Estefania Vallejo Santiago

Estefania Vallejo Santiago investigates the visual production of Black heritage in Puerto Rico, with a methodological interest in the decolonial and critical race theory. She is interested in sites where race-based narratives are shown in public spaces within past and contemporary politics of cultural production and national rhetoric. This study is in efforts to re-imagine Puerto Rican Blackness from a spatial perspective and its relation to national identity.

Recolectando la Semilla:
The Creole House and the Contemporary Art of Damaris Cruz – Negotiating Memory, Space, and Race in Ponce, Puerto Rico

“Commemorating the oldest memory is the pyramidal stone for the freedom of a people. Memory is the one who weaves the identity of the collective.”[1]
Damaris Cruz

Throughout the Caribbean landscape, the significance of nineteenth-century Creole houses is deeply ingrained in local culture, widely acknowledged for their architectural simplicity, political symbolism, and cultural importance. These houses not only serve as physical structures but also act as social and metaphorical spaces that foster discussions on governance, cultural identity, and citizenship. By virtue of their presence in urban areas, Creole houses shape the constructed environment and play a pivotal role in shaping perceptions of heritage and national identity. One specific manifestation of the Creole house can be observed in the city of Ponce, Puerto Rico, which stands out due to its economic and social foundations. Situated on the southern coast of Puerto Rico, Ponce was historically a rival to the island’s capital city, San Juan. The Creole houses in Ponce, with their distinctive architectural features, function as spaces that facilitate collective memories related to Spanish rule, conquest, domination, and colonization.

The house located on Aurora Street in Ponce serves as a notable exemplar for understanding the functions of the Creole house, while simultaneously adding complexity to our comprehension of space and architecture as mnemonic devices. It assumes particular significance due to the inclusion of a mural titled “Recolectando la Semilla” (2015) by Damaris Cruz. This mural, displayed on the façade of the house, pays tribute to the labor of coffee plantation workers who were instrumental in shaping the city of Ponce.

Furthermore, memory plays a crucial role in how the Creole house is remembered and preserved within Puerto Rican culture. The architectural style of the Creole house has been transmitted across generations, adapting and evolving to reflect the changing needs and cultural practices of the island’s inhabitants. The Puerto Rican Creole house holds profound symbolic value as it embodies the cultural identity and heritage of Puerto Rico, intimately tied to the memories of its past and present.

Preserving and restoring these houses is of utmost importance as it safeguards Puerto Rican cultural memory and affirms the island’s cultural significance on a global scale. In this context, the presence of the mural on Aurora Street allows the community to reinterpret a specific Creole memory, thereby challenging the manipulation of the dominant historical narrative for present-day agendas. Specifically, it serves as a means of countering the white elites’ efforts to distance and silence Blackness from the national identity, revealing the mural’s role as a powerful act of resistance. Although there is considerable scholarship investigating the Creole house as a systemic vessel for social power, there is a gap of information considering Puerto Rican Ponce Creole houses’ effort to silence Blackness. Within recent years, Puerto Rican scholarship on the social construction of race has expanded significantly, employing a wide variety of methodological approaches, including silencing. More importantly, scholars such as Isar Godreau and Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva have uncovered the many ways in which subaltern groups have negotiated and challenged white elites’ perceptions and/or racial ideals. However, in response, hegemonic groups have produced new hierarchies and creating further nuanced forms of racialized differences.[2] I build on this scholarship by challenging the harmonious perceptions as presented by those in power. In turn, my research brings forward the silenced narratives behind Ponce’s Creole houses to contest the notions of racial harmony. As the Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot defines silencing, its serves as the negotiation of knowledge, with knowledge being the foundation of power.[3] He notes, that in historical production not everything is mentioned, thus, there is always a selection process about what should be recorded and what should be forgotten.[4] Considering historical narratives as a form of control, there is a dialectic between what is mentioned and what is silenced, thus shaping historical narratives and how they are memorialized in space.

I argue that the mural “Recolectando la Semilla” serves as a collective portrayal of Blackness that remains relevant within both historical and contemporary Puerto Rican culture. The mural heightens the focus on racial dynamics within the city and its architectural configurations. Examining this landscape and its cultural significance allows for an exploration of how architecture conveys prevailing ideologies. In the case of the Creole House on Calle Aurora, the artist is actively shaping history to establish certain identities as foundational to the island’s national identity, while also firmly anchoring them to physical space. Through this analysis, the house on Calle Aurora provides valuable insights into the relationship between what is openly acknowledged and what has been silenced, as it occupies a position within the processes of national formation, colonialism, and the deliberate concealment of racialized subjugation within public spaces.

According to scholar Jorge Duany, Puerto Rico’s history spanning over five centuries of Spanish and US colonial rule has witnessed significant transformations in its colonial organization, with racialized notions of otherness playing a foundational role. Exploring the silences and memories embedded within the Recolectando la Semilla mural on the house in Calle Aurora provides an opportunity to examine the elusive nature of racialized domination in Puerto Rico. It is crucial to acknowledge that due to this elusive nature, there remains a lack of profound critique regarding racial injustice in the region. Furthermore, this absence of discussion is compounded by the reluctance of many Puerto Ricans to openly express their racialized identities, despite the prevalence of assertions of whiteness both historically and in contemporary society. The dynamics of race in Puerto Rico have become more pronounced since Puerto Ricans have actively engaged in migratory circuits between the island and the United States. This movement within US borders has resulted in encounters between Puerto Ricans and other racialized minority populations, leading to clashes in discursive constructions of race, particularly regarding blackness. In response to these complexities, Puerto Rican-centric institutions have often focused on a Hispanic heritage to navigate these tensions.

Considering the argument regarding the racialized undertones present in the mural, it becomes apparent that Puerto Rico’s history with race is nuanced and multifaceted. Recolectando la Semilla (fig. 1) acts as a conduit for expressing the rights of Black Creoles as political and social contributors to Ponce, while simultaneously amplifying and expanding the presence and imagery of Afro-Puerto Ricans within physical space. The mural serves to highlight the agency and contributions of Afro-Puerto Ricans, challenging traditional narratives that may have marginalized or overlooked their role in Puerto Rican society.[5] When considering my argument towards racialized undertones found in the mural, it becomes evident that Puerto Rico’s history with race is a rather nuanced one. Recolectando la Semilla (fig. 1) serves as a vessel that voices the rights of Black Creoles as political and social contributors to Ponce, while simultaneously uplifting and expanding the participation and imagery of Afro-Puerto Ricans through space.

The Ponce Creole House

The architectural style of this house provides a vivid testament to the white Creole elites’ dominance and influence over Ponce’s history. Furthermore, buildings within the city of Ponce epitomize a multiculturalist perspective and convey an open, progressive worldview. Scholar Jorge Colom reinforces this notion, emphasizing the melding of both vernacular and cultivated architectural styles and the blending of local and imported materials. Ponce, renowned as Puerto Rico’s commercial hub, played a pivotal role in the export industry of semi-processed agricultural goods, including dry coffee beans (shipped either raw or roasted) and brown or muscovado sugar.  Situated within the geopolitical confines of Puerto Rico, Ponce has been subjected to a phenomenon that might be characterized as ‘dual colonialism’. Established in 1692 under Spanish dominion and subsequently annexed by the United States in 1898, Ponce’s historical trajectory is indelibly marked by its enduring links to Spanish heritage.

The architectural elements found in the Creole houses of Ponce reflect the city’s economic significance and its ties to the agricultural production and trade that fueled its growth. The combination of local and imported influences in these houses further exemplifies the dynamic cultural exchange and economic interconnectedness present in Ponce during that era.[6] For this, these houses are climatically appropriate, with a use of low-temperature-burned brick masonry and wood, both native mostly in structure and imported in sheathing.

Narrow houses like the one on Aurora Street are two-rooms wide with one side dedicated to bedrooms and the other to public living spaces.  The two-room width house is arranged on the lot to attempt to orient the bedrooms to the east, which is then related to the grid formation of Ponce. This, we can infer, is done to reduce solar gain, so they are fresher in the evenings and helps by using the early sunlight to wake up the residents. In his research, Jorge Ortiz Colom notes that most of these houses will have a utilitarian extension to the back known as a martillo or “hammer”, where in many cases the kitchen, pantry, laundry, and other working spaces of the house are located, conveniently placed next to the rear yard.[7] Rear yards in houses are in most cases utilitarian, and they normally house herb gardens, fruit trees, clotheslines and implements. Few are conceived as ornamental and decorative though some have been converted to the latter functions after renovations. The presence of substantial verandas or balcones (fig. 2) is a common denominator of Ponce’s domestic landscape, making the act of being seen a present understanding within the city. Essential to the balcón’s success is its relation and transition to inside space. As such, the balcón on Creole houses is above all a living space, occupiable for extended periods.[8]

Likewise, this is significant as they were used as a space for surveillance, as noted by Findlay:

Consequently, working Ponceños invested a great deal of energy in patrolling another. Their strategies ranges from gossip to physical violence to calling for police and judicial intervention. Surveillance operated in the neighborhood, at the workplace, within the family, and in the courts.[9]

Surveillance played a pivotal role in upholding colonial power structures in the Caribbean, serving as a tool for monitoring and controlling the actions and mobility of non-white populations. Its primary objective was to prevent rebellions and maintain the dominance of European colonial powers.

To ensure their continued control, colonial powers employed surveillance measures to monitor the movements and activities of enslaved Africans, Indigenous peoples, and free people of color. This surveillance took various forms, such as the deployment of slave patrols, the imposition of curfews, the requirement of passes for travel, and the implementation of laws that regulated the behavior and mobility of non-white populations. These measures were used to establish dominance, instill fear, and prevent resistance against the oppressive colonial system. By exerting control through surveillance, colonial powers sought to maintain their economic and social power in the Caribbean.

Owing to its modest dimensions, the residence on Aurora Street predominantly caters to the socio-economic stratum ranging from lower to middle class. Its configuration, encompassing merely two rooms and a compact architectural footprint, alludes to its target demographic: the working class. Furthermore, when analyzing its relation to the balcony, there emerges an implication of aspirational social mobility. The visibility offered by this architectural feature can be interpreted as symbolizing an ambition for upward movement in both class and racial hierarchies.

The home in Ponce had their regular and rhythmic composition reinforced the symmetry of traditional center-hall houses, and on one-story versions it was part of a spatial sequence from the public to the intimate, culminating in the sala or main living room. On upper stories, balcones were widened, however, they were no longer mere lookouts like the Mediterranean-style galleries that exist in Old San Juan, but usable platforms where life could go on with a view to the world beneath. In Ponce, as noted by Jorge Ortiz Colom, these works of architectural art were built with molded/lathed hardwood, cast iron or brick or concrete pillars, with a shed roof covering.[10]

Additionally, the historic area is all built up as a grid with extensions up to 1960 (fig. 3). Expansion began in earnest around 1860 when the blocks north of the plaza, where the marketplace was sited, were built up by expansion plans devised by Felix Vidal d’Ors, which was of Catalan origin.[11] The use of control and surveillance was integral to the grid-city formation of Ponce, Puerto Rico. Designed by the Spanish colonial authorities as a planned city, their aim was to facilitate the control and monitoring of the local population. The grid pattern of the city was intended to provide a clear and organized system for the management of the population. The streets were laid out in a straight and uniform manner, with the city center serving as a hub for commercial and administrative activities. This layout made it easy for the colonial authorities to regulate and control the movement of people and goods throughout the city.

These conditions speak to the potential for multiple uses of memorializing the house on Aurora Street, an idea put forward by Brian Graham, G. J. Ashworth, and J. E. Tunbridge in A Geography of Heritage. The authors query, “More simply put, can the past be ‘owned’ and, if so, who ‘owns’ it, what do we mean by ‘own’, and who reconciles conflicting claims to such ownership?”[12] This sense of ownership is due by who controls over history and who control over memory. With the construction of this style of house, the ownership of Ponce history is made clear. The white Creole elites make their claims towards achievement over Ponce, despite it being their class that initially subjugated African descendants to chattel slavery. This conquest and eradication of memory by silencing history is the effect of redacting identities.

Black Resin in the City of Ponce

Through the house on Aurora Street, one can observe how white elite concerns over a growing “undisciplined” population were a means to express apprehension about the Black community. This was and continues to be a direct result of the many overlapping processes of dispossession underlying the municipality’s economic and population growth, resulting in the Black community remained impoverished and targeted despite the proclaimed ambitions. As Eileen J. Suárez Findlay reminds us,  while the municipality expanded and contracted to accommodate economic demands and opportunities, white Creole elites and colonial administrators competed against each other and against long-term settled and incoming laborers for control over the direction of infrastructural, ideological, and cultural changes in Ponce.[13] The house’s visual and spatial features could well be viewed as a construction of imperial domination via certain configurations of visual narrative to establish a sense of imperial place and to reconstruct civic memory. As an imperial spatial item, the house would for Creole officials sway interpretations of contemporary events and construct loyal subjectivity. The establishment of a Creole house makes a note not to cultural progression but to the power of the white elites. As the house stood without the mural, hegemony is no longer implied but on complete display.

Indeed, despite this silencing, an expanded repertoire of techniques of racialization organized a wide array of symbolic and material processes at the end of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Findlay notes that blatant anti-Black racism and struggles to challenge its many forms permeated all aspects of Puerto Rico’s reorganization in the three decades following emancipation.[14] These struggles are particularly visible in negotiations over urban development in Ponce, as the city began experiencing political and ideological battles near the end of the nineteen-century.[15] Here elites put in practice their desires to forge a clean, rationally organized, well-adorned, and culturally thriving Ponce. In turn, they created campaigns that racialized the laboring poor as Black and rendered lower-class women and the black/brown population once again as the main targets of political repression.[16] Urban skilled workers, many of whom were of African descent, managed to gain some political recognition amid the elites’ disciplining and marginalizing efforts. Although politicians and artisans articulated these cross-class, cross-racial alliances through a language of labor, race was fundamental. Effectively, the collective and contested memories and commemorations of slavery constituted a space to speak about racial inequality, one where the rehearsal of racial inclusion in a political environment shunned an open debate about the place of Blacks within the social latter in Puerto Rico. Through public debates over health and labor after slavery, different interests silenced race for different reasons, strategically encoding it in articulations of class interests.[17]

The Temporal Bridge of Racism in Puerto Rico

For over a century following emancipation in Puerto Rico, government institutions, academic research, and cultural entities have perpetuated the idea that the island represents a cohesive nation, effectively continuing this erasure.[18] Despite its colonial relation to Spain and later the United States—theses systemic institutions have propagated the idea that Puerto Ricans originated from a harmonious mixture of three racial and cultural roots: the Indigenous Taínos, Africans, and Spaniards. Such national discourse holds because these races mixed harmoniously to create the Puerto Rican race-based nation suggesting the fallacy that racial conflict has never existed. Notably, the lack of racial conflict often defines Puerto Ricanness as it is seen as a marker of racial harmony despite its history of slavery, displacement, and racial inequality. Ironically, the Puerto Rican dominant classes have persistently underscored whiteness, making the Hispanic experience as the main thread that provides coherence to the history and representation of the Puerto Rican people.[19]

Within this context, struggles over racialized exploitation in Puerto Rico were successfully deflected and subordinated to issues of class or instance, the social and economic changes induced by emancipation in 1873 led to new political alignments, especially between Creole autonomist elites and sectors of the laboring classes to reform the colonial arrangement under Spain. As outlined by Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva, race remained an explicitly articulated category of social differentiation and class became a racially constructed category through which demands for citizenship rights and political participation were legitimized.[20] The political and economic changes on the island produced a rhetoric about work as the only means for individual upward mobility (in contrast to noble status Creole connections), change from an old colonial regime (anchored on aristocratic and inheritance values), and modernization.[21] These rhetorical outlooks on work made it difficult for formerly enslaved persons to exit the field of manual labor. Creating a cyclical pattern, the formally enslaved were subjugated back to the fields they once worked.

In Puerto Rico, slavery’s allure was so potent that even staunch abolitionists occasionally found ways to reconcile its existence with modernity. A case in point is a letter penned by Spanish abolitionist Ignacio de Ramón Carbonell during his 1845 visit to San Juan, amidst the zenith of the island’s slave system. Within this correspondence to his sister, Carbonell elucidated not only the shifting dynamics of Puerto Rican slavery but also the evident ideological paradoxes.[22] Contrary to his expectations of Ponce, San Juan emerged not as a relic of colonialism, but rather as a beacon of modernity, replete with paved, well-lit, tidy streets, arranged in a grid, under vigilant policing. Strikingly, Carbonell portrayed the enslaved population as both well-dressed and seemingly content. Such observations stand in stark contradiction to his prior condemnations of slavery as a system that stripped individuals of their humanity. It’s imperative to recognize that while slavery was but one labor system in Puerto Rico, the political, socio-cultural, and economic underpinnings of transatlantic slavery, particularly its Caribbean manifestation, have profoundly influenced Puerto Rican life across all dimensions since the 16th century.[23]

For Carbonell and several of his contemporaries, colonialism did not hinder Puerto Rico’s progression into modernity. To them, slavery was perceived as the sole mechanism by which Afro-descendants could be transformed into civilized and modern entities. Yet, these descendants always retained elements of their inherent African social customs, evident in their consistent use of traditional attire, jewelry, and rituals. Carbonell’s account further perpetuates the misconception of a milder form of slavery in both Puerto Rico and the broader Spanish empire. This narrative strategically detracts from confronting the realities of racial oppression in the Spanish Caribbean. Under the umbrellas of colonialism and slavery, Afro-descendants were believed to be capable of acquiring self-discipline (internalizing authority to be dependable laborers) and transitioning into property owners and consumers. By this rationale, the strict governance of the Spanish colonial empire was deemed successful. Africans were primarily incorporated for their labor, and this labor system, reciprocally, was seen as the catalyst for their societal metamorphosis. Consequently, Carbonell and “abolitionists” of his ilk promulgated the idea that labor and “racial elevation” (as manifested in racialized housing) formed the cornerstone of societal agreements in post-abolition Puerto Rico.

This attempt to silence discussions about racialized domination (especially the persistent denial of racism) and the corollary suppressions regarding individual and communal racialized histories coexist with Puerto Ricans’ everyday antiblack racist practices and racialized talk. Most Puerto Ricans, however, do not recognize their everyday references to racialized markers of difference (mostly derogatory remarks about Blackness) as a product of and form sustaining racialized domination.[24] The construction of the Creole house silence examines the ways in which the display of Black bodily subordination has served to make Blackness into the object of the gaze. Plainly said, the negation of Blackness in Creole architecture results in the objectification of Black representation. The utilization of the ‘white supremacist gaze’ in tandem with the balcony’s function related to surveillance, posits a relationship of subjugation inherent in the architecture of the house on Aurora Street. While the proprietors of the residence may not have been among the highest echelons of society, their actions seemingly align with the elite’s classist and racialized expectations. Through strategic architectural planning and rhetoric there is an attempt to deflect attention from race, especially as an organizing principle in politics and society.

In the Caribbean, efforts at suppressing and circumventing discussions about racialized domination have been a long-standing recourse feature of architectural choices. Many elites in the region have been invested in obscuring the ways in which state formation— that is, the historical development of the host of institutions, functionaries, and the bodies of laws, policies, and regulations that organize nation-states—have been racially constituted and, simultaneously, have constituted racialized social dynamics. As mentioned by Michael Foucault, a body can become docile or can be transformed depending on the space it resides in.[25] In systemic institutions such as slavery, there was the scale of control that dictated how much freedom a person had over their body and the space they reside in. Followed by the object of control, where the behaviors or language of the body and its space were manipulated for their productivity and social subjugation.

For this reason, the Creole house on Aurora Street functions as a vessel for racial silence, perpetuating pro-white sentiments through its employment of strategic architectural types. As pointed by M. Mayer, this process affects social groups in very particular ways because “they occupy very different strategic positions within the post-industrial neoliberal city”.[26] She speaks to the differences between elitist social groups and ‘urban outcast’, who are often targeted by repressive and dispossessing governance strategies. This schism that Mayer contends between the culturally discontent and excluded reshapes the contours of urban spaces. Hence, we see the rejection of Blackness through architecture within the city of Ponce, creating an urban life that is curated. In turn, there is a politicization of everyday practices. However, through the negation to participate in the elites packaged urban lifestyle and the creation of counter-spaces through the everyday, the potential for Black voices to be accounted for emerges. According to Henri Lefebvre, it is through negotiation over space that individuals carve out their right to the city, and therefore, such structures constitute the urban condition of the city.[27] In cities whose structure is chiefly contested according to ethnonational divides, planners and politicians may attempt to confront the status quo through spatial reform, the restructuring of territories, and place regeneration.

Voicing Black Memory through Muralism

In turn, with Recolectando la Semilla (fig. 1) there is a dichotomy of signifiers, obstructing the Creole houses’ intended message. Despite the racialized intentions of this nineteenth-century house, the image of a joyful and young Back woman is rooted in the history of Black resistance in Puerto Rico. Indeed, the fully clothed working stance stands out as the most abundant evidence of the ways in which spectacular visual practices break from the racial control and violence. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the imagery of the defeated Black body was used to manage and maintain complex systems of racial and gendered cultural hierarchies; with examples being the image of a chained black man.[28] Artist Damaris Cruz, thereby, offers a reconsideration of the value of Blackness, one that repudiates Blackness as an imagined surface for white fantasy and puts in favor of material Black bodily performances that fostered kinship, creativity, and connection. Intersecting with and building from the insights of collective Black memory, the mural yield insights for those hailing from multiple fields and subfields.

Employing the technique of wet-pasting Yellowpages onto the edifice, ‘Recolectando la Semilla’ exemplifies an integrated approach, amalgamating both historical and contemporary art practices, while innovatively utilizing theoretical methods to ethically address the voids and the violent undertones within the archives of slavery. Cruz’s selection of Yellowpages serves a symbolic purpose: these pages, listing businesses, residences, and associated phone numbers, are emblematic of the nation’s communities. Once instrumental in fostering connections, her decision to use the wet-pasting of Yellowpages serves as a potent reminder of the communal bonds that characterize these communities. Damaris Cruz’s commitment to antiracist work consistently drives her work. As she describes it, “This is what I know”, vitally important “I paint the truth”.[29] This transformation into what Cruz’s calls an “ode to memory”, a project that promotes the strengthening of history through the identification of the identity that prevails in the community.[30] The mural functions as a means to retell parts of the collective identity through the imaginary of the underrepresented.

Cruz’s employment of memory as history is not unique to Caribbean cultural studies but concerns herself with memory under the same vein as texts such as Maurice Halbwachs’s 1952 Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire and Pierre Nora’s “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire.”[31] These scholars are pertinent to Recolectando la Semilla as it employs the presents unique awareness of the pastness of the past. Within this piece, Cruz contends that Puerto Rico has moved away from memory as an embodied and lived tradition. In memory’s place, the island nation has favored a curated history, the past crystallized in specific sites of commemoration or memorialization. As Nora shares,

The remnants of experience still lived in the warmth of tradition, in the silence of custom, in the repetition of the ancestral, have been displaced under the pressure of a fundamentally historical sensibility. … We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left. [32]

This dichotomy between lived experience and historical sensibility is largely perceived as untenable in contemporary notions of memory. Although, “history” has become a not-so-subtle shorthand for national communities’ eliding and totalizing representations of the past, “memory” evokes ethically charged and living relationships with that past, the past remembered correctly.

When pertaining to notions of Blackness and memory are deeply interconnected and have been explored in various ways throughout history. Blackness, as a concept, has been constructed and defined in relation to whiteness and the dominant culture, and has been subject to various forms of oppression and marginalization. Memory, on the other hand, has played a central role in the ways in which Black people have remembered and reclaimed their histories and cultural heritage. In turn, memory is a powerful tool in the struggle for Black liberation and empowerment.

In the mural’s expanse, recollections of Black resistance, strife, and cultural tenets are not merely depicted; they emerge as a potent legacy transmitted across generations. These memories stand as formidable counters to prevailing narratives, championing a profound sense of cultural identity and pride. Furthermore, the evocation of memory serves to forge unity and belonging within the Black community, acting as a bulwark against their experiences’ systematic erasure and sidelining. Thus, Blackness and memory are inextricably linked, underpinning the ongoing quest for Black liberation and empowerment. These memories are not mere historical remnants; they are foundational to the cultural heritage of Black individuals, continually shaping their self-understanding and positioning in the broader world. In this light, Cruz’s artistry stands as a paradigm, offering a profound template not only for portraying Puerto Rican Blackness but also for activist artists passionately championing social justice.

Though primarily anchored in the architecture of nineteenth-century Puerto Rican Creole houses, ‘Recolectando la Semilla’ oscillates seamlessly across various facets of Ponce, Puerto Rico, and the broader Caribbean. It intertwines diverse trajectories of labor exploitation, industrial evolution, and artistic influences. The project delves deep into the global circulation of coffee and how this cross-cultural exchange challenges and reframes established national artistic traditions. Cruz’s ‘Recolectando la Semilla’ incorporates an eclectic mix of media spanning multiple eras, from photographs to landscape, history, and genre paintings, as well as modern art installations. In doing so, it shifts away from conventional Puerto Rican art historical narratives, offering fresh perspectives on Blackness. It’s essential to note that ‘Recolectando la Semilla’ does not serve as a visual chronicle of the global ascent of coffee, nor does it strictly follow the chronological saga of Spanish colonization and its ensuing industrial pursuits. Instead, it astutely curates fragments, each echoing the greater whole, guiding viewers through a meticulously researched and evocatively conceived journey of rediscovery and imagination. Anna Arabindan-Kesson’s notion of “thinking relationally—not (only) representationally” comes to life in this work, weaving a rich tapestry of visual and material linkages that spotlight the foundational Black spaces in Puerto Rico’s makeup.[33]

Likewise, Cruz’s work is engaging with what urban scholars Ross Beveridge and Philippe Koch argue is “everyday change.”[34] Through the imagery on the façade of the house of Calle Aurora, Recolectando la Semilla is arguing for a return to the everyday as a means of thinking about political possibility. The proclamation of Blackness in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Cruz’s use of imagery can lend us to examine the everyday might be conceived politically and wonder what it is about the current conjuncture that is fueling the reimagining of the political possibility of the present. Plainly said, Recolectando la Semilla serves as a mnemonic reminder of the past to reimagine the present landscape. Mirroring what Beveridge and Koch state is “asserting the political potential of viewing the everyday as a source, stake and site of dissensus in current urban conditions.”[35] This politicizing the urban everyday offers a strategy for transformative politics, one in which the elite voice is lowered. Thus, the mural’s micropolitical action is transcended and democratic possibilities lie in the transformation of the active assertion of Black history. Through the combination of pro-

Blackness and the “everyday” engagement Damaris Cruz offers a different viewpoint towards understanding architecture and collective memory.

Conclusion

Through the study of silencing and Black resurgence, this artwork constitutes a serious step to uncover the constantly changing yet persistent racialized social formations in Puerto Rico. This proves that Black resistance through the use of collective memory in Puerto Rico is an important part of the island’s history and ongoing struggle for liberation. As Puerto Rico has a long history of Black resistance, dating back to the days of slavery and continuing through the present day. The Black community in Puerto Rico has used collective memory as a means of preserving their cultural heritage, asserting their agency, and resisting systemic oppression. Through an analysis of disruptions in silences and the processes of voicing them, thus, Recolectando la Semilla on the house on Calle Aurora unearths how stories about racialized domination were erased and censored as well as how they are rewritten and reenacted. The disruptions of silences in Puerto Rico often occurred during discussions about matters related to colonial subjugation. As a result, anti-Black racism always appeared as a means or by-product of imperial intervention. By looking at this instance where silencing is seriously challenged, we discover that it and its disruptions were produced at multiple locations and out of widely varied impulses. Through this Cruz’s artistic practice, the Black community in Puerto Rico is able to challenge the erasure of their history and culture, and demand justice and equality in the present and the future.

[1] Damaris Cruz, Interview with the author, July 2020.

[2] Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva, “Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico,” in Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 3.

[3] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). pp. 5.

[4] Trouillot, Silencing the Past, pp. 6

[5] Arlene Dávila illustrates the institutional practices that enforced this racial/national myth especially through the organization of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, founded in 1952. See Dávila, Sponsored Identities: Cultural Politics in Puerto Rico (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997).

[6] Francisco A. Scarano, Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico: The Plantation Economy of Ponce, 1800–1850 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) pp. 35.

[7] Jorge Ortiz Colom, Elements to bear in mind on Ponce Architecture, pp. 3.

[8] Ibid, pp. 3.

[9] Eileen Findlay, “Surveillance: Policing the Boundaries of Respectability” in Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 48.

[10] Ibid, pp. 3.

[11] Ibid, pp. 4.

[12] Brian J. Graham, Gregory Ashworth, and J. E. Tunbridge, “Heritage Dissonance,” in A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy (London: Arnold, a member of the Hodder Headline Group., 2004), pp. 24.

[13]Findlay, Imposing Decency, pp. 37.

[14] Ibid, pp. 101.

[15] Findlay, Imposing Decency, pp. 106.

[16] Ibid, pp.109.

[17] Quevedo Baez, “Memorias de un medico,” Boletín de la Asociación Médica de Puerto Rico 9, no. 85 (October 1912), 1–4.

[18] Dávila, Sponsored Identities: Cultural Politics in Puerto Rico (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), pp. 54.

[19] For some examples of the scholarship exploring the mutual constitution of blackness and whiteness in Puerto Rico, see Isabelo Zenón-Cruz, Narciso descubre su trasero: El negro en la cultura puertorriqueña (Humacao: Puerto Rico: Furidi, Vol. 1–2, 1974 [1975]); Magali Roy-Féquière, Women, Creole Identity and Intellectual Life in Early Twentieth- Century Puerto Rico (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004); Lillian Guerra, Popu- lar Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico: The Struggle for Self, Community, and Nation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998)

[20] Rodríguez-Silva, Silencing Race, pp. 23

[21] Ibid, pp. 23.

[22] Díaz Soler “Carta de don Ignacio de Ramón a su hermana sobre un viaje a Puerto Rico,” in, Historia de la esclavitud Negra, pp. 392- 397.

[23] Francisco Antonio Scarano, “Ponce: The Making of a Sugar Economy,” in Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico: The Plantation Economy of Ponce, 1800-1850 (Madison (Wis.), WI: The Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 35.

[24] See Isar Goudreau-Santiago, “Slippery Semantics: Race Talk and Everyday Uses of Racial Terminology in Puerto Rico,” Centro Journal 20, no. 2 (Fall 2008) pp. 5-33

[25] Michel Foucault and Alan Sheridan, “Docile Body,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin Books, 2020), pp. 136.

[26] Margit Mayer, “First World Urban Activism,” City 17, no. 1 (2013): pp. 5,

[27] Henri Lefebvre, Introduction in, Writings on Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 34.

[28] This image can be noted to a plethora of racial icons. For more on this image refer to Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, eds, Afro-Puerto Rican Testimonies, “Against the Myth of Racial Harmony in Puerto Rico” in The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 508–11.

[29] Damariz Cruz, personal interview with author, July 2020

[30] Ibid.

[31] Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire,” in “Memory and Counter-Memory,” special issue, Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24.

[32] Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, no. 26 (1989): 7–24, https://doi.org/10.2307/2928520.

[33]Anna, Arabindan-Kesson. Of Vision and Value: Landscape and Labor After Slavery in “Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World.” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021): pp. 121

[34] Beveridge, R and Koch, P (2018) Urban everyday politics: politicizing practices and the transformation of the here and now. Environment 
here and now. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37(1): pp. 142.

[35] Ibid, pp. 142.