Desarchivar la mirada

Desarchivar la mirada (Unarchiving the Gaze) examines how visual archives shaped racial representation during the early years of U.S. colonial rule in Puerto Rico following the 1898 invasion. The exhibition draws from historical postcards held by the University’s Puerto Rican Collection and Museo Afro Casa Silvana. Produced between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these images taught viewers to interpret Puerto Rico and its Afro-descendant communities through racial and cultural hierarchies that associated Black people with manual labor, rurality, poverty, and exoticism. The exhibition seeks to interrupt inherited ways of seeing and invites new questions: What remains when the words that defined these images disappear? What histories emerge when we stop looking for racial “types” and begin encountering people?