Academic literature on the topic 'Puerto Rican Portrait painting'

Puerto Rican communities have been a reality in many northeastern urban centers for over a century. Schools and classrooms have felt their presence through the Puerto Rican children attending school. The education of Puerto Ricans in U.S. schools has been documented for about seventy years, but in spite of numerous commissions, research reports, and other studies, this history is largely unknown to teachers and the general public. In addition to the research literature, a growing number of fictional accounts in English are providing another fertile avenue for understanding the challenges that Puerto Ricans have faced, and continue to face, in U.S. schools. In this article, Sonia Nieto combines the research on Puerto Rican students in U.S. schools with the power of the growing body of fiction written by Puerto Ricans. In this weaving of "fact" with "fiction," Nieto hopes to provide a more comprehensive and more human portrait of Puerto Rican students. Based on her reading of the literature in both educational research and fiction, Nieto suggests four interrelated and contrasting themes that have emerged from the long history of stories told about Puerto Ricans in U.S. schools: colonialism/resistance, cultural deficit/cultural acceptance, assimilation/identity, and marginalization/belonging. Nieto's analysis of these four themes then leads her to a discussion of the issue of care as the missing ingredient in the education of Puerto Ricans in the United States.

This essay analyzes how the presence of Francisco Oller’s monumental painting, The Wake, challenged the narrative of progress set forth in the Exposición de Puerto Rico de 1893 (Fair of Puerto Rico). The fair celebrated four hundred years of Spanish rule over Puerto Rico and emphasized the cultural and economic advancements achieved throughout that time. As a contrast to the many displays of the island’s bounty, The Wake offered a vision of jíbaros (Puerto Rican peasants) celebrating a baquiné, an Afro-Caribbean tradition honoring a deceased child. The painting brought attention to the poverty and marginalization of the peasantry as well as their persistent practice of nonnormative rituals. Oller, like many of the other social-reform-minded intellectuals of Puerto Rico, focused on the jíbaro class in order to critique their lifestyles but also to propel social transformation that could improve peasants’ quality of life. My study intervenes in the scholarly literature of Oller and the politics of the fair to show how The Wake visually asserted the prejudices and deterministic preconceptions about these peasants that characterized the views of late-nineteenth century sociologists. More importantly, however, careful observation of the painting reveals subtle inaccuracies such as the scarcity of food and drink in the scene, errors that conflict with the conclusions intellectuals of the time were drawing about the peasantry. These ambiguous compositional choices disclose an unbridgeable gap between the critique The Wake offered and the fair’s objectives, but they are also central to the painting’s relevance in Puerto Rican culture today.

Although health information is important to the prevention of much illness, the health information needs of Puerto Rican women remain unaddressed, according to the results of this phenomenological study. Through audiotaped interviews, 21women evaluated various sources of health information. Analysis of the data revealed which health information sources they considered trustworthy and nontrustworthy. Health care providers were found to be one of the least helpful sources, as personal interactions were often hurried and inattentive to women’s needs. Yet, the women were able to present a vivid portrait of a culturally sensitive community environment conducive to the presentation of health information. Implications include the importance of including cultural values in any health information setting, as well as the importance of building cultural bridges between health educators and Puerto Rican women. More research is needed to examine community efforts to enhance health information sources for this population of women.

Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro is a renowned Puerto Rican writer and activist for LGBTI rights and Afro-Caribbean communities. Her literature focuses on the portrait of queer subjectivities and the celebration of Afro-American identity. In this paper, I connect the different arenas in which the author corroborates her political engagement in order to propose a new perspective on autobiography as a literary genre, including such a paradigmatic platform for self-representation as Facebook. This strategy, in turn, is coherent with the author’s proposal, since it is founded on the creation of a network of support for vulnerable communities and on the defense of a deep decolonization. Accordingly, the analysis and visibility of different ways to represent bodies and subjectivities converge in a study that, ultimately, questions the parameters in which writing, genre and nation are founded and interconnected.

Abstract Five interrelated case studies from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries develop the dynamic contrast between portraiture and pictorial genres newly invented in and about Latin America that do not represent their subjects as individuals despite the descriptive focus on the particular. From Jean de Léry’s genre-defining proto-ethnographic text (1578) about the Tupinamba of Brazil to the treatment of the Creole upper class in New Spain as persons whose individuality deserves to be memorialized in contrast to the Mestizaje, African, and Indian underclass objectified as types deserving of scientific study, hierarchical distinctions between portraiture and ethnographic images can be framed in historical terms around the Aristotelian categories of the universal, the individual, and the particular. There are also some intriguing examples that destabilize these inherited distinctions, such as Puerto Rican artist José Campeche’s disturbing and poignant image of a deformed child, Juan Pantaléon Aviles, 1808; and an imaginary portrait of Moctezuma II, c. 1697, based on an ethnographic image, attributed to the leading Mexican painter Antonio Rodriguez. These anomalies serve to focus the study on the hegemonic position accorded to the viewing subject as actually precarious and unstable, always ripe for reinterpretation at the receiving end of European culture.

-Michael D. Olien, Edmund T. Gordon, Disparate Diasporas: Identity and politics in an African-Nicaraguan community.Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. xiv + 330 pp.-Donald Cosentino, Margarite Fernández Olmos ,Sacred possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. viii + 312 pp., Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (eds)-John P. Homiak, Lorna McDaniel, The big drum ritual of Carriacou: Praisesongs in rememory of flight. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. xiv + 198 pp.-Julian Gerstin, Gerdès Fleurant, Dancing spirits: Rhythms and rituals of Haitian Vodun, the Rada Rite. Westport CT: Greenwood, 1996. xvi + 240 pp.-Rose-Marie Chierici, Alex Stepick, Pride against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1998. x + 134 pp.-Rose-Marie Chierici, Flore Zéphir, Haitian immigrants in Black America: A sociological and sociolinguistic portrait. Westport CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1996. xvi + 180 pp.-Luis Martínez-Fernández, Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and temptation in Cuba. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. xxiv + 239 pp.-Jorge L. Giovannetti, My footsteps in Baraguá. Script and direction by Gloria Rolando. VHS, 53 minutes. Havana: Mundo Latino, 1996.-Gert Oostindie, Mona Rosendahl, Inside the revolution: Everyday life in socialist Cuba. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. x + 194 pp.-Frank Argote-Freyre, Lisa Brock ,Between race and empire: African-Americans and Cubans before the Cuban revolution. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. xii + 298 pp., Digna Castañeda Fuertes (eds)-José E. Cruz, Frances Negrón-Muntaner ,Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking colonialism and nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. x + 303 pp., Ramón Grosfoguel (eds)-Helen I. Safa, Félix V. Matos Rodríguez ,Puerto Rican Women's history: New perspectives. Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998. x + 262 pp., Linda C. Delgado (eds)-Arlene Torres, Jean P. Peterman, Telling their stories: Puerto Rican Women and abortion. Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1996. ix + 112 pp.-Trevor W. Purcell, Philip Sherlock ,The story of the Jamaican People. Kingston: Ian Randle; Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1998. xii + 434 pp., Hazel Bennett (eds)-Howard Fergus, Donald Harman Akenson, If the Irish ran the world: Montserrat, 1630-1730. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997. xii + 273 pp.-John S. Brierley, Lawrence S. Grossman, The political ecology of bananas: Contract farming, peasants, and agrarian change in the Eastern Caribbean. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xx + 268 pp.-Mindie Lazarus-Black, Jeannine M. Purdy, Common law and colonised peoples: Studies in Trinidad and Western Australia. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Dartmouth, 1997. xii + 309.-Stephen Slemon, Barbara Lalla, Defining Jamaican fiction: Marronage and the discourse of survival. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. xi + 224 pp.-Stephen Slemon, Renu Juneja, Caribbean transactions: West Indian culture in literature.-Sue N. Greene, Richard F. Patteson, Caribbean Passages: A critical perspective on new fiction from the West Indies. Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998. ix + 187 pp.-Harold Munneke, Ivelaw L. Griffith ,Democracy and human rights in the Caribbean. Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1997. vii + 278 pp., Betty N. Sedoc-Dahlberg (eds)-Francisco E. Thoumi, Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith, Drugs and security in the Caribbean: Sovereignty under seige. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1997. xx + 295 pp.-Michiel Baud, Eric Paul Roorda, The dictator next door: The good neighbor policy and the Trujillo regime in the Dominican republic, 1930-1945. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1998. xii + 337 pp.-Peter Mason, Wim Klooster, The Dutch in the Americas 1600-1800. Providence RI: The John Carter Brown Library, 1997. xviii + 101 pp.-David R. Watters, Aad H. Versteeg ,The archaeology of Aruba: The Tanki Flip site. Oranjestad; Archaeological Museum Aruba, 1997. 518 pp., Stéphen Rostain (eds)

-Valerie I.J. Flint, Margarita Zamora, Reading Columbus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. xvi + 247 pp.-Riva Berleant-Schiller, Historie Naturelle des Indes: The Drake manuscript in the Pierpont Morgan Library. New York: Norton, 1996. xxii + 272 pp.-Neil L. Whitehead, Charles Nicholl, The creature in the map: A journey to Eldorado. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. 398 pp.-William F. Keegan, Ramón Dacal Moure ,Art and archaeology of pre-Columbian Cuba. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996. xxiv + 134 pp., Manuel Rivero de la Calle (eds)-Michael Mullin, Stephan Palmié, Slave cultures and the cultures of slavery. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. xlvii + 283 pp.-Bill Maurer, Karen Fog Olwig, Small islands, large questions: Society, culture and resistance in the post-emancipation Caribbean. London: Frank Cass, 1995. viii + 200 pp.-David M. Stark, Laird W. Bergad ,The Cuban slave market, 1790-1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xxi + 245 pp., Fe Iglesias García, María Del Carmen Barcia (eds)-Susan Fernández, Tom Chaffin, Fatal glory: Narciso López and the first clandestine U.S. war against Cuba. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. xxii + 282 pp.-Damian J. Fernández, María Cristina García, Havana USA: Cuban exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959-1994. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xiii + 290 pp.-Myrna García-Calderón, Carmen Luisa Justiniano, Con valor y a cómo dé lugar: Memorias de una jíbara puertorriqueña. Río Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1994. 538 pp.-Jorge Pérez-Rolon, Ruth Glasser, My music is my flag: Puerto Rican musicians and their New York communities , 1917-1940. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. xxiv + 253 pp.-Lauren Derby, Emelio Betances, State and society in the Dominican Republic. Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1995. xix + 162 pp.-Michiel Baud, Bernardo Vega, Trujillo y Haiti, Volumen II (1937-1938). Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1995. 427 pp.-Danielle Bégot, Elborg Forster ,Sugar and slavery, family and race: The letters and diary of Pierre Dessalles, Planter in Martinique, 1808-1856. Elborg & Robert Forster (eds. and trans.). Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996. 322 pp., Robert Forster (eds)-Catherine Benoit, Richard D.E. Burton, La famille coloniale: La Martinique et la mère patrie, 1789-1992. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994. 308 pp.-Roderick A. McDonald, Kathleen Mary Butler, The economics of emancipation: Jamaica & Barbados, 1823-1843. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. xviii + 198 pp.-K.O. Laurence, David Chanderbali, A portrait of Paternalism: Governor Henry Light of British Guiana, 1838-48. Turkeyen, Guyana: Dr. David Chanderbali, Department of History, University of Guyana, 1994. xiii + 277 pp.-Mindie Lazarus-Black, Brian L. Moore, Cultural power, resistance and pluralism: Colonial Guyana 1838-1900. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press; Mona, Kingston: The Press-University of the West Indies, 1995. xv + 376 pp.-Madhavi Kale, K.O. Laurence, A question of labour: Indentured immigration into Trinidad and British Guiana, 1875-1917. Kingston: Ian Randle; London: James Currey, 1994. ix + 648 pp.-Franklin W. Knight, O. Nigel Bolland, On the March: Labour rebellions in the British Caribbean, 1934-39. Kingston: Ian Randle; London: James Currey, 1995. viii + 216 pp.-Linden Lewis, Kevin A. Yelvington, Producing power: Ethnicity, gender, and class in a Caribbean workplace. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. xv + 286 pp.-Consuelo López Springfield, Alta-Gracia Ortíz, Puerto Rican women and work: Bridges in transnational labor. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. xi + 249 pp.-Peta Henderson, Irma McClaurin, Women of Belize: Gender and change in Central America. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. x + 218 pp.-Bonham C. Richardson, David M. Bush ,Living with the Puerto Rico Shore. José Gonzalez Liboy & William J. Neal. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. xx + 193 pp., Richard M.T. Webb, Lisbeth Hyman (eds)-Bonham C. Richardson, David Barker ,Environment and development in the Caribbean: Geographical perspectives. Mona, Kingston: The Press-University of the West Indies, 1995. xv + 304 pp., Duncan F.M. McGregor (eds)-Alma H. Young, Anthony T. Bryan ,Distant cousins: The Caribbean-Latin American relationship. Miami: North-South-Center Press, 1996. iii + 132 pp., Andrés Serbin (eds)-Alma H. Young, Ian Boxill, Ideology and Caribbean integration. Mona, Kingston: The Press-University of the West Indies, 1993. xiii + 128 pp.-Stephen D. Glazier, Howard Gregory, Caribbean theology: Preparing for the challenges ahead. Mona, Kingston: Canoe Press, University of the West Indies, 1995. xx + 118 pp.-Lise Winer, Richard Allsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean English usage. With a French and Spanish supplement edited by Jeanette Allsopp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. lxxviii + 697 pp.-Geneviève Escure, Jacques Arends ,Pidgins and Creoles: An introduction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995. xiv + 412 pp., Pieter Muysken, Norval Smith (eds)-Jacques Arends, Angela Bartens, Die iberoromanisch-basierten Kreolsprachen: Ansätze der linguistischen Beschreibung. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995. vii + 345 pp.-J. Michael Dash, Richard D.E. Burton, Le roman marron: Études sur la littérature martiniquaise contemporaine. Paris: L'Harmattan. 1997. 282 pp.

In the three decades surrounding the Spanish-American war (1880-1910), three prominent Puerto Rican artists, Francisco Oller (1833-1917), Manuel E. Jordan (1853-1919), and Ramón Frade (1875-1954) created a group of paintings depicting "el jíbaro," the rural Puerto Rican farm worker, in a way that can be appropriately labeled "nationalistic." Using a set of motifs involving clothes, customs, domestic architecture and agricultural practices unique to rural Puerto Rico, they contributed to the imagination of a communal identity for creoles at the turn of the century. ("Creole" here refers to individuals of Spanish heritage, born on the island of Puerto Rico.) This set of shared symbols provided a visual dimension to the aspirational nationalism that had been growing within the creole community since the mid- 1800s. This creollismo mythified the agrarian laborer as a prototypical icon of Puerto Rican identity. By identifying themselves as jíbaros, Puerto Rican creoles used jíbaro self-fashioning as a way to define their community as unique vis a vis the colonial metropolis (first Spain, later the United States). In this thesis, I will examine works by Oller, Jordan and Frade which employ jíbaro motifs to engage this creollismo. They do so by painting the jíbaro himself, his culture and surroundings, the fields in which he worked, and the bohío hut which was his home. Together, these paintings form a body of jíbaro imagery which I will contextualize, taking into account both the historical circumstances of jíbaro life, as well as the ways in which signifiers of jibarismo began to gain resonance amongst creoles who did not strictly belong to the jíbaro class. The resulting study demonstrates the importance of the mythified jíbaro figure to the project of imagining Puerto Rican creole society as a nation, and the extent to which visual culture participated in this creative process.