The piece shown below was made for my WRA 882: Contemporary Theories of Rhetoric taught by Dr. Alexandra Hidalgo. My main goal in creating this piece was to find ways of articulating and explaining the disconnect I was seeing between the lived reality of the 2019 protests and the digitized memory of the same event. From lived experience I can say that the protests were diverse and that the people organizing the events more often than not were members of marginalized groups on the island. This stood in stark contrast to the images I was seeing online which centered whiteness, maleness, and heteronormativity. In other words, the main goal of this essay was to resist the colonization of the digital memory of these protests.
In the essay, I try to establish how there is already a habit of whitewashing Puerto Rico and its history by comparing one form of digital memory (in this case google image search results) across several historical events. I still believe that the idea behind this project is a good one, but there’s also areas where I was still falling short. One of the biggest holes in my argument was that I was not citing Puerto Rican studies scholars nor was I able to bring that field into my work at all. I began to work on this essay again after taking an independent study with Dr. Yomaira Figueroa and am currently finishing a new draft of this essay at the time of writing this portfolio. Given that now I do have a base knowledge of Puerto Rican studies as a field, I can’t wait to show how this essay is transformed.