Black Latino is not a typo
In Santurce, Puerto Rico, the Contemporary Museums of Art decided to dedicate an exhibit on black voices –specifically Black Puerto Rican ones. Puerto Rico Negrx acts as an artistic study in intersectionality. An entire exhibit made up of Black Puerto Rican artists addressing their own and others' questions on what it means to be “Black” and “Latin” and “Black and Latin”. Multifaceted in artistic discipline and identity, every artist in this collection allows their audience to ruminate on the meaning of their art –and the weight it holds, knowing who made it.
A common theme in some art in the exhibit is the struggle to be visible as a multicultural person. Javier Cardona’s photography series You don’t look like… (1996), plays into the harmful racialized stereotypes and assumptions made about Black Latinos and Afro Caribbean by other non-Black people and Latinos. Ten photos of damaging stereotypes are brought to life with self portraits by Cardona through exaggerated expressions and dramatized costumes. Each photo, ranging from a dirtied machete holding jíbaro to a shoeless house maid, is in a black frame removing the possibility of overlap in these crude caricatures. Cardona makes it clear that his identity is not seen as someone to be take seriously, but rather a thing of entertainment.
Not one photograph makes space for intersectionality to come into play. Squaring off each image into their own worlds emphasizes the isolation Black Latinos and Afro Caribbean experience. Reducing someone to one aspect of their identity is to rob them of their humanity. In a world where everything is political, race, sexuality, ethnicity, gender, sex, recognizing that a person with a complex social identity is going to have a different perspective on what it means to be “seen”.
In the same vein of struggling with visibility, Black Latinos are equally absent in their own history. They exist at a cultural median where their communities have not reflected them in textbooks nor conversations. Of course, it would be dismissive to not acknowledge that some of this erasure is a result of Eurocentrism in education. Even with this version of history on slavery, reconstruction done post-slavery, and modern day colonialism, it is disturbing to see a collective dismissal of trying to understand these peoples perspectives and experiences.
William Villalongo’s Black Menagerie (Moon Mask) (2022) is a direct re-addressing of Black Mediterranean and Atlantic history. Menagerie (a common practice in linking animals to objects in naturalist classification systems –and has a loose tie to eugenics) is reinterpreted as a scattered history on a velvet flocked void. An organized mess of objects from African Moorish and nature are linked in a circular constellation with echoes of centuries worth of persecution. There is no labeling or classifying what is more “evolved” or of more importance in this piece though. The intentionality of treating blackness as a collective history highlights the global experience of bearing this history.
Around the world, people have been victims or perpetrators of slavery. It is not a phenomena to endure it, but the reactions to it vary: being forced to pick up the pieces of their community or continuing to exist in it (becoming a colony or commonwealth). Snow White (2020 -2021) by Ada del Pilar Ortiz acts as a commentary on Puerto Rico’s longstanding history of its oppressive agricultural economy. Echoes of legal enslavement are set in slabs of concrete with a sugar cane pattern: mimicking Ponce’s plantation Central Mercedita’s view above the fields, and the frieze design found in the dining area. Colored a sugar snow white, a reference to the last brand of sugar processed at Central Mercedita (Snow White), oppression is cemented into the land that can no longer provide for its own people.
Alzando La Mano Para Hablar (2022) by Deyaneira Maldonado questions the racial democracy found in Puerto Rican classrooms through Afro-Puerto Rican icons. Racial democracy is a term created to discuss the denial of racism in Brazil –which applies to a majority of Latin and South American countries. In this photograph, a girl in a school uniform sits cross legged with a lap full of books. But she has a surreal appearance, her face shrouded by a mask larger than her entire body. Such a strong character presence contrasted by the meek position of being a student raising her hand. Even though she is larger than life, she must still ask for permission to speak –to be noticed. The use of Afro-Puerto Rican iconography being hesitant to speak says volumes.
Active erasure of voices in a previously oppressed, already marginalized, community is to accept the title of hypocrite. Puerto Rico’s racial democratic history of oppressive agriculture is taught in classrooms. Unignorable events in world history such as the Atlantic Slave trade are given just as much importance. When it comes to the intersection of these histories they are silent masked voices waiting to be given the turn to speak. Recreating oppressive structures by filtering history will only further divide a community that is still dealing with generational colonial trauma. Racial democracy only thrives because there is an illusion that slavery has made all Caribbean people one. The irony of this is the longstanding history of a racial caste system created by the Spaniards still persists. Jokes about Dominicans not being black are half truths of centuries worth of internalized racism. Ignoring the issue of race will not solve a lack of solidarity; it will not fix a modern community that refuses to write a non-Eurocentric history.
Throughout this exhibition, there is an understanding in not being understood. A preexisting frustration, disappointment, melancholy, sarcasm and joy in not being able to fit in binaries. Puerto Rico Negrx brings forth the consensus that non-Black people hold expectations against Afro Latino identities without realization. Especially when thinking about Blackness, Latiness, or what it means to exist as both.