Hector Hyppolite. The Congo Queen. by 1946. Enamel, oil, and pencil on cardboard. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Bareiss
How have symbols embodied the resilience of Afro-Indigenous cultures for centuries?
The title of the newly opened Gallery 208: 500 Years at MoMA refers to the span between the year 1492—when Christopher Columbus and his three Spanish ships happened upon the shores of Caribbean islands—and 1992, when K’iche’ Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchú was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The gallery gathers work by a generation of artists confronting legacies of colonialism in the Americas between the 1990s and 2010s. Their creative interventions embody a sentiment that artist Jaune Quick-to-see-Smith has used to describe her practice: “It’s about networking, trading intellectual ideas, bringing people together, being a catalyst to make things happen.”1
Recently, we asked scholar and curator Dr. Margarita Lila Rosa to reflect on the hemispheric impact of Columbus’s arrival and consider how, centuries later, artists responded to its aftermath.
I am currently visiting the island of Borikén, also known as Puerto Rico. At the top of a hill in the rainforest, I swing on a hamaka, a hammock, while smoking sacred tobacco. I can hear the coquís all around me, the small frogs singing coquí, coquí, coquí, coquí. It is not a coincidence that I, an Afro-Indigenous woman, am here, taking part in these native practices. Native Taino rituals, words, and material history have survived within me.
I was born in a region the Taino people of the Caribbean called Cybao, the north of the Dominican Republic. I would not be here, writing this, were it not for the Tainos. I would not be here without my African ancestors, either. They were enslaved in these islands by my European ancestors. And somehow, after all the pillaging, destruction, and enslavement, we have survived.
Black and Indigenous histories in the Americas are intimately connected. After all, the arrival of Columbus had a hemispheric impact: Europeans exploited the so-called New World for mineral and agricultural wealth, and exploited Black and Indigenous people for all they had. Black and Indigenous histories are tethered to each other, tied together by a legacy of premature death and miraculous survival.
