Félix Jiménez's Blog

Freedom is - always has been - in jeopardy, as so patently signal the continuing cultural wars that are being so fiercely contested, so intensive and damning.

"Art is an attempt to bring order to chaos," Stephen Sondheim once said. But the Puerto Rican radical theater group AgitArte has been acting on that premise for quite some time, disrupting, agitating with theater as their base.

Walking with a camera, the images found provoke and confound ceaselessly. And catching and maintaining the look and sound of an image has been a gift for Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, for whom filming is life enhanced.

Art needs to be talked about. Discussed. Verbalized. Felt through words. Mareia Quintero Rivera stresses that the joy and complexity of cultural production, and of the need to catalogue and study the framework and infrastructure of art in Puerto Rico, should be - must be - addressed and seriously covered in the media in Puerto Rico.

Nono never imagined that name would cross seas and languages, and that the beloved granddaughters - mapenzi and mulowayi - would forever espouse this unconditional surrender to the familial.

From the images of a crowd attending a show at a soon-to-be-closed Rio Piedras movie theater to the photographs of drowning Puerto Ricans, scholar Frances Negron-Muntaner probes the uncomfortable  definitions of the end of an era and of the start of another in troubled times.