Facing Pressures: Celebrating Beauty that Nourishes

Daniel Lind-Ramos, Baño de María (2022): enamel on wood, dried palm branches, lacquered coconuts, tambourines, buckets, trumpets, and a FEMA tarp. On view in Into the Time Horizon at the Nevada Museum of Art. Photo credit TK.

During a lunch break at the Nevada Museum of Art's Art + Environment Summit: Under Pressure, I slipped away to walk through Into the Time Horizon, the museum's multi-themed exhibition. I did not expect to find Daniel Lind-Ramos's Baño de María waiting for me there.

The assemblage was first shown at Sarasota Art Museum in the spring of 2022. Standing in front of it in Reno, I found myself reconnecting with another María, the hurricane that swept through my Puerto Rican family within a year of my move to the desert. Lind-Ramos's work carries me back to the island, back to dreaming in blue during my grandmother's visits: her pale-blue housedress, my sky-blue T-shirt with Puerto Rican activist Óscar López Rivera's face on it, and the rosary she prayed every day so that I would land a full-time academic job.

The assemblage reminds me of my grandfather, too. He also worked with found objects and the scraps storms left behind, building the refuges of my childhood: casitas of palm leaves and wood, one of them wired for electricity so it would match the house. The sanctuary Puerto Rico had been for me as a child changed with every hurricane that came and went, and with the storms of silence I am still working to break. The silences my grandmother asked me to keep mirror the ones spreading now through the fear and uncertainty of those of us grappling with censorship.

I had been talking about this with Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón, president of the National Women's Studies Association and editor of Por Qué Estamos Aquí. I cite that conversation because it explains what happened next. Caught up in the emotions of censorship, safety, and nostalgia, I was pulled out of my trance by a docent asking me to take off my backpack.

Censorship and pacing: that is the weight we carry, Pabón-Colón and I had agreed. Among boricuas, among Latinx people, and among people of color more broadly, we contend with institutions and disciplines built to keep our histories and archive our stories. And like the docent protecting what is on display, our senior colleagues and our systems of higher learning ask us to store what we carry, to minimize it, to manage our vulnerable hunger for truth, so that what exists can remain.

“How many of us crown ourselves with silent storms, hoping our silence will save the movement?”

The docent told me about the storage closets. I told her I needed the bag for notes. As she lifted her wrist to radio the others, I thought: in this public place where we struggle to speak, where our numbers are counted as proof of progress, why else would a femme be wearing a backpack? I did not say it out loud. Talking about my menstrual cycle is painful. Standing in front of María, in front of Yemayá, I was grappling with what it means to know that my health requires removing the vehicle of parenthood from me at the end of May.

I struggle with what that means alongside the censorship of this moment, the censorship that institutions, and even some artists, ask of us so that what exists can remain. But as I count the storms above María's head, adorning her like a crown, I wonder how many of us crown ourselves with silent storms, hoping, as Dolores Huerta once did, that our silence will save the movement. That our self-censorship will let others rebuild and take our place.

Asking that, I think of the Lolita Lebrón pin I was wearing, and I remember, with some whimsy, the conversation it sparked. A volunteer in a streaming room at the summit asked who she was, and I named her. I told the volunteer that Lebrón was funny: funny in the stories she told, funny in how accessible she was. On the first night I met her, I was asked to read a poem, so I wrote one in the moment and revised it later. An invitation to speak with purpose, unplanned and unrehearsed. A disruption, much like my dialogue with Baño de María, and a reminder that silence buys me a tomorrow, and that after so many tomorrows, I have learned it dishonors what my grandmother was really praying for. It disrespects the freedom and the sanctuary my grandfather gave me.

Potatoes pulled from a campus garden bed built on students' food scraps: the earth the essay returns to, feeding itself. Photo by Erika Abad.

The freedom and sanctuary to read. To read the books the neighbor said were bad for me. To read rows of knitting, alternating left and right, because of the one time I could not remember where I first learned. To read the sound of bacon fat crackling for mofongo. To read the difference between the árboles (limón dulce, quenepa, limón) and the palos de plátano my grandfather multiplied in the abandoned lot next door so that his neighbors and his family could eat.

And in that freedom, I come back to words. With the sanctuary of their cariño, I come back to the earth. To the words in books others have trusted me to review. To the earth made of my students' food scraps, feeding one another. And between the words and the earth, I hope to make out the languages of Baño de María, and what her visit to northern Nevada tells me about a desert struggling to remember she was an ocean. An ocean of thoughts and dreams worth hearing. And here's hoping that, amid everything we work to preserve, the suffocating silence of censorship isn't one of them.