Creating kinship in these conditions is to refuse the structures of commodification that undergird not just racial slavery and human hierarchy, but indeed the edifice of colonial extraction that fueled early modern capitalism. Did every woman whose labor pains brought her to her knees, whether on board a slave ship or in a holding pen awaiting sale, see her birthing as an act of such profound disruption? No. Of course not. But did the birth of a child — either lost to sale or retained in defiance — steep those women in a space of love, loss, and anguish that categorically rejected the terms that slaveowners endeavored to render normative, rational, and humane? Did they claim connection in the face of commodification? Did they then produce a counter-narrative, rooted in affective claims to kinship from the very onset of transatlantic slavery? I think so. And I think that such a corporeal rejection constitutes an origin story for the Black Radical tradition. In these terms, the Black Radical tradition both builds upon and expands Robinson's. It is one in which sovereignty is impossible to envision without kinship, and in which kinship is understood as antithetical to the marketplace's assertion that Black people were fundamentally and successfully commercialized. This is a kinship that is rooted in the body, irrevocably formed in the crucible of a forced migration. It is a kinship that resulted in children left behind, empty arms filled with other women's babies, families formed in adulthood. Cousins were chosen and sibling bonds crafted, at times so strong that they would preclude marriage with someone with whom the passage had been endured: survival turned them into kin so real that incest prohibitions took hold.14 It is a kinship infused with new meaning and rendered visible to slavery scholars who hold women's experience of forced migration and enslavement at the center of their work.

14 Herman L. Bennett, *Africans in Colonial Mexico*: *Absolutism*, *Christianity*, *and Afro-Creole Consciousness*, *1570–1640* (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).

#### Bibliography

# 17. Black Women's Work: Resisting and Undoing Character Education and the 'Good' White Liberal Agenda

*Bettina L. Love*

### Reclaiming Our Time

In early August 2017, a video of Maxine Waters — US Representative for Californian's 43rd congressional district — went viral when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin tried to elude Waters' questioning by giving long-winded, convoluted, and irrelevant answers. Every time, and I mean every time, Mnuchin attempted not to answer Waters' initial question, she interrupted him and repeated the phrase: 'reclaiming my time.' Although the phrase is a documented rhetorical maneuver in the handbook of the *House Floor Procedure*, the words 'reclaiming my time' aimed at a powerful White man meant something more to people of color: how racism literally takes our time and the hard, never-ending work of reclaiming it.1 Toni Morrison once said, 'The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps

1 Louise M. Slaughter, *House Floor Procedure*, *7* January 2019, https://archivesdemocrats-rules.house.gov/archives/floor\_man.htm

you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.'2

#### Don't Believe the Hype

As a Black woman, I want to use Waters' words to think about the magnitude of time that has been taken from children of color, who grow up to be disillusioned adults because they believed in the American dream of meritocracy; and to explore whose work it becomes to undo the 'good White liberals' agenda, partially in the field of education. What I am describing may sound like racial hyperbole, but in June 2017 a study published in the journal *Child Development* found that youth of color from working-class families who grow up believing in America's narrative of hard work, perseverance, and grit — all components of the education of the White liberal character — are more likely to participate in risky behavior and have lower self-esteem.3 The study is grounded in the social psychology theory of 'system justification', which explains how humans believe, defend, and rationalize the status quo because they see social, economic, and political systems as fair and legitimate. For the low-income youth of color in the study, 91 percent believed in the 'American Dream.' While holding system-justifying beliefs, these youth lacked the skills to interpret a world that is, sadly, filled with intersectional, systemic oppression.

Erin Godfrey, the study's lead author, remarked on her team's findings in an article in *The Atlantic*: *'*We cannot equivocate when it comes to preparing our children to face injustices.'4 Godfrey's study confirms what Black, Brown, and Indigenous people have always known: 'You cannot continue to oppress a consciously historical people.'5 If children of color are attending schools that do not help them

2 Toni Morrison, 'Black Studies Center Public Dialogue', Portland State, *Special Collections*: *Oregon Public Speakers*, 90 (1975), https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/ orspeakers/90

3 Erin B. Godfrey, Carlos E. Santos, and Esther Burson, 'For Better or Worse? System-Justifying Beliefs in Sixth Grade Predict Trajectories of Self-Esteem and Behavior Across Early Adolescence', *Child Development*, 90:1 (2019), 180–95; first published 2017, www.doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12854

4 Melinda D. Anderson, 'Why the Myth of Meritocracy Hurts Kids of Color,' *The Atlantic*, 27 June 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/ internalizing-the-myth-of-meritocracy/535035/

5 John Henrik Clarke, *Africans at the Crossroads*: *African World Revolution* (Trenton: African World Press 1992), p. 36.

interpret the racist, sexist, Islamophobic, patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic and xenophobic world they are living in, then not only is the status quo maintained, but Whiteness is never disrupted; therefore, White supremacy stays on track.

#### What We Had

Before the landmark decision of *Brown v. Board of Education*, which found that separate schools for Black and White students were unconstitutional, Black schools were proud institutions that 'provided black communities with cohesion and leadership'.6 Black schools' facilities and books were inferior to their White counterparts, but not their education. Oral history interviews of Black teachers reflecting on Black schools before *Brown* consistently stated, 'black schools were places where order prevailed, where teachers commanded respect, and where parents supported teachers'.7 Educating Black children was viewed as the collective responsibility of the community, with schools as the anchors and teachers as leaders both inside and outside school walls. As schools desegregated, over 44,000 Black teachers and 90% of Black principals lost their jobs due to the closing of all-Black schools together with the fact that White parents did not want their children taught by a Black teacher. Legal scholar Derrick Bell has argued that Black people would have been better served if the court had rejected *Brown v. Board of Education* and enforced the 'equal' part of 'separate but equal'.8

Since *Brown*, educators of color, particularly women — since many more men of color than women were pushed out of the profession after *Brown* — have been trying to reclaim our time with our children and our community. School integration came at the cost of the collective ability of Black children and their communities to interpret, analyze, research, critique, and resist oppression.  As a direct result of the *Brown* decision, an overwhelming majority (roughly 88 percent) of teachers in the United States are White women, and they walk into

6 Adam Fairclough 'The Costs of Brown: Black Teachers and School Integration', *The Journal of American History*, 91:1 (2004), 43–55.

7 Ibid.

8 Adam Fairclough, 'The Cost of Brown: Black Teachers and School Intergration', *The Journal of American History* 91:1 (2004), 43–55.

the classroom with little to no understanding of the longstanding fight by people of color against cultural genocide. Alongside some White allies (though not enough), women of color are fighting to undo what educational historian Joel Spring calls 'ideological management' that takes place in schools where cultural and linguistic genocide are masked as assimilation.9

### Keep Swimming

Fig. 17.1 Jonathan Edwards, *Grit*, 2018. © Jonathan Edwards. All rights reserved.

In his book *Work Hard*, *Be Hard*: *Journeys Through 'No Excuses Teaching'* (2016), Jim Horn describes how most Boards of Directors of charter schools are typically comprised of wealthy philanthropists, representatives of corporate foundations, and Wall Street hedge fund managers who believe children of color need to learn discipline, character education,

9 Joel Spring, *Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality*: *A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States* (New York: Routledge 2016), p. 178.

rudimentary academic skills, and full submission to white economic demands. These beliefs are not new nor are they egalitarian; they are the very fabric of America's racism. Ibram X. Kendi, author of *Stamped From The Beginning*: *The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America* (2016) writes, 'The principal function of racist ideas in American history has been the suppression of resistance to racial discrimination and its resulting racial disparities.'10 No white liberal educational reform model, regardless of the era (i.e. Separate but Equal, *Brown v. Board of Education*, or No Child Left Behind), has promoted Black consciousness for resistance, self-determination, and/or empowerment. The model is for youth of color to keep swimming against the tide of systemic oppression while so-called 'good' character goals weigh them down, even as the sharks circle (i.e. gang violence, lack of jobs, being pushed out of school, and the intentional gutting of public housing). This is an education for survival, never to thrive or resist.

The single-minded narrative of character education, built on catchy buzzwords like grit, persistence, and zest, is not only racist, but undermines people of color's frustration, disappointment, anger, and determination to fight systemic oppression. For example, when reflecting on his school experiences, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

The streets were not my only problem. If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later. Suffered at the hands of both, but I resent the schools more […] Educated children never offered excuses — certainly not childhood itself. The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls. How could the schools? […] Perhaps they must be burned away so that the heart of this thing might be known.11

As a former elementary school teacher and now a professor of education I know, sadly, the accuracy of Coates' piercing words. We cannot burn down schools; all we can do is undo what has already been done. Fortunately, there is a playbook for the undoing, and Black women wrote it.

10 Ibram X. Kendi, *Stamped From The Beginning*: *The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America* (New York: Nation Books, 2016), p. 10.

11 Ta-Nehisi Coates, *Between the World and Me* (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), p. 16.

#### Black Women's Work

In this chapter I am going to focus on two civil rights icons and master teachers, Ella Baker and Septima Clark. Baker is a name unfamiliar to most people; however, she was one of the most courageous and brilliant civil and human rights activists of all time. She was a community organizer who worked from the premise that 'Strong people don't need strong leaders.'12 Baker worked alongside W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but never aspired to be a celebrity. She believed in grassroots community organizing, and became the first director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In the spring of 1960, after the Greensboro sit-ins, she founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to develop emerging activists as they did the work of the civil rights movement.13 Julian Bond, Bob Moses, Bernice Johnson-Reagon, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Marian Wright Edelman are all political protégés of Baker.14 She believed in the power of everyday people to transform society through leadership that was decentralized and non-hierarchical. Baker taught people to understand just how strong and brilliant they were, both individually and collectively, and stressed the idea of a radical democratic practice in which the oppressed, excluded, and powerless became active in positions of power with decision-making opportunities.15 Baker emphasized that people needed to understand their self-worth and be personally empowered before they could change systems of injustice. She believed in the power of people, all people, to fight for a just world.

Even fewer people know the name of Septima Clark. Dr. King called her 'The Mother of the Movement.' Clark was a master educator and activist, and developed the literacy and citizenship workshops that were the backbone of the voting rights and civil rights movements. Her 'Citizenship Schools' taught adults how to read by ensuring they felt invested in what they were learning. Her goal was not just for her students to be able to pass the literacy test to vote, but also to feed her students with cultural pride, personal pride, self-determination,

12 Barbara Ransby, *Ella Baker and the Black Movement*: *A Radical Democratic Vision* (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), p. 3.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

leadership skills, and a deep understanding of their rights as citizens. Citizenship Schools were established inside homes, tents, beauty parlors, and of course, churches. Clark also trained other women to teach her approach to citizenship pedagogy, which she crafted while working as a teacher at the Highlander Folk School, an interracial adult education center in Tennessee.

According to Katherine Mellen Charron, author of *Freedom's Teacher*: *The Life of Septima Clark* (2009), citizenship pedagogy linked literacy with political and economic literacy, encouraging people to overcome their fear of white reprisals and accept the responsibilities of being a citizen leader in their community, with an understanding of the fundamental issues it faced. After attending Citizenship School, many students indicated that it was the 'First time I have felt like a human being.'16 Septima did not view citizenship as just about registering people to vote. Citizenship was a pedagogy of mattering: people acknowledging and accepting America and its policies as anti-Black, racist, and unjust; learning the socio-political landscape that characterised their communities and themselves; and lastly, everyday people engaging in civic education informed by radical democratic principles of shared leadership in the fight for humanity and intersectional justice.

#### Undoing

These two women understood how to systemically fight systemic oppression by providing people of color with a curated education focused on cultural pride, personal pride, self-determination, leadership skills, and harnessing the grit passed down by their ancestors. We need more like Ella and Septima to fight to reclaim the time we have lost in educating our children. We need an updated and contemporary Citizenship School. We cannot teach our children to take on White supremacy while being taught through the lens of Whiteness. Schools in the US have become more anti-Black, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, and anti-gay every day. Telling kids just to keep swimming, while they are drowning before our eyes, is educational malpractice.

16 Mellen Charron, *Freedom's Teacher*: *The Life of Septima Clark* (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), p. 3.

We need to return to the work of Black women master-teachers who did not rely on gimmicks, acronyms, or buzzwords to chip away at one of the largest mountains of oppression: White supremacy. The education of children of color needs to be intentional, thoughtful, and conducted out of a love for Blackness and Black joy. The education our children receive now only prepares them to survive oppression, at best, because it is not their character that is being questioned, it is their Black skin and Blackness.

#### Bibliography

### 18. Filipina Stories: Gabriela NY and Justice for Mary Jane Veloso

### *Editha Mesina*

According to the Commission on Filipinos Overseas, there are over 10 million Filipino workers in over 200 countries all over the world. Women comprise over half of these overseas workers. Severe economic factors in the Philippines and a lack of sustainable policies to employ women lead to a shortage of opportunities, which drives women to emigrate. These women work worldwide in the domestic service industry as nannies and maids, and also in the medical profession, many as nurses. There are also a number who leave to become marriage migrants and au pairs. My current work has focused on the issues of these Filipino women, these Filipinas.

I have been photographing a Filipina organization called Gabriela New York, a local branch of Gabriela USA. It works with the Gabriela National Alliance of Women, a grassroots alliance that includes over 200 organizations advocating for the human rights of migrant workers and oppressed Filipino women. On 28 April 2015, Gabriela NY, along with other Filipino human rights groups, held a candlelight vigil in support of Mary Jane Veloso. A migrant worker accused of smuggling heroin into Indonesia, she was subsequently jailed and sentenced to death. Mary Jane, a mother of two, maintained her innocence. She claimed that she was duped into carrying a suitcase into Indonesia by her god-sister, who convinced her to go to Indonesia after losing a job in Malaysia. The vigil was held the night before Mary Jane, alongside eight other convicted drug smugglers from Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, and Nigeria, was to be executed on 29 April 2015 at 1am. The case highlighted Indonesia's extreme capital punishment and drug prohibition laws. More so, the case underscored the risks many women like Mary Jane face in order to secure jobs far from home and provide for their families. At midnight on 29 April 2015, while the other eight convicted drug smugglers were executed, Mary Jane was granted a stay of execution on the condition that she would serve as a witness during the trial of her alleged human traffickers. Currently, Mary Jane remains on death row in Indonesia, while her family and advocates continue to seek the commutation of her death sentence. Mary Jane Veloso's case highlights the great struggle that migrant workers and trafficked victims face as a result of dire poverty and forced migration.

Fig. 18.1 Edith Mesina, Candlelight Vigil for Mary Jane Veloso. Indonesian Consulate, New York City, 28 April 2015. © Editha Mesina.

Fig. 18.2 Editha Mesina, Candlelight Vigil for Mary Jane Veloso. Indonesian Consulate, New York City, 28 April 2015. © Editha Mesina.

Fig. 18.3 Editha Mesina, Candlelight Vigil for Mary Jane Veloso. Indonesian Consulate, New York City, 28 April 2015. © Editha Mesina.

Fig. 18.4 Editha Mesina, Candlelight Vigil for Mary Jane Veloso. Indonesian Consulate, New York City, 28 April 2015. © Editha Mesina.

Fig. 18.5 Editha Mesina, Candlelight Vigil for Mary Jane Veloso. Indonesian Consulate, New York City, 28 April 2015. © Editha Mesina.

### Filipina Stories: Gabriela, NY and NBC's *Mail-Order Family*

As an advocate for migrant women, Gabriela works to highlight women's issues in the mainstream media and supports the education of the public through the positive and informed representation of Asian women.

In October 2016 NBC announced the development of a new sitcom, *Mail-Order Family*, the story of a widowed father who buys a Filipina mail-order bride to take care of his children. The mail-order-bride industry thrives between consumer countries like the US and countries that supply potential brides. Asian countries are the most notable suppliers, with the Philippines being one of the largest sources of these women. This industry is contingent on global economic inequalities that drive impoverished women to desperation so that they seek a better life in the West. Attracted largely by stereotypes of docile and subservient women, Western men often seek Filipina women who speak English and are family-oriented.1 Unfortunately, many men exploit the needs of impoverished women who have few options in their own country. Since the passing of the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA) in 2006, Congress has still not implemented federal laws to protect mail-order brides from exploitation and abuse.2

Unfortunately, many of these women suffer severe consequences in marriages to men they do not know. The sexual exploitation and violent abuse of these women continues to be documented.3 With exploitative irony, NBC's proposed sitcom, *Mail-Order Family*, intended to use the pain of women living in dire poverty as content for comedy. Anyone with a conscience surely saw this as disrespectful and inhuman. In a world with increasingly diverse viewers, NBC should be in the

1 Lisa Belkin, 'The Mail-Order Bride Business', *New York Times*, 11 May 1986, https:// www.nytimes.com/1986/05/11/magazine/the-mail-order-bride-business.html

2 US Government Accountability Office, *Immigration Benefits*: *Improvements Needed to Fully Implement the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act*, Government Accountability Office, 10 December 2014, https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-15-3

3 Tahirih Justice Center, 'Report Finds Law to Protect Foreign Brides Has Not Been Fully Implemented', Tahiri Justice Center, 18 December 2014, http://www.tahirih. org/news/report-finds-law-to-protect-foreign-brides-from-abuse-and-exploitationhas-not-been-fully-implemented/

business of portraying a more positive image of Asian women, instead of perpetuating tired racist stereotypes that display Asian women as commodities. On 6 October 2016, Gabriela NY held a protest rally outside of NBC Studios, which I photographed. After a robust social media campaign in which Gabriela USA petitioned for the cancellation of *Mail-Order Family*, NBC stopped further development of the planned sitcom. The protest at NBC illustrates Gabriela NY's role in speaking out against the continued, unregulated mail-order-bride industry. Here, we see an instance where everyday people came together to voice their outrage, and in doing so made a difference.

Fig. 18.6 Editha Mesina, Gabriela Action: NBC's proposed sitcom, *Mail-Order Family*. NBC Headquarters, New York City, 6 October 2016. © Editha Mesina.

Fig. 18.7 Editha Mesina, Gabriela Action: NBC's proposed sitcom, *Mail-Order Family*. NBC Headquarters, New York City, 6 October 2016. © Editha Mesina.

Fig. 18.8 Editha Mesina, Gabriela Action: NBC's proposed sitcom, *Mail-Order Family*. NBC Headquarters, New York City, 6 October 2016. © Editha Mesina.

Fig. 18.9 Editha Mesina, Gabriela Action: NBC's proposed sitcom, *Mail-Order Family*. NBC Headquarters, New York City, 6 October 2016. © Editha Mesina.

Fig. 18.10 Editha Mesina, Gabriela Action: NBC's proposed sitcom, *Mail-Order Family*. NBC Headquarters, New York City, 6 October 2016. © Editha Mesina.

#### Filipina Stories: Gabriela NY

Gabriela is an activist organization named after Gabriela Silang, an eighteenth-century Filipino revolutionary heroine who struggled against Spanish colonization in the Philippines. Her name has become synonymous with any individual fighting for human rights; each member of the organization is commonly known as a 'Gabriela'. Gabriela New York has worked to create a community for women of Philippine descent, educating the Filipino diaspora on the struggles of women in the Philippines. The Gabriela New York women I have met are unique individuals, dedicated to equality and action. Together they illustrate the complexity of the modern Filipino-American experience.

My video piece, Filipina Stories, includes narratives by several Gabrielas that speak of migration and the dislocation of a people and their culture. This is a project in which I ask Filipinas, both recent immigrants and US-born citizens, to tell the story of their and their families' immigration to the US. The stark realization of difference, the struggle to assimilate and succeed in the United States, these are their shared and common stories. These are portraits that ask, and perhaps even answer, questions about these women's worlds, serving as an entry point into their lives, sensibilities and history. In witnessing these Filipinas' stories, I encourage my audience to engage in an honest conversation about race, gender and immigration, hopefully revealing common ground for understanding and an appreciation of diversity.

Fig. 18.11 Editha Mesina, Azreal. Still from Filipina Stories, 2017. © Editha Mesina.

Fig. 18.12 Editha Mesina, Joelle. Still from Filipina Stories, 2018. © Editha Mesina.

Fig. 18.13 Editha Mesina, May. Still from Filipina Stories, 2017. © Editha Mesina.

## 19. Women & Migrations: African Fashion's Global Takeover

*Allana Finley*

Fashion, as a global enterprise, has the magical ability to weave people together and to whisk them on a journey, migrating across cultures, lifestyles and ideas. Our journeys shape our identity and, very often, this manifests in our personal style — even if we don't realize it.

Style has always played an important part in my own development. The women in my family have unfailingly used their appearances to communicate strength and resilience, independence and femininity as they shifted through different spheres of life.

I am myself a product of migration. From a young girl born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I've always had a stirring in my spirit. I was not one to just sit around. My mother and grandmother instilled that drive in me from early on as the child of a single parent.

I got my working papers at thirteen, and by the age of fifteen I was tossing burgers in McDonald's while folding jeans at The Gap. Not long after graduating from the University of Virginia I moved to New York, where I continued my early fashion career working as a showroom assistant at DKNY, before moving on to Eileen Fisher's first flagship store on 53rd & Madison.

Moving again, this time to Los Angeles, I worked my way up the fashion ladder from Rodeo Drive for Tiffany & Co and Gucci America to be hired as a wardrobe supervisor for Jessica Simpson and 98 Degrees' first US/Canadian tour. I then went on to become Head of Costume during Oxygen Media's inaugural year.

In 2000, I decided to move to Johannesburg, South Africa where, while raising my two sons, I discovered my life's mission: African fashion.

There is no clear-cut way to define African fashion — its offerings are as varied as the multitude of cultures that inhabit the continent from which it is born.

Often, when many outside the continent think of African fashion, their minds might conjure up images of women wrapped in animal skins or wax print fabrics, draped in what have now become curious accessories found in airport gift shops.

Today, in this moment, there are international fashion houses pinning those very images on their inspiration boards, while magazine publications have appropriated that aesthetic for financial gain.

However, the African aesthetic that is popping up on runways and in international luxury retail stores is fast becoming harder to appropriate without giving credit to the origin of the inspiration.

This phenomenon has been in existence for years, since before Yves Saint Laurent showed his iconic 1967 'African' collection. But now the world is asking, 'are global brands appropriating to the benefit or detriment of the African design industry?' The global industry treats the design spirit of the continent as a trend, reducing it to the whimsy of a fad and deeming that African fashion amounts simply to traditional techniques and fabrics.

Furthermore, there is the realisation that African creativity is itself excluded from the conversation and commercial exchange. An op-ed in *The Business of Fashion*, one of the global fashion industry's most influential publications, addresses the benefits of cultural appropriation, stating that: 'without the freedom to embrace fantasy, curiosity and interpretation, borders remain closed and the codes of stereotypes remain intact.'1

A rebuttal, published shortly after, argued back: 'calling out cultural appropriation does not kill creative license; it simply holds

1 Osman Ahmed, 'Why Fashion Needs Cultural Appropriation', *Business of Fashion*, 1 June 2017, https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/opinion/whyfashion-needs-cultural-appropriation

those in power accountable to cite their sources. The world is vast and information is free, but *appropriation without citation by those in power*  erases *the culture being referenced*.'2

In 2015, Jenni Avins wrote in an article entitled 'Something borrowed', 'We must stop guarding cultures and subcultures in efforts to preserve them. It's naïve, paternalistic, and counterproductive. Plus, it's just not how culture or creativity work.'3

My own views on the matter have migrated somewhat since the conference Black Portraiture III on 18 November 2016, when I moderated a panel called 'Preservation of African Fashion from Global Mis-appropriation' at the Turbine Hall in Johannesburg. My view now is that the industry must continue to be more collaborative, less competitive and focus on how their diversity is complimentary. This is Africa's time, Africa's century, and I feel moved to make it my mission to ensure that as an industry, fashion in Africa catches the wave.

Returning to my own personal journey, when I got to South Africa after an extended period without work, I knew I had to find something to throw myself into. I was completely taken by the nascent yet bubbling industry, where designers like Stoned Cherrie and Marianne Fassler were not just dictating trends, but helping the public navigate their own identities.

I attended Fashion Weeks in South Africa and asked myself why there wasn't more media coverage, and where the international buyers were. So that became my role. As Global Brand and Marketing Manager for African Fashion International, the owner of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Weeks on the continent, it was my job to foster relationships and ensure that the conversation kept growing.

During this time, I had the privilege of discovering and working with some of the most incredibly talented designers. My role was to support them in reaping commercial benefits from the international fashion companies that come like thieves in the night and migrate the African aesthetic off to high street shops.

2 My emphasis. Darío Calmese, 'Business of Fashion: Fashion Does Not Need Cultural Appropriation', 28 June 2017, dario. the storyteller blog, http://www.dariocalmese. com/writing/2017/6/28/fashion-does-not-need-cultural-appropriation

3 Jenni Avins, 'In Fashion, Cultural Appropriation is Either Very Wrong or Very Right', *Quartz*, 19 October 2015, https://qz.com/520363/borrowing-from-othercultures-is-not-inherently-racist/

Mozambican designer Taibo Bacar, who was taught his craft by his seamstress mother, is working to build a global brand that stretches from Maputo to Lisbon

South African Laduma Ngxokolo was also taught by his mother, and his brand MaXhosa has taken the international scene by storm. His knitwear label answers the appropriation debate with its own authenticity and pride in its uniquely personal cultural roots. His brand has grown from apparel to interiors that inhabit homes around the world and recently the design of his popular range of socks was appropriated by Zara. 'We appreciate that Africa's rich culture is now "en vogue" but not at all costs. But our protected intellectual property rights should be respected as much as we respect that of other global brands', stated Thebe Ikalafeng of Brand Leadership.4

The globally relevant nature of these and other brands' stories are documented visually in an incredible coffee table book celebrated by the *New York Times*, called African Catwalk. In the book, photographer Pers-Anders Pettersson documents the continent's growth in fashion and shows a new side of African design. I was very humbled to write a foreword for the book, along with Alessia Glavino, Photo Editor of *Vogue Italia*, and Stella Jean, a Haitian-Italian designer who has long since taken the world by storm with her designs.

For me, what this really emphasizes is fashion's ability to connect the dots; to create these migratory links between generations, between geographical places; between cultures. Edward Enninful, Editor-in-Chief of *British Vogue*, has a similar story of being inspired by an African mother. His well-documented break, as a model scouted on the tube, hides the true story of what inspired his love for fashion: his Ghanaian mother, who would whip up dresses for all her friends. Many in the industry now call him 'the most powerful man in fashion'. It is clear from his body of work that Enninful has a passion for inclusivity and diversity — his attitude and the fact that he holds a powerful seat in the global industry is an exciting prospect for 'Africa Rising'.

Since moving on from Fashion Week, I have consulted for various brands and retailers both on and off the continent. OXOSI, for example,

4 'Spot the Difference: Zara Accused of Stealing Local Brand MaXhosa's Design', *Sunday Times*, 24 April 2018, https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/lifestyle/ fashion-and-beauty/2018-04-24-spot-the-difference-zara-accused-of-stealing-localbrand-maxhosas-design/

was started by two young Nigerians and has been called 'the African Moda Operandi' by *Vogue*. 5 Brands like OXOSI and Chulaap, whose creator interprets the African aesthetic in his unique Thai way, are a route to the market platform based in North America.

As a shareholder in KISUA, a contemporary brand inspired by the continent, which retails globally and has been worn by the likes of Beyoncé. KISUA has done collaborative capsule collections with Italian e-tailor giant, YOOX, which exposed it to a whole new market. Europe now contributes to 40% of its online sales.

If I think about where I am migrating to next, I've developed a keen interest in sustainable textile recycling, and can see a huge opportunity for it on the continent.

Did you know that cotton fiber that is farmed in Mali and Burkina Faso is sent abroad to be processed in Asia, ending up in the T-shirts, skirts and jackets that hang in our high-street shops and then eventually in African second-hand clothing markets?

Across the world, landfills end up overflowing with megatons of discarded clothes. Waste from high consumption on the continent is set to increase, with the arrival of fast fashion retailers like Zara and H&M to African metropoles.

There are brands that have done some groundwork here. Shaldon Kopman, founder of the brand Naked Ape, has created one of the biggest African menswear brands inspired by the Basotho culture of wrapping, using bamboo cotton and other sustainable textiles. Moreover, Africa's first eco-luxe sustainable clothing label, Fundudzi, through its mantra 'clothing with a conscience' introduces a uniquely African voice to the green conversation — arguing that Africa has since the beginning of time been built on organic principles. The label weaves storytelling into the fabric of its designs, reflected through its name, which is inspired by Lake Fundudzi, a sacred site for the vhaVenda tribe who believe you can hear the ancestors drumming beneath its waters at night.

Having graduated as a founder of the first ever MBA programme with a focus on doing business in Africa at the African Leadership University School of Business, my final Capstone project made a business case for

5 Marjon Carlos, 'Meet the Online Retailer Bringing the Best of African Fashion to the Rest of the World', *Vogue*, 18 November 2016, https://www.vogue.com/article/ oxosi-african-online-retailer

the commercial viability of the textile and textile recycling industries being revived in Africa through sustainable innovations. In so doing, Africa can ally its wealth of inspiration with a sustainable means of production.

I built a case to show that the continent is open for business and fighting for its place at the table. I believe Africa should no longer be defensive about appropriation, or about the origins of inspiration — that this only puts us on the back foot.

With so much interest in African design codes and energy, it is up to the continent's design leaders, artisans, entrepreneurs and consumers to take a proud and proactive approach. Our offering to the global discourse shouldn't be calling out appropriation or being overly protective but rather to add our own voice.

A shining example of this is the South African contingent that annually attends Pitti Uomo, the most important international event for menswear and men's accessories.

Trevor Stuurman, for instance, began as a street style photographer and is now a recognised authority on preserving the African aesthetic for the modern age. Stuurman — along with Laduma of the MaXhosa knitwear brand, Siya Beyile, a menswear blogger and Kwena Baloyi, a stylist — proudly peacock among the rest of the fashionistas. What sets them apart is their authentic celebration of Pan- African culture through their style.

The international community laps it up and they fill the sought-after feature pages of top global fashion magazines all the way up to *Vogue*.

So where does this leave us? The appropriation of African fashion must be treated like any other cultural exchange or creative collaboration — give credit, and consider royalties, as is currently happening with Ma Esther Mahlangu and the commercialization of the Ndebele artistic aesthetic.6

This for me *is* the new approach, where African fashion proudly and publicly owns its identity, and doesn't leave any space for the rest of the world to 'steal', interpret, or appropriate Africa's conversation, African identity, innovation and inspiration and the conversation becomes more one of equals.

6 For more information, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther\_Mahlangu

# 20. What Would It Mean to Sing A Black Girl's Song?: A Brief Statement on the Reality of Anti-Black Girl Terror

*Treva B. Lindsey*

In March 2017, many Black social media users turned their collective outrage to what appeared to be an epidemic of missing girls of color in Washington, D.C., America's capital city. One of the alarming messages retweeted and widely circulated stated that over twenty Black and Latina girls had gone missing in twenty-four hours. The mainstream media remained silent. An intense and impassioned town-hall meeting in D.C. attended only by Black and Latinx residents occurred. A new police task force formed in response to a growing outcry to #BringBackOurGirls. For a brief a moment, it appeared that someone cared deeply about these missing Black and Brown girls.

The reality, however, was that there was no *new* epidemic.1 Despite there being at least a dozen Black and Latinx youth missing, the fear of mass kidnappings proved false. The number of youth of color missing in Washington in the first three months of 2017 resembled the number from

1 Maya Rhodan, 'Social Media Spread the Story of Washington's Missing Girls: It Also Got it Wrong', *Time*, 28 March 2017, http://time.com/4715136/dc-missinggirls-social-media/

that same period in 2016. It became clear that a disastrous combination had caused the outcry: the poorly rolled out police notification system together with the longstanding neglect and invisibility of missing people of color. Together, these fueled the spread of misinformation about missing Black and Latina girls. The urgency to find these missing girls quickly dissipated. Nearly a dozen Black and Brown girls missing was not enough to sustain the initial outrage, nor garner mainstream media coverage.

With the majority of these missing Black and Brown girls classified as runaways, there were no Amber Alerts. Reserved for abductions, Amber Alerts convey a sense of imminent and possibly fatal danger. The designation of a runaway connotes choice and deviance. Few people pushing back against the mis-reported 'epidemic' stopped to ask that if in fact these girls of color were running away at alarming rates, what were they running from and to what or to whom were they running? What would compel a thirteen-year-old Black girl to run away from her home? What happens to that same girl when she runs away into a world that offers very little to those struggling to survive? What does it mean that it took exaggerated misinformation to draw attention to the reality that over 64,000 Black girls and women were missing in the United States?2 Black girls too often go missing from their homes, from our media, from policies and initiatives, and even from our activism. We rarely hear, see, or feel them. The system is working — it was made to fail Black girls.

Each era of this nation's history boasts its own particular iterations of anti-Blackness. From enslavement to mass incarceration to the heinous murders of Black people by police, the epidemic of anti-Black statesanctioned and state-sponsored violence is a fundamental truth of the US empire. A new phase in the nation's racial climate emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century. The problem of the color line remains unresolved — it manifests in familiar and in new ways. The technologies of anti-Blackness are deadly in their sophistication and execution. The brutality of anti-Blackness runs on incessant loops on our smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

2 '64,000 Black Women Currently Missing in the US', *NewsOne*, 31 July 2014, https:// newsone.com/3041792/64000-black-women-currently-missing-in-the-u-s/

This 'new' era of anti-Blackness has particular effects on Black women, girls, and femmes.3 It compels examination of the relationship between Black women and state violence, and more specifically Black women, girls, and femmes surviving in spite of, dying as a result of, and resisting state violence. This exploration necessarily moves between the realities of state violence as experienced by Black women and girls, and the range of resistance mounted by Black femmes, girls, and women to anti-Black racial terror in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, it is important to understand anti-Black racism as mediated and structured through gendered violence. Although attacks on Black womanhood and girlhood and the activism addressing these attacks never ceased, the twenty-first century marks a distinct turning point in both the lived experiences of Black women and in Black women's resistance to state and state-sanctioned violence. Black women in the United States organize and mobilize around injustices, and build upon a legacy of activism.

What would it mean to chronicle the lived experiences of Black girls through the lenses of state and state-sanctioned violence? This question is part of a growing body of scholarship on how Black women, girls, trans, and queer-identified people experience anti-Black state violence. This focus pushes back against the regular erasure of Black girls and Black queer and trans\* people from historical records both as victims and as activists. The framing of contemporary anti-Black racial violence as a pervasive injustice primarily experienced by Black cisgender men and boys fails to capture the deeply entrenched reality of Black violability. In earlier work, I previously defined Black violability as a construct that attempts to encapsulate both the lived and historical experiences of Black people with state-initiated and state-sanctioned violence. Understanding this contemporary era of anti-Black racial terror and subjugation requires excavating the gender-specific and gendered dynamics of anti-Black racial violence, and necessitates a more inclusive conceptualization of the Black violable subject.

Taking seriously the violability of Black people, other than Black non-cisgender men, is of particular exigency because of contemporary

3 Femmes refers to individuals who identify as both being feminine and falling somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum.  We often cite a painful lineage of anti-Black violence against Black men and boys from Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, Jonathan Ferrell, Jordan Davis, Oscar Grant, Ezell Ford, John Crawford, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and Alton Sterling, while forgetting or not fully acknowledging the painful lineage of anti-Black violence against Black women and girls from Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair (more commonly identified as the Four Little Girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963) to Latasha Harlins, Rekia Boyd, Renisha McBride, Aiyana Jones, Pearlie Golden, Tarika Wilson, Shereese Francis, Mya Hall, Sandra Bland, and Tanisha Anderson. Putting these two lineages in conversation with one another paints a broader and more accurate picture of Black violability and anti-Black violence. It also allows for us to have more nuanced and useful conversations about the gendered dynamics of racial injustice. Women, girls, and trans\* people have got stories to tell too, and their experiences of racial violence articulate very clearly the necessity of building a gender-inclusive framework to understand anti-Black racial violence.

The murders of Tyre King in Columbus and of Tamir Rice in Cleveland sit firmly within a legacy of violence against Black cisgender male-identified bodies. They are the strange fruits of a new generation of Black masculine carnage. They become the terrifyingly familiar points of departure for understanding contemporary racial violence. Consequently, a distinct genealogy of anti-Black racial violence emerges that pivots around America's unrelenting violence against Black male flesh. From the Middle Passage to a sidewalk in Staten Island, the linkages and comparative frameworks often deployed signal a history of violence against Black male bodies, which then become synonymous with the Black violable experience.

In *If We Must Die*: *From Bigger Thomas to Biggie Smalls*, Aime Ellis demarcates three distinct periods of racial terror: antebellum slavery, Jim Crow, and the mass incarceration of Black people in the prison-industrial complex.4 Ellis's book tackles the effects of racial terror on Black men by examining cultural texts about death and violence produced by and about Black men. Arguably, an updated periodization of racial terror could include police violence as a distinct, historically specific manifestation of domestic terror. Building on Ellis's periodization using a 'herstorical' framework, I think about the legacies of brutality against Black girls during antebellum slavery. I think about the gendered and sexualized afterlives of chattel slavery and Jim Crow. These temporal linkages help to demarcate anti-Black racial violence into distinct, although overlapping and referential eras. Amie Ellis's work on the Black deathly subject as understood through the Black male body is useful here, and allows me to utilize his historical framing to center Black girl as deathly subjects.

The state is preoccupied with Black femme bodies, and particularly young Black girls' bodies (cis, trans, and gender fluid) as a site for violation. From deaths in police custody to the numerous unsolved murders of Black trans women and femmes, the deathly and violable Black subject is rendered anew. The violable subject also includes Black girls thrown across classrooms or pushed to the ground in their swimsuits, and the little Black girl running away from violence in her home. To think of Black girls as in-flux bodies, bodies moving away from present dangers into differing structures of anti-Black, anti-girl, anti-poor, and anti-queer dangers means to understand the movements of Black women and girls in new ways. It pushes towards a figuration of Black girlhood as a moving state inscribed by terror.

The bodies of Black girls often read as loud — unruly, uncontrollable, aggressive and excessive. They read as a problem, as something to be controlled, surveilled, policed, incarcerated, assault, or killed. Hiphop feminist scholar Ruth Nicole Brown also speaks to these harmful renderings of Black girlhood, unveiling an archive of expressivity rooted in world-making,5 while Bettina Love's writing is attuned to how Black girls engage sound in their world-making.6 The recent

4 Aime Ellis, *If We Must Die*: *From Bigger Thomas to Biggie Smalls* (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011).

5 Ruth Nicole Brown, *Hear Our Truths*: *The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood* (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

6 Bettina Love, *Hip Hop's Lil' Sistas Speak*: *Negotiating Hip Hop Identities and Politics in the New South* (New York: Peter Lang, 2012).

work by Monique Morris on Black girls in schools is also useful here in thinking about the ways in which stereotypes about Black girls lead to discriminatory and disparate outcomes in the classrooms.7 Simply stated, the school-to-prison pipeline includes Black and Brown girls. And even within that framing it is important to remember, the framing of the 'school-to-prison pipeline' establishes the school as a safe or desirable place for Black girls. Far too often, classrooms, as well as the homes, churches, mosques, or community centers, are not safe places in which Black girls can live and thrive.

The cry to #SayHerName is made within the movement for Black Lives as well as to a broader world. Those calling out to be heard, to be seen, and to be felt are crafting, remixing, and conjuring a radical Black feminist vision of life after the afterlives of the failed project of US empire. This call-out is experienced both at the sites of violation and of resistance.  These 'safe' or 'sacred' spaces can be sites of racial and gender terror. Where then can Black girls be safe, cared for, handled warmly, and loved fiercely?

Theorizing Black violability from the unique standpoint of Black girls provides a distinct space for wrestling with what happened to Bresha Meadows.8 Although granted a plea deal, she still had to plead guilty to the 'crime' of being a Black girl who fought for her life and those of her loved ones.  Black violability reminds us that violence occurring in our institutions is deliberate and reckless. Suspensions and expulsions diminish Black girls' chances for social mobility within a

7 Monique Morris, *Pushout*: *The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools* (New York: New Press, 2016).

8 Stassa Edwards, 'After Plea Deal, Bresha Meadows Will Be Released from Juvenile Detention in 60 Days', *Jezebel*, 24 May 2017, https://jezebel.com/ after-plea-deal-bresha-meadows-will-be-released-from-j-1795510171

9 Addison Rose Vincent, 'State of Emergency for Trans Women of Color', *Huffington Post*, 13 August 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/addison-rose-vincent/thestate-of-emergency-co\_b\_7981580.html

system that already views them as disposable. Black violability creates an opportunity to think about the ways in which race, sex, gender, class, religion, ability, sexuality, and citizenship status affect how Black girls experience state and state-sanctioned violence. It grapples with how the state works against Black girls surviving, living, and thriving.

We cannot merely insert Black girls, women, and femmes into hearts and minds as survivors, victims, and/or tireless activists. We must push towards recognizing the complex realities they face and the movements they mount to seek justice on behalf of themselves and their communities. In defense of Black girls, femmes and women, Black girls, women and femmes take to the streets, classrooms, studios, stages, and spaces of worship demanding that you say their names, recognize the justice work that they do and have done for centuries across the diaspora, and hear their/our screams. They/We are indeed magic.

#### Bibliography

### PART FIVE

### SITUATED AT THE EDGE

# 21. Fredi's Migration: Washington's Forgotten War on Hollywood

*Pamela Newkirk*

Fig. 21.1 Portrait of Fredi Washington. Courtesy of Schomburg Center, New York Public Library.

Nearly eight decades before #OscarsSoWhite focused attention on the dearth of roles for Blacks and other people of color in Hollywood, actress Fredi Washington became one of the most vocal critics of the industry's racial bias. But despite her trailblazing work on stage and screen beginning in the 1920s, Washington has largely been forgotten as one of the pioneering African-American leading ladies, and for her noteworthy civil rights activism.

The eldest of five children, Washington was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1903 and relocated to Philadelphia aged eleven following the death of her mother, a former dancer. In 1919 Washington launched her own career as a chorus girl in Harlem's Alabam Club, and, in 1926, landed a coveted role in the landmark Broadway play *Shuffle Along*. When the show closed she sailed to Europe to tour with her dance partner Al Moiret. Two years later she returned to the United States and starred in a string of successful films and plays including the short film *Black and Tan Fantasy* with Duke Ellington (1929); *Black Boy* starring Paul Robeson (1930); *Emperor Jones* with Robeson again (1933); and *Drum in the Night* (1933); with an equal number of plays, including *Singing the Blues* (1930), *Sweet Chariot* (1930) and *Run Lil' Chillun* (1933).

Washington's stardom was secured with her performance as Peola, the tortured bi-racial daughter who passes for white in *Imitation of Life*, the 1934 feature film starring Claudette Corbert and Louise Beavers. However, after achieving critical acclaim for her performance Washington was routinely passed over for lead roles. This was in part due to Hollywood's Hays Codes, which, beginning that year, explicitly prohibited the depiction of miscegenation in film. The Hays Codes made life especially challenging for Washington, whose green eyes and pale complexion rendered her too light to be cast in films with all-Black casts. In 1937 her skin was darkened for her co-starring role in *One Mile from Heaven* with Bill Robinson.

Early in her career Washington was counseled by studio heads to pass as white to achieve greater stardom.  If I do I would be agreeing [that being a Negro makes me inferior].'1

1 'Race Prejudice too Strong, She Tells Reporter', from an unidentified newspaper in the Fredi Washington Papers, Schomburg Center For Research in Black Culture.

Instead she continued to openly challenge Hollywood's color line. After co-starring with Robinson in *One Mile From Heaven* she immersed herself in civil rights and in 1938 became one of the founding members and later the executive director of the Negro Actors Guild. Other officers included Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Robeson and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

In 1939 Washington appeared with Waters in the play *Mamba's Daughter* and in 1946 had a lead role in an all-Black Broadway production of *Lysistrata*, which would mark the end of her stage and film career. However, she continued to speak out against discrimination in the industry. In 1949 she publicly condemned Academy-Award-winning producer Louis de Rochemont and director Alfred Werker for casting white actors to play Black characters in the film *Lost Boundaries*, based on the true story of an African-American physician. The film won the Cannes Film Festival award for best screenplay.

In a letter to *Los Angeles Daily News* dated 2 August 1949, she challenged Werker, who, in a previous article, claimed he didn't cast African-American actors in the film because 'the majority of Negro actors are of the Uncle Tom, Minstreal show, shuffling dancer type of performer.'

Washington said she was 'appalled and not a little fighting mad' over his remarks, noting that neither Werker nor Rochemont had ever considered African-American actors to portray the Johnson family.2 'There are many Negro actors and actresses who are consistently turned down for plays and screen fare on the excuse that they are too fair, too intelligent, too modern looking, etc. I know, because I am one who falls into this category,' she wrote. Washington noted that in *Imitation of Life* she had played the role of a 'neurotic, sensitive, fair Negro girl', adding 'But did Alfred Werker give me an interview for either of the two female roles in *Boundaries*? He did not. He simply was not interested in learning what he evidently did not know; that there are many legitimate Negro actors and actresses who are far more intelligent than Werker proves himself to be.'

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s she actively participated in the Cultural Division of the National Negro Congress and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, which both promoted racial equality and

2 Letter in Fredi Washington Papers, [microform], 1922–1981, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

the eradication of racial stereotypes in all forms of American culture. She also wrote regular columns, 'Fredi Speaks' and 'Headlines and Footlights' for *The People's Voice*, a weekly paper founded in 1938 by Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who was for a time married to her sister, Isabel.

Washington's activism was not limited to the entertainment industry. She actively participated in boycott campaigns and picket lines organized by Powell on 125th Street to pressure Harlem stores, utility companies and bus lines to hire African Americans. Washington also worked behind the scenes in the entertainment industry, serving as a casting consultant for the 1954 film *Carmen Jones* starring Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte, and later for George Gershwin's *Porgy and Bess* performed on Broadway in 1952, and released as a film in 1959.

Washington's first marriage to Lawrence Brown, a trombonist in Duke Ellington's orchestra, ended in divorce, but she remarried Anthony Bell, a Connecticut dentist, in 1952. From 1954 to 1980 Washington worked at the Stamford, Connecticut branch of Bloomingdale's. The stage and screen legend died in 1994 at the age of 90. In 2008 *Time* magazine listed *Imitation of Life* among Hollywood's twenty-five all-time greatest films about race. *Time* critic Richard Corliss said Washington 'had a face, figure and natural elegance made for movies' but added, 'Washington's dusky gorgeousness in "Imitation of Life" must have scared Hollywood bosses even as it tempted them.'3

3 Richard Corliss, 'Top 25 Movies on Race,' *Time*, 4 February 2008, http:// entertainment.time.com/2008/02/04/the-25-most-important-films-on-race/slide/ gods-step-children-1938/

## 22. Julia de Burgos: Cultural Crossing and Iconicity

*Vanessa Pérez-Rosario*

In the early-morning hours of 5 July 1953, two New York City police officers spotted a figure on the ground near the corner of Fifth Avenue and 106th Street in East Harlem. As they approached, they saw the body of a woman with bronze-colored skin. Once a towering woman, she now lay in the street unconscious. They rushed her to Harlem Hospital, where she died shortly thereafter. The woman carried no handbag and had no identification on her. No one came to the morgue to claim her body. No missing person's case fit her description. She was buried in the city's potter's field on Hart Island. One month later, the woman was identified as award-winning Puerto-Rican poet Julia de Burgos. Her family and friends exhumed and repatriated her body.1 Burgos's death in anonymity on an East Harlem street opens up a space for the creation of the Burgos myth. One of the principle reasons that Burgos as a figure elicits veneration in the followers who are committed to the endurance of her work and legacy is precisely because of how blurry, murky, and ambiguous her image is, because of the belief that at any moment she might disappear. The desire to rescue her for our collective memory is rooted in her death in anonymity and her burial in the potter's field: we want to save her, give her a name, and reconstruct her nebulous personality and life.

1 See *La Prensa*, 2 August 1953; *El Mundo*, 4 August 1953.

When I began writing about Julia de Burgos, I hesitated to mention her notorious death, seeking to move away from the narratives of victimhood that have shrouded her life for more than half a century. I wanted to focus on her poetry, her activism, and her legacy. While many Puerto Ricans already know her life story, and many both on the island and in New York have been captivated by her life, I soon realized the importance of recounting even the most difficult details as I introduced her to new audiences. Her migration experience and her death on the streets of New York capture the imaginations of readers everywhere. This essay centers on images of movement, flow and migration in Burgos's work, life, legacy, and iconicity, focusing on the escape routes she created to transcend the rigid confines of gender and 1930s Puerto-Rican nationalism. Because Burgos always situates herself in her work at the edge, at the border, we can read her today as a border icon, inhabiting that space between Puerto Rico and New York. Since her death, the Burgos icon has been mobilized in debates around gender, race, and nationhood, across generations and in multiple contexts, making her a figure through which the cultural tensions of the border between Puerto Rico and New York are negotiated and contested. Icons are defined as a person or thing that is regarded as a representative symbol, that carries a certain fixed meaning, and that is often considered to be worthy of veneration. Constructed by communities, these symbols rely on the presence of an interpretive community that is able to recognize and read them as iconic.2 A careful analysis of the history of the treatment of these figures and their reception can offer insight into the cultural epics and melodramas of the nation, since these objects are used to channel strong emotions in large groups of people. Icons require shared cultural knowledge and act as signifiers of collective aspiration. While icons are often deployed in the service of the nation, the Burgos figure is claimed by Puerto Ricans in both Puerto Rico and New York. Rather than symbolizing a certain fixed meaning, Burgos absorbs a range of contradictory meanings, as symbols often do. As such, Burgos is a border icon, one that inhabits the contact zone, that

2 See Dianna C. Niebylski and Patrick O'Connor, 'Reflections on Iconicity, Celebrity, and Cultural Crossings,' in Dianna C. Niebylski and Patrick O'Connor (eds.), *Latin American Icons*: *Fame across Borders* (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014), pp. 1–18.

third space between Puerto Rico and the United States.3 The tensions between gender, language, race, and nation are negotiated, contested, disputed, and mediated through her figure and through interpretations of her life and work, as later generations of scholars, artists, writers, musicians, performers, and playwrights, on both sides of the border, collaborate in the maintenance of Burgos's afterlives.

Fig. 22.1 Julia de Burgos, ca. 1938. Miriam Román Papers. Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, CUNY.

Julia Constanza Burgos García was born on 17 February 1914 in the town of Carolina, Puerto Rico, the eldest of Paula García de Burgos and Francisco Burgos Hans's thirteen children. Julia was intimately familiar with struggle, hardship, and death. She watched six of her younger siblings die of malnutrition and other illnesses associated with

3 For more on border icons, see Robert McKee Irwin, 'Joaquín Murrieta and Lola Casanova: Shapeshifting Icons of the Contact Zone,' in Niebylski and O'Connor, *Latin American Icons*, pp. 61–72.

Fig. 22.2 Flyer for poetry reading by Julia de Burgos, 10 May 1940. Pura Belpré Papers. Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, CUNY.

poverty. Burgos is the author of four collections of poetry, although only two were published during her lifetime. Her first, *Poemas exactos a mí misma* [Poems to Myself], she later considered juvenilia and never published. In her first published collection, *Poem en veinte surcos* [Poem in Twenty Furrows, 1938], written during the height of the Puerto-Rican nationalist movement, Burgos creates a nomadic feminist subject. While committed to the idea of political nationalism throughout her life, Burgos nonetheless aligned this nomadic poetic subject with the Puerto-Rican literary vanguard, with whom she found points of departure from the phallocentric and patriarchal Puerto-Rican cultural nationalist project of the 1930s. This subject subverts conventions and anticipates her later departure from the island.

As developed in her poetry, nomadism refers to a 'critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behavior.'4 Burgos's writing moves away from modernist theories of impersonality and takes up the self, authenticity, and intimacy as topics. Her second collection of poetry *Canción de la verdad sencilla* [Song of the Simple Truth, 1939] develops images of flight, travel and bodily transformations as a way to escape containment. Many of the poems explore the theme of love: the speaker must leave the world behind and undertake imaginative journeys through which she becomes one with nature and her lover. The collection highlights the desire to break down barriers, remove limitations, and transgress boundaries. Although the canonical literature of the time was concerned with nation building and perpetuating the myth of the *jíbaro* [peasant] and the nation as the great Puerto-Rican family, Burgos's nomadic subject finds a way to escape that world.

On 13 January 1940 she left Puerto Rico for New York, and six months later she moved to Cuba where she lived until November 1942. Her third collection of poetry, *El mar y tú* [The Sea and You] was published posthumously in 1954 by her sister Consuelo, who added a final section, *Otros poemas* [Other Poems], that included works Burgos had sent to family members while she was in Cuba and New York. *El mar y tú* marks the climax of the development of Burgos's nomadic subject. Images of water figure prominently in these poems, creating avenues for escape from the rigid social norms that should have contained her and again demonstrate that the female speaker cannot be restricted. In Burgos's final book, the only one written from exile, the sea becomes an open space without borders where the speaker is freed from all restrictions. Either the sea or death offer a final escape. Many of the poems follow a pattern of loss and abjection followed by renewal and transformation. The sea is a primeval chaos offering the possibility of emergence out of the void, depicted in her poetry as a creative and dynamic open space.

From late 1942 until her death Burgos lived in various neighborhoods in Harlem and the Bronx where she struggled to make a living as a writer. She wrote for the Spanish-language weekly *Pueblos Hispanos* from 1943– 44, further developing her political voice. Many view Burgos's move to New York without family and friends as a self-destructive and suicidal

4 Rosi Braidotti, *Nomadic Subjects*: *Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 26.

impulse. However, her journalism shows her political commitment to radical democracy and the struggle for immigrant and Puerto-Rican rights, as well as her advocacy for solidarity with Harlem's African American community. In addition, these writings as well as her poetry and letters reveal her understanding of cultural identity as fluid and unbound by national territory. From 1947 on, she had difficulty finding steady work and held a series of unsatisfying jobs. Her physical state deteriorated as she battled depression and alcoholism. She spent her last years in and out of Harlem Hospital and Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island) in the East River. She was ultimately diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and upper respiratory disease, both consistent with chronic alcoholism. Aware of her deteriorated physical and emotional state, her family and friends in Puerto Rico begged her to return. With her life spinning out of control because of her financial instability, her alcoholism, and her precarious living situation, Burgos regularly mailed her poetry to her sister and other relatives for safekeeping. In the end, her health problems, poverty, loneliness, and alcoholism led to her decline and death.

Burgos privileges water imagery in her poetry as a way to emphasize travel, movements, and routes to escape the narrowly defined nationisland. These images pre-figure Burgos's migratory routes from Puerto Rico to Havana and New York. Her life and work leave an opening for ambiguity, the imagination, and the contradictions that lure scholars, writers, artists, and activists to attempt to reconstruct her. They do so not only because of the assertions that she made in her poetry and her prose, nor in the way she lived her life, but because of the many contradictions we find in her. Her lacunae, her scattered archive, her penchant always to inscribe herself at the border, on the verge of and in between categories — space and time, life and death, vanishing and beckoning to us — compel us to try to recuperate her. Her poem 'Entre mi voz y el tiempo' [Between My Voice and Time] is a powerful example of Burgos situating herself at the frontier, in the liminal space between life and death, in mid-ocean, between her voice and time.

En la ribera de la muerte, hay algo, alguna voz, alguna vela a punto de partir, alguna tumba libre que me enamora el alma. ¡Si hasta tengo rubor de parecerme a mí! ¡Debe ser tan profunda la lealtad de la muerte!

En la ribera de la muerte, ¡tan cerca!, en la ribera (que es como contemplarme llegando hasta un espejo) me reconocen la canción, y hasta el color del nombre.

¿Seré yo el puente errante entre el sueño y la muerte? ¡Presente…! ¿De qué lado del mundo me llaman, de qué frente? Estoy en altamar… En la mitad del tiempo… ¿Estoy viva? ¿Estoy muerta? ¡Presente! ¡Aquí! ¡Presente…!5

[On the banks of death, there is something, some voice, some sail about to depart, some vacant tomb/that courts my soul. Why, I even blush at looking like myself! The loyalty of death must be so profound!

On the banks of death, so close!, on the bank (which is like contemplating myself arriving at a mirror) the song recognizes me, and even the color of my name. Am I the errant bridge that between the dream and death? Present…! From what side of the world do they call me, from what front? I am at high sea… In the middle of time… Who will win? Present! Am I alive? Am I dead? Present! Here! Present…!]

5 Julia de Burgos, *Song of the Simple Truth*: *The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos*, trans. and ed. by Jack Agüeros (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1997), pp. 192–93.

In this poem we see Burgos positioning herself in that space in-between. Her place on the margins of official history entices and invites readers to secure her in our collective memory. Inhabiting that space in-between allows her to take on a range of identifications, associations, and interpretations. The Burgos icon is able to assimilate a spectrum of inevitably contradictory ideas, including the unresolved tensions around race and gender and the national questions that are debated, negotiated, and contested through her in Puerto Rico and the United States. Burgos's status as an icon goes unquestioned even though what she stands for has long been contested.

Their exists a range of stories, at times conflicting and contradictory, told about her in multiple cultural contexts, primarily in Puerto Rico and New York. I am interested here in exploring and interrogating the Burgos icon. How did she become an icon? How has this icon become so powerful? How has it evolved as a national, transnational, and border icon? What does its popularity say about those who created it? What do the stories we tell about her say about us? In the end, it is her death in anonymity that opens the path for the creation of both the Burgos myth and the Burgos icon. This icon is the site of contested and politicized ideas; it incorporates and reflects the great variety of the stories, rumors, gossip, and tidbits told both on the island and in New York.

There are two distinct historical moments that have provided fertile ground for reading Burgos as a cultural icon. The first moment was during the civil rights movement of the 1960s when women of color sought to correct the elisions and omissions of writers, artists, and intellectuals of color in the historical records and the literary canon. Latina writers reclaimed Burgos and struggled to have her recognized in literary history. These women set out to dispel the generalized portrayal of Burgos as a woman victimized by love and failed relationships, consumed by the self-destructive alcohol addiction that left her destitute and caused her to develop cirrhosis of the liver, depression, and other physical ailments that brought her to an early death.6 However, secondwave feminist writers, such as Rosario Ferré, grappled with Burgos's legacy and struggled to make her into an icon of feminist empowerment.7 They wrestled with how to reconcile the fiercely independent subject

6 For a summary of these debates, see Rubén Ríos Ávila, 'Víctima de luz,' in *La raza cómica del sujeto en Puerto Rico* (San Juan: Ediciones Cajellón, 2002), pp. 211–21.

7 Rosario Ferré, *Sitio a eros*: *Quince ensayos literarios* (Mexico City: Moritz, 1986).

created in some of Burgos's most iconic poems — such as 'Pentacromia', and 'A Julia de Burgos' in which the speakers reject traditional family values — with the woman herself.

As a border icon, the Burgos figure is utilized to debate the politics of gender and sexuality in Puerto Rico and Puerto-Rican diasporic communities. A range of differing meanings are attributed to Burgos's life. Puerto-Rican writer Mayra Santos Febres calls Burgos Puerto Rico's first modern woman, who had been a champion javelin thrower at university, and by 1932 was divorced, had had abortions, smoked, and drank — and goes on to explain that Burgos's tragic end highlights how challenging it was for women to be modern.8 One need only recall the well-known polemics in the celebrated 'María Cristina' poetic exchange between two women writers who both closely identify with Burgos: Sandra María Esteves, often referred to as the *madrina* [godmother] of Nuyorican poetry, and Luz María Umpierre, a queer Puerto-Rican poet, writer, and scholar. Their debate over appropriate gender roles for Puerto-Rican women took place over a decade (1985–95), across different cultural contexts and positionalities, in the form of published poetic exchanges. Esteves published a poem, 'A la mujer borrinqueña' [To the Puerto-Rican Woman], espousing traditional family values imposed by a dominant patriarchal culture through a narrator named 'María Christina'; Umpierre countered with a poem titled 'In Response,' which opens with the lines, 'My name is not María Christina. / I am a Puerto-Rican woman born in another Barrio,' and continues with a challenge to patriarchal authority and a refusal to adhere to traditional roles for women.9 Although second-wave feminist writers and scholars sought to rescue Burgos from victimhood and narratives of migration as tragedy, some also desired to distance themselves from her alcoholism and other characteristics they viewed as weaknesses. They recognized her brilliance as a writer, but some also saw her as a cautionary tale.

8 Mayra Santos Febres, 'Julia de Burgos, vida corta e intensa,' *El Nuevo Día*, 3 July 2011, www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/nota/juliadeburgosvidacortaeintensa-1006858.

9 Luz María Umpierre, … *Y otras desgracias/ And Other Misfortunes…* (Bloomington: Third Woman Press, 1985), p. 1. Sandra María Esteves, 'A la mujer borinqueña' in her *Yerba Buena* (Greenfield Center, NY: Greenfield Review Press, 1980). For a summary of the debate, see Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, *Queer Ricans*: *Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora* (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp. 73–75. For more on their deployment of Burgos in their work, see Vanessa Pérez Rosario, *Becoming Julia de Burgos*, pp. 94–116.

As a border icon, the Burgos figure is a site where the conflicts around Puerto-Rican gender norms are contested and negotiated.

Fig. 22.3 Many Vega, *Remembering Julia*, 2006. Mosaic by Manny Vega. Photo by Francisco Molina Reyes II. Courtesy of Mambóso Nuyotópia Archives. All rights reserved.

Fig. 22.4 Commemorating Julia de Burgos's death. La Bruja, 2011. Photo taken by author, CC BY 4.0.

In the contested terrain around Puerto Ricans, US Latinxs, and race, the Burgos icon becomes one of the sites where these tensions surface and are debated, contested, and negotiated from various points of view by people who have different investments and attachments.10 I will share briefly two examples of how the Burgos icon is deployed to debate the questions around Puerto Rico and Blackness by Nuyorican artist Manny Vega and poet Mariposa. In 2006, Vega created the mosaic mural *Remembering Julia*, one of the more popular murals in El Barrio (Fig. 3). 'I purposely made her more mulatto,' Vega says, 'because that's who she

10 For more on Puerto Ricans and Blackness, see Ileana Rodriguez-Silva, *Silencing Race*: *Disentangling Blackness*, *Colonialism*, *and National Identities in Puerto Rico* (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and Isar Godreau, *Scripts of Blackness*: *Race*, *Cultural Nationalism*, *and US Colonialism in Puerto Rico* (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015). For more on Latinos and Blackness, see Juan Flores and Miriam Jiménez-Román (eds.), *The Afro-Latin@ Reader*: *History and Culture in the United States* (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

was, you know? Beautiful, tall, elegant.'11 In other words, in the mural he gave her a darker complexion because, in his words, 'that's who she was.' That is who she is to *him*. Vega is aware that he is contributing to the mythmaking of the icon when he reinvents her to be a symbol of Blackness. That is not to say that there is nothing in her life or writing that would allow for such an interpretation. The poem often used as the basis for Burgos's identification with Blackness is 'Ay ay ay de la grifa negra', published in 1938 in her first collection of poetry, *Poema en veinte surcos*: the speaker in the poem, a descendant of an enslaved woman, is a Black Puerto-Rican woman who takes the position that she would prefer to align herself with the enslaved rather than with the colonizer.12 Mariposa nods to this poem by Burgos in 'Poem for My Grifa-Rican Sistah, or Broken Ends Broken Promises', a poem in which she works out her own Black Puerto-Rican identity.13 One can see how Burgos's voice mediates the affirmation of a Black political identity, although the distance between Burgos's poem and Mariposa's is great. In the end, Mariposa's poem is not really about Burgos; it is a poem about racist and oppressive standards of beauty, the imaginary of the Puerto-Rican nation, and its relationship to Blackness. These brief examples highlight the way race among Puerto Ricans, in both Puerto Rico and in New York, is brokered and debated through the icon. The island's literary establishment created a sanitized version of Burgos that was taught in schools in Puerto Rico in the 1950s and 1960s.14 This Burgos is in contrast to the Burgos icon deployed as an affirmation of Blackness by Vega and Mariposa, highlighting the conflicts around Puerto Ricans and race that play out in multiple cultural contexts, across generations, and

11 Pérez-Rosario, *Becoming Julia de Burgos*, p. 143.

12 Julia de Burgos, 'Ay ay ay de la grifa negra,' in *Poema en veinte surcos* (Rio Piedras: Ediciones Huracán, 1938), p. 52. For further analysis of this poem and reactions to its publication in Puerto Rico in 1938, see Pérez Rosario, *Becoming Julia de Burgos*, pp. 33–37.

13 Mariposa [María Teresa Fernández], 'Poem for My Grifa-Rican Sistah, or Broken Ends Broken Promises,' in Jiménez Román and Flores, *The Afro-Latin@ Reader*: *History and Culture in the United States* (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 280–81. For a more complete reading of this poem and the way Mariposa inherits and extends Burgos's legacy, see Vanessa Pérez Rosario, 'Affirming an Afro-Latin@ Identity: An Interview with Poet María Teresa (Mariposa) Fernández,' *Latino Studies*, 12 (2014), 468–75; and *Becoming Julia de Burgos*, pp. 94–122.

14 Edna Acosta-Belén, 'Rediscovering Julia de Burgos: The People's Rebel Soul Poet', *Small Axe*, 54 (2017), 188–202.

borders.15 I would argue that no single group comes to own the icon, and no version of Burgos's story surpasses the other. As a border icon, Burgos is mobilized by various groups in multiple cultural contexts to debate the tensions that exist among Puerto Ricans and their unresolved relationship to Blackness.

If icons signify a certain era, perhaps it is among the turn-of-thecentury generation of writers, poets, artists, activists, and scholars that the Burgos icon gains its greatest salience. Beyond a figure through which conflicting views of gender and race are disputed, Burgos's prominence as an icon today is due to her transformation into a site where the national question — the political status of Puerto Rico and its future — is contested and debated. The intensity and urgency over the political status of the island has surged since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. Puerto Rico became a nation on the move in 1917, when the Jones Act passed and Puerto Ricans became US citizens.16 The current financial crisis has led to a migration crisis, and since 2013, more Puerto Ricans live in the continental United States than in the island.17 This reality makes defining the nation by its geopolitical territory an act of erasure that effectively renders millions of Puerto Ricans landless, if not nationless. While there have been five referendums to determine the political status of the island, four of them have taken place since 1993.18 The recent referendum votes suggest that current political forms are exhausted, as voters reject the options available on the plebiscite that include statehood, independence, and maintaining the status quo. In the 1998 referendum, which marked one hundred years of the US occupation of Puerto Rico, the majority of voters rejected the options on the ballot by writing in, 'ninguna de las anteriores' [none of the above].19 In 2012, half a million ballots were left blank. And in the

15 In fact, census data indicates that a higher percentage of Puerto Ricans on the island identify as white compared to those who live in the United States. Carlos Vargas-Ramos, *Some Social Differences on the Basis of Race Among Puerto Ricans*, December 2016, https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/data\_briefs/RB2016-10\_ RACE.pdf

16 Jorge Duany, *The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move*: *Identities on the Island and in the United States* (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

17 Jens Manuel Krogstad, 'Puerto Ricans Leave in Record Numbers for Mainland US,' Pew Research Center, 14 October 2015, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/14/ puerto-ricans-leave-in-record-numbers-for-mainland-u-s.

18 The first referendum vote took place in 1967, and there was not another referendum until 1993.

19 For more on the debates on the political status of Puerto Rico, see Frances Negrón-Muntaner (ed.), *None of the Above*: *Puerto Ricans in the Global Era* (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

most recent referendum at the time of writing, held on 11 June 2017, the Popular Democratic Party organized a boycott, resulting in only 23 percent of the population voting.20 Faced with no suitable options for a political future that would ensure human dignity and self-determination, Puerto Ricans have expressed their disenchantment with official politics and their dissatisfaction with limited political options as solutions to Puerto Rico's problems, creating an opening to imagine alternative forms of belonging and solidarity and to find a creative response to enduring problems. It is in this moment of crisis and conflict that the Burgos icon has grown in prominence.

I would like to briefly highlight here Puerto-Rican muralist Alexis Díaz's 2012 work titled 'Dejarse vencer por la vida es peor que dejarse vencer por la muerte' [To Allow Oneself to Be Conquered by Life Is Worse than to Be Conquered by Death]. The title and inscription on the mural is taken from a letter that Burgos wrote to her sister in 1942. The mural powerfully conveys the effects of the current debt crisis in Puerto Rico that has devastated the people and brought the island nation to its knees.

Fig. 22.5 Alexis Díaz, 'Dejarse vencer por la vida es por que dejarse vencer por la muerte', Santurce, Puerto Rico, 2013. © Hunter College. All rights reserved.

20 Puerto Rico faces a national debt of \$74 billion, with another \$49 billion in pension obligations that it cannot pay. Public schools and hospitals have closed amid a mass exodus of the population.

As an anti-colonial writer in the 1930s and 1940s, Burgos was preoccupied with decolonial struggles in the Caribbean and the liberation of the peoples of Latin America. In her poetry, essays, and letters she expressed her visions of freedom, human dignity, social justice, and self-determination for Puerto Rico. The economic crisis of the 1930s led to widespread strikes and boycotts on the island. Migration to the United States became a way to offer relief to Puerto Ricans who could not find work. In response to the Puerto Rican political situation, Burgos wrote the essay 'Ser o no ser es la divisa' [To Be or Not to Be Is the Motto], which appeared in 1945 in *Semanario Hispano*, a shortlived Spanish-language newspaper published in New York, in which she elaborated her sociopolitical ideology as it related to Puerto Rico and Latin America. The following year, the essay garnered her the *Instituto de Literatura Puertorriqueña's Premio de Periodismo* [Institute of Puerto-Rican Letters Journalism Prize]. In the essay she frames the debate regarding Puerto-Rican independence in the language of human rights — the right of a people to govern themselves rather than to be merely pawns in capitalist and imperialist designs. In several letters to her sister Consuelo that same year, Burgos wrote of the right of the people of Puerto Rico to 'vivir decentemente en este planeta' [To live with decency on this planet].21 She connected the question of Puerto Rico's status to the global struggles of the Second World War, as well as to the despotic governments in power in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Honduras:

A esta hora de encrucijada a que ha llegado la humanidad, podemos llamar la hora de las definiciones. No de las definiciones de carácter lingüístico, sino de las definiciones de carácter humano que tienen su tronco en el hombre, y se esparcen sobre las colectividades en una dinámica social que rige el destino de los pueblos por el bien o por el mal. Estamos en la era de la definición del hombre.22

[Today, humanity finds itself at a crossroads. We might call this the era of the definitions. Not definitions of a linguistic character, but definitions of a human character, with its roots found in man, and it spread to collectivities in a social dynamic that governs the fate of the people for good or bad. This is the age of the definition of man.]

21 Julia de Burgos, *Cartas a Consuelo*, ed. by Eugenio Ballou (San Juan: Editorial Folium, 2014), p. 189.

22 Pérez-Rosario, *Becoming Julia de Burgos*, p. 79.

Burgos argued that the colonial situation in Puerto Rico could be resolved only through a complete break with the United States, through independence: 'En Puerto Rico hay solo dos caminos. O exigir el reconocimiento incondicional de nuestra independencia, o ser traidores a la libertad, en cualquiera otra forma de solución a nuestro problema que se nos ofrezca' [In Puerto Rico there are only two paths. Either we demand the unconditional recognition of our independence, or we become traitors to freedom by accepting any other solution to our problem that is offered].23 The renewed engagement with Burgos's life, work, and iconicity since the 1990s is telling of the cultural and political concerns of the contemporary moment. Burgos's voice, her image, and her status as an icon are mobilized to debate Puerto-Rican sovereignty, humanity, freedom, and human dignity.

At a time when current political forms appear to be exhausted, artists, writers, and scholars turn to Burgos. There are, as mentioned, some parallels that can be drawn between the two historical moments — the economic and migration crises, for example. However, Burgos lived at a moment when she believed that there *were* options, that there *was* a choice to be made. In many ways Burgos was a woman ahead of her time, but in other ways she was very much a woman of her moment. She believed in revolution, in self-determination, in independence. The turn to Burgos at this present moment is not necessarily to advocate for the independence of Puerto Rico. With each passing year the statehood movement grows on the island. The turn to this icon, rather, is a call for Burgos's radical imagination, her visions of freedom that could dream up a world that was more just, more humane, and more liberated.

23 Pérez-Rosario, *Becoming Julia de Burgos*, p. 79.

#### Bibliography

## 23. Sarah Parker Remond's Black American Grand Tour

*Sirpa Salenius*

Black women struggle with the problem of defining their identities in positive terms because the dominating stereotypes that contribute to Black women's oppression conceptualize their identities through a variety of negative images, ranging from asexual mammies and smiling Aunt Jemimas on pancake mix boxes, to the hypersexual jezebels, breeder women of slavery and the stereotypes of welfare mothers that pervade contemporary popular culture. In addition, as bell hooks points out, 'the absence of recognition is a strategy that facilitates making a group of the Other'. 1 Similarly, one form of oppression, as feminist critic Patricia Hill Collins notes, is that of omission.2 Rendering successful women invisible and eradicating their achievements from historical narratives are acts of omission that distort reality.  Sarah Parker Remond, who was a Black proto-feminist and a doctor, serves in this rewriting of history if we recuperate her among the protagonists of nineteenth-century activism. By including Remond in national and transnational narratives, as well as other prominent

1 bell hooks, *Killing Rage*: *Ending Racism* (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), p. 34.

2 Patricia Hill Collins, *Black Feminist Thought*: *Knowledge*, *Consciousness*, *and the Politics of Empowerment* (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 8.

Black women, we contribute to the process of 'recognizing the range and complexity of the Black experience in slavery and freedom'.3

Remond, who participated in transatlantic struggles for social justice, moved beyond the boundaries of her nationality, race, and gender.4 She traveled from the United States to Europe where she lectured against slavery, touring in England, Scotland, and Ireland before permanently establishing herself in Florence, Italy. 'African-American mobility', historians Farah J. Griffin and Cheryl J. Fish suggest, 'is often connected to the impulse for increased opportunities and the desire to find a home or homeland as well as for the purposes of pilgrimage, exile, and pleasure'. 5 In Europe, Remond found a home as well as an intellectually and culturally nourishing environment that allowed her the freedom to reinvent her Black womanhood. Her travels can be connected to the American Grand Tour tradition commonly associated with white intellectuals who, like Remond, headed for Europe in search of increased educational and professional opportunities. 'My strongest desire through life', wrote Remond in her autobiographical essay published in London in 1861, 'has been to be educated'.6 For her, as for other travelers, even before the development of any infrastructure for international Black travel, mobility was intertwined with subjectivity.7 In the United States, segregation limited her self-expression and hindered the conceptualization of powerful Black womanhood. Geographical mobility was therefore a necessary requisite for Remond's social and cultural ascent. Her expatriation triggered a change in her self-definition that was fundamental for the progress of Remond personally, and Black women collectively.

3 Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, *Envisioning Emancipation*: *Black Americans and the End of Slavery* (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), p. 24.

4 See also chapter 17 in this volume, Bettina Love, 'Black Women's Work: Undoing Character Education', for more information about the places and ways in which Black women have mattered and have been striving to thrive.

5 Cheryl J. Fish and Farah J. Griffin, 'Introduction', in Farah J. Griffin and Cheryl J. Fish (eds.), *A Stranger in the Village*: *Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing* (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), pp. xiii–xvii (p. xiii).

6 Sarah P. Remond, 'Sarah P. Remond', in Matthew Davenport Hill (ed.), *Our Exemplars*, *Poor and Rich*; *Biographical Sketches of Men and Women Who Have*, *by an Extraordinary Use of Their Opportunities*, *Benefited Their Fellow-Creatures* (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1861), pp. 276–86 (p. 277).

7 See Tiffany Gill, '"The World is Ours, Too": Millennial Women and the New Black Travel Movement' in this volume.

Remond's background was instrumental in her struggle for independence and her journey toward success. She was born free in Salem (Massachusetts) in 1826 into a rather prosperous family. Her father, John Remond, was Salem's famous caterer who, among many other events, was in charge of the dinner organized in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette's visit to the United States in 1824. Remond's mother, Nancy Lenox, was a Boston baker and one of the founding members of Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, established in 1834. She, as Remond wrote in her autobiographical essay, prepared her children 'to meet the terrible pressure which prejudice against colour would force upon them'.8 Also Remond's siblings were all professionals — bakers, hairdressers, manufacturers of wigs — and active in anti-slavery societies. They were educated mainly in segregated schools but to a great extent also at home. The Remond family thus defied the oppression and segregation that was deeply entrenched in the areas of housing, schooling, and employment by obtaining education and creating their own businesses that were housed in Salem's prime locations.

In 1856, Remond started her career as an abolitionist lecturer, touring with Abby Kelley Foster and Susan B. Anthony, and in 1858 she left the United States for England in search of international support for the cause of abolition. She traveled alone, which is quite remarkable, and she had not secured any support from abolitionist societies. She soon connected with British activists as a member of the London Emancipation Committee, then by becoming an active delegate in the Executive Committee of the Ladies' London Emancipation Society. She excelled in her career as a lecturer while continuing her studies, first at the Bedford Ladies College, where she studied humanities, followed by her training to become a nurse.

In August 1866, Remond traveled from London to Florence, again alone, to study at one of the most prestigious medical schools of Europe, the Santa Maria Nuova hospital school. She carried letters of introduction from one of the protagonists of Italian Risorgimento, Giuseppe Mazzini, whom she had met in London where she had assisted him with fundraising efforts that contributed to achieving his cherished goal of creating one unified Italian nation.

8 Remond, 'Sarah P. Remond', p. 277.

In Florence, Remond passed the entrance examination to the medical school with excellent marks, then conducted her studies in Italian, graduating as an obstetrician in 1868. Her work prospects as a doctor were good, even though she was Black and a woman. She was well connected to the high society in Italy where she attended cosmopolitan gatherings of artists, writers, and intellectuals. Her social life included Italians and Anglo-Americans as well as representatives of other nationalities. For instance, she attended the intellectual salon hosted by the Greek author Margherita Mignaty and participated in soirées at the poet Francesco dell'Ongaro's, where she met the American poet and scholar Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

After her graduation she traveled to Rome together with the American art collector James Jackson Jarves to attend a gathering at the American sculptor Anne Whitney's residence.  Her clothing, like that of other Black Americans, many of whom appeared in the period's photographs, 'highlighted their sense of racial pride'. 10 The long, broad gold chain she wore around her head testified to her class-based upward mobility and success. The image she affirmed of herself resembled portraits commissioned by free BlackAmericans from the mid nineteenth century in which they represented themselves as empowering models for others to emulate, conveying, as historians Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer note, 'self-worth, dignity, beauty, intellectual achievement, and leadership'. 11

At another reception, organized in Rome in March 1878, Remond, now married to an Italian, Lazzaro Pintor, appeared again elegantly dressed: 'She was a bride, […] and wore her bridal dress of grey silk […] It appears that she is very clever, and a female doctor', wrote Matilda

9 Qtd. in Sibyl Ventress Brownlee, *Out of the Abundance of the Heart*: *Sarah Ann Parker Remond's Quest for Freedom* (doctoral thesis, University of Massachusetts, 1997), p. 154 and in Angelita Reyes, 'Elusive Autobiographical Performativity', in John Cullen Gruesser and Hanna Wallinger (eds.), *Loopholes and Retreats*: *African American Writers and the Nineteenth Century*, Forecaast 17 (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2009), pp. 141–68 (p. 160).

10 Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, *Envisioning Emancipation*, p. 23.

11 Ibid., p. 14.

Lucas in her travel journal.12 A month later, Remond attended another reception, this time organized by her nephew and his wife who were running a hotel in Rome, 'elegantly dressed in lavender silk'.13 It was at the nephew Edmund Putnam and his wife Gertie's hotel Palazzo Moroni, next to St. Peter's, where Frederick Douglass had lunch with them in January 1887. Two days later, Douglass visited the sculptor Edmonia Lewis, another talented and successful Black woman living and working in Italy. Upon his return from Egypt, Douglass again met Remond and her sisters in Rome: 'It was very pleasant to meet so far away from home these dear people. Like [their brother] Charles they detest prejudice of color and say they would not live in the U. States, if you could or would give them America!'.14 Despite such distancing from her roots, Remond always considered herself American; her prolonged expatriation, however, can be seen as a rejection of the white supremacist society of the United States.

Although she never returned to her native America, Remond continued to protest against discrimination during her expatriation. In 1866, while living in Florence, she addressed the failure of Reconstruction, arguing that 'the Southerners and their Northern allies are determined that the Black race shall not be recognized, shall not receive justice […]. No one who has kept pace with the history of the coloured race can hope to re-educate a nation at once: therefore the only remedy is to check this hatred, made up of fashion, prejudice, and intense ignorance'.15 To end white supremacy, hooks suggests, 'is a struggle to change a system, a structure'.16 Remond raised awareness on both shores of the Atlantic about the continuing discrimination and racist injustice that permeated Black experience in the United States. Moreover, with the example of her own success she created a counter-narrative to this prejudiced discourse, contesting persistent stereotypes of Black inferiority. Her experience contributes to rewriting American narratives of Black experience that

12 Matilda Lucas, *Two Englishwomen in Rome*, *1871–1900* (London: Methuen, 1938), p. 99.

13 Ibid.

14 Frederick Douglass to Amy Post, 10 June 1887, D.93, Post Family Papers, University of Rochester Frederick Douglass Project.

15 Sarah Parker Remond, 'The Negro Race in America', *London Daily News*, 22 September 1866, dated Florence, Italy, 19 September 1866.

16 hooks, *Killing Rage*, p. 195.

need to be uncovered and deconstructed, as hooks suggests, 'so that new paths, different journeys, are possible'.17 The process of telling Black history, hooks continues, 'enables political self-recovery'.18

Not much is known about Remond's last years in Italy, but according to her death certificate, she passed away in December 1894, at the mature age of sixty-eight, at the Hospital of Sant'Antonio in Rome. At the time of her death, she was still married to Pintor and her residence was Florence; her profession as indicated in the death certificate was surgeon ('medico chirurgo').

Remond thus became actively engaged in social and political change and history-writing, both as an activist and through the example of her own life. Her journey was geographical and ideological: in cosmopolitan Europe she constructed a progressive model of Black womanhood, one of independence, intellectuality, and success. She troubled dominant notions of Blackness, working against patriarchy and white supremacy. Remond showed how empowerment and positive images of Black womanhood emerge in the context of lived experience.

17 Ibid., p. 41.

18 Ibid., p. 47.

#### Bibliography

## 24. Making Latinx Art: Juana Valdes at the Crossroads of Latinx and Latin American Art

*Arlene Dávila*

Fig. 24.1 Juana Valdes, 'Redbone Colored China Rags', 2017, CC BY 4.0.

Latinx and Latin American art have been historically contingent on globalization, particularly on the US empire and its involvement in Latin America. The relevant question today is how current globalization trends impact on our theorization of Latinx and Latin American art in relation to each other, and what are the particular challenges, openings and concerns for artists maneuvering through contemporary art world trends. In what follows I consider these issues not to reify differences between Latinx and Latin American art but to account for and appreciate the different projects and politics that are involved in their promotion. Additionally, through the work of Afro-Latinx artist Juana Valdes I discuss the importance of confronting the differential valorization of Latinx and Latin American art whenever we teach, study and exhibit these artists, and why it is so important to carve a space for the study and evaluation of Latinx art. My argument is that efforts by curators, scholars and artists in defining a space for intervention for Latinx artists need to be analyzed in relation to a global contemporary art market that increasingly exacerbates distinctions between Latinx and Latin American art and artists, at the very same time that it situationally elides the resulting hierarchies and distinctions in order to profit more ably from these categories.1

The last decade has seen a growing consensus about the need to specify, define and promote Latinx art as a space of scholarly, curatorial concern and as a market category. Some of the key agents and spaces include the UCLA's Chicano Center's Aver Revision Art History Project (2002–present), and the Latino Art Now Conference launched as part of the Inter-University Program for Latino/a Studies (2005). More recently we have seen the foundation of the US Latinx Art Forum, by a younger generation of Latinx art historian's challenging the College Art Association's lack of panels and spaces devoted to Latinx art, and the US Latinx Art Futures Ford Foundation conference organized by artist Teresita Fernandez (2016) was also pivotal to the current Latinx art movement.

These spaces have been central to teasing out the relationship between Latinx and Latin American art, and to ensuring Latino/a artists are not easily ignored and bypassed. Rather they must be recognized as an integral component of American art, and also an important

1 This paper draws from ongoing research on Latinx art worlds, involving interviews and participation with arsis, and stakeholders of the Latinx art movement and dealers, curators, gallerists and other participants of Latinx and Latin American art worlds in the United States and Latin America from 2016–18. See my forthcoming book *Latinx Art*: *Artists*, *Markets and Politics* for a larger discussion of these issues.

group constitutive of Latin American art. In particular, it is important to focus on artists of Latin American background in the US, whether they are first generation or have a longer history in the country and who work primarily in the United States, as differentiated from Latin American artists who work primarily in Latin America and who are not immersed in the US Latino/a experience. This provides a means of addressing the misrecognition of generations of US Latinx artists who are ignored both by the United States' canon and by the nation-centric biases that dominate Latin American art. There is a growing concern to recognize Latinx art as a project, not a fixed identity, a blueprint for the acknowledgment and identification of the work of artists who have been consistently bypassed by American and Latin American art history.

Advocates for Latinx art follow similar paths to those who helped to launch Latin American art, and any other specialized category. These paths also stem from institutional spaces and interests that create these categories as differentiated spheres of production, study, collection and consumption. For instance, since the late 1970s major auctions houses like Sotheby (1979) and Christie's (1977) and most recently Phillips (2009) have held regular Latin American art auctions, feeding interest in the category. Meanwhile major survey exhibitions helped to consolidate Latin American art as a fashionable subject for collectors, institutional spaces, and scholars devoted to its study, and it was marketed as such across the United States and beyond. Consequently, while still relegated below a dominant Anglo- and Eurocentric canon, Latin American art now carries weight with important institutions that create and sustain what Arjun Appadurai has termed 'regimes of value' for the evaluation and valuation of Latin American art. 2

Most interestingly, the value of Latin American art is increasingly fueled by a number of global stakeholders across the world, spanning the US, Latin America and Europe. Examples of how Latin American stakeholders are intervening in the international collection practices of major museums, and hence in the overall valuation of Latin American art, include the sponsorship of a Latin American and Caribbean acquisition fund at MOMA by art collector Patricia Cisneros (2006–), the creation of a Curator of Latin American art endowed position at MOMA

2 See Arjun Appadurai, *The Social Life of Things*: *Commodities in Cultural Perspective*  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

by Estrellita Brodsky, and the rise in regional Latin American art fairs, such as ArteBA (1991), ArtRio (2010), ArtBo (2005) and Park ArtLima (2013), all modeled after international mega fairs like ArtBasel.3

In sum, the growing popularity of Latin American art shows how useful categories can be to carve out spaces in the art world; as well as their uselessness if a movement lacks the necessary capital to fund sustainable infrastructure. Such is the case with Latinx art, which grew out of the Nuyorican and Chicano art movement, as part of a demand for fair recognition and to expose, challenge and transform the whiteness and Eurocentrism of mainstream museums, which have marginalized the artistic creations and input of people of color in the art world and society at large. This arts-culture-based social movement was all about forging and validating alternative aesthetics as well as alternative spaces such as institutions like the Taller Boricua and El Museo del Barrio. As scholars and art historians of this period note, this campaign resulted in art that was connected to communities; that was informed by larger social movements around equity, anti-racism and social justice; and that was not defined by market prerogatives but by the impulse to expand Nuyoricans' symbolic and aesthetic repertoires.

This history has shaped debates over the recognition of Latinx art from the beginning, both its racialization and its connection with a racial minoritarian status, and the 'assumptions that it is monolithically concerned with identity politics and/or is lacking in aesthetic and conceptual experimentation.'4 Similarly Latinx art and artists have historically lacked patrons, while their typical omission from the market means that their work is rarely assigned economic value, making it impossible to be prized. This represents a circular and self-perpetuating problem: lack of access to the market hinders the evaluation of work by Latinx artists, and hence their future ability to enter the market.

The result is that even within Latino/Latin American art spaces there's a lot of reluctance to identify as a Latino/Latin American artist, — in itself the greatest indication of the whiteness of the art market, and the immediate devaluation of any artist that cannot come across as 'unmarked' and hence white. Most Latin American artists

3 See Giuliana Borea, 'Fuelling Museums and Art Fairs in Peru's Capital: The Work of the Market and Multi-scale Assemblages' *World Art*, 6:2 (2017), 315–37.

4 Adriana Zavala, '2015 Latin@ Art at the Intersection', *Aztlan*, 40:1 (2015), 125–40 (p. 125).

don't want to be identified as such because it compromises their ability to enter the 'white world' of contemporary art markets, even when most Latin American art dealers recognize that the label, together with the institutional structures in place to promote Latin American art, have formed the platform to build these artists in the first place. If any identity is to be claimed, it is demonstrably better to select the more appreciated category of 'Latin American art', never that of a 'Latino/a'. The representation of Carmen Herrera is a good example: even though she's lived in the States for over fifty years, she is always described as Cuban-born, never as a Latina. Yes, some artists have roots and connections with home countries, yet at the root of Latinx identity is the 'Neither here or nor there effect' that distinguishes Latinxs from Latin Americans, who are most often also shunned from their heritage countries.

In sum, when grappling with Latinx artists we must confront the lack of institutional structures and market interests invested in this category, and the fact that they lack the nation-centric references and connections that have provided value for Latin American art, among other issues. Ultimately we have to grapple with racism in the art world, and how it affects artists of color and the lack of institutional spaces promoting, and ultimately valuing their work.5 The recognition and evaluation of Latinx art therefore depends on US-based curators, scholars, museum professionals and art stakeholders finally turning their eyes to these artists, and understanding the multiplicity of experiences that shape and enrich Latinx art, and all types of 'contemporary American art'.

Take for example multidisciplinary artist Juana Valdes, an afro-Cuban artist who came to Miami as a young child, and who, like most Latinx artists I spoke to, has had a lot of experience navigating the cultural politics of Latinx art. Valdes was one of the speakers during the 2016 Ford Foundation US Latinx Art Futures symposium, after which I asked her more about her experiences in the contemporary art world. In particular, Valdes has long been confronted with the need to navigate

5 See James Case-Leal, 'Art Statistics 2016–2017', produced for Arts in NYC course taught at CUNY Guttman College by James Case-Leal, Spring 2017, http://www. havenforthedispossessed.org/; Maximiliano Duron, 'Latino Art Underrepresented at College Art Association's Annual Conference', *Art News*, 20 September 2016, http://www.artnews.com/2016/09/20/study-latino-art-underrepresented-atcollege-art-associations-annual-conference/

her experiences as an immigrant, a Cuban artist, a Latinx and Caribbean artist, a woman and foremost a Black woman, which is what people immediately see in the white spaces of the art world where she's often the only Black person in the room.

Valdes's work is geared to ensuring the totality of her experience is not compromised and that her Caribbean, Cuban and Hispanic immigrant experience and her Blackness are recognized in simultaneity, fully aware that often these categories (Caribbean, Cuban, Black and Hispanic) are often considered in isolation or even held to be total opposites of each other. Her work is all about addressing this complexity head on, although there are some categories that are easier for her to navigate than others. I was not surprised that, for her, the most challenging category is Latin American art: As she tells; 'my work does not fit the visual demands. It's not colorful, it's not dealing with history of Latin America […] or does not scream to you Latin America.' In fact, Valdes has purposefully reduced the amount of color in her work, seeking to distance herself from what she saw as the stereotypical colorful aesthetic associated with Latin American art in survey shows, similar to the dominant aesthetic of Hispanic art in the United States in the 1980s. Most of her works, from sculpture and ceramics to prints, are created in shades of white, beige and black, playing with neutrality and translucency. This is especially the case in her use of bone china, a material she works with in *Colored China Rags* (2012) and as the basis of some of the decorative objects in *An Inherent View of the World* (2015) to evoke questions of value, race, commodity and trade. One of the first commodities to be globalized, bone china was brought in from China through Europe, and then exported as a highly sought commodity in the Americas and the Caribbean, where it is still a sign of prestige that conveys an aesthetic of middle class respectability. Valdes recalls it adorning living rooms in Cuba, where it was displayed as a prized object and a marker of dignified status. With this material she foregrounds colorism and questions of value, and its creation in the Americas invokes the commodity fetishism that is at the root of both the Caribbean slave trade, and the making of luxury items. *Colored China Rags* depicts cloth rags commonly used for housework and domestic work, but made in bone china, which involved coloring and altering a material known for its whiteness and pureness with shades that evoked human skin.

Valdes foregrounds race, color and empire in most of her pieces as the formative experiences that are central to her Cuban identity off the island, and the reality of what it is to live as a Black person in America. In her view these topics find little room within the category of Latin American art, which tends to embrace a whiter South American version of identity and does not highlight Latin America's African roots; she has therefore found it less welcoming to her work. In particular, Valdes has identified the lack of conversations about color and race to be most oppressive for her and other Latinx artists. They can experience and talk about racism more openly than in Latin America, where these topics are still largely considered taboo and are often drowned out by nationalist ideologies that disavow the very existence of racism. In fact, it was not a Latin American art museum or collector who first acquired Valdes' work, but the Perez Museum in Miami through its African-American and African Diaspora Acquisitions fund. The museum purchased *An Inherent View of the World* (2014–15). This installation of decorative objects made of porcelain, bone china, glass, and wood, set atop a large wooden table, builds on her desire to tease out a relationship between identities and objects against the backdrop of a long history of colonialism, trade and capitalism.

One would think that, as a Cuban American, Valdes would have benefitted from the growing popularity of Cuban art among collectors of Latin American art. Cuban art has been given more attention than most other Latin American countries and the rest of the Caribbean, due to the state funding and infrastructure that Cuba provides for artists particularly through the celebration of Havana's Biennial (1984) and the consistent patronage of wealthy Cuban collectors in exile, together with Cuban arts and humanities foundations such as CINTAS (1957–). Boundaries between Cuba and the US are always shifting, although the fetishizing of a reified isolation and the exoticism of a socialist country remains a source of validation and value. Yet Valdes' engagement with the booming category of Cuban art is highly complex.

One of the ironies of the growing economic relationships between the US and Cuba is the budding fetish for Cuban art 'discovered' and purchased on the island. A gallerist representing Cuban artists described this trend as voyeuristic: 'They think it's very sexy to go to Cuba, and they want to be seen as ahead of the curve.'6 He described how young

6 Conversation with the author.

Cuban artists have become a brand, whereas Cuban artists in the US are seemingly more accessible and known; they have trajectories that can be read in terms of 'quality' recognized by the art market, signs that are lacking or less marked among younger unknown artists. This Cuban art fetish has been reinforced by the increased ease of travel to Cuba, which has launched a whole subsector of art tours, such as 'Cubanartours' to expose participants to 'one of the most exciting and thriving are scenes of the world.'7 Cuba's 'thriving Contemporary art scene.' More than one Cuban gallerist in the US or abroad described bringing work to Cuba to sell, either through the biennial or through local art entrepreneurs, because collectors prefer to buy in Cuba rather than in the US or Europe. As he tells me: 'It's the same work, the same artists, but collectors won't buy it in the States, but they'll gobble it in Cuba.' Valdes is fully aware of this trend. In her words: 'they want to buy that story, they don't want to buy the American story. It's part of the exoticness to say I saw the studio and the artists, and we had this amazing experience in Cuba […] and that's part of the value and the script and what gives it value.' In this way, the popularity of Cuban art has also helped to reinforce national boundaries, or as Valdes put it: 'If you're in Cuba, you're IT. If you're in Miami, then you're one of the many.'8 This phenomenon also affects other US Latino/ as, who are similarly unrecognized or at risk of losing any recognition within their countries after they have migrated. However, these tensions affect Cuban artists in particular, given that Cuba's political situation has placed greater constraints on artists' movement, migration and return, and hence their ability to maintain links to Cuba once they leave.

In particular, Valdes regrets this trend because the popularity of Cuban art has neither helped Caribbeanize Latin American art, nor raised awareness of the African diaspora in Latin America. This is yet another reason why the category of Latinx art seems to be a space where all that she values as central to her identity is at least recognized, and not seen as contradictory. 'I don't think the art world knows what Latinx art is, they just figure out what Latin American art is and what Mexican art is. They're catching up […] It brought something that is happening out in the street and in practice, out there into the institution […] and said to the people, you need to look at this.'9

7 https://www.cubartours.com

8 Conversation with the author.

9 Ibid.

In sum, artists like Juana Valdes are producing rich work that transcends categories. It is a possibility both poignant and revealing that it might require the promotion and elevation of yet another category — one that confronts and challenges the art world to see Latinx artists — that helps us finally to take note of their work.

#### Bibliography

Zavala, Adriana, '2015 Latin@ Art at the Intersection', *Aztlan*, 40:1 (2015), 125–40.

# 25. Moving Mountains: Harriet Hosmer's Nineteenth-Century Italian Migration to Become the First Professional Woman Sculptor

*Patricia Cronin*

I first became interested in American neoclassical art when I was researching my monumental three-ton Carrara marble statue, *Memorial To A Marriage* (2002), which addressed marriage equality before gay marriage was legal anywhere in the United States. I used a 'nationalist' form, American neoclassical sculpture, to address a federal failure, the prohibition of same sex marriage.

Because the only legal protections available to homosexual couples were wills, healthcare proxies and power of attorney documents (depressing papers about our deterioration, incapacitation and death instead of a celebration our life together) I designed a mortuary double portrait sepulcher and permanently installed it on our burial plot in the place the Garden and Rural Cemetery Movement designed as America's Père Lachaise Cemetery, Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx. Our tomb will be on view through eternity. Or as I tell my female artist friends — if you want permanent public art, you've got to buy the land.

Fig. 25.1 Patricia Cronin, *Memorial To A Marriage*, 2002. Carrara marble, over life size, photographed by Steven Bates. Courtesy of the artist. All rights reserved.

To make my first marble statue, I had to study the entire history of sculpture and, while combing through every tome, I stumbled across an extraordinary nineteenth-century marble sculpture of *Beatrice Cenci* (Fig. 25.2). I thought, 'that's strange, I don't know this one.' I looked at the bottom of the page and read the name, 'Harriet Hosmer.' I thought, 'hmmm, I've never heard of her.' I looked at it again and then wondered, 'WHY have I never heard of her?' I knew then and there she would be my next project. So, while I was thinking about my own death I discovered someone else's life.

Fig. 25.2Patricia Cronin, *Beatrice Cenci*, 2007. Watercolor on paper, 12 x 15 inches. After Harriet Hosmer, *Beatrice Cenci*, 1856. Courtesy of the artist. All rights reserved.

Harriet Hosmer was born in 1830 in Watertown, Massachusetts and lost her mother, two brothers and her sister to consumption before she was twelve years old. Her father Dr Hosmer, not wanting to risk losing his sole remaining family member, bought her a dog, a canoe, a gun and horse to inspire a strong, physically active outdoor lifestyle and then sent her to Miss Sedgwick's school in Lenox, Massachusetts for a progressive education. These strategies worked well and Hosmer began to exhibit many of the vibrant personality traits she would become known for: a precocious prankster with a lively sense of humor, intense curiosity and boundless confidence. At that time all women were barred from attending college in the US so she was denied the anatomy courses necessary to carve realistic figurative neoclassical sculptures, which defined American art in the mid-nineteenth century. As a result, any woman who wanted to be a professional artist and practice her profession was forced to leave her birth country, and Hosmer migrated to Rome in 1852 when she was twenty-two years old. She apprenticed with the leading neoclassical sculptor at the time, British artist John Gibson, and within a few years struck out on her own and became known as the first professional woman sculptor.

Hosmer lived within a lively Anglo-American expatriate community of famous writers and artists, as well as a circle of 'independent women', internationally renowned actresses, artists and writers, who were never romantically involved with men. In her time, she had a prominent career, was critically acclaimed, financially successful, and exhibited in all the international exhibitions. She was infamous. Nathaniel Hawthorne even based the character of Hilda, from his 1860 novel *The Marble Faun*, on Hosmer. And yet she is largely unknown today.

This essay will consider how she created and maintained a critically acclaimed career, pushed the boundaries of acceptable female propriety to a degree that was inconceivable in the United States, including: owning a large studio workshop that employed over two dozen Italian workmen, adeptly handling jealous male competitors, and being involved in several long-term same-sex relationships. How was her work received then and now? Are there any lessons we can learn from her experiences that shed light on the plight of women artists today, 150 years later? As a contemporary artist, I wanted to create a series to reveal the complexities of Hosmer's career, reputation, and legacy.