Isla de Las Palmas: 100 Yrs
Six unique portfolios in Riso-printed boxes, made with the bookmaker Rory Sparks, 11 × 13.5 × 2 in. Each box holds ten of the thirteen pairings, so no two boxes are the same, and each cover is made from different Riso prints of the photographs. Each folder carries an 8.5 × 11 in. archival print and a reproduction of the writer's handwritten page on Moab Estrada Rag. The portfolios were made for university art museums and collections, to work as both exhibition and teaching tool.
Artist-published, Richmond, Virginia, April 2023.
Thirteen Puerto Ricans, on the island and in the diaspora, each chose one of my photographs and answered, in their own handwriting, one question: What wisdom do you have for a future generation of Puerto Ricans 100 years from your present?
I built the first book to cross distance. I built this one to cross time. Most archives hold the past, and the powerful decide what survives. This one is written by the people in it and addressed to the future.
from Goldfish
“The things apparently most enduring meet their end in unsuspected ways. These spaces where essential parts of us once moved no longer receive us. They fall into ruin, until the clamor demands they be torn down.”
from the cold, imperial North
“an ancestral pain that has become inter-generationally traumatic: rhizomatic pain. The pain of writing these words afar; the pain of not belonging; the pain of more than five centuries of colonial violence.”
“What we accomplish today will have repercussions in the future. Yet I have a profound hope that we will be a beautiful, sovereign and independent nation, sharing love and tolerance toward our fellow citizens.”
One hundred years
“100 years from now, you might be searching for answers at the edge of the sea… Born of struggle, born of strength, born with resilience running through your veins.”
Books include Ultramar (2013) and La expansión de los cuerpos (2020).
Founding member of Pistolera; drummer for Os Mutantes. Albums include Querido Mundo (2017) and El Machete (2019).
Born in Ponce, to an independentista family.
Author of The Lettered Barriada (2021) and Puerto Rico: A National History (2024). Came up in Puerto Rico’s punk scene.
2025 Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellow.
Co-founder of the punk band Rechazo Social (1990).
At the Universidad de Puerto Rico when he wrote his letter.
Author of Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico (2024).
Writes on Puerto Rican anticolonial feminism.
Author of To Love an Island (2021) and Que tiemble (2023).
Former host of PBS’s America ReFramed; Emmy winner.
Author of the memoir Fish Out of Agua (2010).
JD, Universidad de Puerto Rico. Co-editor of Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies (2026).