The Bronx is Burnt: Imaging (Post)-Nuyorican Urban Space in the 1980s

This essay comes from the opening chapter of my dissertation project entitled Beyond Borinquen: The Afterlives of Puerto Rican Nationalism in Diaspora, 1980 to the Present. As the opening chapter of the dissertation, it... [ view full abstract ]

This essay comes from the opening chapter of my dissertation project entitled Beyond Borinquen: The Afterlives of Puerto Rican Nationalism in Diaspora, 1980 to the Present. As the opening chapter of the dissertation, it focuses on the Puerto Rican communities of the Bronx during the 1980s through an analysis of the photographic archive of Los Seis del Sur. A collective of six Nuyorican photographers from the South Bronx, Los Seis individually photographed the South Bronx at a time when popular images of the borough exoticized its urban decay and racialized criminality as a symbolic warning of the dangers of the post-industrial U.S. inner city. Their photographs offer an insight into the cultural and communal formations of Puerto Ricans in the Bronx at an understudied historical conjuncture in both Puerto Rican and Latina/o Studies. As such, this chapter endeavors to historicize the place of the Bronx in the discourse of Puerto Rican migration to and movement within New York City. It takes the vernacular photographic practices of Los Seis as a method for encapsulating the daily life of Puerto Rican subjects at a time when their demographic presence in the city began to wane and the nationalist movements that characterized the 1970s had fractured. I am interested in how these photographers came to frame their subjects and the urban space of the city, how the photographs themselves circulated within the social and familial worlds of Puerto Ricans at the time, and how we read these materials in relation to the tropes of resistance and opposition that have defined the discourses of culture in Latina/o Studies. Likewise, I endeavor to probe the possibilities that these images open up in theorizing a Puerto Rican aesthetics that can interrogate and perhaps move from the category of the Nuyorican.