Rican-Feminism, Performing Womxn & Beyond: An Interview with Dr. Jessica Pabón-Colón
Dr. Jessica Pabón-Colón speaking at PRSA in her role as Secretary.
Puerto Rican feminist scholar Dr. Jessica N. Pabón-Colón (she/ella) is a force to be reckoned with in academia. After the release of Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora in 2018, Dr. Pabón-Colón’s voice has made an impact in Hip-Hop and performance studies, especially for womxn graffiti artists. In addition, she has used her knowledge and ethnology to cultivate strong interest and movements in support of feminists and Puerto Ricans, both on the island and in the diaspora.
In her current role as Associate Professor at SUNY New Paltz, her teaching and research areas include Performance Studies & Theory; Black and Latina/o/x Performance and Visual Culture Studies; Women of Color Feminisms; and LGBT & Queer Studies.
Amidst the pandemic lockdown, Pabón-Colón took a break from her writings and lectures and focused on sewing masks for her communities near and far, along with mutual aid in her community. In the spirit of her recent projects, Dr. Pabón-Colón participated in several community conferences and Puerto Rican-focused events. Our conversation centered around her current project, feminist and Puerto Rican activist groups, the power of womxn in academia, and why making space for Rican feminists and performing womxn is so necessary. She also calls on readers to contribute to one of her many projects: Rican Feminisms.*
*For more information, please read until the end of the interview.
After embarking on a 15-year journey of writing Graffiti Girlz, you're now working on a book called Performing Beyond. Is it still in the works and how does it differ from your previous book?
So the book project—now it's called Diasporican… I'm still focusing on the same idea of being beyond binaries imposed by colonialism. Each chapter is an investigation of the binaries in my lived experience that are imposed upon me. I'm just always trying to [find] my place. But I mix that self-exploration work with performance analysis. The book opens with Mariposa’s poem “Ode to the Diasporican” and a deep analysis of her video. It's kind of amazing! She wrote it specific to her Nuyorican experience, but she called it Diasporican. So I'm still mining that performance site, but it sets up the whole book. I'm thinking about “performance of everyday life” in terms of something between an auto-ethnography and a performance ethnography. I haven't really figured that out yet, but it's wildly experimental. I'm just trying to find some common ground and understanding around the limitations of the boxes that we’re put in as Puerto Rican subjects, and how performance, broadly speaking, helps us to navigate. Instead of trying to move towards whiteness or blackness—to just reject binaries altogether. Which, of course, is hard.
For this book project, I'm thinking along the lines of adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, where it's more focused on the quality of a small conversation, a small group, a small community, then grows organically versus trying to reach everybody all at once.
What have you learned throughout this process compared to the process of writing Graffiti Girlz?
In 2003, I wrote this paper, it was my first graduate conference. I was 21, a baby academic. I presented this paper called “On Being A White Woman of Color.” I was trying to understand how I fit into the term women of color in my white skin, if there is space for me in this coalition term, when I move through the world with white privilege.
I presented the paper and was quickly put in my place and told that because I was white, I shouldn't be writing about women of color feminisms, that I had no place and didn't understand the struggle. Now that I'm a mid-career scholar, whatever that means, I understand that you don't do that. You're generous with your co-panelists. Also, with graduate students, be kind, be gentle.
I came from a pretty rigorous program. I was being taught by people like Laura Briggs, Miranda Joseph, Sandy Soto, who guided me along the paper and presentation writing process, but I was not prepared to be shut down in that way and it just jacked me up. I didn't return to that project until Graffiti Grrlz was completed.
Now, of course, having done so much more reading, writing, living, experiencing, I have very different approaches to thinking about the questions I posed in that presentation. I reflected on my shifts in thinking in a 2019 essay for Latina Outsiders: Remaking Latina Identity, edited by Grisel Y. Acosta.
So now I'm five years into engaging Puerto Rican studies specifically.
Dr. Jessica Pabón-Colón and her longtime mentor, Laura Briggs, at Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA)
I started writing about motherhood and how everybody was trying to colonize my child's body. I was thinking about what it meant to be an anti-colonial Puerto Rican, white-bodied queer mom, trying to raise this child in a way that he's in touch with his culture and his ancestry, feels free to express [themselves] in terms of gender, and eventually, we'll get to sexuality. [Diasporican] took off from there. Then Hurricane Maria happened. Through Twitter, I was able to tap into a network of other Puerto Rican scholars, which was a thing that I had never tried to do explicitly, because in my head, I got kicked out. That was the narrative I told myself, the one that held me back from exploring my own identity.
You narrated a roundtable as a chair at the 2022 Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA) conference on that very topic of Rican futures, what topics did you learn about in this conference?
As a conference attendee I chose panels that were investigating minoritized identities within Puerto Rican studies, and specifically diasporican experiences. We’re all trying to figure out who we are when we're living in the belly of empire. We're settlers here, but we're also displaced from our land and these are not complications I was thinking about 20 years ago.
Speaking to the theme of Morivivi (conference schedule and poem) and how to activate feminist futures for my roundtable, I just gave panelists five prompts—tell me how Rican feminism shows up in your work. It was so good, exactly what I wanted it to be. So many people showed up to the roundtable. I was so nervous to present stuff that has to do with my ethnicity, but the world has changed. I feel like we're not so reliant on limiting ideas of authenticity that don't take into consideration the complexity of Puerto Rican identity.
One person spoke about how her Rican feminism is really about uplifting hidden histories of Puerto Rican, diasporic life. She's specifically talking about how Rican-ness shows up in California. Another was talking about the notion of contested identity. She recently moved to Canada, where there's a lot of discourse about indigeneity. Her daughter's asking, “Are we indigenous?” And she wants to think about the politics of claiming [her] indigeneity as a diasporican even though [she] knows that [her] ancestors were Taíno. Another was talking about being queer, Afro-boricua, and what that meant for entering Rican spaces. Because of her queerness and her blackness, she felt like she was never Puerto Rican enough. The last one, Jade, I can't wait for her contribution to come to life. She does bomba and starts off saying, “When I think about Rican feminisms,” she shared, “I think about my abuela getting impatient with my machete skills, and just taking it from me and harvesting whatever it was that she was harvesting.” I was like, yes, I want abuelas with machetes in my book, that is 100% what I want.
On the topic of your panel Rican Feminisms—it kind of came out of your involvement in community fundraising for Feminists for Puerto Rico, which came out of Hurricane Maria and fundraising for that. You created this panel with the topic of Gathering to Feel Our Presence to Claim Our Power. Can you explain the significance of that? What is Rican Feminisms?
It was a panel at the National Women's Studies Association conference. At the conference, there is no Puerto Rican studies group and there are very few visible Rican feminist scholars; I’m working to change that. I thought of the roundtables as a kind of “tour” to let people know about this project, but also to identify people who could be contributors. I want it to be an edited anthology that is experimental and really sort of a mash up methodology. Reflecting on Graffiti Grrlz, it seems that's my thing, right? I'm not a disciplinarian. Some parts of the anthology will be traditional research essays, but I also want recipes in there, manifestos, and poems. I want to introduce the projects that people who identify as Rican feminists are working on and to introduce that complexity. The different intersections in terms of our privileges and our oppressions as Rican feminists in relationship to the topics that we choose as scholars.
Rican Feminisms comes out of my desire to find a place within feminist thinking for us [Puerto Ricans]. To think about the ways that Rican Feminism is already in conversation with Black feminism, in conversation with Latin American-Caribbean feminism broadly. But to sort of feel the edges of what it is because it's not static. I'm not trying to give a definition of Rican Feminism, I want to show how people sort of engage it in their own lives, in their creative work, in their kitchen, on the dance floor, wherever they see it happening. I now have Aurora Levins Morales committed to contributing to Rican Feminisms, which is crazy to me because I value her perspective so much. It's an honor.
Rican Feminisms panel at National Women's Studies Association (NWSA); (left to right) Zorimar Rivera Montes, Aurora Santiago Ortiz, Dr. Jessica Pabón-Colón, Karrieann Soto Vega
The NWSA conference highlighting the work of Rican feminist, Aurora Levins Morales
We continue to see many from Puerto Rican and Diasporican organizations today and the Caribbean at large; are there any activists or organizations you admire for their work and active involvement?
We want to be on the island and be part of the queer feminist revolution that's happening there in the hands of organizations like Colectivo Moriviví, or La Cole, they're doing such good work.
I was teaching students about neoliberalism and we gave the example of privatizing power in Puerto Rico, and LUMA, Ricky Renuncia. Those were protests led by queer feminists, they're doing real revolutionary work down there. What's our place up here? How do we participate and feel the rage with them, even though we're apart from them?
CENTRO [Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College] has this really cool project right now bridging the divide between the archipelago and the continental U.S. CENTRO just had a feminist takeover of its own. So did the Puerto Rican Studies Association. I really think we're in this moment, the perfect time for these kinds of projects.
There's so much critical scholarship on Nuyorican and Diasporican topics on visual art through decolonization. It’s been largely explored within your field, but largely unknown because it's in academia. How would you like to see it become more accessible? How would you like to see the things that already exist come into fruition and come into light for people that don't know about it?
That's why I think art is so important. That's why I focus on creative and different ways of communicating.
When I think about making [my work] accessible to somebody like my mom, if we had some contribution that had to do with everyday practices of “Santeria”, for example, she might be interested and engage. There are ways of communicating that I think bring people in. And, of course, you can't put a performance visually into a book, but you can write about it in a way that allows people to engage. There's a lot of exciting stuff that people are doing that we just don't have access to.
Do feminists in the archipelago have access to Rican feminists that live in the diaspora? What are the barriers? A huge one is language. A lot of Puerto Rican subjects in the diaspora don't have the kind of historical background to understand colonization and what that really has done to our community. I know that because I am teaching it to myself now and I have a PhD! I had to access so many levels of higher education, to then dive into the literature. Of course, it's all English language literature, so there's a whole body of [Spanish-language literature] that I have access to because my fluency in Spanish is a work in progress. It would take me so long to get through to read and understand that it becomes a barrier. I want the anthology to help us find pathways to communicate with each other outside of not just academia, but institutions in general.
I want to make sure that the anthology exists both in English and Spanish somehow. I want to create something that we can then share with our community. One of the things I was thinking is sort of like an easy answer, just having a digital open access. In my dream fantasy world to have Rican Feminisms exists in both English and Spanish online and off, and published by a non-academic press.
Moving away from your current project of Diasporican, you are going to be contributing to a catalog for an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum called The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century [formerly named All Eyez on Me: Hip Hop, Style and Contemporary Art]. Are you going to be re-entering on the topic of graffiti? What's your contribution to the exhibition? What do you think of the exhibition?
The original title came from 2Pac’s incarcerated clapback to a woman who he sexually assaulted. A lot of the time when it comes to these important cultural figures you have to believe survivors. So at first, I didn't put two and two together. I was just like, Oh, cool. I'll write an essay for this exhibition catalog, they want to include graffiti. I love that. It's about performances of feminism in hip-hop, and hip-hop graffiti. But before I started writing, when I was doing research on the exhibition and the [2Pac] album I was like, hold on. This album is like a victim blaming clap back and I don't know that I want my name as a feminist scholar attached to an exhibition that is not addressing that difficulty.
I wrote the curators and I said, “Thank you for thinking of me, and for the opportunity, and I want to write this piece. But I also want to talk to you about how you're dealing with the ‘me too’ situation that we've bumped up against.” That was last year. I like to think my intervention was part of the name change for the show.
I made it a point—if my essay is going to be in here, and it's going to be about performances of feminism, I'm going to talk about cultural producers in hip-hop, who identify as women experience and how they use their craft, their art, to speak back, to reclaim power.
I am very much in line with the thought that graffiti is one of the most important global art movements in contemporary life. That was sort of my vibe, we have to talk about graffiti if we're talking about the importance of hip hop, right? We're 50 years in, what have we learned? What do we know now? How is it different than it was before?
You’ve used the term “Graffiteras” [femme graffiti artists], who embrace femininity while performing masculinity. Are there any artists you have seen this profoundly explored other than the ones you mentioned in your book Graffiti Girlz?
There is a beatboxer I met in the city, her name is “Say Wut?!”. I wrote an essay for Signs featuring her and other beatboxers who identify as women, it's called “Writin’, Breakin’, Beatboxin’: Strategically Performing ‘Women’ in Hip-Hop.” I didn't mark this a performance of masculinity at the moment, instead I thought of it as a strategic performance of womanhood in hip-hop.
When you're beatboxing, you're spitting, your face is all distorted, right? So I said, this was an opportunity for them to show the hip-hop community in attendance how to perform “woman” in all these different ways.
So she comes onstage, she's got a mug of tea. It's like the most femme performance I've ever seen in my life at any kind of hip-hop anything, performance wise. She's got one of those [Fascinator hats], and this beautiful dress and giant high heels. All the other beatboxers had shown up in kicks and sneakers and t-shirts.
So she's talking to us and sipping her tea. A lot of us wrote about her because it was just such an interesting [performance]. She started singing, then she'd box really heavy beats, like, nasty, nasty beats. Then she pulls a harmonica out of her cleavage. It's just these very intentional femme performance decisions—like the harmonica did not have to come out of her breast. Then she breaks into her last song, “Feeling Good”. She likes to riff off Nina Simone and change some of the words and the audience is going wild.
The most recent performance I saw was actually about producing masks and the pandemic solo performance artist [Kristina Wong]. So I'm sure what we're looking for is a kind of queered performance of women where the traits of masculinity, the characteristics—not the way we think about [how] mask-presenting is different [from] masculine gestures, and a masculine kind of attitude. And that's what I'm trying to tease apart in that part of the book [Graffiti Grrlz], that these women can be super femme, and at the same time, claim their space, be super confident, aggressive, assertive. All of the sort of stereotypical aspects of Western masculinity.
But when I was in Brazil and Chile. The expectation for how you look, how you act, how you claim space, even the medium that you use—a lot of them are painting. They're doing graffiti, but also painting with a paintbrush. That's not really allowed here when you graffiti, right? If it's not aerosol, it's not graffiti. Purity gets us nowhere. But one of the things I had to do when I got down there was think about femininity because I had been spending so much time thinking about masculinity and how these girls perform masculinity that I had neglected to really think about femininity.
There was something about these graffiteras that was different. And it was this embrace of femininity, which my colleague, Imani Johnson with a phrase she coined “badass femininity.” There are writers who specifically paint in heels and dresses to fuck with gender expectations. To stretch them, to expand them. There's also a celebration of the cute and the beautiful, and the floral and the colorful, and the inviting. A lot of the work had a kind of cartoonish quality, or pastel colors, and that didn't take away from their credibility as writers. It's still feminist masculinity in that they're still dealing with sexual harassment, and in the face of that they are still like, “No, I'm gonna take my space.”
It gets worse than sexual harassment, of course, because you're by yourself a lot of times. It's nighttime, you're vulnerable. And they know that. Bad things happen. But it doesn't stop them. Some of them just change things up. Like, if they have a negative experience they alter how they take public space, but they don't stop. Which I think is really something. So I talk about how they build community, and how they use their art to soften urban landscapes, which is different from what's going on here [in New York]. It's a gender performance that doesn't have to do with what you wear, but sort of how you are in the world. I'm reading these masculine traits in order to sort of push this feminist agenda or this feminist worldview of equity on the wall. Sometimes it comes down to just material questions of who gets what paint? Who gets what spot on the wall? I just focused on how they keep claiming their space, but without returning the toxic components of masculinity that they experience from cis-men.
You have so many projects, where can people find your work?
Before Musk, I was very active on Twitter! I’m still there but the vibe is different. I have my website…That's pretty much it for my public persona. I opened a TikTok but I’m too afraid to do it. I'm afraid to dive in because it's so addictive and I need to be writing.
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Call for contributors: Dr. Jessica Pabón-Colón invites you to contribute to her Rican Feminisms project focusing specifically on Puerto Rican feminist praxis in diaspora and across the archipelago. Artists, activists, and scholars (at all levels, from various kinds of institutions, or no institution) identifying as/with and/or working on/with boricua feminisms, Afro-Rican feminisms, queer rican feminisms, trans Rican feminisms, diaspoRican feminisms, barrio feminisms, indigenous rican feminisms, and other expressions of minoritized Rican identity and practice are strongly encouraged to submit. Click here for more information!
Natalie De Jesus is an independent curator and art researcher of contemporary, modern, and ancient art of the Americas (primarily Latin America and the U.S). In both her professional and personal life, she continues to work towards the promotion and advocacy for diverse narratives within art.
De Jesus currently holds a position as Research Associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art of Ancient Americas. De Jesus has worked at Lisson Gallery, Company Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, ArtBinder and the National 9/11 Museum & Memorial. She graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology with her BA in Art History & Museum Professions and is originally from Bronx, New York.