Diasporic Visions: Nuyorican Photography in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

This dissertation offers the first comprehensive art-historical study of Nuyorican (New York-born or based) photographic production from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. Emerging from the intertwined conditions of postwar migration, U.S. colonial citizenship, and urban dispossession, the project examines how Puerto Rican photographers mobilized the medium to articulate diasporic subjectivity, contest dominant visual regimes, and claim cultural and spatial belonging within the barrios of New York City. Situating these practices within the political struggles and community-based cultural production of the broader Nuyorican Arts Movement, the dissertation frames photographic practice as a critical register of intervention, historical recovery, and collective survival—a means of asserting presence, producing counter-images, and reclaiming cultural agency. Beyond a demographic descriptor, Nuyorican is theorized here as an operative political, cultural, and aesthetic formation through which questions of belonging, visibility, and representation were actively negotiated within the everyday spaces and encounters that structured Puerto Rican life in New York. Foregrounding diaspora as a visual and spatial condition, the project analyzes how photographic form, circulation, and exhibition functioned as mediating practices of collective world-making across island and metropole, public and private spheres, and between documentation and self-fashioning. Ultimately, by repositioning Nuyorican photography as central to histories of American photography and Latinx art, this dissertation demonstrates how diasporic photographic practices fundamentally reconfigure narratives of U.S. visual culture, urban modernity, and aesthetic experimentation within alternative art circuits in the 1970s and 1980s.