How Do You Move Through Grief? A Conversation with Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz

In an ongoing series of comic book-style wall murals and drawings she began exhibiting in 2005 (Fig. 1), the Orlando, USA-based artist WANDA RAIMUNDI-ORTIZ introduces the "Wepa Woman"—the Nuyorican superheroine charged with "upholding the moral code of the Puerto Rican community."¹ By turns satirical and deeply tragic, Wepa Woman embodies the spirit of Latinx independence and uplift, her name invoking the celebratory wepa! in Puerto Rican Spanish. But Wepa Woman has it tough, and she finds that the path of social justice is a twisted one, always at risk of coming abruptly to a dead end. For in addition to combating the macroaggressions and microaggressions of white supremacy, Wepa Woman also has a nemesis: Chuleta (Spanish for "pork chop") Yoprimero, a smart-mouthed, anarchic, and powerfully self-centered culture warrior in her own

Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz. Photo by University of Central Florida.

Figure 1.

Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Wepa Woman (2005), part of the EXILE Series. Mural, India ink, 16 × 50 ft. Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. Image courtesy of the artist.

right. Whereas Wepa Woman faces pain and defeat in fighting for cultural preservation, Chuleta doesn't have any fucks to give. By 2007, Wepa Woman faced a crisis in her persona, which fractured and gave rise to an alter-ego, La Llorona. Wepa, in other words, began to weep. Chuleta, on the other hand, began to transcend the comic book form and became a performance artist in her own right. Featured in live performance lectures and a series of "Ask Chuleta" videos on YouTube, Chuleta takes up various art-world concepts and tendencies in order to call out racial and gender bias and to "reach out beyond the confines of the 'white cube' to talk to anyone that wanted to listen."²

All three characters—Wepa Woman, La Llorona, and Chuleta—are modeled after and inhabited by the internationally recognized multimedia artist Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, who is also an associate professor of Studio Art at the University of Central Florida. As three of the many personae she has developed in her graphic and performance work, these superheroines form a kind of holy trinity of social justice warfare. Together they outline an artistic practice that directly confronts the psychodynamics of political and ideological struggle, as well as the intricacies—the deep pleasures as well as the anger and grief—of Latinx, and, specifically, Puerto Rican, self-representation in a United States that persists in rendering its colonial relationship to the island and its diaspora at once invisible and hypervisible. As Chuleta says in Raimundi-Ortiz's 2006 mural Chuleta's Wrath, "Fuck John Q. Public … I'm right here. Act like you know! Recognize or back the fuck up!"³

In her visual and performance work over the past ten years, Raimundi-Ortiz has developed a host of additional personae that are at once more grandiose than the superheroines while also being far quieter than the outspoken Chuleta. In her Reinas (Queens) series, Raimundi-Ortiz poses—live as well as in still photographs and drawn portraits—as a series of "archetypal" sovereigns that include the figures GringaReina, GuerrilleReina, PorcelaReina, and the Bargain Basement Sovereign. Dressed in monumental costumes constructed from found materials, Raimundi-Ortiz's Reinas do not speak. They instead bear the gravity of the psychic and physical traumas they represent, both in the fabrication of their gowns and in their relationship to audiences. PorcelaReina, the Porcelain Queen, her pregnant body encased in bubble wrap, presents her fusion of fragility and strength to spectators, who are invited to care for her. The Bargain Basement Sovereign holds court while spectators are invited to place trash upon her body, thus conflating royal tributes with refuse, sovereignty with service work. In the wake of Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, Raimundi-Ortiz developed Exodus/Pilgrimage (Fig. 4 and 7), which features a massive gown and six-foot train constructed from debris she and her...