Sculpting Blackness: Representations of Black‐Puerto Ricans in Public Art

Abstract

This article examines how race is represented in public art‐works sponsored by the State in contemporary Puerto Rico. We focus mainly on two sculptures that commemorate Puerto Rico's black heritage, the sculptural triad entitled “Ritmo” (2006), and the sculpture titled “Osaín” (2007), both located in the town of Caguas. We argue that blackness in Puerto Rican art‐works is rendered passive, foreign, and primitive. Nevertheless, while creating folkloric representations of blacks, black artists also try to convey a different image of blackness: one that is marked by modernity and rebelliousness.

Monuments to Mestizaje and the Commemoration of Racial Democracy in Puerto Rico

“…Monuments to mestizaje privilege the white European portion of the racial triad by presenting Taínos and Africans as complementary roots that contribute to the predominantly Spanish trunk of Puerto Rican identity. This critique is in line with scholarship on cultural politics in Puerto Rico (Capó García forthcoming; Dávila 1997; Godreau 2015; Godreau et al 2008; Jiménez Román 2019; Lloréns and Carrasquillo 2008). One of the five statues located in visual artist José Buscaglia Guillermety's breathtaking sculptural group the Plaza de la Herencia de las Américas (Plaza of the Heritage of the Americas) is called La Herencia Social (Social Heritage) which consists of an Iberian priestess who is described as the symbolic mother of the New World and is presenting her white creole son alongside a Spanish conquistador who appears to be the father (Figure 7).…”

“…While I do not disagree with these statements, nor with Godreau et al's (2008) extension of this view in their analysis of textbook imagery, I believe that alternative depictions, especially those carried out through monuments, also carry with them their own ideological maneuvers, though admittedly from a much more desirable social justice perspective. Wouldn't “the celebration of the enslaved persons' resilience” (Lloréns and Carrasquillo 2008, 114–115) continue to privilege the enslaved aspects of Black identity, or on the contrary, would it conceal the violence of its history and assuage its interpretation to avoid threatening white fragility.…”

“…I look to build upon and add to anthropologists Hilda Llorén's and Rosa Carrasquillo's (2008) brilliant scholarship on sculptural representations of Blackness in the town of Caguas, published in Visual Anthropology Review . They argue that the two sculptures they analyzed “maintain the folklorizing strategy that works to sustain the Puerto Rican myth of a racial democracy and of the creole nation” while relegating black bodies to the realm of the cultural, thus “[impeding] the possibility of a just engagement with what it means to live as a black person in Puerto Rico's racial democracy today” (2008, 115).…”

“…As argued by scholars (Dávila 1997; Géliga, Rosas, and Delgado 2007; Godreau 2015; Jiménez Román 2019; Lloréns and Carrasquillo 2008), Africans' contribution to Puerto Rican identity has predominantly been conceptualized around their labor and their role as entertainers. In Manatí's La Formación del Pueblo Puertorriqueño (The Formation of the Puerto Rican People), there is a statue of an African man holding a shovel, much like in the insignia of the ICP where he holds a machete (Figure 14).…”

‘Pulling Up Myths from the Root:’ Designing and Implementing an Anti-Racist Curriculum About the African Heritage for Third Graders in Puerto Rico

“…Racial prejudice has been documented in the workplace (Hernández 2002), in schools (Godreau et al, 2008), in the media (Rivero 2000), in law enforcement (Santiago-Valles 1996), in health outcomes (Gravlee 2005 et. al.,), in the context of urban planning (Godreau 2001; Lloréns & Carrasquillo, 2008 ), in linguistic, aesthetic practices, and in cultural production (Godreau 2008; Lloréns 2005; 2008), and, finally, in the formation of a national identity (González 1985; Zenón Cruz 1974; Duany 2002; Géliga-Vargas et. al., 2008).…”