Friday December 5, 2025 | 9:00AM – 10:45AM

Latin American Library Seminar Room (Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, 4th Floor)

Session Abstract

In this panel we will analyze contemporary Caribbean mediascapes and its afterlives with a focus in contemporary media, television, and performance. Departing from notions of moving media objects, the panel will contextualize the sonic affects of amargue and “viral” femininities in the Dominican Republic, as well as the work of feminist decolonial performers Macha Colón, (Puerto Rico), Helen Ceballos (Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic), Awilda Rodríguez Lora (Puerto Rico) and Awilda Sterling (Puerto Rico) to describe the role of the moving media object and its afterlives in contemporary Caribbean neoliberal contexts.

Presenters

• Jossiana Arroyo (The University of Texas at Austin, chair and discussant)

 

• Zorimar Rivera-Montes (Tulane University), “Disappropriation, friendship, and undiscipline in the work of Macha Colón”

Puerto Rican performance artist Macha Colón is a self-described ‘undisciplined’ artist who has been the exuberant frontwoman of the punk-rock tropical band Macha Colón y los Okapi, a filmmaker-cultural producer and community organizer. In her live shows and music videos, she performs in baroque self-designed costumes that reveal a strong DIY and surrealist aesthetic, hands out props to the audience, imbuing her show with the quality of a cheeky and irreverent Church service, of which she is a genderqueer Reverend (with strong echoes of the performance persona of Pedro Pietri). In this presentation, I consider the performance and media interventions of the band Macha Colón y los Okapi alongside her filmmaking and distinct types of cultural work and activism to chart what she terms an undisciplined and collective ethos of culture-making that is inseparable from a politics of Black feminist friendship and collectivity. Macha Colón’s live performance and media enacts this will towards the collective, an epistemology rooted in Black communality that centers cuir past and future forms of collectivity and kin.

• Anastasia Valecce (Spelman College), “Aesthetics in Motion: Disobedient Media and the Affective Politics of Afro-Queer Feminist Art in Puerto Rico”

This presentation draws from my forthcoming book Mujeres Desobedientes: Cultural and Artistic Movements of Afro Queer Puerto Rican Women (2013–2023) to examine how four interdisciplinary artists, Macha Colón, Awilda Rodríguez Lora, Awilda Sterling and Helen Ceballos, navigate and transform media platforms as affective channels for dissent and collective survival. Focusing on Jayá (Colón, 2021), Bailar todos los días (Rodríguez Lora, ongoing since 2015),Cuerpos Fronterizos (Ceballos, 2021), and Soy la reencarnación de un alma esclavizada
(Sterling-Duprey, 2021), I explore how these artists use video, dance, sound, and digital
circulation as forms of “moving media” that contest normative scripts of femininity, nation, and
belonging. I theorize their interventions as part of a “moving media” praxis in which aesthetic
disobedience becomes a tool for circulating queer feminist imaginaries beyond normative timelines, geographies, and forms. By foregrounding media’s affective power and its role in circulating queer-of-color worldmaking, I explore how these artists reconfigure public space and spectatorship in the context of systemic neglect, climate disaster, and colonial crisis. In doing so, they offer a decolonial feminist response to the troubled conditions of the archipelago and the larger Caribbean, making visible new forms of belonging through disorderly, undisciplined, and radically moving media.

• Wilfredo José Burgos-Matos (Lehman College, CUNY), “Maldita vida: Amargue and the Communal Ecologies of a Dominican Affect”

This paper examines how Dominican bachata, influenced by the affective force of amargue (romantic bitterness), serves as a form of velación, a mourning ritual in the 21 Divisions (Dominican Vudú). In Afro-Dominican confraternities, velaciones are spiritual ceremonies that honor the dead by transforming grief into collective resilience through prayer and music. Following the 1960s, amargue emerged powerfully in the margins of Santo Domingo, where bachateros and their communities created ritual spaces to mourn symbolic deaths imposed by racial and class exclusion under Trujillo’s Eurocentric and anti-Black legacy. Through synchronized singing, mimetic dancing, and expressive gestures of sorrow, participants enter a trance-like mourning state, guided by lyrics of heartbreak, migration, and economic precarity. This paper analyzes performances by artists like Tony Santos and social media figures such as El Compa Fofito, who popularized the phrase maldita vida (“godforsaken life”) in viral videos that capture the collective spirit of amargue. These performances show how amargue circulates through bodies, social media, and community gatherings, forming a shared ecology of feeling. Ultimately, these affective practices revive a ritual code born in the “plantationocene,” reimagined today across dance floors, bodegas, and diasporic spaces.