Century-old postcards depicting Black Puerto Ricans are on view at Hunter College’s CENTRO Gallery in East Harlem. The images show Black life on the archipelago just after the United States took over Puerto Rico in 1898.
What’s disturbing is that these postcards reduced Black Puerto Ricans to colonial stereotypes, portraying them as laborers, curiosities, or symbols of poverty. CENTRO’s exhibit “Dearchiving the Gaze” asks visitors to look past that idea, toward the humanity of the people on view.
Curated by Dr. Windy M. Cosme Rosario, the exhibition features 30 reproductions of photographs and postcards made from the late 19th into the early 20th century, when U.S. photographers documented Puerto Rico after the 1898 invasion. These images –– culled from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) and the Afro Puerto Rican-focused Museo Afro Casa Silvana (MACAS) –– were originally captioned with text that linked Black life in Puerto Rico with manual labor, rural isolation, poverty, and exoticism.
Cosme Rosario, who created the project while serving as a 2025-2026 research seminarist at PRAFRO, the Afrodescendant and racial studies program at UPR, explained that PRAFRO’s director, Dr. Mayra Santos-Febres, had asked her to identify and show a way for students and future researchers to find Afro Puerto Rican images. When they found these images from the late 19th through early 20th centuries, they turned them into an exhibition that was shown at this year’s annual Cumbre Afro. CENTRO has adapted and expanded the original display for New York City viewers.
Cosme Rosario first looked at how other scholars had used the postcards and why they were produced. “I didn’t want to simply exhibit postcards; I wanted to work with the visualities those postcards produced. ‘Dearchiving the Gaze’ emerges from that exercise: temporarily suspending inherited titles and categories, reorganizing the images through other experiences and creating the conditions to look at them again through different questions. It is not about erasing their history, but about recognizing everything that those forms of classification had left outside our field of vision,” she said.
Colonial rule by Spain initially established racial hierarchies based on ancestry, color, class, and enslavement. African enslavement was abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873, but inequality remained. Once the U.S. gained control over Puerto Rico, pictures and publications cast Puerto Ricans as colonial subjects who could be classified and governed.
Cosme Rosario says that the people seen in “Dearchiving the Gaze” may have been asked to pose, and yet never told how their likenesses would be used. These postcards were later circulated with demeaning titles and handwritten messages.
“I decided that if my mission is to recover visual images, then what I specifically wanted to display as pieces in the gallery were those visual images of these bodies, these faces of African descent within these images — and to separate them from the colonial elements that accompanied them,” Cosme Rosario told the AmNews. “Because, you see, the original images, which are postcards, were accompanied by texts and captions that sometimes pigeonholed these people into a specific psychological framework. They were completely ignored, their agency was completely stripped away, [and] their bodies were seen merely as part of the landscape. The process by which these images were produced is the same process by which certain publications began to appear from the United States, like ‘Our Islands and Their People as Seen with Camera and Pencil.’
CENTRO Gallery photos
“There’s also an intentionality within the narrative of these texts — to teach the colonizers how to look at us, how to view these new possessions,” she added. “Well, my interest is precisely in critiquing these narratives, and the act of critiquing them is to highlight the people who appear in those images — most of whom were forced to be there or weren’t even aware of what was really going on.”
During a tour of the gallery show, CENTRO Director Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez moved through different sections of “Dearchiving the Gaze” and talked about how they were organized around sociality, childhood, labor, and landscape. The Puerto Rican national image has often been celebrated as a harmonious mixture of Indigenous, European, and African ancestry. But many have shown that this idea also pushed Puerto Rico to distance itself from Blackness, minimize instances of racism, and elevate blanqueamiento — whitening — as a social ideal.
Figueroa-Vásquez said the images on view in “Dearchiving the Gaze” are important because they show Black Puerto Rican life at a time when the national image of Ricanness was being formulated around the image of the jibaro, Puerto Rico’s traditional rural farmer. The jibaro is typically symbolized as a white-facing mixed race person. “Like that becomes a hero, but that man, that figure becomes the hero after these images are taken,” Figueroa-Vásquez said. U.S. photographers were trying to depict Puerto Rico, the land they had just conquered, for other white Americans.
Figueroa-Vásquez added, “This is from the U.S. perspective, like how are we going to make this acceptable to the American public, which is when you get books like ‘Our Islands and Their People,’ these important books where they have that expansion of the U.S. and they’re doing these colonial photographs. They’re like, ‘okay, here are our Islands, everyone –– we are the Big Brother, we’re the dad, we’re the big uncle to these little islands. And here are our islands and their people.’ Your main figure, who’s a man of the land, he’s like, you know, European and Indigenous, mixed race, and he wears these hats. That becomes the national symbol for like 60 years, completely erasing the fact that the interior of Puerto Rico, not just the coast, because people understand that the coast of Puerto Rico looks [Black], but the interior of Puerto Rico also looked like this.”
Cosme Rosario said she tried to isolate the faces and bodies depicted in the images from titles that boxed them into a colonial psychology or treated them as scenery. In Puerto Rico, the exhibition included a short curatorial text and three responses by research and curatorial assistant Daniel Rivera, who retitled selected images and wrote from what he observed. At CENTRO, the exhibition asked scholars and cultural workers to add their interpretations of the images, and there is a bilingual newspaper available to visitors that allows them to offer titles as well. Cosme Rosario said the effort is to ask people to question how they learned to look at and imagine the people in these colonial pictures and to begin to recognize them as ancestors and community members.
Cosme Rosario said she hopes the exhibition will travel and that this method of viewing colonial-era images will be used in places beyond Puerto Rico, because colonial photography imposed similar ways of seeing in other countries. “Desarchivar is an invitation to explore liberation through historical reinterpretation,” said Ángel Antonio Ruiz-Laboy, CENTRO’s associate director of arts and culture.
Desarchivar la mirada is on view through Dec. 18, 2026, Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., at CENTRO Gallery in the Silberman School of Social Work, 2180 Third Ave. at East 119th Street. Admission to the exhibit is free and open to the public. For more info, visit centropr.hunter.cuny.edu.
