Haciendo Patria: The Puerto Rican Flag in the Art of Juan Sánchez

Puerto Rico is an island adrift in the predominantly postcolonial Caribbean sphere that is its topographic equivalent. Lying between the North Americas and the Nuestras Américas, Puerto Rico epitomizes the historical reality of a "divided nation": nearly one-half of the Puerto Rican population lives on the US mainland.¹ Some scholars have used the phrases "commuter nation" and "translocal nation" to illuminate the transit of bodies on flights between San Juan and cities such as New York, Miami, and Chicago.² These terms—divided nation, commuter nation, translocal nation—affix paradigms of nationality, albeit a transitory nationality, onto the people of this nonsovereign nation. Puerto Rican nationality is thus rendered vis-à-vis the dynamics of Puerto Rican migration and, specifically, migration to the US mainland. As such, Puerto Rican nationality and nationalism operate in relational modes that emphasize the self-positioning and the multiple locations of the Puerto Rican subject within the diaspora. Migratory flow, then, functions as the definitive narrative of nation. As the anthropologist Jorge Duany notes in the title of his 2002 book, Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans are a "nation on the move."³

Just as discussions of the national question are part of daily life on the island, expressions of nationalism are de rigueur in mainland Puerto Rican communities. In New York City, for example, the omnipresence of the Puerto Rican flag is striking given the city's infinitely international population. Puerto Rican flags decorate apartment windows in Brooklyn, hang from car rearview mirrors in Queens, cling to backpacks in the Bronx, and flash on tattooed bodies striding down Fifth Avenue during the annual Puerto Rican Day parade. The flag miniatures are vestiges of the national emblem that have been re-sourced from and reinserted into the city's landscape; they give viewing pleasure to the urban dwellers and passersby, many of whom regard the flags as visual affirmations of cultural pride, if not physical demarcations of nation-space.

This essay considers the ways the placing of and playing with Puerto Rican flags constitutes a visual praxis of "haciendo patria"—a term loosely translated here to mean nation building.⁴ Amid the rhetoric of a transitory nationality, the planting of the flag signals Puerto Rican rootedness and belonging within mainland communities, even as it evokes emotional connections to an island past. For outside of the communal, diasporic spaces maintained by mainland Puerto Ricans, the nation's past, present, and future is something of a void—or something avoided.

Haciendo Patria in the Diaspora

Puerto Rico, the shining star, the great lap dog of the Caribbean.

—Abraham Rodriguez, "The Boy Without a Flag"

A former Spanish colony, Puerto Rico became a protectorate of the United States of America in 1898, following the Spanish-American War. In 1917, under the Jones Act, Puerto Ricans on the island were granted US citizenship. Citizenship allowed Puerto Ricans to enlist in the US Army—a boon in 1917, as the United States entered World War I.⁵ In 1952, under the leadership of Luis Muñoz Marin and his Popular Democratic Party (Partido Popular Democrático), Puerto Rico became a "free associated state" (Estado Libre Asociado). As a commonwealth of the United States but not a state, Puerto Rico receives limited benefits in the form of federal assistance from its so-called free association.⁶ In contrast to the neighboring Caribbean islands that produced revolutions or affirmed themselves as republics or nation-states, Puerto Rico uses nonbinding polls, called plebiscites, to determine whether island residents prefer to pursue US statehood, independence, or maintain their commonwealth status. Since 1952 commonwealth supporters have outweighed the other groups, exposing the willingness of the Puerto Rican people to remain in between, to be "free" and "associated."⁷

Indeed, Puerto Rico's unique relationship with the United States, arguably a kind of exceptionalism, fuels the island's exemption and...