Towards a Place of Belonging

I did not come to research because I wanted answers. I came because I couldn't stop noticing things. Histories that bore against my body. Places people carried after leaving. Photographs that appeared to know more than the stories told about them. Surfaces that spoke when official histories stayed silent. What I study followed me long before I knew what it even was.

My first day of school in Carolina, Puerto Rico.

I grew up between Puerto Rico and the United States, between Carolina and Dallas, Georgia. I moved between different understandings of home, race, language, family, and belonging. Leaving Puerto Rico as a child made place feel important, but it also made place unstable. Home became something I remembered. Something I inherited. Something I missed. Something I had to imagine. For a long time, I thought belonging meant finding the place where all those pieces would finally settle. Yet, I’m learning to let that go. Édouard Glissant writes of identity through Relation through movement, encounter, history, landscape, and the presence of others.¹ I return to that idea often because I understand myself through relation. Puerto Rico and the Deep South. Blackness and my family’s unspoken histories, artist and scholar, the one who left and the one always seeking to return. I do not see these as contradictions to resolve, but as the foundation of my work.

“I dreamed about a culture of belonging. I still dream that dream. I contemplate what our lives would be like if we knew how to cultivate awareness, to live mindfully, peacefully; if we learned habits of being that would bring us closer together, that would help us build beloved community.”²

As an art historian, I examine Puerto Rican and Caribbean visual culture, focusing on modern and contemporary practices, street art, colonial architecture, and the everyday ways communities construct and reconstruct memory and identity. My research centers on surfaces: who paints them, who owns them, who passes by them daily, who is represented, and who is painted over. Murals reveal not only their creators’ intentions but also the dynamics of the spaces they inhabit. A wall can serve as a declaration, an argument, a memorial, a gathering place, or an archive. At times, it stands as evidence of a community's presence. My dissertation, Puerto Rican Muralism: Decolonial Aesthetics and the Politics of Place, traces the development of muralism across Puerto Rico and its diaspora from the mid-twentieth century to the present. I analyze public art as a spatial practice shaped by colonialism, migration, race, memory, and political struggle.

I ask: Who has the authority to make history visible? Katherine McKittrick writes that Black geographies are shaped by the relationship between racial violence, space, and the ways Black people continue to imagine and create places of possibility.³ Her work changed how I understood geography. Space is never just where something happened. Space is made through power. Place is made through memory, movement, refusal, care, and survival. This is especially relevant in Puerto Rico, where colonialism has shaped land, movement, architecture, development, and the stories we are taught about ourselves. It matters in the diasporas too. I am interested in what people carry with them when they leave and how those memories are transformed when they return elsewhere.

The archive gives us some answers but also leaves gaps. I have always imagined archives as rooms with missing furniture; you know that something was there because the absence has a definite form. I look to Saidiya Hartman, who addresses this issue: how to come across Black lives in archives that have recorded Black people in an uneven, violent, or almost entirely absent manner.⁴ Her work makes me realize that absence isn’t neutral: someone chose what was worth recording, and someone decided what could be lost. As a result, I have turned to listening in other places: to photographs, architecture, oral histories, family tales, the streets, and what people remember even when no document proves they should remember it.

This thinking grounds the Ancestral Landscapes Lab (ALL), a digital humanities project I co-developed that focuses on Afro-Puerto Rican spatial memory. Our approach uses oral histories, archival research, photography, mapping, architecture, and community knowledge to document how people understand and remember place. I am drawn to what official archives often fail to hold. The house somebody still describes even though it no longer exists. The road which every member of the family knows by a different name. The photograph tucked inside an envelope. A grandmother recounting where something used to be. A story told so often it starts to feel like architecture.

In my artistic practice, I’m still exploring, experimenting, trying.

I base my teaching on the same belief: knowledge should belong to people. I believe that when students enter the classroom, they already have knowledge obtained from their families, neighborhoods, languages, experiences, and the way they see the world. My job is not to act as the one who knows everything. I want to build a place where we can ask better questions. bell hooks describes education as a practice of freedom.⁵ In my classroom, I treat learning as something that we develop together. I ask students to question authority, even my own. I hope they will realize that art history is constructed, as are the concepts of canons and archives. The stories we receive about culture result from choices. That means they can be questioned. They can be expanded.

Sometimes they need to be refused.

Previously, my teaching, scholarship, artistic work, writing, and community all seemed like distinct aspects of my life, and for a long time I sought the right name for myself.

Artist.

Art historian.

Curator.

Writer.

Professor.

I care less about those borders now. Sylvia Wynter asks us to reconsider the inherited limits through which the category of the human has been defined.⁶ I think about that question often. What becomes possible when we stop treating inherited structures as inevitable? I do not have a clean answer.

I am more interested in the practice.

Making.

Remembering.

Teaching.

Listening.

Returning.

Building something from what remains. Maybe that is what belonging has come to mean for me. Not finding the place where everything finally makes sense. Not becoming one fixed version of myself.

Belonging is the practice of making place.

For memory.

For contradiction.

For people.

For whoever I am still becoming. I am still learning what to carry. Still learning what to leave behind.

To let go of
those titles—
those borders.
To just be.

Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, 2009).

Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.

bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).

Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

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