Lulu Varona, Mapa (Map), 2020 

Lulu Varona: I’m María Lucía Varona Borges. I’m also called Lulu. Or Lulú. I’m an embroidery artist who is fascinated with textiles in general.

I use embroidery in my artistic practice because I decided to revisit it—it’s an activity I used to do with my grandmother when I was little, and since I was so familiar with the medium and I was becoming fascinated with graphic novels, I wanted to, uh, start to make embroidered stories, and all of that has led me, little by little, to make maps. The map actually came out of a need to return to my land, since I was displaced from Puerto Rico to New York by Hurricane Maria.

Narrator: Varona described the contents of the two maps.

Lulu Varona: It’s like my dream, my desire to acknowledge details about the things that happen to me, that are all around me, and to mix reality with my dream and my fantasy reality a little bit too.

There are lots and lots and lots of farms. There are farms scattered all around. There’s Old San Juan with people on bicycles. That is a reference to the 2019 protests.

Vieques is also there. It’s the island with the galloping horse.

Narrator: In one of the maps, there’s a self-portrait in the lower right. Varona shows herself watching airplanes come and go.

Lulu Varona: The planes are there for the great migration that happened later. Just after the hurricane happened it was, it was very moving to be at the airport and see all of the people leaving and the kinds of people they were, or usually were—the neediest ones and the ones who needed specific kinds of assistance, like older people, people with functional diversity, and, and it was very overwhelming, that mess.