the island shores to the further reaches of Diaspo Rico. Despite being omitted from the structure González conceived, Puerto Ricans in the diaspora lobby for a place in the nation, a fl oor in the building that represents their homeland. Not surprisingly, Flores’s call for revision—specifi cally, adding another level to accommodate Puerto Ricans in the United States—falls in line with art historian Shifra Goldman’s estimation of where Sánchez’s art fi ts into this scheme of Puerto Rican nation building. In her aptly titled essay “Living on the Fifth Floor of the Four-Floor Coun- try,” Goldman places Sánchez and all Puerto Ricans in the diaspora in this new upper- level addition to the old edifi ce. Goldman imagines that for Sánchez, “the building is equipped with glass rather than wooden fl oors, through which he can see and transcribe all of Puerto Rican history from the beginning to the present simultaneously.”²⁵ Her reading echoes Sánchez’s declaration that “the combination of Taino Indian petroglyphs from pre-Columbian Borinquen, the saints and orishas of popular African and Catholic religion, and the gritty ghetto environment” of New York City all contribute to his art and identity.²⁶ As archaeologist, Sánchez digs through the ruins of his storied patria; as architect, he rebuilds and restructures its histories onto his canvas. Yet instead of simply replicating the layers as represented by González or revised by Flores, Sánchez seeks to destabilize a singular structural reading of Puerto Rican nationality. By privileging dif- ferent icons, texts, and individuals in each work, the process of “ricanstruction” is not a stagnant representation of nation but a dynamic circuit of national imaginings.

BANDERA AS BORDER, FLAG AS FRAME

Th e Bandera Series (fi gure 1), a 1982 oil and mixed-media work on canvas included in the blockbuster exhibition Th e Decade Show, provides a revealing example of Sán- chez’s multivalent nationalist aesthetic. In this work, whose title translates as Th e Flag Series, Sánchez makes visible the central place the fl ag occupies in the iconography of

24. Ibid., 66. 25. Shifra Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 434. 26. Juan Sánchez, “Untitled,” in Being America: Essays on Art, Literature, and Identity from Latin America, ed. Rachel Weiss with Alan West (Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press, 1991), 97. 7700

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Fig. 1. Juan Sánchez, Th e Bandera Series, 1982, oil, mixed media on canvas. Four panels, each 28 × 66 in.: “Danza Guerrera (War Dance),” “Th e World Belongs to MMichelleichelle the People,” “Th e Old Building,” JJoanoan “Willie Escapes!” WWilkinsonilkinson Image courtesy of artist.

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 communities transplanted from the island. More specifi cally, he focuses on the Puerto Rican fl ag as an emblem of Puerto Rican nationalisms. Th e fl ag had been banned in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of the 1948 Ley de la Mordaza (gag law) and the clashes ssmallmall between police and members of the Nationalist Party in 1950.²⁷ As a means of politi- aaxexe cal repression, anyone found possessing or displaying the fl ag could be arrested for conspiracy to overthrow the government.²⁸ When Puerto Rico became a commonwealth in 1952, the fl ag was adopted as the national emblem; however, it had (and still has) to be accompanied by a US fl ag when- ever it is fl own in any offi cial capacity on the island. Th e red, white, and blue design of the Puerto Rican fl ag shares some similarities with the US fl ag, but in fact the single- starred Puerto Rican bandera was created in 1895 to be the color-inverse of the Cuban fl ag and to show solidarity with the Cuban struggle for independence from .²⁹ As Puerto Rico changed from a Spanish colony into a US territory, the fl ag remained sym- bolic of a Puerto Rican nationality that could not be masked under the banner of US citizenship. As Sánchez himself articulates, Th e Puerto Rican fl ag, (a reduction of the United States fl ag to one star and three stripes) is a symbol sprayed and painted on the walls of subway stations and buildings, as well as on cars, trucks and storefronts protesting against the conditions of a colonial state of mind which domi- nates the occupation of Puerto Rican land and culture by the United States.³⁰ Hence, for Sánchez to paint the fl ag in light of its history of repression, in light of its design referencing the Cuban fl ag, in light of the continuing relevance of US imperial- ism in Puerto Rico, makes his Bandera Series part of the legacy of those rebellious acts of possession and display that were once punishable by law. Curator and critic Julia P. Herzberg describes Th e Bandera Series as a work in which “the artist explores the central theme of Puerto Rican independence, then weaves in a

27. Scholar Roberto P. Rodríguez-Morazzani writes, “Th e rise of the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the conducting of witch hunts in the United States was matched in Puerto Rico by La Mordaza, or the gag law. In 1948 the Puerto Rican version of the Smith Act, known as la lea 53, was passed by the Puerto Rican legislature and was not repealed until 1957. Th e main targets of La Mordaza were the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party of Puerto Rico.” “Political Cultures of the Puerto Rican Left in the United States,” in Th e Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora, ed. Andrés Torres and José E. Velázquez (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 32. 28. Perhaps the most notable casualty of the repression was Don Pedro Albizu Campos: the Harvard-educated Afro–Puerto Rican leader of the Nationalist Party who was arrested on charges of sedition and later died in 1965 suff ering from mistreatment he had received during the years of his imprisonment. 29. On the history of the design of the Puerto Rican fl ag, see Ovidio Dávila, “El centenario de la adopcíon de la Bandera de Puerto Rico diseñada por don Antonio Vélez Alvarado, 1895–1995,” Cultura: Revista de la División de Promoción Cultural en los Pueblos 2, no. 2 (December 1997): 20–28. 30. Juan Sánchez, Beyond Aesthetics: Art of Necessity by Artists of Conscience (New York: Henry Street Settlement, 1982). 7722

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 number of sub-texts focusing on specifi c people and events, each aff ecting the other in myriad ways.”³¹ Th e work is compromised of four rectangular panels, each twenty- eight inches by sixty-six inches, arranged vertically. On the left side of each panel is a painting of a Puerto Rican fl ag, with a photograph centered and superimposed onto the MMichelleichelle JJoanoan painted fl ag. On the right side of each panel is some form of written text—excerpts from WWilkinsonilkinson speeches, letters, a poem, or comments from the artist. Th e red and white pigment of each fl ag slightly bleeds into other colors on the canvas, emoting a sense of vulnerability and the specter of violence. Th e events of the painting, as represented in black-and-white photographs, give visual evidence of Puerto Rican experiences in the United States and provide visual clues for the literary texts on the adjacent panels that, at times, are only partially legible. Like ink-blotted fi ngerprints, the pigments in one section of the canvas reappear faintly in other sections. Similarly, the lone white star of the Puerto Rican fl ag shoots across the canvas to land haphazardly outside of its appropriate location within the blue triangle, the small, perhaps Caribbean, sea which can no longer contain the fl oating, migrating island. Th e four photographs that correspond to the titles of the four panels are “Danza Guerrera (War Dance),” a rally scene with participants waving large Puerto Rican fl ags; “Th e World Belongs to the People,” a wall spray-painted with “Free FALN”—a Puerto Rican revolutionary organization (Armed Forces for National Liberation, in English); “Th e Old Building,” a decaying building with a Puerto Rican fl ag painted onto an exte- rior wall (fi gure 2); and “Willie Escapes!,” a group carrying a large Puerto Rican fl ag and holding a sign that reads “Free William Morales,” a political prisoner. Th e fl ag is not only incorporated at the left half of each of the four panels but it is reproduced inside the frame each painted fl ag provides. Superimposing and centering photographs that depict the fl ag onto his painted fl ags, Sánchez creates a mixed-media mise en abime in which fl ags frame fl ags, and fl ags descend in size as the viewer’s eyes move from the borders of each left-side panel to its center. Th e work directs viewers from the visual to the textual to the visual. Th e text on the right-side panel is a verbal comment on and complement to the visual politics imaged on the left. Sánchez has often incorporated poetry into his work. In Th e Bandera Series, the panel “Th e Old Building” pairs the black-and-white photograph of a deteriorated building on the left side of the panel with a copy of a poem by Pedro Pietri titled “Th e Old Buildings,” from his 1973 volume Puerto Rican Obituary. A forerunner of

31. Julia P. Herzberg, “Re-membering Identity: Vision of Connections,” in Th e Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (New York: Museum of Contemporary Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990), 49. 7733

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Fig. 2. Juan Sánchez, Th e Bandera Series, “Th e Old Building,” detail, 1982.

the Nuyorican poetry movement, Pietri has been hailed the “people’s poet” and liter- ary biographer of El Barrio and the Lower East Side, two of New York’s largest Puerto Rican neighborhoods. In his poem “Th e Old Buildings,” Pietri describes the demolition of a building and the subsequent scattering of its residents. Pietri’s poem begins with the address “1422 Amsterdam Avenue” suggesting not merely a poetic commentary on general urban decay but a site-specifi c eulogy for the loss of a demolished building that the poet writes “could have been / saved by renovation.”³² In literally taking a page out of Pietri’s book, Sánchez integrates local people, places, and priorities into his tableau. He connects the experience of eviction from the building to the experiences of economic migration from the island. Sánchez’s representations of the fl ag are part of a continuum that includes varied political ideologies. In Th e Bandera Series the paintings present Puerto Rican national- ism as the common support for other modes of politicization: namely, Puerto Rican socialism identifi ed by the words “libre y socialista” in “War Dance”; Puerto Rican radi- calism and revolutionary nationalism identifi ed with the FALN, the Young Lords, and political prisoner William Morales in “Th e World Belongs to the People” and “Willie Escapes!”; and Nuyorican cultural nationalism identifi ed by the “unity” of residents “living and loving and breathing together” in “Th e Old Building.”³³ Th e fl ags sig- nify national consciousness, not political allegiance; yet they also expose the thwarted gestures toward complete national sovereignty.

32. Pedro Pietri, Puerto Rican Obituary (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 53–54. 33. Ibid. 7744

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 While each richly painted fl ag in Th e Bandera Series attracts the viewer’s attention, a small portion of each fl ag’s blue triangle is hidden behind the centered photograph. Th e partially obstructed view of the Puerto Rican fl ag suggests the obstructions placed on the full-fl edged declaration of Puerto Rican nationality via Puerto Rican citizenship. MMichelleichelle JJoanoan Th e hidden part of each fl ag is concealed by documentary evidence from the struggle, WWilkinsonilkinson that is, the visual testimony that the photographic image presents. Th e imprisonment of political activists and the deterioration of living conditions are juxtaposed with strate- gies of resistance and survival, as seen in the rally and the graffi tied wall. Moreover, because Sánchez knows the Puerto Rican fl ag was once was illegal to exhibit on the island, he retrieves the emblem, secures it within his visual repertoire of representa- tion, and mirrors it back to those for whom the history of its repression is replaced with its now ostensible display, as is the fl ag painted onto the deteriorated building. By visually repeating Puerto Rican fl ags, Sánchez reproduces Puerto Rican nationalisms; the painting’s “subtexts” become the subgroups of Puerto Rican nationality. When the partially obscured surfaces of the painted fl ags appear fully retrieved in the fl ags of the black-and-white photographs, the painting restores the symbol to its specifi c uses by socialists, independentistas, or other groups. Yet as Sánchez explains, the larger benefi t of using the icon is that “it’s the one fl ag that embraces a whole population regardless of their political perspective”; even though some individuals may support statehood or the commonwealth status quo, they all “identify with that fl ag as their own.”³⁴ Th us, the abundance of banderas connects Sánchez not only with the independentista cause that he supports but also with all the other Puerto Ricans. Despite the overt pro-independence content in Th e Bandera Series, Sánchez formal- izes a mixed-media approach that in and of itself speaks more to the unique experiences of the mainland Nuyorican community (as a nation) than to the national identity of Puerto Ricans remaining on the island. Sánchez’s series presents the praxis of “haciendo patria” as particularly replenishing for Puerto Ricans in the diaspora who are excluded from the island’s political future and removed from the foundational “stories” of their parents’ country. Th e combination of romanticism and radicalism in Sánchez’s visual nationalism, and for that matter in most forms of nationalism, is not unusual. In his treatise on nationalism, Th e Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon refers to a moment, “the national period,” in which the ability to chart a heroic past is presumed to be an indicator of a redeemable future.³⁵ For Sánchez, who has quoted Fanon in his essays and

34. Sánchez, interview by author, 2001. 35. Frantz Fanon, Th e Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 7755

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 paintings, Puerto Rico’s continuing colonial status means that “the national period” extends into our contemporary era.³⁶ As such, nationalist icons remain a conduit for imagining an autonomous past and an independent future. ssmallmall By using the fl ag as a lingua franca, Sánchez belongs to an international canon that aaxexe includes forerunners like white American artist Jasper Johns as well as contemporary practitioners like Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier and Jamaican-American pho- tographer Lauri Lyons. When Johns’s now iconic painting the fl ag of the United States of America, Flag (1954–1955), was fi rst shown in the late 1950s, the work launched critical questions about patriotism, nationalism, and illusionism: How, if at all, was the painted and stitched canvas of Flag distinct from other fl ags that designated the offi - cial emblem of the nation?³⁷ Writing on the representation of fl ag motifs in visual art, critic Gilane Tawadros comments that “as a symbolic object, representing an imagined, homogeneous community which we call a nation,” a fl ag, like the one Johns painted, conjures up our “yearnings for nationhood and more specifi cally for homogeneity and cohesion which national identity implies.”³⁸ Th ough Sánchez’s work may suggest a desire for cohesion corresponding to a nationalist consciousness, his work does not, however, express a desire for homogeneity. Instead, he searches for ways to represent and record the fl ag’s ability to embody diff erence, as in Th e Bandera Series. Never one-dimensional or unrefl ective, Sánchez’s fl ag paintings are skillfully stylized and playfully polemic. As he explains, I consider myself a kind of formalist. So the whole question of color, the whole question of tex- ture, and the whole dynamic of the formalist attitude of manipulation of pigment and surface is, I feel, ammunition which will entice people who will then have to reckon with what I am trying to say.³⁹ Sánchez admits the power of visual icons to signify and to seduce. In fact, the fl ags in his paintings function metonymically—as a visual shorthand for the collective body they purport to encompass. He continues, “So it becomes kind of manipulative. It’s using a vocabulary that they want, that they are used to responding to, to express some of the terrible things that are happening. It’s a way of sensitizing them to these issues.”⁴⁰ Th e

36. Since 1952 diff erent political parties have been in power in Puerto Rico, but they have all functioned from within the apparatus of the “free associated state.” 37. Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 38. Gilane Tawadros, “Th e Case of the Missing Body: A Cultural Mystery in Several Parts,” Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. Jean Fisher (London: Kala Press, 1994), 106. 39. Juan Sánchez, interview with Susan Canning, Interventions and Provocations: Conversations on Art, Culture, and Resistance, ed. Glenn Harper (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 82. 40. Ibid. 7766

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 formalism Sánchez employs is both strategic and aesthetic but dissimilar to the formal- ism of Johns, who has been described as taking “banal symbols and signs of everyday life” and reimaging them in “nonreferential ways.”⁴¹ Sánchez replaces the divested illu- sionism that has come to characterize Johns’s experiment; instead, he opts for an invested MMichelleichelle JJoanoan iconoclasm that relies on the symbolic power of the national referent. WWilkinsonilkinson Compared to some contemporary artists on the island, whose visual language exists in the world of conceptual, nonreferential discourse, Sánchez’s fl ag paintings can be a sensory overload of Puerto Rican icons not unlike those one might fi nd in a tourist souvenir shop. During a recent visit to San Juan, an artist told me that no one in Puerto Rico (meaning none of the up-and-coming artists) uses those tropes of Puerto Ricanness, those very direct modes of appeal that Sánchez embeds into his multilayered composi- tions: the fl ags, the Taino petroglyphs, the saint icons, the quotations from nationalist leaders.⁴² If, from a distance, Sánchez’s visual praxis reads as a correlate to the souvenir piece, it is not mere coincidence. A souvenir, by defi nition, is an object that brings back memories—a catalyst for remembering. Likewise, Sánchez’s art is evocatively layered with relics of a Puerto Rican past, glimpsed through the lens of a DiaspoRican present. His inclusion of newspapers articles of current events adds both a collaged texture and the contemporary context. Yet Sánchez uses the canvas to ask questions about the Puerto Rican future, as in his 1990 painting Plebicite [sic]. Th e painting, titled for the nonbind- ing polls on the island, features a Puerto Rican fl ag spray-painted with two question marks. Superimposed on the painted fl ag, one question mark is upside down, as at the beginning of an interrogative statement in Spanish; the other question mark is right side up, as if coming at the end of the interrogative statement. Th e question marks announce the “national question”—statehood, independence, or commonwealth—that the Puerto Rican fl ag implicitly but consistently asks. In employing and playing on the template of the fl ag, Sánchez parallels contem- porary artist David Hammons, who challenges viewers to position themselves vis-à-vis the who, what, where, when, and how of nation making. In a particularly stunning recoloration of the US fl ag, Hammons, an African American, New York–based artist, created African American Flag, which replaces the red, white, and blue of the US fl ag with red, black, and green—colors represented in the Pan-Africanist fl ag championed by Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey, and later associated with black nationalism

41. Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 142–43. 42. Th e contention that contemporary island-based artists do not use island icons is debatable; however, many mainland artists, like Miguel Luciano, work with the icons and tropes of Puerto Rican popular culture to great eff ect. 7777

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 in general. In 1999 Sánchez presented a similarly provocative recoloration project. One of his new series of Puerto Rican fl ag paintings depicted Malcolm X and employed the color scheme of red, black, and green, referencing Hammons’s African American Flag, ssmallmall albeit as it outlined the dimensions of a Puerto Rican fl ag. In this series of fl ag paint- aaxexe ings, of which his Bandera Para Malcolm X (Flag for Malcolm X, fi gure 3) is only one example, Sánchez unites international anticolonial movements in Africa, Latin Ameri- can, the Caribbean, and Asia. For example, other fl ags in the series depict Don Pedro Albizu Campos and Bruce Lee (fi gures 4 and 5). In Bandera Para Malcolm X two painted sections are attached to form an elongated fi fty-eight-inch by thirty-two-inch “T” shape. Th e wider top half of this work on paper is a Puerto Rican fl ag, vertically positioned. Approximately one half of the fl ag is rep- resented, so that only the triangle, the star, and the part of the stripes that would fall along the left edge of a horizontal banner are included. Similar to the parts of the fl ags obscured in 1982’s Th e Bandera Series, this fl ag is partially obscured by an embedded photograph that covers sections of the stripes and the point of the triangle. Again, the photograph is centered, framed by the single star to the top and the stripes to the sides. Below the painted fl ag, on the bottom portion of the “T,” is an image of an upside-down palm tree—another recurring motif from Sánchez’s visual inventory of island icons. Where the jíbaro was used as symbol of the pro-commonwealth party, the palm tree was adopted as the symbol of the statehooders, or the Partido Nuevo Progresista. Sánchez does not introduce these icons as explicit references to the island’s parties, but he draws on their potency and portability as national signifi ers. In Bandera Para Malcolm X, the trunk of the palm tree bifurcates the bottom portion of the painting, creating a dividing line between green and yellow fi elds of color. Toward the bottom of the composition, the trunk of the upside-down tree blossoms with palm leaves that branch out against the green and yellow background. Th e photograph in the top portion of the painting shows a series of fi ve variously colorized fragments (fi gure 6) from an often-reproduced image of the African American leader. Th e identical fragments are lined up horizontally in a sort of prismatic repetition of an originally black-and-white image. Th e close-up fragment of Malcolm’s redoubling and recoloring might suggest Andy Warhol’s machinations of multiple Marilyns; but there is no whimsy here—the Pan-Africanist Puerto Rican fl ag claims its subject with a sphinx-like sobriety. Malcolm’s directed confi dence and earnest gaze lends authority to the diasporic concept of nationalism Sánchez projects. Excerpted and refracted through each of the fi ve colors—orange, green, yellow, blue, and red—the portrait captures Malcolm in a pose slightly reminiscent of Auguste Rodin’s Th e Th inker, as the black 7788

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Fig. 3. Juan Sánchez, Bandera Para Malcolm X, 1999, acrylic, mixed media on paper, 58 × 32 in.

MMichelleichelle JJoanoan WWilkinsonilkinson Image courtesy of artist.

7799

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Fig. 4. Juan Sánchez, Bandera Albizu, 1997, acrylic, mixed media on paper, 58 × 32 in.

ssmallmall aaxexe Image courtesy of artist.

8800

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Fig. 5. Juan Sánchez, Boricua Create Determine Your Destiny, detail, 1999, acrylic, mixed media on paper,

leader’s goateed chin rests squarely on the pedestal provided by the clenched fi ngers of his hand. But instead of the classic sculpture’s positioning of the fi gure’s body bent over in thought, in this portrait a clear-eyed Malcolm looks straight ahead, bowing to noth- ing and no one. In much the same way that Malcolm’s hand anchors his head, the photograph of Malcolm serves to anchor the palm tree sprouting from below the fl ag. For Sánchez, a staunch independentista, the inverted palm tree represents his position that given Puerto Rico’s current status as a commonwealth, “the island is out of balance, or upside down.”⁴³ Th us, if this inverted icon is a visual mode of critique, how might we read the inverted colors of the fl ag? As in Hammons’s African American Flag, Sánchez’s Malcolm X fl ag retains red and black stripes, instead of red and white ones. Both artists also replace the blue background, on which the stars of the US and Puerto Rican fl ags sit, with the color green. However, Hammons places a fl eet of black stars across the green quadrant of his

43. Juan Sánchez, Printed Convictions/Convicciones Grabadas (Jersey City, NJ: Jersey City Museum, 1998), 17–18. 8811

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Fig. 6. Juan Sánchez, Bandera Para Malcolm X, detail, 1999.

African American Flag—perhaps in keeping with Garvey’s founding of the “Black Star Line,” which would sail to West Africa taking blacks in the diaspora to repatriate on the continent. Sánchez does not follow Hammons here; instead, he opts for a single yellow star, as in the “shining star of the Caribbean” Puerto Rico has been said to represent. As in his other paintings with similar imagery, the palm tree relocates the Pan- Africanist bandera to the island of Puerto Rico and to the diasporic, discursive space of Puerto Rican nationalism. Th e yellow star’s fi ve-pronged ray of light channels energy through the length of the painting. Likewise, the yellow photographic fragment occu- pies a central position in the spectrum of colors, connecting the star above and the tree below. Color here becomes a conduit for bridging the movements forged by Afri- can , African , Puerto Ricans, and other dispersed peoples. In his attempt to make a bandera for (“para”) Malcolm X, Sánchez is “haciendo patria” from and with the vestiges of Malcolm’s life: again, the familiar photograph with the trade- mark horn-rimmed glasses, the unfl inching gaze, the pedestal fi st. Giving credence to black nationalism while commemorating the Puerto Rican struggle toward sovereignty, Sánchez maps a continuum of resistance. * * * * * 8822

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/8/2/61/696353/6-sa16+wilkinson+(61-83).pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Sánchez has developed a visual lexicon that undercuts the careless or calculated erasures enacted upon the island. In Sánchez’s work the Puerto Rican fl ag is not only the emblem of the nonsovereign nation but it is also a symbolic space, a dynamic fi eld and frame that can be transformed to show solidarity with African American causes or Asian anti- MMichelleichelle JJoanoan colonial movements. For as critic Lucy Lippard notes, in Sánchez’s paintings even “such WWilkinsonilkinson ‘political art cliches’ as barbed wire and the Puerto Rican Independence fl ag take on new resonance because of the many-layered contexts in which they are placed.”⁴⁴ A self-defi ned formalist of sorts, Sánchez primes his canvas with subliminal matter that reveals itself only when viewers, seduced by the surface eff ects, get close enough to see through the layers. By reproducing the dimensions, reenvisioning the color, or rein- terpreting an identifi able fl ag in any way, Sánchez, like similarly minded artists, enters an imaginative discourse on national identity. Puerto Ricans who see the fl ag in his paintings recognize the emblem’s discursive potential and its multiple applications given the diverse groups supporting statehood, commonwealth, and independence. Th rough the dense but yielding visual language of his works, Sánchez projects expressions of national identity without collapsing the distinctiveness of his own local and diasporic experiences. Engaging and changing the form of the fl ag as a tableau for eff ective and accessible commentary, Sánchez calls attention to both obvious and subversive languages of “nation making,” or “haciendo patria.” Th e Puerto Rico made visible in his mixed- media compositions alerts viewers to the varied goals and values of the translocal nation. If he is a bricoleur, as Fusco asserts, his multilayered text is more than the reassemblage a fractured culture; it is, according to his own vision, a DiaspoRican structure in which each room has a view.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Krista A. Th ompson, Wilson Valentín-Escobar, and Priscilla Renta for their useful comments on this essay. I also thank Juan Flores for his suggestions regarding the term “haciendo patria.”

44. Lucy R. Lippard, “Coming to Life,” in Juan Sánchez: Rican/Structed Convictions (New York: Exit Art, 1989), 10. 8833

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