Recent Exhibitions at US Museums Explore the Complexity of Puerto Rican Identity

In a portrait from 1928, a Puerto Rican woman holds a devotional painting of the Virgin Mary and child. She stares directly at the viewer, her other hand on her hip. Perhaps she is on her way to church. The work by Miguel Pou y Becerra is titled La promesa. As we look into her eyes, we get a sense of what promise Pou y Becerra is referring to: the broken promise of salvation through Catholicism, forced upon Puerto Rico during Spain’s colonization of the island. The olive-skinned woman, wearing a plain, ochre-colored dress, looks at us with sadness and doubt telling us the lies she has endured.

This painting is one of the first things visitors see upon entering “Nostalgia For My Island: Puerto Rican Painting from the Museo de Arte de Ponce (1786–1962),” a 20-work exhibition at the Rollins Museum of Art in Orlando, Florida (on view through January 5). Next to La promesa is The Vision of Saint Philip Benizi (1786), showing the saint, Christ, and the Virgin, by José Campeche y Jordán, the first known Puerto Rican artist.   

The Rollins exhibition is one of several recent ones—including “1898: Visual Culture and U.S. Imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., and “Puerto Rico Negrx,” at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico—that have taken up the complexities of Puerto Rican identity, both during Spanish colonization and since 1898,  the year the United States took possession of the island.

“At the end of the 19th century, Puerto Ricans were trying to reinforce their own identity, independent of Spain, and that was being reflected, particularly in politics during the time,” Iraida Rodriguez Negron, curator of the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, told ARTnews. “But then suddenly there’s this huge switch [when the US took over] that not only are we going to continue under a colonial domain, but it is something completely foreign and different.”

The three exhibitions deal with the topic of identity on the island as an ongoing process, amid the realities of continued colonization. The Rollins show weaves the story of Puerto Rican identity over the course of more than 175 years, while the NPG’s “1898” takes a broader scope, looking at portraiture throughout all the US’s territories, including Puerto Rico. “Puerto Rico Negrx” pushes this conversation into the 21st century by looking at how Puerto Rican identity has been formed from the 1990s to today. These exhibitions come at the heels of devastating environmental, financial, and political blows to the island and its people, serving as a way to look at the island’s current moment through its history and to better understand the complex stages of identity formation under colonization.

Changing of the Guard

That complexity comes to a head in 1898, when the US went to war with Spain for 16 weeks, which ultimately saw Spain, as its empire declines, transfer ownership of Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the US. It was in this moment at the turn of the century in which Puerto Rico goes “from being a colony of Spain, of the Spanish Empire, and then suddenly being transferred to a culture that is completely different,” Rodriguez Negron said. How Puerto Rican artists navigated that shift and documented it in the work is an essential part to the Rollins and NPG exhibitions. 

“People who are not specialists, sort of the public in general in the United States, are not aware of this war that was so consequential for US history in the 20th century. It’s the war that makes this country,” Taina Caragol, the NPG’s curator of painting and sculpture and Latino art and history who co-organized the “1898” exhibition, told ARTnews. “What we could do through the various portraits we chose was to point to different political beliefs and to those Puerto Ricans trying to empower themselves and their people and doing so through a variety of frameworks.”

The NPG exhibition opened with Francisco Oller y Cestero’s 1898 portrait of President William McKinley, showing the former US president wearing a tight black suit, as he grips the map of Puerto Rico, dated to July 18, 1898, the day of the US’s invasion. His stance denotes the power of a man who believes himself to be charged with establishing a new order on the island, while his sunken eyes and pale white skin give the sitter a sickly, almost vampiric look, a strong indication of Oller y Cestero’s true sentiments toward his new colonizer.

The show’s section focusing on Puerto Rico presents a grouping of portraits of leading Puerto Ricans, including Lola Rodriguez de Tio (1918), an acclaimed poet who equally fought for women’s rights and Puerto Rican independence; a young Arturo Schomburg (1896), an Afro-Puerto Rican who researched and advocated for Afro Latin Americans and the Black experience; and Eugenio Maria de Hostos (1903), an advocate for Puerto Rican independence who also believed in the creation of an Antillean Confederation between Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic as a united force against colonization. These three thinkers represent a cross-section of the conversations that were occurring both on the island and in its diaspora at the turn of the century, calling for independence.

Each representation of these sitters’ pictures them in ways that help further their causes. Rodriguez de Tio, for example, is shown with short hair and dressed like a Spanish statesman, a form of masculine self-presentation that she likely adopted as a strategy to be taken seriously as a colonized woman. Schomburg’s small photograph likewise shows him wearing a black tuxedo, a marker of social class. These three thinkers largely set up the ideas for the next generation to resist this new regime like the Nationalist Party Revolts in mid-20th century, foregrounding the creation of national symbols of Puerto Rican identity that would come later.

Symbols of Identity, Then and Now

With this new Anglo-Saxon order, Puerto Ricans were determined to affirm a distinct national identity, like through the reclamation of the jibaro, a term for someone from the campo (countryside) who practices traditional farming, as a true Boricuasymbol.

“This sense to reassert itself, that’s how they were attaching to something that was uniquely Puerto Rican,” Rodriguez Negron said. “It happened even in the literature during the 19th century, when they start talking about the hero [jibaro] and how it becomes the symbol of who Puerto Ricans are, completely separated from their Spanish identity.”

Yet, there was an idealization that was created around this national symbol, which often didn’t consider the precarious realities of the jibaro. Oscar Colón Delgado’s Countryside in Utuado (1937), for example, shows a jibaro who’s depicted as mixed race walking his donkey to drink water amid a lush landscape of rolling green hill and dreamy blue mountains.

That work is paired with Marilu Rodriguez Salas’s Mountains / Montañas (1959), a semi-abstract landscape of hazy mountains, their blurriness likely a metaphor for how Puerto Ricans began to see themselves as a blended race, that of Spanish, Taino, and African ancestry. This concept of depicting a “mixed race,” however, had the effect of erasing dark-skinned Puerto Ricans from the national conversation. “The idealization was more about the mixing versus explicitly saying we are Black,” said Gisela Carbonell, the curator of the Rollins Museum of Art.

A Paradigm Shift

By the close of the 20th century, Puerto Ricans began to question these national symbols and think more expansively about what it means to be Puerto Rican based on their own lived experiences. This paradigm shift is the crux of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico’s “Puerto Rico Negrx” show, which takes as its starting point the 1996 exhibition “Paréntesis: ocho artistas negros contemporáneos” (Parenthesis: Eight Black Contemporary Artists) at the Institute for Puerto Rican Culture in San Juan.

“What was important is that artists organized it themselves, and they were responding to other, more, official exhibitions and publications that wanted to speak about what they called the African presence in Puerto Rico or this third part of Puerto Rican identity that hadn’t been as centered before,” Marina Reyes Franco, a cocurator of “Puerto Rico Negrx,” told ARTnews of the 1996 exhibition.

Ramón Bulerín’s Los Tres Amigos (1996), which opened the recent MAC show, depicts the three powers that control life in Puerto Rico: the bank, the church, and the government. Sitting side-by-side a banker, bishop, and politician hold a tense news conference in which the latter figure aggressively raises his arm as he speaks into a cluster of microphones.

Made centuries after The Vision of Saint Philip Benizi and the McKinley portrait, Bulerín’s painting was in many ways a premonition for today’s Puerto Rico. In identifying the players of domination, there is room to question what has been lost—and how Puerto Ricans might return to it. Kiván Quiñones’s Teléfono Caracol 1-5 (2021), a suite of sculptures of conch shells as landline telephones, provides the door to this past of returning to our ancestors, asking Puerto Ricans to return the calls from our roots. In doing so, we can reclaim space and that which was stolen. Esteban Valdés’s 1967 text-based work puts its succinctly: Puerto Rico Para Los Puertorrisueños (punning on the Spanish word for dreams).

There are subtleties and intricacies to these reclamations, however. Deyaneira Maldonado’s 1996 Alzando La Mano Para Hablar (Raising One’s Hand to Speak) shows an Afro Puerto Rican man wearing a large mask as he raises his hand. He too is asking these important questions about Puerto Rico but still he feels he must permission to speak—there is still much work to be done when it comes to decolonization.

María Elena Ortiz, the exhibition’s other cocurator and a curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, said, “For me, they’re all saying, Yes, there is an experience of racism in Puerto Rico, which a lot of us have completely grown [and] have been taught to deny—to me that basic kind of admission at a public setting is very powerful.”

The range of expressions of Puerto Rican identity over the past long century are vast, though they have often bended “toward preserving identity, toward criticizing the injustices that were happening,” Carbonell said. “Maybe some of them, especially the earlier ones, would be surprised to see how things have developed and [how] what it means to be Puerto Rican can be described or characterized in different ways.”