By Marci Reaven
One of the least acknowledged yet defining aspects of New York City’s history is its centuries-long connection to the Spanish-speaking world. Although Spaniards and Spanish Americans only began coming to New York and other eastern cities after the American Revolution, economic and political connections and conflicts date to the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century, the South American trade helped turn the New York-Brooklyn metropolis into one of the world’s most prosperous urban centers. Cárdenas, Cuba, became known as an “American city” for its large North American population, and Cuban wags referred to New York as a neighborhood of Havana. The connections only thickened in later years.
The recent exhibit Nueva York (1613-1945)—which appeared at New York’s El Museo del Barrio from September 2010 to January 2011—was the first attempt to tell this story in a museum setting. The exhibit was sponsored by New-York Historical Society (N-YHS) and El Museo, devoted to the arts of the Caribbean and Latin America, and was timed to coincide with the bicentennial celebrations of Latin American independence. Mutual interest in the subject and a major construction project at the historical society that had closed its galleries brought the two museums together for their first collaboration. The idea for the exhibit came from Mike Wallace, coauthor of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, who also served as the project’s chief historian. I guest curated the exhibit with City Lore colleagues Elena Martínez and Mariana Mogilevich, aided by curators from both museums. Numerous distinguished guest scholars took part throughout and contributed essays to a companion book by the same name.
Nueva York broke new ground with its topic and, in bringing together a history and an art museum to present a single, integrated show, also represented an unusual partnership. Both helped the exhibit garner attention. It topped El Museo’s attendance record with more than thirty thousand visitors in four months and received very good and extensive press coverage in the United States and internationally. But its ambitious scale, the newness of its subject matter, and joint sponsorship also presented significant challenges. At MARCH’s invitation, this piece reflects on a few key issues we tackled—recognizable, I’m sure, to producers of public humanities projects. I’ll discuss them mainly through the lens of the chronology of the exhibit narrative, because as always, where one decides to begin and end is significant.
Conventionally, narratives that connect New York to the Spanish-speaking world begin after World War II with the massive migration of Puerto Ricans to the city. Nueva York’s main point was that this migration was not the start of the connection but rather an important result. Indeed, the exhibit began its account with Jan Rodrigues (or Juan Rodriguez) , who arrived from Santo Domingo on a Dutch trader in 1613 but refused to continue to Amsterdam with the ship. This early starting date resulted in an early ending date. With centuries of complex story to convey in less than four thousand square feet of gallery space, the sponsors decided to end the story in 1945, before the recent half century of migrations.
Rational as this decision might have been, we all worried that ending in 1945 would fly in the face of visitor expectations and seem to dismiss the importance of the much larger migrations to the city from Puerto Rico in the immediate postwar years, and after 1965, from countries throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. While we could argue that we were telling the as-yet-untold backstory, we also were aware that the overall lack of attention to Spanish and Latino/Latin American history in New York’s public history would mean that many visitors would feel dissatisfied with an exhibit that did not extend to the present. We worried that they might feel cheated if they did not encounter displays that corresponded to their own lives and memories.
In response, we developed a couple of additional elements that stood outside the formal exhibition timeline. N-YHS commissioned Ric Burns to make a film about postwar Latino migration that connected the exhibit to the present. It played in the final gallery in a theater space designed by artist Antonio Martorell. Inspired by a popular short story, “La guagua aérea,” by Luis Rafael Sánchez, Martorell created a simulation of the body of an airplane to evoke the “flying buses” that brought large numbers of Puerto Ricans to New York. Each window of the faux plane contained images of Puerto Rican community life in the East Harlem neighborhood surrounding El Museo. Each seat of the plane was designed by a local artist and wonderfully “costumed” to represent a migrant. Watching the film, each audience member thus sat in the lap of someone who had presumably made the journey.
Adjacent to the exhibit exit, we also displayed maps produced especially for Nueva York by the Department of City Planning showing the growth in Latino migration over the twentieth century as well as current residential patterns. Programming these post-1945 elements left even less space for the already tight pre-1945 displays, but their popularity with visitors suggests that it was the right decision.
The long timeline and space limitations challenged us in other ways. For one, the story could only unfold as fast as visitors could follow along. As with survey history courses, it was hard to get up to the twentieth century! While the early material made a strong case for the significant role played by Hispanics and the Spanish-speaking world in shaping the historical city, little space was left for the rich material of more modern times. Again, we worried that we would disappoint our visitors.
Since we had to telescope the story substantially, we tried to compensate wherever possible by drilling deep. To give a few examples, in the last gallery, a ten-foot-high interactive map tracked the establishment of Hispano communities and organizational life after 1900, thus highlighting the diversity of places and people that created a discernable Hispano landscape in New York. A listening station played three dozen, often rare cuts of the music Latinos made in New York before the mambo era. As visitors listened they learned more by paging through a detailed compendium of musicians’ biographies, song lyrics, photographs, and brief contextual entries. In earlier galleries, intricately programmed, custom-made maps portrayed Atlantic World trading and slaving routes and the growth of New York’s sugar industry with links to the Caribbean. Throughout, short video pieces probed topics like the Spanish-Cuban-American War and U.S. capital expansion to South America.
The exhibit’s long temporal focus also meant that the preponderance of historical actors treated in the show, from the Caribbean and South America, were wealthy and white. After the 1870s and especially after 1898, the Hispano presence in the city became more economically and racially diverse. But this point came rather late in the exhibit and therefore contended with many other stories for space in the twentieth-century sections.
This problem of representation was compounded by the lack of preserved objects, documents, and images (especially non-demeaning images) that habitually plague historical evocations of the working classes and people of color. Presenting the story of, say, Afro-Caribbean cigar workers in New York—for whom no objects or even images exist—would have required making use of stagecraft to create evocative environments or devices. This strategy is often adopted by history museums, but in an art museum setting, there is often a strong preference for authentic artifacts. As a result we stayed away from theatrical re-creations; however, in another setting, they might have helped us balance the presentation.
In general, finding appropriate, let alone authentic objects and images posed one of our greatest challenges. It was difficult to locate things associated with even the wealthiest individuals. Few collecting institutions have aggressively acquired material culture connected to New York’s Hispanic populations. Moreover, the sorry state of U.S.-Cuban relations and our relatively short lead time precluded loans from the Spanish-speaking country most closely associated with early New York. Collections such as the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College helped immensely, as did those of several private collectors, particularly Emilio Cueto, whose Cuban Americana served as a resource for loans as well as research. Another private collection, belonging to Ralph Hernández, allowed us to treat Puerto Rican migration to New York after the island’s occupation by the U.S. as a consequence of the Spanish-American War—one of the exhibit displays that directly treated Latinos of color and of modest means.
Given the art museum setting, we also tried to include as much fine art as possible. Writing labels for the artwork revealed further differences between history and art museums. While art museum labels typically focus on the art historical context, the paintings in Nueva York—such as a Velázquez portrait of Spain’s King Philip IV or a William Merritt Chase evocation of picturesque Spain—needed to advance the overall narrative. Our strategy was to try to craft labels to serve both ends, while at the same time staying very succinct, doubly important since all text was in both English and Spanish. While we did manage to respect the conventions of both fields in developing the labels, doing so took time and care, and along with other challenges discussed above, would be among the things to plan for in any similar, future collaborations.
Ironically, the greatest challenges confronted in Nueva York’s production—its long timeline in a modestly-sized space, novel subject matter, and interdisciplinary mandate—were also what made it exciting to create and to experience. For a project to be exhilarating to producers and audience, it needs to set itself ambitious goals, but one lesson I learned is to try for fewer at once, thus leaving more time for fine-tuning and trouble-shooting.
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Marci Reaven was, until recently, Managing Director of the New York City cultural organization, City Lore. As of mid-March 2011, she is Vice President of History Exhibits at New-York Historical Society. Although Nueva York is no longer on view, it maintains an online presence at http://www.nuevayork-exhibition.org/home. The Web site includes summaries of the five exhibit galleries, graphics, audio clips, and materials for classroom use.
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Nueva York received a 2011 Museumwise Award of Merit at the Museums in Conversation Conference in Buffalo, N.Y., on April 3, 2011.