Identity and Diaspora: The Puerto Rican Artist Between Two Worlds
By Rafael Colón | Originally published 2003 | El Cuarto del Quenepón Archive
Editor’s note: This essay, originally published in El Cuarto del Quenepón’s third issue, has become one of our most-cited pieces. It captures a moment when questions of diaspora identity were being articulated with new urgency in Puerto Rican art circles. We present it here in its original form.
The Puerto Rican artist exists in a peculiar condition: not quite immigrant, not quite native; American citizen by law but colonial subject in practice; belonging to an island that belongs to another nation. This condition—call it diaspora, call it colonialism, call it simply the Puerto Rican experience—shapes everything we make.
I want to examine how artists have navigated this condition, how they have made work that speaks from the hyphenated space of Puerto Rican-American identity. This is not a comprehensive survey but a meditation on certain artists and certain works that illuminate the tensions and possibilities of creating from between two worlds.
The Problem of Place
Where is the Puerto Rican artist from? The question seems simple but isn’t.
Consider the painter Arnaldo Roche Rabell. Born in Santurce in 1955, trained in Chicago, working between the island and various mainland locations—where is Roche from? His paintings, with their furious expressionism and tortured figures, draw on Puerto Rican themes (the vejigante, the colonial body, the scarred landscape) but speak a visual language shaped by Chicago imagism and European modernism.
Roche’s work insists that place is not singular. The Puerto Rican artist carries multiple places within—the island as memory and longing, the mainland as daily reality and economic necessity, the imaginary Puerto Rico constructed from family stories and cultural fragments. The work emerges from this multiplicity, not despite it.
Or consider the Nuyorican poets—Pietri, Piñero, Esteves—who wrote in English about Puerto Rican experience. They were dismissed by some island critics as not really Puerto Rican, as having lost their authenticity through linguistic betrayal. But their poetry captured something that island-based writers could not: the specific alienation of growing up Puerto Rican in New York, speaking the colonizer’s language but remaining colonized, belonging to America but not being welcomed by it.
The question “where are you from?” has no clean answer. We are from the space between.
The Problem of Language
Language is never neutral for the Puerto Rican artist. Spanish carries the weight of colonial history—imposed by one empire, preserved against another. English carries the weight of the present—the language of opportunity, assimilation, erasure. To choose one is to lose something; to attempt both is to risk belonging fully to neither.
The visual artist has an apparent advantage: images seem to transcend language, to communicate across linguistic boundaries. But this advantage is illusory. Visual art is never purely visual; it exists within contexts of interpretation, criticism, institutional framing—all of which happen in language. A Puerto Rican artist showing work in New York must reckon with critics who cannot read the Spanish titles, who miss the local references, who filter the work through their own cultural assumptions.
Some artists have made language itself their subject. Pepón Osorio’s installations are stuffed with text—newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, official documents—that most mainland viewers cannot read. The illegibility is deliberate; it reproduces the experience of the Spanish-speaking immigrant confronted with English bureaucracy, the English-speaking viewer confronted with untranslatable culture.
Other artists work in the space between languages. Juan Sánchez combines English and Spanish in paintings that refuse to prioritize either. His work demands bilingual viewers—or demands that monolingual viewers confront the limits of their comprehension. This is not accommodation; it is insistence.
The Problem of Audience
For whom does the Puerto Rican artist make work?
The island audience knows the references, shares the history, understands the jokes. But the island art market is small, the institutions underfunded, the opportunities limited. To survive as an artist, most Puerto Ricans must seek audiences elsewhere—in New York, in Miami, in the international biennial circuit.
These mainland and international audiences bring resources but also demands. They want work that is recognizably Puerto Rican—that performs identity in ways they can understand. The pressure is toward the folkloric, the tropical, the safely exotic. Work that is too culturally specific alienates; work that is too culturally generic satisfies nobody.
Some artists refuse the choice. They make work for multiple audiences simultaneously, layering meanings so that different viewers take different things away. Papo Colo’s performances operate this way—visceral and immediate for any audience, but containing references that only Puerto Rican viewers will catch.
Others accept that they cannot please everyone. They make work for the Puerto Rican audience they want, trusting that genuine specificity will eventually find broader appreciation. This is the longer path, but perhaps the more honest one.
The Possibilities
I have dwelt on problems—of place, language, audience—because they define the conditions under which Puerto Rican art is made. But conditions are not only constraints; they are also possibilities.
The space between worlds is a creative space. The Puerto Rican artist sees what monocultural artists cannot: the contingency of cultural norms, the constructed nature of identity, the flexibility of meaning across contexts. This double vision—or multiple vision—enables work that monolingual, monocultural artists could not imagine.
The hyphenated identity is a hybrid identity. The Puerto Rican artist draws on multiple traditions—Spanish colonial, African Caribbean, American modernist, Latin American conceptualist—and synthesizes them into something new. This synthesis is not dilution; it is enrichment.
The colonial condition, for all its injustice, produces cultural complexity. The Puerto Rican artist working through colonialism makes visible what artists from dominant cultures can ignore: the violence of borders, the power relations embedded in language, the economic determinations of artistic production. This visibility is politically necessary.
Conclusion
The Puerto Rican artist between two worlds occupies an uncomfortable but generative position. The work that emerges from this position—when it is honest, when it refuses easy resolutions—contributes something essential to contemporary art. It demonstrates that identity is always plural, that place is always contested, that language is always political.
We do not need to resolve our contradictions. We need to make work that holds them, that shows them, that insists on their complexity. The best Puerto Rican art does exactly this. It refuses the simplifications that both island nationalism and mainland multiculturalism would impose. It speaks from the space between, and in so doing, speaks for everyone who lives between worlds—which is to say, in our globalized era, almost everyone.
The diaspora condition is increasingly the human condition. Puerto Rican artists, who have grappled with it for generations, have something to teach.
Rafael Colón is an art critic and curator based in New York and San Juan. This essay originally appeared in El Cuarto del Quenepón, Issue 3, Spring 2003.