Puerto Rico

Letter from an Artist Reader

Dear June,

Thank you for the recent ReVista issue “Violence: A Daily Threat.” The issue is literally a re-vista, a topic seen again from another perspective. We—your collaborators and yourself—put into practice this form of re-seeing, carefully viewing what we have always seen in our own countries, but which we often refuse to witness, withdrawing our gaze from this painful and threatening reality, and in the process withdrawing our conscience.

We pass through an odyssey of pain, a voyage through the violence seen and seen again in our continent of discontent: kidnappings, rapes, murders, wounds, amputations and attacks that tactlessly let us perceive that so-called progress has been distributed in such a way as to leave the enormous majority to stew in injustice and to incubate violence. All violence is political, with the community as both its source and its destiny, especially when the community does not perceive itself as coherent and responsible, as the author of the narrative of its precarious existence.

Violence against women at home and in the workplace, violence against gays, lesbians and transexuals, and violence against children adds to that carried out by military and paramilitary forces, oppressors and insurgents,  fueling remnants of resentment and vengeance, of hate and retaliation.

It is heartening to learn that not everything is bad news, that there are efforts and notable achievements to transform the legacy of abuse, leaving behind the path of human misery to convert it into the road to peace, reconciliation and justice. It is important to recognize these measures as news in order to compensate for the irresponsible and alarmist approach in the media described by Benjamín Fernández in his article.

In response to your kind invitation to create the cover for the ReVista issue on Puerto Rico—where the reader is revising these words—I decided that the cover image would be a profile that would enter into a dialogue with the partially hidden frontality of the bruised woman of the previous cover. In a certain way, the profile would be—if not the reverse side of the coin—its melancholy shadow.

To accomplish this effect, I turned to the worn out emblem of the jibaro—the Puerto Rican peasant—that protagonized Operation Bootstrap in the 1950s. While the profile with its straw sombrero evokes the countryside and tradition, the same profile in the government program opens the way to the manufacturing industry, services and tourism, turning its back on the world of agriculture.

Already since the beginning of the last century, agricultural workers had been brought by labor emigration programs to destinations as distant as Hawaii or as close by as Florida. The airplane, symbol of tourism, had transformed itself into the round-trip “guagua aerea”—the airborne bus—whose migratory ticket was a U.S. passport handed down from generation to generation.

Though not without paying a very high price.
The leap was fatal, not only a jump across the Atlantic, but a sudden and brusque change in social. economic, cultural, religious structures in a small and rural Caribbean and Spanish-speaking island— now blinded by the flashing neon lights of hotels, casinos and bars, swamped by a flourishing drug traffic with its accompanying territorial squabbles, suffering the fragmentation of homes and neighborhoods, as well as the agony and death of communitarian ideals. Puerto Rico’s sovereignty  has been put off for more than a century,  as the island contiues to be subordinate to the metropolitan authority with its headquarters in Washington, D.C. And with that subordination came Obligatory Military Service for decades and now, even with voluntary service, Puerto Ricans pay a tremendous cost in deaths in overseas wars.

Boricua hospitality and traditional welcome are translated on this cover as “well come,” a well of water from which one extracts what one wants and can, and an insatiable hunger for consumer products—a word play on the Spanish word “comer,” to eat—to which Puerto Ricans are becoming accustomed, even addicted. If the profile I’ve drawn here is not flattering, it is because it attempts to reflect a reality that is more than worrisome; it is threatening.

My own home within the Cayey campus of the University of Puerto Rico was burned down on Sunday afternoon on the Thanksgiving weekend a little more than a year ago. The fire was set by four adolescents, 15- and 16-years-old, who stole a record player and a VCR before setting fire to the house. Artwork and handicrafts, books, documents and photographs were turned into ashes, demonstrating how no security system, alarms or even security guards are capable of mending the deterioration of a sick society in danger of extinction. Only by transforming the reality, nourishing it with brave and imaginative initiatives such as those described in the last issue of ReVista, can people bring about the necessary change.

After the fire, and learning from the aesthetics of fire with its dark and warm footprint, I used charcoal, smoke, fire, ashes and water on paper and wood to create the exhibit Martorell D.F. (después del fuego, after the fire) in hopes of taking something positive from the tragedy, grace from disgrace. A performance conceived by theatre artist Rosa Luisa Márquez entitled Cenizas quedan (“The Ashes Remain”) brought together actors, dancers, artists and writers to the house’s ruins to celebrate rebirth from the ashes.

The reaction of solidarity from our people was not long in coming. They felt and expressed their need to overcome and transcend our wrongs. If the carbon profile of the Puerto Rican peasant that opens these pages looks ahead, if he manages to look-again, to manage a re-vista, of our reality, perhaps he also can transform it.

Antonio Martorell, the artist who drew this ReVista’s cover, is the Wilbur Marvin Visiting Fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. This is a translation of the article in Spanish that appeared in the printed version of ReVista.