Art as protest and memorialisation: a survey of local and diasporic responses to Hurricane María

ABSTRACT

Puerto Rico has a history of rich funerary traditions that include the use of cemí and the baquiné. Presently, the practice of extreme embalming has also taken hold, creating funerary displays that include motorcycles, dominoes, and ambulances, among others. However, what can a community do when there are no bodies to grieve? Worse, the deaths themselves are denied? This was an all too real question in the aftermath of 2017‘s Hurricane María. With a rising death count and government denial, people turned to artistic creation and protest to make their voices heard. Memorialisation of the missing and deceased became a crucial part in overcoming the disaster’s trauma, as well as contesting a government that refused to acknowledge its role in the disaster. Culminating in the Verano Boricua of 2019, the Puerto Rican people’s fight against the government’s necropolitics resulted in a boom of creative expression to remember those that the government wanted to forget. Through murals, comics, performance art, and protests, Boricuas resisted marginalisation in unique and memorable ways. By exploring these artistic manifestations, one can recognise Puerto Rican community across the island and in the diaspora and how it sought to honour the deceased while processing grief and trauma.

KEYWORDS:

• Disaster
• Puerto Rico
• death
• memorialisation
• Diaspora

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Puerto Rico’s status as a territory has been a source of conflict that has spanned two colonial powers. Under Spanish colonial rule, Puerto Rico had made strides towards becoming an autonomous territory all the while vying for independence. With the United States’ invasion in 1898, the island became a US colony, which it remains to this day. Puerto Ricans have US citizenship and may travel freely from the island archipelago to the United States. However, they do not enjoy benefits of statehood and are subject to a fiscal control board (Junta Fiscal instituted by The Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) of 2016) that pushes austerity measures, maritime acts controlling imports and exports (the Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917), among others.

2. Puerto Rican politics can be categorised into three main practices and parties: the Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP) is the pro-statehood party that is usually aligned with US Republican ideals; the Partido Popular Democrático (PPD), which frequently aligns with US Democrats and believes in a freely associated Puerto Rican commonwealth that establishes a self-governing PR with ties to the United States; the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (PIP) campaigns for Puerto Rican independence. Historically, local island administration is split between the PNP and the PPD. During Hurricane María, the Rosselló government, along with a significant amount of municipalities, was PNP and for the most part aligned with Trump’s practices. San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto was part of the PPD and quite vocal in her critiques of the Rosselló and Trump administrations, which led to her being antagonised by both.

3. In Disasters Without Borders (2012), John Hannigan explores ‘Disaster Politics as Game Playing’. Hannigan discusses the issues of disaster aid allocation and provision, which are inextricably tied to politics and which can result in loss of life. In this case, local political interest prevailed over Puerto Ricans’ quality of life: in what Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s State Against Nation (1990) may refer to as reminding ‘everyone of the state’s omnipotence (169)’, Puerto Rican officials exerted violence upon their constituents by withholding aid. Thankfully, civilians would end up requisitioning these provisions to tide them over after the seismic catastrophe.

4. Rossana Reguillo’s Necromáquina: Cuando morir no es suficiente (2021) explores the violent citizen deaths as a consequence of narco culture, as well as the government’s inaction in quelling the violence and poor handling of the victims. Francisco Ferrándiz’as and Antonius C. G. M. Robben’s Necropolitics: Mass graves and exhumations in the age of human rights (2015) explore at length the necropolitical events in Chile and Argentina under dictatorships.

5. Ese pobre lechón/que murió de repente/con un tajo en la frente y otro en el corazón./Lo metieron al horno/lo sacaron caliente/le metieron el diente/le metieron el diente/a ese pobre lechón.

Translated, the plena says:

That poor pig/he died suddenly/with a cut on his forehead and another to his heart./They put him in the oven/they took him out hot/they ate him/they ate him/that poor pig (‘Ese pobre lechón’, El Nuevo Día, 2014).

6. Black and multiracial communities, as well as the jíbaro, the subsistence farmer that came from indigenous Puerto Rican or multiracial backgrounds, who has become a figure of resistance and reclamation of Puerto Rican identity.

7. Per the Observatorio de Equidad de Género de Puerto Rico, there were 79 femicides and 71 attempted femicides, in addition to over 60 women reported missing due to gender violence, on the island archipelago in 2022. The previous years, 2021 and 2020, saw femicide rates of 58 and 75 victims, respectively. As of March 2023, there have been 9 reported femicides and 5 attempted femicides (Feminicidios, n.d). Hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community have also been reported, most notably the murders of trans women like Alexa Neulisa Luciano Ruiz, who had been subject to continued harassment (some of which was recorded and uploaded online by the killers) and was murdered in a fast food bathroom, and Michelle Ramos Vargas, who was assassinated in her vehicle, shot at over 50 times. Both incidents made international news when they occurred in 2020.

8. Also known as repeat migration, the repetitive movement of going to and from two core countries. While numbers vary greatly, Puerto Ricans travel back and forth from the island to the Diaspora ‘sometimes several times a year … more and more Puerto Ricans are remapping the borders of their identity by moving frequently between their nation of origin and the diaspora throughout their life (Duany, 33)’.

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Stella M. Ramírez Rodríguez

Stella M. Ramírez Rodríguez earned her Master of Arts in English Education in the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus. She is currently pursuing her doctorate at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. Her academic work explores the supernatural, folklore, and necropolitics within Boricua and Latino communities. Outside of academia, she can be found working within the animal welfare community as a humane educator, volunteer, and coordinator for large-scale spay/neuter events.