Saturday December 6, 2025 | 9:00AM – 10:45AM

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

Session Abstract

Gilberto Blasini’s “21st Century Islanders’ Survival Tactics: Building (Gendered) Communities in Los domirriqueños (2015) and Perfume de Gardenias (2021)” analyzes two Puerto Rican films, focusing on how the construction of local and transnational alliances, mainly but not exclusively in terms of gender and class, constitutes a productive way of generating political strength to build sustainable communities within the insular Caribbean. Katerina Ramos-Jordán’s “Rituales de erosión: Los ensayos anticoloniales del cine experimental de Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Sofía Gallisá Muriente y Natalia Lasalle Morillo” looks at the contemporary effervescence of avant-garde film practice in the archipelago. Katerina argues that these women filmmakers activate experimental documentary to remember and retell the past via its “eroded forms” of the present. In “Romance in Absentia: Reception of a Puerto Rican Film Found and Lost,” Pedro Noel Doreste Rodríguez revisits Puerto Rico’s earliest extant sound film, Romance tropical (1934), which was rediscovered in 2017. Though today the film is the subject of both celebration and critique for its representation of 1930s Puerto Rico—along with its attendant racial imaginaries—Pedro’s paper problematizes the film’s reception during its initial theatrical run and its contemporary afterlives, thus highlighting cross-temporal resistance to the film to complicate its obstinate apologia as a “product of its time.” Lastly, Dunja Fehimović’s “Entre la heterogeneidad y la resistencia: Un acercamiento ampliado al cine comunitario en Puerto Rico” examines community filmmaking in Puerto Rico in relation to the multiple political, environmental, cultural, and economic disasters associated with the archipelago’s colonial status. The paper reflects on the experience of co-producing a participatory documentary and explores the challenges and possibilities of this type of cinema in confronting invisibility, neglect, and displacement. In keeping with this emphasis on community, our panel reconsiders Puerto Ricans’ relationship to the cinema and how film practice, preservation, and spectatorship continue to inflect the course of the nation’s history and identity formation.

Presenters

• Gilberto M. Blasini (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee), “21st Century Islanders’ Survival Tactics: Building (Gendered) Communities in Los Domirriqueños (2015) and Perfume de Gardenias (2021)”

This paper analyzes two Puerto Rican films, Los Domirriqueños (Dir. Eduardo Ortiz), and Perfume de Gardenias (Dir. Gisela Rosario Ramos). I focus on the distinct ways they create versions of life in contemporary Puerto Rico, and propose how the construction of alliances, mainly but not exclusively in terms of gender and class, constitutes a productive way of generating political strength to build sustainable communities. The economic struggles extant within lower and working communities constitute a key element explored in these texts, especially in relation to Puerto Rico’s social and cultural idiosyncrasies. I would argue that these idiosyncrasies are further nuanced through discourses of Caribbeanness that engage with the region’s histories of colonialism, as well as the legacies of the African nations that were forcefully transposed into the Antilles to work as slaves.
The differences in each film’s comedic style complement their respective constructions of gender. On the one hand, Ortiz’s film privileges male characters by making them the center of narrative. One character disguises in a gender opposite their own and creates diegetic confusion to elicit humor and propel a romantic subplot forward while dissipating any feelings of homosexual panic. I argue that these conventions muddle the text’s ideological project of finding strength in allegiances based on the notion of the shared Caribbeanness between the Puerto Rican and Dominican characters. On the other hand, Rosario Ramos’s story focuses on female characters. As a result, the film can explore how women form bonds, rivalries, and support systems based upon their gender as well as age and class standing.

• Pedro Noel Doreste Rodríguez (Michigan State University, chair and moderator), “Romance in Absentia: Reception of a Puerto Rican Film Found and Lost”

“Romance in Absentia: Reception of a Puerto Rican Film Found and Lost” revisits the reception of Puerto Rico’s earliest extant sound film, Romance Tropical (1934), upon its release in 1934 and its rediscovery in 2017. After being lost for over 80 years and located at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the film has received celebratory screenings on account of its “re-discovery,” while also being rightly critique for its representation of 1930s Puerto Rico and its attendant racial imaginaries. “Romance in Absentia” historicizes the popular protests against the film and its uneven reception between 1934 and 1935. Countering the revisionist accounts of Romance Tropical as the either Puerto Rican cinema’s axiomatic holy grail or its irredeemable bad object, this paper reveals the labor done by Puerto Rican intellectuals, film critics, and community activists both on the main island and its diaspora to organize against the film’s caricature of Puerto Rican popular culture. Though today the film is the subject of both celebration and critique for its representation of 1930s Puerto Rico, along with its attendant racial imaginaries, this paper problematizes the film’s reception during its initial theatrical run and its contemporary afterlives, thus highlighting cross-temporal resistance to the film to complicate its obstinate apologia as a “product of its time.”

• Dunja Fehimović (Newcastle University), “Entre la heterogeneidad y la resistencia: Un acercamiento ampliado al cine comunitario en Puerto Rico”

En el contexto de la lucha por la visibilidad del llamado ‘cuarto’ cine (Barclay, 2000) y contra los acercamientos más restrictivos al fenómeno (Gumucio-Dagron, 2014), este capítulo examina el cine comunitario en Puerto Rico desde toda la heterogeneidad de sus prácticas, y en relación a los múltiples desastres políticos, ambientales, culturales y económicos asociados a la condición colonial del archipiélago. Lo hace a partir de tres experiencias claves generadas por el proyecto de investigación ‘(De)colonial Ecologies in 21st-century insular Hispanic Caribbean Film’. Por un lado, se apoya en las intervenciones realizadas por cineastas, académicos, activistas, y organizaciones comunitarias durante el Primer Junte sobre Cine Comunitario, en Casa Pueblo, y también en un conversatorio sobre el tema para ofrecer una mirada crítica sobre el panorama amplio del cine comunitario a la luz de los proyectos culturales históricos acontecidos en el país. Por último, reflexionando sobre la experiencia de coproducir un documental participativo con miembros de la comunidad de Adjuntas, en el interior montañoso de la isla grande, explora los desafíos y posibilidades de este tipo de cine para enfrentar la invisibilización, el olvido, y el desplazamiento.

• Katerina Ramos-Jordán (Brown University), “Rituales de erosión: Los ensayos anticoloniales del cine experimental de Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Sofía Gallisá Muriente y Natalia Lasalle Morillo”

El cine experimental contemporáneo de Puerto Rico ha desarrollado formas transgresoras de cuestionar su presente colonial desde miradas críticas a la fragmentación de la memoria histórica. Este ensayo entreteje un diálogo del trabajo de Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Sofía Gallisá Muriente y Natalia Lasalle Morillo para vislumbrar cómo las artistas activan una cinematografía experimental documentalista que crea caminos alternos para recordar y recontar el pasado a través de sus manifestaciones erosionadas en el presente. Presentaré el contexto histórico del legado estético del cine experimental y el cine etnográfico, militante en y fuera del Caribe–de cineastas como Sara Gómez, Nicolás Guillén Landrián y Maya Deren, para vislumbrar las prácticas y filosofías fílmicas de sus trabajos. Discutiré el rol de la investigación de sitio-específico y la integración de la ficción y el material de archivo para crear rupturas audiovisuales, conscientes del legado colonial de la forma fílmica dentro del lenguaje cinematográfico de las mismas. Así, propongo revisar y profundizar sus obras como ensayos anticoloniales que emergen de las rupturas entre el pasado y el presente movilizando un pensamiento crítico y una poética experimental que busca permanecer y observar la multiplicidad transtemporal de la realidad puertorriqueña para así crear del archivo histórico, una experiencia alucinante y del cine, un ritual.