Danielle de Jesus, Google the Ponce Massacre, 2021

Narrator: Danielle de Jesus discusses the title of this painting.

Danielle de Jesús: I gave it the name Google the Ponce Massacre because, yes, it's going to direct people to pick up their phone and Google it since I'm not there to really speak about it. You don't directly see what's going on. You see what's going on in the image, but you don't exactly know who the subjects are. It forces you to do the work.

Being someone in the diaspora, born and raised in New York City, I was never taught the history of Puerto Rico. I was never taught about the Ponce massacre. We don't hear about that in American schools, but neither do we hear about it in Puerto Rico because the students in Puerto Rico, they're exposed to American history. U.S. history and not the history of their own land. 

Narrator: In the painting, de Jesus layers images from different moments in history.

Danielle de Jesús: It's a juxtaposition of people marching in Ponce in Puerto Rico, then people marching here in the diaspora in New York City during the protest against Ricky Rosselló, who was the governor of Puerto Rico. This was a moment that was very personal to me because I was there, and this cop that's in the image was demanding that I separate from the crowd.

He was pushing me around and trying to get me to cross the street and get away. I wanted to defend my friends who I was there with and it got heated quickly. I took this picture of him and used it in the painting. Then I used these colors, the red, white, and the blue, specifically the navy blue because navy blue is the color that was adopted in the Puerto Rican flag.