Yomaira’s second book manuscript, The Survival of a People, traces the disappearances and excesses of Afro-Puerto Ricans in the colonial archive and in contemporary cultural memory from the late 19th century to the present. A personally inflected project, The Survival of a People begins by tracing the precarity of archival material related to Afro-Puerto Rican communities and ends with an examination of alternative archives –including photography and film– of Afro-Puerto Rican life produced on the island and in diaspora. The book is in progress and under contract with Duke University Press.
Nuestra Señora del Rosario, Vega Baja, Puerto Rico
Christina in Barrio Tokio, Puerto Rico, 1981 [Frank Espada’s The Puerto Rican Diaspora Project]
“Boricua “paperlessness” and its antidote (the creation of paper, material, and other productions) should be understood within racialized, class, and gendered contexts. This is because we must contend with how Afro-Boricuas in general, and Afro-Boricua women in particular, are positioned within the Puerto Rican diasporic cultural imaginary. ”
Puerto Rican Passenger List for SS Coamo, 1931
“Boricua aesthetics — what I examine [...] in terms of poetics and photography — turns the gaze of modernity onto itself, using the production of paper and material as a way to mark the problems endemic to colonization and coloniality.”
Remembering Catalina…
A photo of Catalina Figueroa López wherein she smiles and embraces an unidentified woman. Vega Baja, PR circa 1940
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Puerto Rican/Haitian Artist
Boy in flight [Frank Espada’s The Puerto Rican Diaspora Project]
[Living] Los Sures…
Photograph from “Los Sures” 1984, featuring my now deceased maternal cousin Danny [second from left/foremost figure]