Entre Puerto Rico y Richmond: A Conversation on Embodied Decolonial Creation with Alicia Díaz & Patricia Herrera

Still from Entre Puerto Rico y Richmond: Women in Resistance Shall Not Be Moved, 2020. Directed by Alicia Díaz.

This text¹ is a result of a collaborative process orbiting a collaborative project, a conversation stemming from events centered on Entre Puerto Rico y Richmond: Women in Resistance Shall Not Be Moved. This award-winning film² performance/dance film—most recently presented in March 2022 at the University of Richmond and in November 2021 at the College of William & Mary’s Muscarelle Museum—is a product of a collaborative ethos in which all participants are recognized as co-creators. One of its main messages is a focus on linkages, the entre [between], that suggests what powerful women like Luisa Capetillo called for and worked toward.

Entre Puerto Rico y Richmond… centers its narrative through the embodied personifications of Luisa Capetillo (1879-1922) and Dominga de la Cruz Becerril (1909-1981). This text coincides with the 100th anniversary of Capetillo’s death on April 10, 1922. Capetillo, an anarcho-syndicalist and radical feminist, and de la Cruz Becerril, an Afro-Puerto Rican leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party who survived the 1937 Ponce Massacre, were women in resistance. Entre Puerto Rico y Richmond… goes beyond educating us about these overlooked figures and celebrates Capetillo and de la Cruz Becerril’s radical activism.

Finally, Entre Puerto Rico y Richmond… augments its complexity by weaving interrelated histories from Virginia and Puerto Rico’s colonial capitalist context, represented materially in the former American Tobacco Company warehouse where the piece was filmed. These linkages are framed from critical-creative practice where radical imagination can constitute overlooked colonial histories. Notwithstanding, Capetillo and de la Cruz Becerril, both tobacco factory readers, likely did not meet. There is also very little information of Black female tobacco stemmers union leaders that the film honors and the segregation they faced at the American Tobacco Company warehouse in Virginia. Moreover, Virginia and Puerto Rico are ‘commonwealths,’ though Puerto Rico remains a non-incorporated territory (a euphemism to an arcane form of colonialism). Through the film’s interrelated histories, there is a linkage of the perverse politics of patriarchy, imperialism, colonialism or coloniality, and racial capitalism that all depend on disproportionately extracting more labor out of racialized and gendered bodies. At the same time, the film eclipses these processes through a powerful foregrounding of Blackness, Brownness, Ritual and Femininity, and the indisputable power of these celebrated linkages. As Luisa Capetillo stated in Ensayos Libertarios³:

“La organización [social] es el único medio defensivo contra el Sistema actual. Es el único medio para combatir las injusticias que se nos cometen contra todos los que producen”.

Carlos Rivera Santana (CRS): You both share a fascinating artistic trajectory, transiting between dance, performance, art, theater, and more. Yet perhaps a good entry point for this conversation could be to focus on your individual trajectories leading to the video art/performance film “Entre Puerto Rico y Richmond: Women in Resistance Shall Not be Moved.” I am particularly interested in how you both arrive at this powerful project as co-creators.

Alicia Díaz (AD): I come from a family of artists. My mother, Alma Concepción, was a dancer with Ballet de San Juan in Puerto Rico. She was a student of Gilda Navarra, director of Taller de Histriones and co-founder of Ballets de San Juan with Ana García. So I grew up in that world—Gilda was my godmother. I insisted I wanted to dance since I was three. So when my mother opened a dance studio in Río Piedras downstairs from where we lived, she opened a class for three-year-old’s and up. So literally I have been dancing my entire life.

I migrated when I was twelve from San Juan to Princeton, New Jersey, where my father, Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, was teaching at Princeton University. Dance became my anchor in that traumatic experience of migration. I didn't speak English, I had never encountered questions of my own racial identity in Puerto Rico and that was at the forefront when I came to Princeton, where I was the only Latina in a very segregated school. So all these questions of identity were at the forefront, without a language to be able to articulate it. Dance became the place where I could connect with myself, where I could negotiate a sense of who I am in this nonverbal way. It was also the place of being “othered.” I was neither white nor Black. So what do you do with a body like mine? I was in student dance companies at the Princeton Ballet at the time—how do you cast this brown body that doesn't fit into the stories that are being told the1980s and 90s?

I also began teaching very early on with my mother. She had a volunteer dance program called Taller de Danza for about 30 years in Trenton, NJ, with the Puerto Rican community where we lived. Dancing also connected me with education. That early training wasn't about creating curriculum, it was about creating community through dance and movement. That's at the core of my understanding of dance as an art form.

When I graduated from high school, I auditioned and was accepted in the Scholarship Program of The Ailey School, the school of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. That was my entry point to a more pre-professional and then professional level in the Black dance community. The experience that Ailey provides for aspiring young dancers was another entry point into thinking about dance, not only through very rigorous technical work, but also what stories do we tell through dance? And there are stories that need to be told that if we don't tell them ourselves, no one will tell them, or they will be told through stereotypes.

CRS: Embodied stories, which sounds like an interesting intersection between performance art and contemporary art. How did these stereotypes affect you in that context?

AD: I was really invested in my understanding of art in that context, while at the same time I was the Other. I was, again, not Black, like the majority of my peers, so all these questions of what it means to be Puerto Rican in this context, a light brown-skinned Puerto Rican in this context, were very present for me. And even in this wonderful world that is inclusive of stories that are not told, what stories of my own heritage, and my own lineage, and my own conditions, am I not able to explore here? I always have this dance with the Other. Being on the margins is a place that I'm very familiar with.

I continued to dance in college. Eventually my parents said, “We support you as an artist, but you have to go to college.” So I continued thinking about anthropology and dance. I did my senior thesis on dance in the Puerto Rican community in New York. So these ideas of oral histories and activating them through movement were already part of what I was thinking as I was completing college.

I met Patricia at Henry Street Settlement in New York City, where we were working with the Urban Youth Theater Ensemble—a program offering young aspiring actors, writers and musicians the opportunity to dive into the world of theater. Our initial connection was through theater director José Joaquín García, who was with Pregones. We were both working with José in Henry Street Settlement and we met doing this really intense community work with youth through the arts in the Lower East Side.

CRS: That is a great entry point for Patricia to tell us about her journey leading up to meeting Alicia.

Patricia Herrera (PH): Yes, I'll go backwards from there. So we met in Henry Street Settlement. I had just graduated from Dartmouth College, which, to a city girl like myself, is in the middle of nowhere in New Hampshire. But my interest in theater came there. I literally was in an English writing seminar and the writing consultant said, “Would you audition for my play?” I was like, “I have no experience with theater or anything.” And he said, “It doesn't matter, I just want you to audition.” And I did. I got the part and from that moment on, I got the theater bug. Just the idea of being on stage and being able to be somebody else—I don't think I ever stepped outside of myself. So at that moment, I remember the possibilities of what theater can do and what you can make with theater—if you can just imagine being somebody else, imagine the possibilities.

In 1992, my first year at Dartmouth, I had not experienced the racial tensions yet. I think we were still in our first or second week of the semester, so I was just beginning to kind of settle in. It was in New Hampshire where I became politically a Latina, because I had never identified myself as being Latina. I grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and everyone looked like me! I grew up in a Caribbean neighborhood. I didn't have to say, “I'm Latina.” But I quickly realized how important it was because there were so few of us at that time—there were only 3% Latinos at Dartmouth. It was a small community. That really got me into connecting with other Chicanos there. I would say that I learned my “Boricuaness” in New York and my “Chicanxness” in college.

My mom always talks about how she came here as an immigrant. Both of my parents are from Ecuador. In fact, they came to New York City for their honeymoon, and they never left, so the joke is that they're still in their honeymoon. If you have a child here in the U.S,, then they automatically get citizenship, and I was then the child who gave them their citizenship. My mom talks about how the people who really supported her and made her feel at home were predominantly Puerto Ricans in Brooklyn. She always says she cooks like a Boricua because her friends taught her how to cook. I think that's why I gravitate to Nuyorican culture. My work is on Nuyorican culture and I feel very much connected to that. But ancestrally, my parents are from Ecuador. I have an Afro-Ecuadorian father and my mom is white Ecuadorian of Indigenous descent. But the politics of identity really didn't come to me ‘til I was in college, where I had to articulate who I was and where I came from.

I took Chicano studies classes and was very much influenced and shaped by Diana Taylor's work. She was a professor there and she taught Latinx classes. I began to think about how I could use theater to bring in who I am or my experiences into that process. At the time, the students had just founded Nuestras Voces, a Latino student theater group. In my second year, a senior passed it on to me to direct the organization. I did not have any experience, but that's okay: ¡Ahí me metí en el teatro! All of a sudden I was directing Cherríe Moraga’s plays and Migdalia Cruz’s plays without ever having taken a directing or acting class. I just knew that these were stories that needed to be told and put on stage. So I really kind of dove into theater blindly, but very curious.

CRS: What were you majoring in at Dartmouth College?

PH: I was going to be a Biomedical Sciences major. I was a science student throughout my whole career. While I was doing theater, I was still doing lab work. The directors would be like, “What are you doing?” And I’m like, “I have to do my lab work.” It wasn't until junior year when I had the opportunity to study abroad in London that I decided, “Why am I trying to split myself into two people?” The desire to be a doctor was coming from Mami and Papi, who wanted me to have a good profession and a good job. I finally affirmed at the end of my junior year that I wanted to do theater, which of course blew my parents away. They were really upset, “Why are we sending you to college? What are you doing with your life? What is that anyway? I have no idea what you’re doing.” But it really opened up many possibilities for me because it forced me to be like, “How will I pursue this?” As a child of immigrant parents, education was the only way around having a better life.

And the same way that you're talking about Alicia, it’s like, “Well, I have to continue going to school.” So los que me dieron la beca was the CUNY Graduate Theater Center and I just embarked on that. How I got to Henry Street Settlement was that my senior year I was determined to continue the route of exploring what Latino theater means. Dartmouth had an opportunity for seniors, like a gap year, where you could apply for funding to study or intern with somebody. I had proposed to apprentice with three Latina playwrights: Carmen Rivera, Migdalia Cruz, and Dolores Prida. They gave me funding for the year to do that. So I deferred graduate school and did these two apprenticeships. But the money wasn't going to last long, so I started looking into other places and Henry Street Settlement came up as a possibility for me to work there. So while I was apprenticing, I was working at the Henry Street Settlement. I was the coordinator for Urban Theater, which was a great connection because Carmen Rivera also taught playwriting at Henry Street Settlement, and Migdalia Cruz grew up in the Lower East Side. So there were a lot of interesting connections that really helped me to think about how we create culture through the arts. There’s something about the creation of language, the production of sound and music—how that happens within the experience of a particular space. And it was clear that these different artists from the Lower East Side were creating their own culture through their art. And that was exciting to me. José is one of these people; Alicia is one of these people. They're bringing their culture and their familial knowledge into the art-making practice. Which for me was really eye opening. The youth’s entry point was very different. They were adding a different language into the mix—rapping, beatboxing, and breakdancing became part of this bigger picture, which is what also brought us together, like “Ooh, wow, we're creating new things, creating other possibilities.”

AD: I love hearing that story all in one sitting and this forgotten science world of yours—that’s why you're good at math! [laughs].

CRS: I was also pleasantly shaken by the difference, yet sameness of both of your experiences. How they are, como, casi respondiendo lo mismo, but at the same time, necessarily unalike. It's basically coming from different perspectives, but complementing each other. From performance and dance to theater experiences, dealing with the politics of identity, the ways in which you both found a medium and a language that was not logocentric or just the dominant/traditional way of understanding how we should express ourselves. Even within that embodied way of expressing the politics of identity—when one goes from one place to another—it's urgent to locate oneself.

Alicia, you were talking about something that stayed with me: that you understand dance as community building. And Patricia, it’s so interesting the way you built community through theater and processed otherness through imagining yourself as other when you were first on the stage. At the same time, you were both telling and creating more stories using overlooked representations in narratives, movement, etc.—not the mainstream or canonical way of creating theater or performing dance. Sometimes we don't see ourselves represented. It's not that the stories are not there, it's just not dominant. They’re just not easily accessible, particularly in contexts like a university. Building community is the healthiest way to thrive in contexts where underrepresentation seeks to invisibilize us. I can see a common thread in your affirmation of creating work collaboratively—your stance that works like “Entre Richmond y Puerto Rico…” have co-creators and collaborators, and not defined hierarchical roles like director, producer, writer, etc. Did this start with the Henry Street Settlement project?

AD: Yes, Henry Street Settlement is where we, for the first time, [in the 90s] collaborated with each other. With José García as mentor for both of us. For me, he was a crucial person in understanding what the possibilities of performance could provide us. He helped us understand theater as a transformational experience in community and how you can work with youth—this demand for excellence that was really eye opening to me. No matter the circumstances, no matter the conditions that you're working in, this demand for excellence was transformational in the quality of all the creativity that came out of that. Then there was a play that Patricia did the dramaturgy and direction for, “A Woman Who Outshone the Sun” [by Lucía Zenteno], within the work that we were doing at Henry Street and with Urban Youth Theater. And I feel that's where I was working with you, Patricia. Like there was a new way of working together, creatively, through that play, which is a beautiful story of struggle, hope, and strategizing of a community for a future and an environmental issue—like all sorts of ways in which I could look at that experience now that I wasn't as aware [of] then. So in these ideas of collaboration, the accumulation of years and experiences is really important. It doesn't have to happen, but in this case it did: a friendship developed and deeply integrated into our lives. Our lives have been connected in very deep ways. We’ve been in each other's births of our children. That doesn't have to happen for a successful collaboration, but it is present in this one.

PH: There's a couple of things that you're reminding me of. José was directing and was the artistic director of the Urban Youth Theatre Ensemble. Something beautiful that I learned from José is that no matter what, everyone has a creative contribution to give. As directors and mentors, we have—or at least that's what I feel José taught me—we have the ability to make everyone shine, regardless of where they are in their creative process. That level of artistry, it's a skill to do that. That was something that I feel he definitely passed on to everyone he taught. It's easy to say, “I'm going to work with youth.” But to commit to working and creating original work with them is a whole different type of work. That is what inspired us to found our theater company, Rubí Theater Company. Alicia, Jose, Jennifer Fleming, and Amarelys Pérez were part of that. We were committed to working with youth in creating original theater and dance pieces, and really opened the doors for them to just do what they brought to the table. We produced several original plays that were created by youth, and we also created pieces inspired by Martín Espada’s poetry that then were turned into dance/theater pieces incorporating hip-hop elements.

AD: That was with “Imagine the Angels of Bread.”⁴

CRS: That’s a beautiful poem. This is so informative because, in that context, the work that you both did for Entre Richmond y Puerto Rico… makes a lot of sense. Obviously, there is a clear, established connection that goes beyond a working relationship. I like the word “vínculo” en español: hay un vínculo ya establecido. The work is clearly intentional, that is seen in the community that participated in the production, the co-creators, as you intentionally name them. So there is a radically collaborative approach to creating work, community, and culture, as you both mentioned in the beginning.

Given the overlooked figures of Luisa Capetillo and Dominga Becerril, despite their visionary politics in Puerto Rico and globally, what was the creative process to represent these figures as protagonists in the film? You mentioned that the film was co-created in the middle of the pandemia in the midst of the BLM and George Floyd movement. There are even flyers in the film referencing George Floyd protests. How did that manifest in the creative process when bridging the gap between two historical figures, the space of the American Tobacco Company warehouse (all referring to the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century), and contemporary issues such as the BLM movement?

PH: One of the things that was done by two of our co-creators, Christine Wyatt and Cristina Leoni-Osion, was to create values and agreements for the group. The question was also posed to all of us, “What are you doing to contribute to Black liberation?” This was important because the film crew were not people of color. They had no connections with us, but they asked them that question. Which is a very challenging question if that's not the space you're coming from. Many of us went often, if not daily, to the BLM protests in Monument Avenue in Richmond where Robert E. Lee’s statue eventually was removed. But to think that from out of ruins there is beauty, and that beauty can grow, that brings a sense of joy and freedom. That is something that we talked about: “Wow, we’re in the middle of challenging times, but we're also in the middle of this creative project.” It’s like ecstasy and pain at the same time. And I must say, it's reminding me that the coupling of emotions, two historical figures, Richmond and Puerto Rico, is not harmonious whatsoever. Luisa Capetillo is an anarchist, Dominga is a nationalist, these two philosophies do not necessarily fit nicely together. Even thinking about all of our co-creators, not all of them were people of color. We had a Black woman who was questioning, “Well, why am I embodying an Afro-Puerto Rican woman? What does that mean? What does it mean to me? And how do you reconcile those differences?” In the case of Cristina Leoni-Osion, her family were Italian immigrants who worked in a tobacco company. She had a history without even knowing that linking histories existed with her family. She was like, “How do I create from this space, knowing very well that my ancestors also had a similar experience in a place like this?” This creative process is about inciting historical imagination. What does it mean to bring different historical figures from different periods, who wouldn't necessarily be on the same pathways, together? What we realized is that these kinds of couplings—history, political ideas, personal experiences, countries—bring us to notions of coalition building, and what does that show, and how do we take those strategies of coalition building into our present moment for justice and equity?

AD: That brings me back because we didn't talk that much about Luisa and Dominga and their work. Christine and Cristina didn't know these figures either. Patricia gave them biographical notes on Luisa Capetillo and Dominga Becerril, all of the writings of Luisa, the interview given to Claridad newspaper, etc. That was our research and the materials we collected for them to also investigate these historical figures, to be able to embody them.

I remember Cristina saying, “How can we be making a work based on Luisa Capetillo and all that she stands for and her ideas, and not think about how we're making the work in relation to all those political positions?” Anarcho-syndicalism, radical feminism, anti-colonialism, self-determination, and more. That was really interesting, because it's not just the embodying of the character, but it entails a meaningful engagement with the material, with the thinking, the doing, the action of the women in the making of a political imagination and coming together, alive, in the process.

CRS: That is so powerful, and the idea of unforeseen connections and relationships, perhaps non-linear relationships. Even Richmond (rich world) and Puerto Rico (rich port) have an almost homonym connection, perhaps to name or target a place for the purposes of extraction for profit which can define colonialism. In the presentation of the film at the Muscarelle Museum at William and Mary, we discussed how the work is at the intersection of a few artistic genres— dance, theater, literature, video art, visual art, and performance art—and how it revisits the idea of genre and tries to even implode categorizations of genres. It’s not really a film that has a traditional narrative; it's not solely a dance performance; it's not only a film that depicts a theater play; it's not a purely abstract video art piece in the tradition of the 1930s surrealist movement. I'm thinking that it’s in the path of the contemporary, a perpetual present.

Thinking of that, what are your thoughts of these new emerging mediums, artists, new ways of doing work and new cultures, and how do you see your work in relation to these new landscapes of creativity? Broadly, I am curious about both of your reflections on the future of culture and art.

AD: That’s a big question Carlos! (laughs)

PH: Sure! (laughs). We've created a workshop entitled “Using The Arts For Social Change,” which encourages participants to bring their personal history and connect with other people. We ask participants to bring three objects that express who they are. They get a chance to share an object and then create a piece about their object, but in relationship to other people who have come to the workshops and share their objects as well. At the end of the day, what we've done is create a community archive of people's personal objects. At the same time, we've created a vocabulary in which people are connecting their history with other people! Very contrary to how we think about history traditionally. To think about future work, it’s more related to how we create a sense of presence today, and bring light to people's histories, experiences, and stories, and make it important—because they matter! I think part of what's so violent about being in academia is that you're supposed to not be in your story and not be in your body, and you study and examine other people's stories and bodies. The work that I feel is really urgent is how do you connect your story to these histories? How do we find ways of connecting, relating, building coalitions? I'm also thinking about the dance piece “We Must Say Her Name” and how our youth or just people in general are disconnected from that history because it's painful! Because sometimes you don't want to see it! How do you make a history that you don't want to see—and that's hard to see in some ways—aesthetically pleasing so that you can take it, understand it, digest it, and then let it sit with you for a while?

AD: You know, I think about the idea of facilitating that visibilization process through co-creation and collaboration. We're both doing that very much in our teaching (we co-teach courses), as well as in our artistic practices. How do we move away from the single authorship, and so many other issues with academia that Patricia was thinking about before, to actually nurturing collaboration? It's about how you collaborate to co-create something new. Many of the assignments we give our students require collaboration. Yes, you can do things on your own as well, but that’s not what is dominant in our approach. And I think that is part of our future. The future is collaboration.

Footnotes

¹ Special thanks to the William & Mary Hispanic Studies Program and the C. Sharon Philpott and Marta Perez (SPMP) Faculty-Student Research Endowment.

² Best Experimental Film at the International Puerto Rican Heritage Film Festival, Vanguard Award for Outstanding Experimental Film at The Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, among others.

³ Ensayos Libertarios (edited by Norma del Valle Ferrer).

⁴ Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982-2002 by Martín Espada. Recipient of the 2021 National Book Award.

Carlos Rivera Santana is an assistant professor of Hispanic Studies at the College of William & Mary. Rivera Santana is a Latin American/Caribbean cultural studies scholar specializing in Indigenous studies, visual culture and decolonial theories. He is the author of the book, Archaeology of Colonisation: From Aesthetics to Biopolitics and is currently working on a second book with renowned artist Diógenes Ballester entitled Puerto Rican Visual Arts and its Decolonial Diasporic Character: An Arteologist Approach, signed with Centro Press—among other peer-review publications and interviews with other LatinX artists.

Whitney Ledesma is completing a BA in Latin American Studies with a minor in Psychology at the College of William & Mary. She is a listener, artist, and aspiring holistic therapist/ community builder dedicated to collective movement toward decolonial love and liberation.

Malvika Shrimali is studying Hispanic Studies and Environmental Science at the College of William and Mary. Their focus lies in environmental journalism and collaboration with Indigenous communities.

Alicia Díaz, as a Puerto Rican contemporary dance artist in the diaspora, Díaz's choreographic work speaks to issues of memory and identity, migration, colonialism, and the legacy of slavery. Her decolonizing and inclusive artistic and pedagogical approaches are rooted in the premise that the body is a site of knowledge. She is committed to engaging dance as a tool for social justice through acts of co-creation and collaboration, creating works for concert dance, museums, film, and site-specific locations. Trained in modern dance at The Ailey School of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and later in postmodern dance at Movement Research in New York City, Alicia has performed professionally nationally and internationally with Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Andanza: Puerto Rican Contemporary Dance Company, Donald Byrd/The Group, Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre, Maida Withers Dance Construction Company, numerous independent choreographers including Marion Ramírez and Sally Silvers, as well as en la brega dance company, co-directed with Esther Ñequi González, and Agua Dulce Dance Theater, co-directed with Matthew Thornton. For more information, visit: https://aliciadiazmfa.com/

Patricia Herrera, as a community-engaged educator, scholar, and artist, Dr. Herrera uses the arts to explore ways of producing radical imaginings of resilience, hope, futurity, and justice. She is the author of Nuyorican Feminist Performances: From the Café to Hip Hop Theater (University of Michigan Press). Since 2011 Patricia has engaged with the city of Richmond on a community-based public history project entitled Civil Rights and Education in Richmond, Virginia: A Documentary Theater Project, which has led to the creation of a digital archive The Fight for Knowledge, as well as three community exhibitions at The Valentine Museum: Made in Church Hill (2015), Nuestras Historias: Latinos in Richmond (2017) and Voices from Richmond’s Hidden Epidemic(2019–2020) and Through it All: Families Moving Richmond (2021) at GRTC’s Transit Museum. For more information, visit: https://www.drpatriciaherrera.com/

Entre Puerto Rico y Richmond: A Conversation on Embodied Decolonial Creation with Alicia Díaz & Patricia Herrera

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Entre Puerto Rico y Richmond: A Conversation on Embodied Decolonial Creation with Alicia Díaz & Patricia Herrera

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