Afro-Boricua Feminine Aesthetics for Survival and Protection: A Conversation with Afro-Puerto Rican Visual Artist Brenda Torres-Figueroa
I met Brenda in Puerto Rico in 2019 during a bombazo. This particular bombazo was organized by (my then bomba school in Puerto Rico) Taller Tambuye and La Escuelita de Bombera Corazon (my now bomba school in Chicago) to celebrate La Escuelita’s ten year anniversary. Brenda and I discussed how my transition to living in Puerto Rico was going since she was from the part of the island I was living in. Since that night, Brenda and I have been in bomba song and history classes, in the batey, and on community organizational meetings together. While I knew Brenda as a bombera, and then as other bomberes know her as a bomba skirt maker; Brenda is an artist that focuses on textiles and multimedia to interrogate femininity, displacement, and how to make life in the midst of constant catastrophe. She is a curator, teacher, mother, and fierce Afro-Boricua.
The particular exhibition that anchored our discussion is Dressed as Home and Refuge which went up in February 2020 in the Humboldt Park Boathouse Gallery.
It was a progression of a piece Torres-Figueroa began in 2000 when she plotted to leave the island and move to Chicago and attend the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She left with a heart shaped box music box, a jar containing dirt from her parents’ back yard in Fajardo, a photo of the sky after Hurricane George, and a couple of underskirts that belonged to her grandmother and aunts. These undergarments or enaguas and her matrilineal legacy of seamstresses and mundillo are what ultimately led to Torres Figueroa’s artistic focus of textiles and how patterns of fabric mirror the patterns of womanhood expected of women. Since 2000 she moved back to Puerto Rico to work as a curator of contemporary art and back again to work as an art teacher in Chicago Public Schools and now as a teacher in Chicago’s High School of the Arts, Chi Arts.
del verbo morir. to die away from home, 2017 from Dressed as Home and Refuge.
In 2000 she had left after Hurricane George and in 2020 when putting the exhibition together again, Torres-Figueroa was still reeling from Hurricane Maria and being away from her parents during the aftermath that followed. “It tried us…it really tried us.” The cyclical survival mode of Puerto Rican life brought forth feelings that she had regarding homelessness, defining and redefining diaspora, and how she had made a life in the almost two decades between George and Maria. For her, she wanted her exhibit to prompt conversations amongst the Chicago Puerto Rican community about what makes a home, life, and healing.
We discussed how endurance (Ruiz 2019) sculpts under colonialism often shapes even the most intimate parts of Puerto Rican life on the archipelago and in the States. Torres-Figueroa described the survival mode she experienced post-Hurricane George and then again post-Maria and during Chicago’s 2020 demonstrations after George Floyd. “Hurricanes can be major clean ups of many things,” and with that Torres-Figueroa was pointing towards her understanding of how survival mode in Puerto Rico is framed by being a colony. The daily mitigation of political corruption, poverty, and environmental catastrophes as eroding remainders after occupation makes for an almost numbing archipelagic survival mode. Torres-Figueroa remarks, “I don’t think I was able to be out of survival mode in Puerto Rico.” Now, like many other Puerto Ricans across the world, she remarks how that survival mode will not follow newer property investors who flock to the island to buy property for cheap.
del verbo asimilar. to assimilate, 2017 from Dressed as Home and Refuge .
del verbo contener. to hold, 2018 from Dressed as Home and Refuge
Her thoughts and art centering on the Afro-Boricua feminine aesthetic are framed by this archipelagic survival mode and the lessons of the Black Puerto Rican women in her life. “My grandmother always emphasized wearing enaguas as a way to protect yourself as a woman.” Enaguas or slips or petticoats are worn under dresses and are still expected to be worn by some women. Torres-Figueroa was drawn to the idea of how extra fabric must be created and stitched together to add protection for Puerto Rican women from the environment but also men. The idea that women in Puerto Rico must anticipate violence from men through the whispered lessons of how to get dressed.
Centering textiles and the unique Afro-Puerto Rican legacies within the textile industry in Puerto Rico continue to keep a steady rhythm throughout Torres-Figueroa’s work. How did dresses or enaguas shape daily life for Black women in Puerto Rico? Bomba, for example, is often praised for the beautiful skirts worn by dancers. Historically women in bomba cared more about the enaguas beneath the skirts, “bomba dancers today wear even more layers of clothing.” She points to the headscarf and already heavy skirt, and also to the now traditional enagua. “How did we perpetuate the idea of decency so that other people could feel comfortable?”
“We are a ready people, women are prepared or preparing.” When describing an aesthetic of Afro-Puerto Rican femininity Torres-Figueroa highlighted doobies (hairs being wrapped), make up, and heels even for the daily errands Puerto Rican women are ready to face the world. Whereas, a diasporic Rican aesthetic is more about the flag and now, thankfully, natural curly hair.
Survival mode for diaspoRicans, on the other hand, also resonated with Torres-Figueroa. “As a Black Puerto Rican woman, I understand the frustration and devastation of living in the States’ blatant segregated racism. In Puerto Rico, at least we can all get together and dream on the ocean…We are still in our forties and dreaming of better futures...here the spirit is almost broken. It’s almost not survival mode, it’s a miracle when someone makes it out of the brutal racist system.” For her, the trauma of racism in Chicago and in the United States—its egregious disrespect on Black life requires her to return to her other home in Puerto Rico. “That’s why I have to go back home and dream with my people and see the ocean”
Brenda Torres-Figueroa
By: Sarah Bruno