Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2000)

ISSN: 1525-447X

CONVERSATION WITH JUAN SÁNCHEZ (Bronx Museum of Art, NY., Sept.16, 1998)

Gladys M. Jiménez Muñoz

1898: RICAN / STRUCTION, Multi-layered Impressions. A conceptual video and slide installation commemorating the 1898 invasion of Puerto Rico by the United States [The Exhibition -- Automated Slide Show and Non-Automated Slide Show].

What kind of conversation do I want to have with Juan Sánchez one hundred years after the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico, which is to say, after the U.S. colonization of Puerto Ricans ("here" and "there")? I want to have the kind of conversation that will go to the core of what I think is the most important statement in Juan's work, namely: his desire to draw the links between artistic expression and the struggle against the results of colonial rule. You see, after one hundred years of U.S. domination, Juan's graphic images continually remind us of why it is still necessary to resist the consequences of this same domination.

Let's start with some comments about this exhibition and its esthetic and social importance in terms of "speaking the truth to power" - in this case, U.S. colonialism.

As I entered Juan's installation a week ago, I suddenly felt pulled toward various projected scenes and texts. All of these figures required that I simultaneously pay attention to a multiplicity of sounds and images. It reminded me of what African-American historian Elsa Barkley Brown says in her article "Polyrhythms and Improvisation: Lessons for Women's History," (1991) when she compares history to a jazz improvisation:

History is also everybody talking at once, multiple rhythms played simultaneously. The events and people we write about did not occur in isolation but in dialogue with a myriad of other people and events. In fact, at any given moment millions of people are all talking at once. As historians we try to isolate one conversation and to explore it but the trick is then how to put that conversation in a context which makes evident its dialogue with so many others--how to make this one lyric stand alone and at the same time be in connection with all the other lyrics being sung (85).

I concentrated first on a series of black-and-white slides projecting texts on the wall: dates in no particular chronological order, going backward and forward in time, taking me to the early twentieth century and bringing me back to the nineties, to go yet back again, to the fifties and so forth. It could appear to be cacophonic(?), repetitive(?) and simple. There was a much more complex selection of memories, kinships, and circumstances being displayed and quoted here. The common-sense notion of spectatorship implies being an innocent, neutral bystander. But Juan makes us uncomfortably conscious and even painfully aware, in a very real way. "Spectatorship" actually requires that we participate actively and take a position about what we are seeing. We need to make decisions about what our emphasis will be: Which one of the multiple images are we going to concentrate on first? What bridges of meaning are we going to construct, linking us to these very same images? As John Berger in Ways of Seeing suggests, seeing is not a passive activity. "The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe;" and then he adds: "To look is an act of choice" (1972, 8). "We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves" (9).

Some of the slide- and video portions of the installation represents a collective-historical piecing together of things ignored or dimly remembered things. Juan reminds us of - or introduces to us - an entire constellation of operations, figures, and the sorts of faces that we should never forget or have ever forgotten. The section of the slide/video presentation covering the 1898-1950s period was particularly significant for me because they made possible a "dialogue with a myriad of other people and events." I am talking about the other painful and interconnected colonial and neo-colonial North American ventures being visited on the rest of the Caribbean when the new regime was being imposed on all Puerto Ricans.

Seeing these images reminded me that, after U.S. troops invaded all of the island of Quisqueya in 1914, Haitian "cacos" resisted U.S. military rule during 1915-1934, while Dominican "gavilleros" did the same and for the same reasons between 1916 and 1924. The repeated allusions to U.S. soldiers and the American eagle in the installation recalled to me the period (1925-1933) when other North American "birds of prey" - in this case, U.S. airplanes - bombed the Nicaraguan countryside where the guerrilla army of Sandino was resisting the Marines who were propping up the local neo-colonial regime, immediately following direct U.S. rule during 1912-1925. Juan's visual echoes of the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico evoked scenes of México being twice again occupied by U.S. troops (1914-1917 and 1918-1919); of Honduras being invaded four times (1912, 1919, 1924, and 1925); and of Panamá being intervened once more (1918-1920 and 1925) by U.S. ground forces - far beyond the colonial strip of the Canal Zone.

The installation also contained implicit or explicit allusions to the U.S. repression of thousands of Puerto Ricans resisting the effects of capitalist colonialism in multiple ways during the first half of this century. I was reminded of the bloody crack-downs against the island-wide strike waves of 1900-1906, 1914-1921, and 1933-1934, as well as against the Nationalist militancy of the 1930s, 1950, and 1954. But this, in turn, reminded me of how other, Caribbean, and larger-scale repressions became possible at this same time: of the bloody reign of the U.S.-imposed Trujillo (1930-1961); at this same time and after a long series of U.S. military incursions (1906-1909, 1912, and 1917-1922), in Cuba other U.S.-imposed dictatorships (those of Machado and Batista) were being resisted in the streets, in the mountains, and in the cane fields. All the while, the extended, slow-motion scenes of the "bracero" cutting sugar-cane in Puerto Rico reminded me of how U.S. corporations (the Sugar Trust, in particular) were raking in billions of dollars in profits in the entire Caribbean Basin for almost half a century - none of which would have been possible if the War of 1898 had not turned the entire region into "an American lake," the so-called Backyard of the United States.

The slides and video covering the postwar period brought to mind similar parallels, interconnections, and dialogues. The slow motion and stylized scenes of the U.S.-sponsored industrialization program in Puerto Rico clearly gestured towards the new invasions of U.S. capital in Puerto Rico of the 1940s and 1950s. This was the same economic invasions which massively displaced thousands of Puerto Ricans to the U.S. mainland during those decades: just like the U.S. military invasion of 1965-1966 during the Civil War in the Dominican Republic and the Bay of Pigs invasion and the economic war since 1961 (up to the present) has displaced thousands of Dominicans and Cubans to U.S. territory, Puerto Rico, included. Juan's more contemporary selection of images evoked the third wave of the U.S. economic war in the Caribbean Basin during the 1970s and 1980s, which coincided with multiple resistances to these new ventures. For Puerto Ricans (in the island and in the United States), this included the strike waves, student, women's, anti-imperialist, and other social movements of these same decades. Most of these, particularly the underground pro-independence militancy, were heavily persecuted - a repression which repeatedly surfaces in Juan's graphics. Analogous movements in the rest of the Caribbean had to face even more brutal U.S.-sponsored attempts to crush them. Such was the case of Nicaragua, Grenada, Jamaica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, and Haiti. It is against this historical background of U.S. imperialism and colonialism that I locate Juan's exhibition: because his work reminds us of the things - and suggests even more - that we should never forget.

But that's not all. Another video, this one embedded in the wall shows the figure of a naked woman confined to an empty room, the Puerto Rican flag covering her face and her arms tied behind her back. This is a very haunting and painfully familiar vision for some of us. In more ways than one, this is an unsettling - yet arresting - image; one which also has multiple and simultaneous readings. Women as colonial subjects occupy a much more precarious position in relation to the colonizer and in relation to the colonized male. I think this is one of the most controversial depictions in the exhibition. It's a description that, in part, contrasts with yet, in part, reinforces the portrayal on the other side of the wall (where the video/slide presentation is located) showing the young girls dancing in the Puerto Rican Day Parade. I would like Juan to talk more about both images and their possible inter-connections.

In his piece Baquiné for Taíno Warrior: Gold, AIDS, Police Brutality" (1996-98) Juan juxtaposed the historical with the contemporary. The violence we Puerto Ricans suffered under Spanish colonialism is present, re-presented, and mixed-up with the violence we suffer today as a result of U.S. colonialism. Two horizontal panels painted in red, projecting a bare chest with a cross in a chain, newspaper clippings of youth violence documenting the 1994 murder of Anthony Baez by the NYPD, repetitive oval shapes simulating congas being played by pairs of hands whose repetitiveness almost make you hear the sound of a pra-ta-ta-ta-tá. It is "la clave" telling us that any kind of colonialism annihilates lives, reducing bodies to nothing, destroying the substance of, and within, a people: we run the risk of ceasing to exist. ...And yet, as that same "clave" within Juan's work also illustrates, repeats, and argues: hope remains, the dead live on, the struggle - for dreams, communities, and lives - continues.

As this last work demonstrates, Juan is also interested in referencing Afro-Caribbean ceremonies and signs. I would like Juan to talk more about the issue of race because I think this is one of the most relevant and important aspects of his work: as it pertains to Puerto Rican identity and as a counter-memory to Iberian and U.S. colonialism. The "baquiné" iconography; the visual richness and multiple layering upon layering of images and bright colors; the deliberate patchwork of scratched script echoing, not only graffiti tags, but also santería or vodoun signs; the syncopated sampling of interwoven danzas, boleros, salsa, and Latin Jazz; and the "velas a las siete potencias" placed on the floor (on the other side of the gallery, in front of the dark-room video presentation), to name a few: all of these gesture in a very significant way to how national identity is constructed and reconstructed among Puerto Ricans ("here" and "there"). They allude to, as well as re-invent, an embattled national identity--but this time against how the prevailing "blanquito" definitions try to erase, exoticize, and/or trivialize our African heritage.

You see, African heritage constitutes a shared element among Latin American and Caribbean cultures. This is one thing we all have in common as Caribbean and Latin American peoples, but many of us do not want to recognize this African legacy. What is specifically Caribbean or Latin American about this invisibility and this absence? Like all cultures, Puerto Rican national culture ("here" and "there") has primarily defined itself not only by what it is, but - even more importantly - by what it is not. To be Puerto Rican is to have nothing to do with that which is alien and strange to Puerto Rican-ness: historically, one of the principal symbols of such strangeness and non-Puerto Rican-ness has been blackness and, specifically, African-ness. Whites and most of the intermediary racial categories that constitute the Puerto Rican population have traditionally perceived and understood blackness as something - literally - foreign. This perception extends from the 19th-century stupidity of identifying as a continental-African or as an English-West-Indian any prieto/a born in the island (while embracing into "the [national] family," the last Gallego or Corso that just got off the boat), to the current "changüería" of assuming that all the dark- skinned "hispanas/os" among us have to be Dominicans. Why the denial? Why does this African-diasporic, and no less Puerto Rican, past remain invisible? Why does this African- diasporic presence still remain absent today? In his use of space and sound, of light and shadow, of colour and chronology, of memory and narrative, Juan reminds us that these invisibilities and these absences are also one of the legacies of 1898.

This is why Juan's reference to our African heritage and our various Afro-diasporic characteristics is something very complex. Once again, I think this entire process - including, Juan's references - do "not occur in isolation but [rather] in dialogue with a myriad of other people and events." We tend to assume our Puerto Rican-ness in many problematic and contradictory ways: as a way to differentiate us from those that were not considered Puerto Rican, as well as who have lived or still live in the Island ("dominicanos," "cubanos," and "americanos"), and as a way to distance ourselves from those Puerto Ricans born and/or brought up in the United States. But this national-cultural identity was and is also assumed in the Island to establish distinctions between degrees of Puerto Rican-ness. The members of certain political parties are perceived as more Puerto Rican than others. Men are understood to be more representative of Puerto Rico (ideologically and politically) than women. Educated people of means are seen as more Puerto Rican than the ignorant and poor majorities of the population. The lighter skinned you are, the more Puerto Rican you feel and are treated. Heterosexuals are perceived as more Puerto Rican than lesbians and gays, and so on. You see, we continuously struggle with our Puerto Rican-ness in a national, political, cultural, gendered, sexualized, and racialized context.

And yet, paradoxically, Juan's work always reminds me that we need to learn to treasure the rejection of the colonizer; that we need to learn to imagine a new way of being Puerto Rican; that we need to continue - and, in some cases, begin - a conversation about what all of this means after 1898. For me and once again recalling the words of Elsa Barkley Brown, this installation by Juan Sánchez has "put that conversation in a context which makes evident its dialogue with so many others--...[making] this one lyric stand alone and at the same time be in connection with all the other lyrics being sung (85)"

References

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing (New York: Viking Press, 1973)

Brown, Elsa Barkley. "Polyrhythms and Improvisation: Lessons for Women's History," History Workshop Journal, 31 (Spring 1991): 85-90.

Citation Format

Jiménez Muñoz, Gladys M.. (2000). CONVERSATION WITH JUAN SÁNCHEZ (Bronx Museum of Art, NY., Sept.16, 1998). Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World: 1 , 2.