Nuyorican Jíbaro Reterritorialization and Translocal Cultural Practice is a virtual exhibition that compiles works of art, documents and ephemera that reflect the various representations of the figure of the jíbaro across time and geographies. This exhibition has been conceived as a free an accessible resource available for students, parents, teachers and a general audience interested in Puerto Rican, Latin America and Caribbean art and culture.

Representations of the jíbaro, the emblematic Puerto Rican peasant from mountainous rural areas, commonly depicted wearing a straw hat, light colored clothes and standing around fields and pastural lands, has undergone several transformations over a period of 170 years. This virtual exhibition explores these transformations in Puerto Rican and Nuyorican literary traditions, in the aesthetics of traditional visual arts in Puerto Rico, in the aesthetics of resistance in street art across New York City’s urban landscape, through the cultural and grassroots political work of musical artists inspired by symbolisms of the jíbaro, as well as grassroots and electoral political movements that invoke this autochthonous Puerto Rican symbol. Included in this exhibition are works that cross the boundaries between fine arts, independent and alternative art forms, and folkloric expressions.

How representations of the jíbaro and what it symbolizes have changed over time and across media? What modern-day symbolisms are attached to the mythologized jíbaro in the Nuyorican context? are some of the question this exhibition proposes, taking into consideration the geographical trajectory from the Puerto Rican archipelago to the burgeoning New York City diasporic communities.