Natality in Adál Maldonado’s Work (2002)

What does it mean to belong to a community? What are the legal and cultural meanings of citizenship? What is indeed specific to the Puerto Ricans and to the Puerto Rican diaspora in a changing social and geographic landscape? Those seem to be the central questions asked by the exhibit/installation Jíbaro and Blueprints for a Nation. And the answer to those questions is primarily that a community involves the body and the spirit, language and memory. The body is my place in a changing world I share with others. Others participate in making me who I am. Because we live, we must strife. But conflicts are subdued by a sense of belonging to a language or to shared myths and memories. Moreover, collective life is marked by rituals, such as end-of-the-year celebrations or the Promesa de Reyes, rituals which release energy to establishing a new foundation and which perhaps escape colonial control.

Díaz-Quiñones, Arcadio. “Natality in Adál Maldonado’s Work.” Catalog of Two Installations at Lehigh University Art Galleries,15 May-14 July, 2002.