Becoming Doll

Abstract

This article looks at how Puerto Rican visual artist Freddie Mercado, in his performances, uses dolls as an agentic catalyst for contesting otherness. Influenced by an Afro-Caribbean worldview, his methods for treating and relating to dolls are grounded in decolonial relations and spiritual beliefs that have survived past and current colonization processes in Puerto Rico. Mercado mirrors himself in the so-called inanimate, rendering it alive as a possibility of constant metamorphosis as well as using it as a tactics for survival. The identification process in Mercado is both a creative act and a transformative path. Mercado’s dolls allow for a fluidity of identity to emerge through a performative repertoire. By ‘becoming doll’ Mercado addresses, directly, the violence inflicted on Puerto Rican bodies by colonial objectification strategies, while, at the same time, refocusing the fixity of the Western subject--object relation.

Notes

1 There are numerous historical examples of the asymmetry that characterizes colonial relations between Puerto Rico and US. Some of these include: the Jones– Shafroth Act (1917– ongoing) that established Puerto Rico as a territory of the US and Puerto Ricans as US citizens unable to vote in presidential elections (although capable of being drafted by the US army); the cabotage laws (since 1900, the Foraker Act) that established absolute control of the commerce of Puerto Rico by the US Merchant Marine; the introduction and testing of the contraceptive pill among Puerto Rican women (1956); a programme of population control with involuntary sterilization (1930s–70s); the carpeteo system of espionage and political harassment; the Gag Law (1948, Ley de la Mordaza or Law 53); which criminalized the gathering and expression of national independence thought; the torturing, imprisonment and violent death of political dissidents; the testing of Agent Orange on Puerto Rican farms during the Vietnam War; the bombarding and polluting of the Puerto Rican islands of Culebra (1909–75) and Vieques (1941–2003) for US navy military practice; and the implementation of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) – signed by Barack Obama on 30 June 2016 – which established an unelected Fiscal Control Board to preside over the repayment of an unpayable and possibly illegal 72-billion-dollar debt. This Fiscal Control Board is able to overrule decisions by Puerto Rico’s legislature and democratically elected governor.

2 From the American transatlantic slave trade, hundreds of thousands of people were kidnapped from different zones of western Africa. West Africa has a wide cultural diversity that includes the Yoruba of Nigeria, the Fon people of the Kingdom of Dahomey, the Dogón of Volta and the Ashanti, among others. Among the western peoples, the Yoruba occupy a place of great importance and it was their religious traditions that were most noticeably passed on to the Caribbean. For over four centuries, enslaved Africans were brought to Puerto Rico from different parts of the Caribbean and from different zones of West Africa. Diverse African ethnicities arrived in the island, from the Mendé culture of Sierra Leone to the Bantú culture of Congo. After the 1959 Cuban revolution the Cuban Diaspora that settled in Puerto Rico brought with it the Santería religion, based in a Yoruba belief system. Santería has large numbers of followers throughout the island of Puerto Rico.

3 Some examples of the phenomenon of Yoruba-Catholic transculturation in the Caribbean are found in the merging of orishas and saints: Changó/St Barbara, Olodumare or Olofi/ Catholic God, Orula/St Francis of Assisi, Obatalá/ Our Lady of Mercy, Yemayá/ St Mary of Regla, Elegguá/ Holy Child of Atocha, Oshún/Our Lady of Charity, Oggún/St Peter and Ochosi/ St Norbert (this is not an exhaustive list). In the case of the male deities Changó and Obatalá, it is interesting to note how they merge with female saints.

4 Influenced by the writings of French philosopher Allan Kardec, the first community of Espiritistas in Puerto Rico was founded in the town of Mayagüez in 1871. Initially practised by the intellectual elite, these beliefs soon entered the popular sectors. This new form of ‘Espiritismo popular’ incorporated African religious medical traditions, popular Catholicism from rural Spanish migrants and religious relics of the indigenous inhabitants of the island, the Taínos. Espiritismo strengthened its African elements with the arrival of Santería to Puerto Rico during the 1960s migration of Cubans to the island and the interaction of Puerto Rican Espiritistas with practitioners of Cuban Santería in the US. Ever since, the practices of Santería and Espiritismo have merged to the extent that both terms are at times interchangeable.

5 In 2003, the doll contest was first opened to male participation. Freddie Mercado and his good friend and long-time collaborator Hector Torres (‘La Jector’) presented their dolls. Mercado’s dolls did not win the prize. The organizers told Mercado that they would need to initiate a new category for the ‘artistic doll’. As the artist described in a personal correspondence (April 2015): ‘They missed the historical opportunity of having a male winner on the doll contest for the first time. Well … an androgen.’ Mercado’s dolls were eventually bought by La Casa del Libro in Old San Juan and included in their collection.

6 On the day of Felisa Rincón de Gautier’s death, Mercado ‘modestly’ impersonated her. A family, perplexed by Mercado’s likeness to doña Fela, approached him believing he was her relative, took pictures of him and quickly went away. The anecdote is narrated by Mercado in his interview with Antonio Pantojas for his TV talk show Estoy Aquí, on TUTV, 16 September 2005.