Centro Journal ISSN: 1538-6279 [email protected] The City University of Estados Unidos

Caragol-Barreto, Taína B. Aesthetics of exile: The construction of Nuyorican identity in the art of El Taller Boricua Centro Journal, vol. XVII, núm. 2, fall, 2005, pp. 6-21 The City University of New York New York, Estados Unidos

Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=37717202

How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative Caragol(v4).qxd 12/10/05 3:15 PM Page 6

CENTRO Journal

Volume7 xv1i Number 2 fall 2005 Aesthetics of exile: The construction of Nuyorican identity in the art of El Taller Boricua

TAÍNA B. CARAGOL-BARRETO

ABSTRACT

In his 1983 essay Reflexions on Exile, the cultural critic Edward Said defines exiles in the broadest sense as people who are prevented from returning to their land. He also argues that the displacement experienced by exiles in the foreign land calls for a reconstruction of their historical past as a way to find a common ground where they can identify as a group, overcoming their solitude. Although in the United States are émigrés rather than ostracized people, several conditions, such as the massiveness of the Diaspora launched with Operation Bootstrap, and the social and racial discrimination faced by Puerto Ricans in the metropolis made of this experience one marked by the trauma of social displacement. This article examines the Nuyorican artistic movement of the sixties and seventies as an attempt to reconstruct that fragmented history that Said identifies as intrinsic to the exile. I will argue that some common elements that surface in the art-production of El Taller Boricua, and the Nuyorican Poets, such as the use of Taíno and African imagery, the critique of the Spanish colonization in , the

Tom and Jill (1982). Jorge Soto. reference to social displacement, and the subversion of artistic Mixed media, 80" x 60 1/2". Permanent collection of . conventions function together to create an “aesthetics of the Puerto Reprinted, by permission, from El Museo del Barrio. Rican exile.” [Key words: Taller Boricua, Nuyorican Art, diasporic experience, Nuyorican poets, Puerto Rican art and identity]

[ 6 ] [ 7 ] Caragol(v4).qxd 12/10/05 3:15 PM Page 8

A brief overview of the Nuyorican arts movement and the artists of El Taller Boricua been traditionally regarded as a danger to Puerto Rican national identity on the The sixties and the seventies were prolific decades in the arts for Puerto Ricans in Island due to their close physic and metaphorical contact with American culture. the United States. Two decades after the massive exodus that brought approximately Fortunately, in the last decade a number of scholars from different disciplines half a million islanders to the USA,1 a strong cultural movement searched to establish have debated this limiting and essentialist perspective, exposing in their writings a voice for the marginalized Puerto Ricans. One of the most important expressions the contributions of the Diaspora to Puerto Rican history, sociology, and culture. of this movement took place in the artistic world of New York. In the field of visual The period of the sixties and seventies has been given special attention due to the arts, the artists of the Puerto Rican community founded various important substantial social and cultural improvements that were achieved with the activism institutions such as El Taller Boricua, El Museo del Barrio, and En Foco, among of the Nuyorican community. Still, there are yet no comprehensive texts on the others, to provide workshops and exhibition spaces for Puerto Rican artists who history of the New York-Puerto Rican art movement. Until now, the existing together with other artists of color were under-represented or unrepresented in literature on Nuyorican art from the seventies has consisted of a few essays by artists mainstream museums. These new alternative spaces also intended to serve as of the movement and art historians. The lack of a more extensive analysis on the art educational and cultural centers for the Puerto Rican community in New York. of this important period constitutes an invitation to explore the diversity of this Although no specific artistic program was explicit among the artists active at artistic movement, the history of its institutions, and the cultural impact it had on El Taller Boricua, the artwork of most of their founders and members, such as Nitza the Puerto Rican community in the U.S.2 Tufiño, Fernando Salicrup, Jorge Soto, and Marcos Dimas, shares several thematic This paper opens up the discussion on the issue of cultural negotiation, which has and formal characteristics. Most prominent among them are the use of Taíno and been and still is a creative motor in today’s art world. Having just ended a century African imagery, the critique of Spanish colonization in Puerto Rico, the reference that was characterized by huge international migration movements, this paper offers to the social displacement of Puerto Ricans as immigrants in the United States, a possible model for studying the complexity of the art production of diasporic and and the subversion of artistic conventions such as traditional artistic genres and exilic populations, a production that is often understudied, due precisely to its media. These characteristics will be best understood as an expression of the ambiguous placement within more than one culture. In the actual context of sociocultural identity of an exiled or emigrated people. “Latinization” of the United States, the creation of such research models is urgently In his seminal essay “Reflections on Exile,” cultural critic Edward Said affirmed necessary in order to witness and describe the overcoming of the actual peripheral that the displacement experienced by exiles in the foreign land calls for a status of art in art history. reconstruction of their historical past as a way to find a common ground where they can identify as a group, and overcome their feeling of solitude (Said 2000: 173–86). The “unhomely” in Said’s exile and the Puerto Rican émigré I propose to analyze the artwork of Salicrup, Soto, Dimas, and Nitza Tufiño, in the Numerous diasporic movements caused by the national and international conflicts light of Said’s statement, finding the commonalities between the diasporic condition and post-colonial processes of the twentieth century, and the intellectual and artistic and the exile’s and—most important—looking at the process of reconstruction and contributions made by exilic populations, internationally have called for a re- rearticulation of Puerto Rican identity in the art production of El Taller Boricua. examination of the exile’s condition in fields like sociology, cultural criticism, and Toward that end, I will analyze a series of selected works of art. I would like to put literature. Edward Said, Michael Seidel, and Homi Bhabha are some of the scholars a special emphasis on their relations to the collective myths, memories, and icons concerned with the condition of exiles and diasporic people in relation to their associated to Puerto Rican identity on the Island, while keeping in mind the context literary production. In this paper I use their theories as a loose framework for of the social displacement experienced by the Puerto Rican Diaspora in New York. discussing the art of El Taller Boricua. In some cases, comparisons will be established with other New York Puerto Rican First, it is appropriate to discuss assumptions of the definition of exile by Said artistic groups concerned with the cultural identity of the Diaspora, such as the and to relate them to the Puerto Rican Diaspora. For the purpose of this paper, Nuyorican poets. Similarities in the work of the artists and the poets and the common I will adhere to Said’s broader definition of the exile as “anyone who is prevented procedure of rupture with tradition in the artwork of El Taller and the poetry of the from returning home” (Said 2000: 181). Going into the specifics of this condition, Nuyoricans will help us identify the referents chosen by these two groups to signify Said affirms that an exile is anyone banned from his/her land. For Said, this banish- the diasporic identity as well as to understand the way it is articulated. This will lead ment constitutes the particularity that distinguishes exiles from refugees, expatriates, us to a better understanding of the meaning of Taíno and African references, and to and émigrés. According to him, the word refugee denotes a collective of innocent the Puerto Rican diasporic experience. people requiring urgent international assistance, while expatriates and émigrés always Despite its richness in terms of form and content, the artistic production of these have the choice to move out of their homeland. For this reason, exile is more of a Nuyorican artists has been very much neglected in Puerto Rican art history. solitary state, as there is nothing voluntary to the exile’s displacement, and he/she This absence of documentation is a manifestation of a broader phenomenon of does not necessarily count with the sense of collectivity and/or international help exclusion of the Diaspora from the historiography of Puerto Rico. The persistence that émigrés and refugees have. of an essentialist national discourse in the Island, which defines Puerto Rican identity While these distinctions acknowledge the gravity and trauma of ostracism, in relation to Spain and in binary opposition to American culture, accounts for this they also seem to undermine the seriousness of these “other” forms of exile and exclusion. (For a critique of that stance, see Dávila 1997; Díaz-Quiñones 1993; their impact for these populations at cultural, sociological, and psychological levels. Duany 2002.) In such a narrow definition, Puerto Ricans from the Diaspora have It is clear that due to the nature of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, which occurred as a

[ 8 ] [ 9 ] Caragol(v4).qxd 12/10/05 3:15 PM Page 10

consequence of the Island’s transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy in the 1940s and ‘50s, Puerto Ricans in the United States should be considered as émigrés.3 In Said’s terms, it should be stressed that these Puerto Ricans were never banished or expelled from their country. Nevertheless, the high unemployment caused by Operation Bootstrap among the rural workers in the Island and the demands for cheap labor from the crescent American economy left almost no choice for the 41,200 Puerto Ricans who left the Island annually from 1950 to 1960 to pursue the elusive American Dream (López 1980: 317–20). Most of them came to live in the poor neighborhoods of as well as , , Newark, and other cities. Many historical and sociological texts on Puerto Rican and Latino populations in the U.S. have documented the precarious living conditions, labor exploitation, forced cultural assimilation, and institutional racism to which these Puerto Ricans were subject as one of the first immigrations from Latin America and the Caribbean. These circumstances had an impact on the culture and identity of the Puerto Rican population, which was suddenly situated between two cultures and temporalities— the past, related to the Island, and the present, related to the U.S.—but not fully inserted in either. Homi Bhabha defines the result of this border—existence as “unhomeliness”—a condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations common to (post)colonial subjects (Bhabha 2004: 13). With Bhabha I would argue that unhomeliness is the paradigm for the so-called “second generation” of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. (the children of the ‘40s and ‘50s émigrés) who grew up in a marginalizing Anglo-American society that forced their assimilation to white hegemonic culture. The unhomely second generation shared the exile’s “constant and insurmountable sadness of been denied of a land, an identity, and a past,” as described by Said (Said 2000: 173). As exiles—in Said’s broadest sense—the first generation of Puerto Ricans from the Diaspora felt the “discontinuous state of being” Said finds inherent to the condition of exile (Said 2000: 177). As a displaced population the unhomely exiles experience the solitude of being outside their nation and their new homeland.4 Understandably, the urgent need of exiles to reconstitute their broken lives and reassemble their national identity was the leading force of the Puerto Rican social- political and cultural movement of the seventies.5 Along the same line and borrowing the words used by Michael Seidel in the introduction to his book Exile and the Narrative Imagination, Marcos Dimas, Nitza Tufiño, Fernando Salicrup, and Jorge Soto transformed through their art the figure of historic rupture back into a Una vez más Colombus (1978). Fernando Salicrup. acrylic on linen, 54" x 44 1/8". “figure of connection” (1986: 10). Permanent collection of El Museo del Barrio. Reprinted, by permission, from El Museo del Barrio. Reconstructing a fragmented identity In this reconstruction of the identity of the exile, it is not surprising to treat the This description of the exile is helpful for understanding the work of the artists from reference to Taíno culture as a first element in its reassembling. As the inhabitants El Taller Boricua. Despite their individual originality, Marcos Dimas, Nitza Tufiño, of Puerto Rico before the Spanish arrived, the Taínos have been traditionally Fernando Salicrup, and Jorge Soto all share some iconographic and formal characteristics considered, in the narration of the Puerto Rican nation, as “the first root” of Puerto that contribute to the reconstruction of their broken identity as Puerto Ricans from the Rican identity. This affirmation of the Taíno culture has undergone several periods Diaspora. In the case of these artists, this identity incorporates the traditional repertoire of historical research that have shaped the way they have been portrayed as a of collective myths, memories, and icons that have come to be associated with national population. The last of these, established by the anthropologist Ricardo Alegría, identity in the Island. It is also strongly informed by their experience of exile and the founder and first director of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña6 in the 1950s, precarious social conditions it entailed, as well as by the contact with other “peripheral” presented Taínos as a kind, noble, and docile population that facilitated the Spanish cultures in New York, particularly the African-American. Analyzing this art is essential colonial enterprise (Duany 2002: 261–3). For promoters of the Commonwealth of to understand the duality of the exile’s identity as one that flows between a past and Puerto Rico founded in 1952, these were values to stress in the colonial relationship a present culture, as described by Seidel (1986: 13). of Puerto Rico to the United States.

[ 10 ] [ 11 ] Caragol(v4).qxd 12/10/05 3:15 PM Page 12

visible presence of the conquistador, Salicrup questions the protagonist role of the Genovese sailor in his discovery of the Island. Inverting the traditional scheme that situates the colonized as the Other, Salicrup situates Taínos as subjects instead of objects of history who seem to discover the real intentions of exploitation and extermination of the colonizers. The reiteration implied in the title Una vez más Colombus expresses the reinvention of the official history of colonization. The confronting gaze of the Taínos toward the viewers makes them equal to the colonizers and implies their participation in the current oppression and marginalization of Puerto Rican culture in the United States. Another artist that uses the Taínos as a polyvalent symbol of national identity in the Diaspora is Nitza Tufiño. In her painting Pareja taína (Taíno Couple), she represents the Puerto Rican man and woman as a series of reinterpreted Taíno icons. In the work of Tufiño, the icon that forms the face of the female at the left of the painting is similar to the military protection masks used by soldiers at war to protect themselves against toxic gases. This is possibly a reference to the Vietnam War, which ended in the early seventies, and where many Puerto Rican colleagues of Tufiño (like the three male artists in this paper) fought. Indeed, it is known that Puerto Ricans were given the American citizenship in 1917 as a strategy of the current president Woodrow Wilson to use them as soldiers in the First World War. Ever since, Puerto Ricans have participated in all the wars in which the U.S. has intervened. Jorge Rodríguez Beruff, specialist on the militarization of the Caribbean, has pointed out that the number of Puerto Rican casualties in these wars is unproportionally high (Rodríguez Beruff 188: 154). In her painting Nitza Tufiño seems to condemn the U.S. racist practice of putting Puerto Ricans at the riskiest positions in their military campaigns. By masking the face of the female, traditionally portrayed as the keeper of culture, Tufiño also denounces U.S. cultural imposition over Puerto Rico. A phallus that tries to penetrate the protection mask replaces the nose in the female figure. This phallic Pareja taína (1972). Nitza Tufiño. Gessoed masonite with old paint in coated Fabillon, 48 3/4" x 48 1/4". form acquires a polysemic value referring to a multiple violation that takes place at Permanent collection of El Museo del Barrio. Reprinted, by permission, from El Museo del Barrio. political, cultural, and sexual levels. The placement of the phallus in the female figure suggests the absence of that organ in the male. This symbolic amputation, together The artists of the Puerto Rican Diaspora retook the symbol of the Taíno as the with the pink color (associated with the feminine), infantilizes and feminizes the most legitimate link of Puerto Ricans to their land. Most of the art produced by the male figure. For Tufiño the reproduction of Puerto Rican race, symbolized by the artists discussed in this paper contains Taíno iconography or references to that Taíno icon of the coquí on the chest of the male, is uncertain and at risk.9 The artist culture. Indeed, even the name Taller Boricua makes reference to the indigenous establishes an analogy between the extinguishing of the human race through war culture, since Borikén was the name Taínos had given to Puerto Rico before the and the danger of disappearance of Puerto Rican culture through its assimilation arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. Yet in a reinterpretation, the artists of El Taller to American culture. used Taíno culture as a symbol of Puerto Rican-ness that preceded the never-ending As a counterpoint, the Nuyorican poet Miguel Algarín disturbingly uses a similar domination of the Island by foreign political powers, as well as the consequent metaphor, a flaccid phallus, to characterize the political disempowerment of Puerto cultural influence of the metropolis upon the Island’s inhabitants.7 Due to the labor Ricans in their colonial status. His poem “Mongo affair,” published in the Nuyorican exploitation, and the racial and cultural segregation they faced in the U.S., Puerto Poetry (1975), reads: Ricans in the Diaspora identified with the history of oppression lived by the Taínos under Spain. For this reason, the unmasking of historical narratives that traditionally that even the fucking a man does erased the genocide, and the affirmation of the active role of Taínos as historical subjects before and during colonization, was primordial in the art of El Taller. on a government mattress draws the blood from his cock Fernando Salicrup is one of the artists who revisits Puerto Rican colonial history, cockless, sin espina dorsal, as seen in his painting Una vez más Colombus (1978).8 In this work, Salicrup depicts mongo—that’s it! dozens of eyes of Taíno Indians suspiciously staring through the wild flora of the A welfare fuck is a mongo affair! Island at an unseen Other the viewer imagines to be the colonizer. By omitting the Mongo means flojo

[ 12 ] [ 13 ] Caragol(v4).qxd 12/10/05 3:15 PM Page 14

[. . . .] mongo can only tease but it can’t tickle the juice of the earth-vagina mongo es el bicho Taíno porque murió mongo es el borinqueño[...]10

Both Tufiño and Miguel Algarín relate the colonial status of Puerto Rico to sexual impotence. In the case of Nitza Tufiño, a chain of relations is built through the iconography, starting at the Taíno genocide, passing through the Puerto Rican participation in U.S. wars, and ending in the menaced future of Puerto Rican culture under colonial rule. It is worth mentioning that in the rest of the poem, Algarín also denounces the use of Puerto Rican soldiers as cannon-feed in American wars. Compared to Miguel Algarín’s poem, Nitza Tufiño’s work seems more a cry of warning against the cultural risks of colonialism than a condemnatory stance on the passivity and subjugation of the Taíno people in colonial history. This is especially true when analyzed in the context of the larger production of El Taller Boricua, where the praising of Taíno culture is so prevalent. This is a fundamental difference between the work of the Nuyorican poets and the artists of El Taller. The Nuyorican poets seldom took the task of vindicating the Taíno heritage of Puerto Ricans. Instead, their concern was to find a language that would communicate the daily experience of cultural negotiation of Puerto Ricans from the Diaspora, wanting to keep their identity as a people while living and working in an Anglo-American system. Thus, it is not surprising to find a condemnatory stance towards the tameness of Taínos in one of the few poems in Nuyorican Poetry (1975) that make reference to that population. Unlike most of the art production of El Taller Boricua, the literary production of the Nuyorican poets does not show such a strong attachment to traditional icons of Puerto Rican identity. Instead, it embraces more easily the cultural give-and-take inherent in the diasporic experience as the hybrid name Nuyo-Rican and the characteristic code switching of their poetry suggest. In that sense, the artists of El Taller Boricua seem to have a more nostalgic and essentialist vision of the cultural identity of diasporic Puerto Ricans (Olalquiaga 1993: 110–21).11 The rescue of African culture is the second recurrent characteristic in the work Pariah (1971–72). Marcos Dimas, Oil on canvas, 65" x 54". Taller Boricua. of these artists that points to the reassembling of their national identity. Painted by Reprinted, by permission, from Marcos Dimas. Marcos Dimas, founder and current artistic director of El Taller, the painting Pariah In a similar juxtaposition, Dimas paints a monumental portrait of this figure, (1971–72) is an example of this recuperation of African culture. Pariah is a portrait of an who is racially excluded from society and from the artistic canon for reasons of race, unidentified man whose curly hair, thick lips, and black skin identify him as being from to acknowledge and claim his importance for society and art. It should be noticed African descent. The anonymity of the figure and his uneven hair, nude neck, and rustic that the three-quarter profile chosen by Dimas to portray this figure, its facial necklace give him a tribal character and shock the viewer, who is expecting to see well- features, and the self-assurance it projects, are reminiscent of Diego Velazquez’s combed and elegantly dressed white prestigious figures as subjects of portraiture. portrait of Juan de Pareja at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even the phonetic It is interesting that Puerto Rican-born Dimas entitled this work Pariah, similarity between Juan de Pareja and Pariah reinstate the link. Since the year it was referring to a marginalized person, an abject figure in society. Yet, far from being painted, the portrait of Juan de Pareja shocked the art world for its technical bravura, victimized, the figure gazes at the viewer with dignity, fearlessly affirming his as well as for being such a dignified portrayal of Velázquez’s assistant, a slave from North presence and his racial identity. Dimas transgresses the genre of portraiture, Africa whom Velázquez freed after instructing him on how to paint (López-Rey 1963: conventionally used in Western painting to emphasize the importance and wealth 100). By quoting Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja, Marcos Dimas allies himself to a tradi- of the dominant white elites. Thus, he simultaneously denounces and abolishes tion of daring artists who break restricting conventions that do not allow for repre- the status of the figure as a pariah. sentation of cultural and social diversity, claiming equity and freedom for the oppressed.

[ 14 ] [ 15 ] Caragol(v4).qxd 12/10/05 3:15 PM Page 16

Another possible way of reading this painting is by relating it to the colonial over the silver bodies of the mannequins have the visceral quality of Abstract history of Puerto Rico and the Hispanophilic discourse on national identity Expressionism, and together with the mutilation of the bodies they suggest images officially defended by the government of the Island. As Jorge Duany has pointed of violence, abandonment, and impurity. out, the writers of La Generación del 30 (the ‘30s Generation) established the According to Nitza Tufiño, the title Tom and Jill is a reference to the rebus- national discourse that was later defended by the ICP, which supported the idea rhyme Jack and Jill that Puerto Rican students had to learn at school in the U.S. of Puerto Ricans as a population with mostly racial and cultural traits derived ("Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water...").12 The composition of the from the Spanish, demeaning the contributions of Taíno and, to a greater extent, assemblage suggests a new version of Jack and Jill, this time not as happy children of African cultures on the Island. Only from the seventies on did artists and that “go for a pail of water,” but as suffering, injured, and incomplete beings lost in intellectuals begin to question the Hispanophilic foundations of this conception the urban space. of identity as well as the underlying myth of a peaceful and harmonious mestizaje By making reference to a children’s rhyme to treat a subject as inhumane as between Taínos, Spaniards, and Africans, which finally led to a normalization into marginalization, Soto recurs to a variant of cynicism that can be seen as well in the a “whitened Puerto Rican culture” (Dávila 1997: 64–5). From New York, poem “The Book of Genesis According to Saint Miguelito” by the Nuyorican poet Marcos Dimas unites his diasporic voice with those of contesting Islanders Miguel Piñero. Appropriating the biblical discourse of the Book of Genesis, this denouncing the underprivileged position of black people in Puerto Rican society poem narrates the creation of the slums and ghettos inhabited by Puerto Ricans in and identity since colonial times. New York City. “In the beginning,” Piñero writes, Various reasons allow us to see this painting also as a critique to racism in the United States. Among these are the close ties that have always existed between God created the ghettos and slums Puerto Ricans and African in the U.S. As scholar Juan Flores has and God saw this was good pointed out, the contiguities between Puerto Ricans and Blacks in communities [. . . . ] like El Barrio and Harlem or Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant, the migratory to decorate it patterns of both populations, their cultural and racial similarities, and their God created lead-base paint common history as socially displaced populations in the U.S. are some of the factors that fostered the exchanges between Puerto Ricans and , and then and made each other sensible to the problems they confronted (Flores 1993: God commanded the rivers of garbage and filth 182–98). In more personal terms, the artist Marcos Dimas was also in contact to flow gracefully through the ghettos. with many black artists as a member of the Art Workers Coalition, an important organization composed of international artists and cultural activists that fought With biting sarcasm Piñero makes an inventory of the elements that define against the exclusion of so-called minority artists in mainstream museums. the Puerto Rican ghettos and their social problems. He inverts the idea of This personal and collective bond with African-Americans certainly encouraged perfection in the creation of the universe by the divinity, presenting the crude Dimas to pictorially denounce racism in the United States. reality of the slum, its ugliness, its dirtiness, and the indifference of God, In other words, as a product of Puerto Rican mestizaje himself, Dimas here referring to the supposedly democratic U.S. system as a generator of the social recognizes the underestimated contribution of African culture to Puerto Rican differences. Likewise, through the rescuing and assemblage of thrown-out national identity. His acknowledgment is not based on an intellectualized relation materials, Jorge Soto creates a metaphor for the degraded life in the ghetto and the to African culture. Instead, he introduces his everyday experience as an émigré social displacement of Puerto Ricans in New York. In his work, the strong images Puerto Rican who fights the same struggles against racial and social segregation of disenfranchisement and mutilation mirror the brutality of the events chosen by fought by African Americans. the artist for his “biographical sketch” in his catalogue of drawings from 1979 for his exhibition at El Museo del Barrio. Some of these life experiences are: Estrangement, alienation, and its sarcastic response Social estrangement and segregation are themes that were central to another artist 1951 Playing in abandoned lots, rusty cans, broken bricks, dead cats being heavily committed to Taíno and African imagery, the deceased Jorge Soto. This can devoured by hundreds of worms, dead rats, olor de podrido,13 be seen in a work where Taíno and African imagery are absent. In his work Tom and decaying matter. Jill (1982) Soto transgresses the tradition of sculpture through the assemblage of 1974 Martín Tito Pérez, like thousands of other Puerto Ricans, urban waste to construct a metaphor for the marginality of the Puerto Rican is unmercifully, brutally beaten to his death in the precinct. experience in New York. In Tom and Jill Soto assembles a series of found objects that he collects as an Despite the initial crudeness of his proposal, the dirty, injured, and incomplete urban archaeologist from the garbage in the streets of El Barrio. Tom and Jill is a figures are still standing. This suggests at least the spirit of survival of the Puerto Rican couple of mutilated mannequins: both have only one arm, and the woman also lacks community even in the social and cultural misery of the ghetto. Likewise, in Piñero’s one leg. The genitals of the man are covered with the head of a doll, while those of poem the writer for a brief moment gives the people of the ghetto the possibility of the woman have a black mass that resembles asphalt. The aggressive brushstrokes becoming politically conscious and understanding their oppression when he writes:

[ 16 ] [ 17 ] Caragol(v4).qxd 12/10/05 3:15 PM Page 18

On the seventh day God was tired The seventies remain a fixture in the history of the Diaspora, a point of So he called in sick departure from which subsequent generations of Puerto Rican artists in New Collected his overtime pay York continue creating their works. In recent times, the exilic solitude of that A paid vacation included second generation has become less disorienting and painful. Two trends But before God got on that t.w.a exemplify the transformation of the Puerto Rican population in the mainland. The first, occurring mainly in the late seventies and eighties was the shifting For the sunny beaches of Puerto Rico of the sense of displacement from the U.S. to the Island, as the U.S. became He noticed his main man satan home to the third and fourth generations after the Diaspora, a group of people Planting the learning trees of consciousness who are considered Americans by most Islanders. In a remarkable reversal, Around his ghetto edens the Latino U.S. has become an accepted homeland, the Island, an exotic So God called a news conference on a state of the heavens destination. An interesting topic for research would be to see how the address experience of displacement of New York-born Puerto Ricans who went back [. . . .] to the Island (e.g. Nick Quijano and Carlos Irizarry) is expressed in their art and God told the people to be and how it has shaped their notion of cultural identity. COOL The second trend is more frequent and goes hand in hand with a current process that is generally summarized under the concept of transnationalism. [. . . .] The international mobility of people in constant transit from their home and the people stayed cool. countries to the world economic centers and “cosmo-polis” (to borrow Walter Mignolo’s term) has rendered territorially bounded definitions of national Instead of going back to the Taíno and African roots that serve as a cultural identity less significant (Mignolo 2002: 156). National identity is just one among referent of the past to Puerto Ricans on the Island, in Tom and Jill and “The Book a variety new identities that are constituted by multiple cultural exchanges that of Genesis According to San Miguelito” the images chosen by Jorge Soto and Miguel inevitably take place in a hybrid context constantly in the making.15 The Piñero constitute the everyday life, the present of the exile’s fragmented history. opposition between globalization, with its homogenizing effect on the cultural This historic moment is filled with uncertainties and marked by the experience of landscape, and transnationalism, an idealistic project of a harmonious social displacement, only approachable through a bitter and tragic humor. A profound multicultural global conviviality, are new elements taken into account by Puerto frustration emanates from the poem and the assemblage analyzed here, the frustration Rican artists in the Island and the mainland who deal with the subject of of being uprooted and transplanted from a homeland imagined as a paradisiacal Island identity. Ironically, this contradiction between globalization and transnation- into an urban slum, where the possibility of leaving is more or less impossible. alism has rendered identity a more elusive concept, and at the same time made it an ever more interesting and much needed one for believers of multiculturalism. From the seventies to the twenty-first century To summarize, the artistic production of the Puerto Ricans Nitza Tufiño, Marcos Dimas, Jorge Soto, and Fernando Salicrup is part of the project of forging and valuing the particular and unique identity and culture of Puerto Ricans in New York City. The persistent questioning of colonial history, the rescuing of demeaned Taíno and African cultural elements, and the reference to marginalization and 3( exilic displacement define this cultural identity as one in a continuous process of transformation. Its main characteristics are the tearing down of colonial narratives and the construction of a new self, based on the complex exchanges of the Diaspora population with its place of origin (Puerto Rico) and the Anglo-American society where it lives. In the case of the artists of El Taller Boricua, we have seen the border between the two temporalities and cultural poles—the past in Puerto Rico and the present in New York—transforming itself into a place of creation.14 The African and Taíno iconography, the aesthetic of the object, and the artistic subversion of the canon became the threads in their artwork that mended their fragmented history, reconstituting the broken pieces of the culture left behind and integrating them into the present of the diasporic experience. The result is a highly complex and unique artistic expression that simultaneously evokes humiliation and self-pride, profound sadness and ironic humor, hopelessness, chaos, and anarchy, and finally the hope for a dignified future.

[ 18 ] [ 19 ] Caragol(v4).qxd 12/10/05 3:15 PM Page 20

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 12 “Jack and Jill went up the hill, / To fetch a pail of water. /Jack fell down, / And broke his I would like to thank CENTRO Journal’s anonymous reviewers for their insightful crown; / And Jill came tumbling after. / Then up back got, and home did trot, / as fast as he comments. My gratitude goes as well to Marc Neumann for editorial assistance. could caper./ They put him to bed, / and plastered his head, / with vinegar and brown paper.” This essay is a revised version of a paper I wrote for a seminar class titled “Nationalism 13 Odor of rotten material. and Identity Across the Americas” which Dr. Katherine Manthorne gave at the Graduate 14 I am borrowing the metaphor of the border as the place of creation from Gloria Center, CUNY, in the Fall of 2002. Anzaldúa’s text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, where she uses it to describe the origin of her Chicana poetic expression. NOTES 15 Some examples of identities defined by hybridity and transnationalism might include 1 That exodus is known as the Puerto Rican Diaspora. As Elizabeth Harney explains, the Pakistani taxi-driver in New York, the Turkish cook in Germany, the Algerian stock- the term diaspora was traditionally used by social scientists to refer to the spread of Jews, broker in Paris, etc. Armenians, and Greeks. Today, many use it in the greater discourse of transnationalism to describe and explore the repercussions of the fall of geographic, cultural, and national REFERENCES boundaries that has resulted from migrations of the twentieth century and the process Algarín, Miguel and Miguel Piñero eds. 1975. Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Words of globalization (Harney: 17). and Feelings. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc. 2 Yasmin Ramírez has recently accepted this invitation and presented the most extensive Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza research on the Nuyorican art movement. Ramírez presented and defended her doctoral Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. . San Francisco: Aunt dissertation at CUNY’s Graduate Center in 2005. Lute Books. 3 One might debate the appropriateness of the term exile for the Puerto Rican Bhabha, Homi. 2004 (1994). The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge diasporic experience. However, I take economic hardship and underdevelopment Classics. as a constraint that accounts for “banishment,” being aware of the intrinsic danger Dávila, Arlene. 1997. Sponsored Identities: Cultural Politics in Puerto Rico. Philadelphia: of romanticizing the Puerto Rican experience out of proportion. Temple University Press. 4 In terms of the relation between nationalism and exile, Said writes, “Nationalisms Díaz-Quiñones, Arcadio. 1993. La memoria rota. Río Piedras: Ediciones Huracán. are about groups, but in a very acute sense exile is a solitude experienced outside the group […]” (2000: 177). Duany, Jorge. 2002. The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in 5 Said writes that the only way exiles can overcome their feeling of solitude and the United States. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. identify to a collective is by reconstructing their history and identity (2000: 177–8). Flores, Juan. 1993. 'Qué Asimilated, Brother, Yo Soy Asimilao': The Structuring of Puerto 6 The ICP or Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña was established by the Popular Rican Identity in the U.S. In Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity, Democratic Party (PPD) in 1956 as the official government institution that would 182–95. Houston: Arte Público Press. promote and preserve Puerto Rican culture. Harney, Elizabeth et al. 2003. Ethiopian Passages: Contemporary Art from the Diaspora. 7 Similarly, artists who, as a result of the Anglo-American conquest of the Published in conjunction with the exhibition Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in West, often consider themselves as exiles in their own land. Aztlán—the mythic land the Diaspora, organized by the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian of the Mexica—is seen as a symbol of their indigenous and Mexican heritage. Institute, May 2- October 5, 2003. London: Philip Wilson Publishers. 8 I translate Una vez más Colombus as “Colombus once again.” 9 The coquí is a native frog and one of the national symbols of Puerto Rico. López, Adalberto. 1980. Puerto Ricans: Their History, Culture and Society. Cambridge, 10 “that even the fucking a man does/ on a government mattress draws the blood from Mass: Schenkman Publishers Co. his cock/ cockles/ without a spinal cord/ numb—that’s it!/ A welfare fuck is a numb affair/ López Rey, José. 1963. Velazquez: A Catalogue Raisonné of His Oeuvre. London: Faber and numb means weak/ numb can only tease but it can’t tickle the juice of the earth-vagina; Faber. the Taíno’s dick is numb/ because he died/ the borinqueño is numb […].” Mignolo, Walter D. 2002. The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical 11 I agree with Celeste Olalquiaga’s explanation of the attachment of Nuyoricans and Cosmopolitalism. In Cosmopolitalism, eds. Carol A. Beckendridge et al., 157–87. to traditional notions of cultural identity as a protective reaction against racism Durham: Duke University Press. and the commodification of Latino culture. I also agree with her interpretation of this reaction as cultural hindrance, as it does not allow for a parodying reading of the stereotypes Olalquiaga, Celeste. 1993. Megalópolis. Venezuela: Monte Avila Editores that the hegemonic culture has of Third World Cultures. According to her, that capacity for Latinoamericana. recycling, parodying, and inverting those stereotypes is an important strategy of political, Ramírez, Yasmin. 2004. Nuyorican Vanguards, Political Actions, Poetic Visions: A and social resistance in Latin America (particularly in Brazil), which has produced a dynamic History of Puerto Rican Artists in New York, 1964–1984. Ph.D. dissertation, process of cultural negotiation where Third World cultures embrace or discard elements of Graduate Center, CUNY. First-World culture at their convenience. I do not fully agree with Olalquiaga’s statement Rodríguez Beruff, Jorge. 1988. Política militar y dominación: Puerto Rico en el contexto that Nuyoricans and Chicanos have always been circumscribed to defining their identity as latinoamericano. Rio Piedras: Ediciones Huracán. either purely Latino or fully assimilated to Anglo culture. This explanation is simplistic and Reflexions on Exile and Other Essays does not take into account the signs of cultural hybridity discussed in this paper that are Said, Edward. 2000. Reflections on Exile. In , 173–86. manifest in the Nuyorican visual and literary art production. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

[ 20 ] [ 21 ]