A sea change has transformed migration scholarship in the last two decades. Most scholars now recognize that many migrants maintain ties to their home countries at the same time that they become incorporated into the places where they settle. They continue to invest, support political candidates, and raise families in their homelands while they buy homes and join the PTA in the United States. By belonging to several communities at once, migrants redefine the boundaries of belonging and create new kinds of memberships and citizenships, dramatically transforming the contours social experience.

One place these processes not only unfold but are also represented is in the creative arts. To explore how the relationship between art and society changes when social life no longer stays within national boundaries, the Transnational Studies Initiative (TSI) at Harvard organized a series of public events in the Boston area in spring of 2007. Three artists—Giles Li, a Chinese-American spoken word artist, Samina Ali, an Indian Muslim writer, and Miguel Luciano, a Puerto Rican visual artist—were invited to present and speak about their work and how it explores an intersection between art, identity and homeland. Interviews with the artists, as well as the public conversations were filmed and made into a documentary film, Art Beyond Borders, which speaks not only to the relationship between art and identity but about the role of art and culture in bringing about social change.

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My work addresses playful and painful exchanges between Puerto Rico and the United States, questioning a colonial relationship that exists to present day and problematizing the space between the two cultures. I am interested in examining how colonial subordination is extended through globalization as communities have shifted gears from a production based society to one that is grounded in consumption. My work often organizes popular, religious, and consumer iconography into fluctuating new hierarchies to describe the hybridity of contemporary belief systems.

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I’m a visual artist who was born in Puerto Rico and grew up primarily in the states from Seattle to Miami to NY I’ve lived in a lot of different cities and I’ve also spent a lot of time in Puerto Rico during all those years-mostly going to visit family over the years, but in the recent years I’ve been able to go back and make work which has been exciting experience  for me. But my work as an artist deals with a lot of those issues in the back and forth about looking at Puerto Rican culture and politics and the experience about being on the island and the United States and negotiating the politics of that identity and that politics of that experience as well.

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I don’t know if there’s truth about it being Puerto Rican in the States. It’s really about being  Puerto Rican period. It’s about redefining the Puerto Rican experience and the Puerto Rican experience in the States or in New York is just as valid as the experience on the island-—we are all one people—who share a history of migration that’s gone on for a long long time and that story is one that impacts everyone – regardless of where you live.

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Nuyorican has been redefined here as a very proud term as a statement of identity....It becomes a language of empowerment if we embrace it that way- and that’s the place where I am interested in working from.

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In Puerto Rico, I presented the Mano Poderosa Race Track, a kind of interactive sculpture installation that takes Puerto Rican folkloric iconography and combines it with this consumer fantasy that plays out on this competitive hotwheels race track that come out of this huge hand of god—kind of a carved wooden saint icon. It’s taking Puerto Rican Art form right, a folkloric tradition sort of that is considered an authentic historic tradition and is taking it into a whole another carnavalesque place combining it with this consumer past time and it’s all being satirically mixed together in this race to the sacred heart finish line.

A lot of that political reality is as a result of a very complex and difficult relationship with the united states for the last 100 years- you’re looking at issues of subjugation that have gone on for a long long time and what’s the impact of that- what is the impact of being a colonized people for 500 years- and hopefully in the work it’s opening up up some of these questions and trying to make sense of them- but it’s also addressing quite serious subject matter sometimes in playful ways.

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I like using that strategy sometimes to evoke humor to evoke sometimes imagery that is from our childhood that is from a place of innocence often times that is deceiving.  And it’s using  … devices that is recognizable from a commercial advertisement , from a cereal box or from a children’s book and it’s using that image or that imagery to tell a different story.

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I am interested in reconstructing a colonial mentality you know that we have been living for a long time- and finding sort of places of resistance that we can empower and celebrate and grow up- I don’t know what the words are that I am looking for…but that’s the whole idea behind the work is that it may evoke a spirit of resistance and that we can move forward with and we can do something constructive with.

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Things happen sometimes at an accelerated pace sometimes in Puerto Rico in absurd and amazing ways. But um it’s happening all over the world and I think that’s what happens sometimes with my work—and people can identify regardless because the issues have become universal.

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I think a lot about the way how issues of dependency have worked in Puerto Rico- how we go from being a production based society to being a consumption based society and today Puerto Ricans are among the greatest consumer’s really in the world - per capita we spend more than – and we buy more than consumers in any American state and we make less.  We are statistically twice as poor as the poorest state in the US—which I think is still Mississippi. 

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(If you use Cracker Jack image) 

I started out with this image of Craker Juan which is sort of a piece wich describes a lot of the things I am interested in doing- it’s a poster image that I made from appropriating a Craker Jack label—so it’s appropriating advertising and consumer imagery—this was in 1998 and 1998 was the centennial mark the 100 year mark of the US colonialism in Puerto Rico- this was an easy image to work with because the Craker Jack character is kind of a military character a sailor and looking at relationships between Puerto Rico and the military the historic relationship with Puerto Rico and the military is one example that clearly illustrates the strained relationship we have with the United States and the inequities we have a citizens.

Art and activism for me are two important continuums that I try to get through to in the work, in some work it’s more direct than others, but their equally important the idea that the art can inspire activism somehow- I think it can and I am interested in using art as a vehicle towards that action.

Peggy Levitt is Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Sociology at
Wellesley College, and Co-Director of the Transnational Studies Initiative and Associate at The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and The Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Harvard University. She is the author of God Needs No Passport:Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape.

Jessica Hejtmanek is Project Coordinator of the Transnational Studies Initiative at Harvard University and an independent researcher whose work focuses on the relationship between art, media and identity.

Miguel Luciano is a Brooklyn-based Puerto Rican artist. He received his MFA from the University of Florida. His work has been exhibited widely, including at the El Museo del Barrio, Chelsea Art Museum, El Museo de Puerto Rico and the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City. He was awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Artist Fellowship and participated in the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ Artists-In-the-Marketplace Program and The Kitchen Residency. He can be reached at lmluciano@hotmail.com.