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1981
Volume 20, Issue 1-2
  • ISSN: 2050-4837
  • E-ISSN: 2050-4845

Abstract

This article is the winner of the 2021 SCMS Latinx Caucus’s Graduate Student Award. It focuses on the mid-century fictional and documentary films on the Black cultural practice of Loíza produced by Puerto Rico’s Division of Community Education (DivEdCo) and addresses the pedagogical film’s role in promoting its attendant cultural-nationalist project. It analyses the DivEdCo period of Oscar Torres, a pioneering presence in the national cinemas of all three Hispanic Caribbean islands. Torres was an artist twice exiled; banished from the Dominican Republic for decrying the oppressive policies of the Trujillo regime and later forced out of Castro’s Cuba under mysterious circumstances. Torres’s lone stint of creative stability – though not of complete creative freedom – came in the intervening years of the 1950s, at DivEdCo, where he directed a series of films that represent the role of Puerto Rico’s working poor in the face of rapid modernization initiated by the new political and social relationship with the United States. Torres’s (1955), an exploration of film Blackness in Puerto Rico, has elicited claims of trafficking in extractive modes of ethnography, but may reveal his commitment to transnational solidarities across the greater Caribbean.

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2024-11-15
2025-02-15
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