Juan Sánchez’s Counter-Archive

Abstract

This essay examines the video work UNKNOWN BORICUA STREAMING: A Nuyorican State of Mind (2011) by the Brooklyn-born Nuyorican artist Juan Sánchez. The video is a digital collage that incorporates photographs of Puerto Rican migrants reposited in the archive of the Migration Division at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños), along with materials mined from Sánchez’s own archive. The images are set against a flickering, multicolored grid and accompanied by a transnational soundtrack of musical and vocal clips. Given Sánchez’s fracturing of the grid, I interpret the video as a counter-archive that interrogates his community’s encounter, both stateside and in Puerto Rico, with U.S. neocolonialism. Moreover, as a Black “AmeRícan” (a concept borrowed from poet Tato Laviera), Sánchez’s collage renders visible how his community’s struggle is inexorably connected to other civil rights struggles in the United States, and to global human rights movements.