Bodega Surrealism: The Emergence of Latin@ Artivists in New York City, 1976-Present.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the cultural activism, or artivism, of two community-based art communities and projects that originated in the 1970s within the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City: the New Rican Village Cultural Arts Center (NRV) and the Puerto Rican Embassy. Based on the premise that culture has the potential to create anti-hegemonic, emancipatory social change for a generation of working-class Puerto Rican and Latina/o artists, their art responded to the social and political alienation they and their accompanying communities experienced. By examining cultural performances, art installations, and arts programming, I demonstrate how the artists embarked upon aesthetic, social, spatial, and political interventions.

In analyzing the NRV’s Latin jazz musical performances and workshops, I suggest that the NRV musicians were harbingers of a new Latina/o identity and style that posited a dialectical relationship between aesthetics, racial identity, and society. This eventually gave rise to an avant-garde Latin jazz music scene and community that I identify as a “Latin jazz Left.” In addition, through the musicians’ collaborations with poets, dancers, and artists, an interartistic space and aesthetic emerged. In addition to music, the artists at the NRV also engaged in aesthetic innovations, highlighted by the spurious Puerto Rican Embassy project and accompanying Spirit Republic of Puerto Rico. A spaceless institution that exists virtually on the Web and emphasizes liberation as a conceptual and decolonial space, the Embassy serves as a creative response to the material constraints afforded to a colonized community struggling for autonomy. These expressions give rise to what I call a “Bodega Surrealism,” a working-class aesthetic “sancocho” or collage that merges disparate cultural ensembles that engage the everyday logics and spaces of marginality.

Drawing from extensive oral history interviews, and primary and archival documents, this study employs the interdisciplinary methods of American Studies, Latina/o Studies, and Visual and Cultural Studies to chronicle an alternative, counter-narrative of avant-gardism rooted in working-class and racial struggles and experiences. This study documents the creative and significant artivism employed by the NRV and the Puerto Rican Embassy and reveal a community acutely able to engage in decolonial social action through cultural practices.