Labor

The Centro recently moved from Hunter College on Park Avenue to its new location in the Silberman School of Social Work on Lexington Avenue and East 119th Street in East Harlem, the historic heart of the Puerto Rican diaspora. In celebrating the Centro’s move and its new art gallery, Melissa Calderón, Miguel Luciano, Antonio Martorell, Juan Sánchez, and Nitza Tufiño, prominent Puerto Rican artists of different generations, backgrounds, and experiences, were commissioned to produce new work inspired by their research in the Centro’s Archives focusing on the “Great Migration” from the island to the mainland in the 1940s and 1950s. Their exhibition, Labor, explores the social reality of Puerto Rican laborers in every imaginable field with passion, commitment, beauty, and even humor.
Melissa Calderón’s grandmother, a seamstress, taught her to sew and embroider, skills she employed in the series of embroideries titled Reality /My Unemployed Life (2011). In a ten-month “period of meditation on the nature of work” (Susana T. Leval, co-curator), the artist “channeled her grandmother,” producing four intimate images of everyday objects. Prone features a worn-out sofa commonly found in struggling households.
Miguel Luciano’s Porto Rican Cotton Picker (2011) features a photograph of Felícita Méndez, a restored 1971 Schwinn bike (Schwinn Cotton Picker), and a leather bike club vest with original pins and buttons from the civil rights movement and labor struggles of the 1950s through 1970s. In the 1920s Méndez’s family migrated from the island to work in Arizona’s cotton fields. Some years latter, she moved to California and raised her children, who because of their color and surnames were not allowed to attend public schools. She took the school district to court, and after the landmark decision Méndez v. Westminster, California became the first state to desegregate public schools.
Luciano’s recuperation of the Méndez case through the Archives, his own retooled Schwinn Cotton Picker (in the tradition of the Puerto Rico Schwinn Club, the original Puerto Rican bicycle club of New York), and the vest speak to issues of resistance, affirmation, and pride.
In a series of woodcuts designed as stamps, artist and co-curator Antonio Martorell found in the Archives countless portraits of working class people who, dressed in their finery, had themselves photographed on the tar rooftops of their tenements in New York City, giving the impression they had achieved better economic status than they had. As a child the artist remembers receiving similar pictures in the mail from relatives who had gone to the mainland to better their lives. Martorell’s “commemorative stamps” honor the anonymous laborers who worked to achieve their dream of a better future.
Nitza Tufiño, who trained at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico, painted a traditional group portrait in the style of Mexican murals. In creating a very personal interpretation of her family’s history, she placed the image of her grandfather, whose photograph she unexpectedly found in the Archives on a job application, in the center. In recomposing a family portrait, she not only included family members of several generations who were from different ethnicities and places (Puerto Rico and Mexico), but who also traveled in search of new opportunities. The artist strived to instill in the portraits a sense of “yearning,” the feeling people have for their homelands.
In Juan Sanchez’s video collage Unknown Boricua Streaming: A Nuyorican State of Mind, hundreds of photos flash by in split-second stream of consciousness. The background grid features a flag of Puerto Rico over the figures of a man and woman. The digitally overlaid imagery embraces an encyclopedic range of people central to Puerto Rican history and culture on the island, in New York, and beyond. The pulsating visual history moves to the sounds of Billy Holiday, John Coltrain, and Tito Puente; the images of liberating heroes—Pedro Albizu Campos, Lolita Lebrón, Emiliano Zapata, Nelson Mandela; religious figures—Christ, Buddha, Martin Luther King; street graffiti and pop images; Taino petroglyphs; as well as archival photos of labor union rallies, female garment workers, an anonymous soldier, and the poet Julia de Burgos.
Sánchez’s appropriation of Bernardo Vega’s text sums up the essential concept of Streaming as well as the entire exhibition: “Without a doubt, in order to stand/on our own two feet Puerto Ricans/of all generations must begin by affirming our history./It is as if we are saying that/we have roots, therefore we are!”