The Wake’s Challenge to the Exposición de Puerto Rico

The board members for the Exposición de Puerto Rico of 1893 aimed to organize a “fair to honor the momentous event in the history of humankind and the most glorious of [Puerto Rico’s] national epic.”¹ Acknowledging that 1893 marked the four hundredth anniversary of Spanish presence on the island, the board devised a fair with displays and contests proving “the civilizing effects of four centuries.”² Pageants, parades, and multiple exhibits commemorated the historical event.³ Visitors to the Palacio de Santurce, the fair’s main pavilion, viewed art exhibits and displays of handcrafted, manufactured, and agricultural goods.

Nineteenth-century fairs and colonial exhibitions have attracted some scholarly attention. They have been widely understood as popular events that promoted imperialistic enterprises and publicly avowed the dynamics of colonial relationships.⁴ But what of a small-scale fair that took place in a colonial territory, like the Exposición in Puerto Rico? What vision could the colony’s exhibit offer to the anticipated local public? The organizing board proposed a modest account. Rather than revise the narrative of the colonial relationship to present Spain and Puerto Rico on commensurate terms, the displays affirmed that the island’s culture and progress depended on its steadfast relationship with Spain. Still, from the Caribbean vantage point, the fair proclaimed Puerto Rico as neither a cultural nor economic backwater. Instead, exhibits of fine art, sugarcane, coffee, embroidered cloth, rums, and new industrial machines proved that the island was fundamentally enmeshed within the global networks of modern capitalist commerce. Literary and visual arts contests declared that the island’s wealth was not limited to what could be extracted from or produced by the earth; culture, too, was paramount.⁵

Among the artworks exhibited in the Palacio de Santurce, visitors could see forty-four of Francisco Oller’s paintings (fig. 1).⁶ Oller’s art, awarded the Exposición’s gold prize for painting, demanded attention. He was the most famous living Puerto Rican artist and, by virtue of his training in Madrid and Paris, he embodied the international spirit of the event. The display in the Palacio de Santurce’s gallery evidenced his skill in various genres: portraiture, still lifes, and landscapes.⁷ The Wake, debuting at the Exposición, represented the culmination of all his previous studies (fig. 2). Larger than the others, the painting confirmed Oller’s ability to depict landscapes, character, and type studies, as well as his skill rendering accurate still lifes within a complex and inventive composition. Too large for the gallery, this forty-fifth painting was showcased by itself in a separate venue, the Ateneo de Puerto Rico, as an extension of the 1893 fair.⁸

The Wake presents a raucous scene: a rural cabin’s interior containing dozens of peasants—musicians, revelers, children. It takes time to register the various actions unfolding across the busy composition. Oller’s jíbaros (a term used to designate Puerto Rican rural laborers or peasants) are depicted celebrating the Afro-Caribbean funerary rite known as the baquiné. A viewer might initially overlook the central figure and reason for the festivity: the deceased child. The child (he or she cannot be more than two years old) has been posed with hands carefully folded in prayer. This delicate gesture resonates across the other tender details of the table setting, including the starched, immaculate tablecloth with its intricate bobbin-lace border placed under the body, and the floral crown with a bed of roses that surround the small, pale corpse. The figures across the room engage in conversation and contrast with the central Black male figure, who leans toward the heartrending tableau. He stands out, as if captured in the act of meditative contemplation, gazing at the deceased toddler. This singular gesture of constrained observation possibly best illustrated how the public at the fair would engage with The Wake: quietly and intentionally.

Although The Wake captures a fleeting instant in a baquiné, no aspect of the composition is incidental. The painting is carefully rendered; it is the summation of Oller’s stylistic development. The polished texture shows Oller’s adherence to academic training. The enormity of the canvas demanded the work be done in a studio, and Oller’s various sketches show the development of the design and his deliberate study of models for each character.⁹ People and objects within the cabin are painted carefully, in keeping with the smooth brushwork associated with Realism. The landscape shows the influence of Impressionism; dabs of loose color replicate the Caribbean light and more easily convey the airy liveliness of the hillside.¹⁰ The Wake proclaimed the then sixty-year-old artist’s mastery and abiding creativity.

This essay examines The Wake within the context of the Exposición de Puerto Rico to explore the significance of introducing a genre scene of peasant life and death within this celebratory expo. A close analysis of historical and sociological period texts relevant to the jíbaro allows for greater contextualization and understanding of how the fair’s audience may have understood the work. Within the bountiful displays of Puerto Rico’s progress in the 1893 fair, the painting’s portrayals of rowdy jíbaros, a deceased child, and the celebration of a superstitious ritual provoked viewers to consider the deprivation and marginalization of the island’s peasant class. Although it proposed to criticize jíbaros, I argue that, as part of a fair dedicated to the promotion of the island’s resources and its advancement under Spanish rule, the painting cast aspersion over the narrative of progress set by the fair.

Today, The Wake has achieved the unofficial status of a “national painting” in Puerto Rico. Contemporary artists, like Rafael Trelles and Antonio Martorell, have used the composition as inspiration for their work. In 1991, Trelles created the life-size installation, Visitas al velorio (Homenaje a Francisco Oller) (Visits to the Wake [Tribute to Francisco Oller]), which invites the viewer to comment on Puerto Rican politics within an updated version of the artwork (fig. 3). Martorell’s charcoal and pastel Copias al carbón: homenaje a “El velorio” (Carbon Copies, Homage to The Wake, 2000), a detailed re-creation of the original painting’s different vignettes, brings attention to the complexity of Oller’s artwork. But perhaps The Wake’s national status is best revealed by references to popular culture rather than fine art. For instance, the caricature Coño despierta, Boricua (Dammit, Wake Up, Boricua; date and artist unknown) uses the cabin setting of the painting for a political statement (fig. 4). This particular cartoon was on display at a chinchorro, a dive selling drinks and fried foods in Puerto Rico.¹¹ Important advocates for Puerto Rican independence are depicted attending a baquiné for a flag-draped jíbaro. The historical figures appear to be inciting the peasant to wake up, presumably to continue to fight for freedom. This popular rendition is relevant due to the reference to The Wake’s cabin setting. The visual quotation signals the widespread local knowledge of the painting and its political implications. The Wake, in short, is central to Oller’s status as a national hero.

Oller was not the first island-born painter to achieve great fame (the eighteenth-century Rococo artist José Campeche preceded him). However, art historians consider him to be the true founder of a Puerto Rican school of painting because he initiated an art tradition fully immersed in and committed to local culture. Scholars identify The Wake as Oller’s masterpiece in exemplifying this new school. Past Puerto Rican art employed the cultural standards of Spain to cater to the preferences and culture of the islands’ urban elites, but the monumental eight-by-thirteen-foot canvas focuses on a tradition that islanders recognized as Puerto Rican, despite or perhaps because of the ritual’s African origins. Thus, the painting epitomizes the artist’s success in the Realist movement’s objective to present daily life as it was, what art historian Linda Nochlin identified as the search for an authentic “sense of place.”¹²

The painting’s ambiguous title may confuse the uninitiated viewer, who might mistake it for a traditional wake. But Oller’s compatriots would have immediately perceived that the painting’s subject matter was a baquiné, from the rustic setting and the types of behaviors exhibited by the participants. Baquiné roots are traced to African rituals brought to Puerto Rico by the enslaved people from the nearby island of Tortola.¹³ As early as the eighteenth century, Friar Iñigo Abad, one of Puerto Rico’s earliest historians, described it as a funerary practice where death became the motive for a feast. Like a wake, the baquiné ritual commemorated a death, but unlike the traditionally somber and solemn Spanish wake, it was a jovial event. Oller’s feast exemplifies a velorio de angelitos (wake for little angels) common among peasants. These celebrations rejoiced in the child’s assured entry into heaven, since—according to popular belief—children have no sins.¹⁴ Their innocence ensures their entry into heaven, a prospect worthy of jubilation. The child’s soul could intercede and ask God for mercy toward the family, a blessing for the kin of the deceased.¹⁵ The island’s creole upper-class believed that these rituals desecrated the dead.¹⁶ Moreover, they considered them to be not only borderline pagan but also wasteful, since they entailed the expenses of a feast. But among the island’s peasantry, the death of a child merited the buoyant celebration; the baquiné honored the child and served as a communal experience that symbolized hope in the afterlife.¹⁷

The baquiné combined the sacred, the belief in the great beyond, with the profane, the unrestrained satisfaction of earthly appetites. Oller emphasized this latter aspect by introducing the viewer to the sensorially charged event. Physical contact prevails: near the center, a child pushes his way past the hips of a woman; to the far left, a pair of lovers embrace in the cover of a darkened corner; three children, barely visible in the lower left foreground, have toppled over each other; and even the sacristan leans over the priest and gently rests his hands upon him. The painting, as much as the visual medium can, emphasizes the olfactory and aural elements of the scene. People, food, and flowers suggest an amalgamation of strong aromas in the room. The Wake conjures the cacophony of these events. Open mouths imply conversation or even shouting. Near the entrance, a group of musicians conjures the familiar noise of a scratched güiro, the maraca’s rattle, and the strum of the tiple (a string instrument) ever-present in Puerto Rican parties.¹⁸ The cabin’s open doors offer a view of the tropical panorama, reminding the viewer of the sweltering warmth resulting from bodies assembled within the cabin in the equatorial climate. The sight of the expansive verdant landscape relieves the crowded composition (fig. 5). Oller’s painting offered a glimpse into the life of the people whose labor sustained the cash crop economy, in sugar, coffee, or tobacco. Moreover, it exposed the living conditions that resulted from the industry’s miserable wages.¹⁹

Before Oller painted The Wake, jíbaros had become archetypes and icons of Puerto Rico; today their clothes (like the wide-brimmed straw pava hats) remain a standard of the national costume, and their representation stands out as the paradigmatic Puerto Rican type.²⁰ Starting in the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries, the jíbaro acquired a symbolic protonationalist status. Historian Francisco Scarano examines how Puerto Rican creole elites presented themselves as jíbaros in order to criticize politics and policies that benefited foreign capital and investors rather than cater to the local elite. By employing what he calls a “jíbaro masquerade,” these privileged Puerto Ricans intended to voice their criticisms while positioning themselves as nonthreatening in the manner of the subordinate and marginalized peasants.²¹ The creoles’ guise helped define the outlines of the jíbaro as a local type; by the 1850s, jíbaros formed an integral part of Puerto Rican literature. The literary jíbaro was, broadly speaking, a romanticized figure. The earliest image referencing the Puerto Rican peasant typology is Self-Portrait (1776) by Luis Paret y Alcázar—a Spanish Rococo painter in exile in Puerto Rico. Although he was decidedly not a jíbaro, he created the self-portrait depicting himself as such to send to Spain in the hopes of regaining the King’s favor and being allowed to return to the peninsula.²² In the painting, Paret y Alcázar called attention to the exotic and distant locale of his banishment by wearing the typical loose-fitting clothes and wide-brimmed hat and carrying plantains. The self-presentation explicitly points to his exclusion from the Spanish courtly lifestyle. From then on, the visual type of the Puerto Rican jíbaro was set. It is a ubiquitous element of popular visual culture even today, be that in politics—a jíbaro silhouette is the icon for the Partido Popular, one of the main political parties of Puerto Rico—or as the national costume worn for local festivities.

The Wake’s peasants wear the costume but otherwise defy the fictional characterization of mythologized literary figures. They resemble the real peasants who comprised 81 percent of the island’s population and who the island’s late-nineteenth-century intellectual elite, the social class to which Oller belonged, saw as an obstacle to the nation’s progress.²³ Rather than personifying national identity, peasants embodied the backwardness that held back Puerto Rico.²⁴ Philosopher Eugenio María de Hostos, in an 1873 essay, exemplifies this view as he spoke of Puerto Rican jíbaros’ potential in shaping the future of the nation. Nevertheless, they were characterized by the “same ignorance, moderated by instincts of generosity” and “replicate the almost virgin nature that produces them.”²⁵ Numerous intellectuals continued this line of thinking and analyzed the causes and effects of the living conditions of the peasantry, along with the local history that had led to the expansion of this most numerous class in Puerto Rico. Thus, their resulting work can be tied to patriotically minded interests: how could the nation prosper if its constituent bodies were physically and intellectually feeble? Investigations of the physical, mental, and social conditions of the jíbaros found their subjects’ character, education, habits, health, hygiene, and morality to be lacking and requiring a series of interventions.²⁶

Similarly, while Oller received praise for The Wake, he did not intend the jíbaros he portrayed to be admired. The artist described his subjects as engaged “in an orgy of brutal appetites, under the veil of a crass tradition.”²⁷ Oller’s succinct statement indicates that the painting is not so much a tribute to the baquiné as an indictment of such events and their problematic conflation with local tradition. Contemporary reviews of the artwork appear to have understood Oller’s painting as a social critique. Alejandro Infiesta, one of the organizers of the Exposición of 1893 and the author of the report detailing the fair, shared Oller’s view. He understood the composition to be a rude satire: “not humorous like Cervantes but biting like Voltaire.”²⁸ He commended Oller’s audacity even as he considered the painting a failure for art: he believed that social regeneration was the task of philosophers and politicians, not artists.²⁹ A contemporary critic also interpreted it as social commentary but disagreed with Infiesta: The Wake introduced Oller within the “realist school of Prud’home [sic]” which demanded the arts work toward the correction of social vices.³⁰

In the three descriptions, The Wake’s peasants were the targets of criticism; subjects to be denounced and deplored. These sentiments echoed those expressed in the contemporaneous sociological studies that attended to jíbaros. At the time, progressive intellectuals concentrated much of their work on Puerto Rico’s enormous jíbaro population to improve their lives. Oller, a cultured urbanite, was not merely friendly with the island’s intelligentsia; he was integral to the group of scholars and politicians, such as Manuel Fernández Juncos, José Julián Acosta, and Román Baldorioty de Castro, who were determined to accomplish large-scale reforms.³¹ The painter shared their commitment to education, an endeavor they valued almost as a panacea to the nation’s ills.³² Their work addressed how to remedy what they saw as the peasantry’s ignorant and dissipate lifestyles. Specifically, they looked to the causes behind the prevalence of disease, lack of education, and neglect of proper Catholic comportment among the jíbaro population. Despite scholars’ barely veiled condescendence toward their subjects, within the nineteenth-century context, theirs was a progressively minded project.³³ Francisco del Valle Atiles’s 1887 study, El campesino puertorriqueño, exemplifies the spirit of these studies. He presented his work as an impartial study aimed at analyzing pervasive problems affecting jíbaros while uncovering the most significant issues they faced.³⁴ These issues were high infant death rates, anemia, alcoholism, lack of education, lack of footwear, lack of knowledge of how to cultivate land, and poor housing conditions.³⁵ The Wake’s depiction of barefoot jíbaros attending the wake of a small child not only parallels but seemingly illustrates the laundry list of hardships listed by del Valle Atiles and other nineteenth-century thinkers. Consider, then, what The Wake meant in the context of the 1893 fair, whose narrative promised that prosperity went hand in hand with the intelligent exploitation of the island’s resources and human capital.

Educated viewers, familiar with the sociological concerns regarding the jíbaro, might have found the same moral and material concerns of peasant life in the painting. Jíbaros were both the object of study and the would-be recipients of the educational enterprises devised by reformers. It is not surprising that an examination of Oller’s peasants alongside the sociological studies of the period reveals numerous overlaps. Despite the paternalistic attitude toward peasants, sociologists and historians’ primary intention was to understand them in order to ameliorate their situation. Regardless, these turn-of-the-century studies often pathologized the peasantry by ignoring the nuances of their circumstances. To that end, viewers of The Wake are positioned at a distance, at the would-be corner of the cabin, to act as silent witnesses to an unruly baquiné, much like the sociologists who attempted to objectively observe the peasantry. Perhaps it was meant to compel viewers to participate in the work of assimilating the jíbaro into a productive member of “proper” society.

In the midst of the fair, The Wake stood out as a depiction of failure on the part of the official state. It portrayed the state’s inability to eradicate marginal practices in favor of the Spanish cultural model, and it monumentalized an image of poverty. The fair commemorated four hundred years of Spanish presence on the island: four centuries of history, culture, and, above all, progress. That progress had been achieved was the crucial argument set forth by the various exhibits and the art or poetry contests.³⁶ Infiesta noted that the submissions of the group of “obras del ingenio humano” (works of human ingenuity), which included science, music, literature, and painting contests, were the areas where advancement was most evident.³⁷ Baquiné rituals, like other examples of what intellectuals perceived as deviant behavior, are rarely mentioned in historical accounts. The authors of the time, primarily educated men from privileged classes, desired to bring little attention to such events beyond critiquing them or using them as examples of how the peasants grasped onto foreign and—according to their perspective—illegitimate cultural forms. Yet the responses to the painting, noting its intention to moralize, demonstrate a widespread knowledge of the ritual’s existence and prevalence. Still, any criticisms aimed at the peasantry posed within the fair could not be extracted from a critical evaluation of the systems complicit in the jíbaros’ living conditions. The products of the land displayed at the Exposición could not exist without the uneducated jíbaros. Peasants provided the necessary labor for the island’s hacienda-based economy, centered around commodity export of few agricultural crops, most famously the island’s coffee, sugar, and tobacco.³⁸

Oller’s painting employs ambiguity to retain legibility. The hilly landscape is reminiscent of the mountainous interior where coffee is cultivated in Puerto Rico, but it could arguably also represent the elevated areas that surround coastal haciendas where sugarcane grew.³⁹ The different skin tones depicted also convey the diverse racial composition of rural Puerto Ricans without clearly connecting them to an exact geographic location.⁴⁰ The painting was effective in creating easily identifiable character types which, according to Infiesta, resulted in some viewers exclaiming “that jíbaro is from my town!” upon seeing the artwork.⁴¹ The lack of specificity functioned to throw into relief the prevalence of baquinés on the island, a celebration that, according to a journalist’s report, was “known to all from having seen it in the countryside” of Puerto Rico.⁴²

Oller’s audience would have also understood the societal roles implied in the composition. The landscape shows a man on horseback who has been interpreted to be the hacienda owner.⁴³ He recedes into the background, but his presence reminds viewers of the social organization of rural Puerto Rico during the late nineteenth century. After 1850, most independent subsistence farmers had disappeared and had been turned into what historian Laird Begard calls an “embryonic rural proletariat” of lucrative cash crops like coffee and sugarcane.⁴⁴ So Oller’s jíbaros represented a class of workers whose independence and freedom existed more in the imagination of critics and intellectuals than in reality. The paradox of The Wake lies in that it depicts these jíbaros, responsible for an enormous portion of the national economy, as they defiantly celebrate a countercultural baquiné. Yet they act as antagonistic figures in the context of the narrative of industry and cultural normativity set forth by the fair.⁴⁵

Sociological studies established a significant link between their conception of a Puerto Rican jíbaro, including what they understood to be the class’s weaknesses and strengths, and the local environment and heritage. Most jíbaros were categorized as white or mixed race, but they were not defined by a specific racial profile. Within the mountainous interior of the island, the population was identified as mostly white or of mixed race. Along the coasts, the cultivation area for sugarcane, there was a greater population of Black or mixed-race peasants due to the historical reliance on enslaved people in the sugar industry.⁴⁶ Racist ideology did not so much frame the sociological studies as underlie the research of scholars who accepted and propagated bigoted ideas that linked race with biological and character differences. They deemed people with a greater percentage of African heritage as having “natural” endurance that made them fit for hard work, and having negative character traits that supposedly reflected their lower evolutionary status.⁴⁷

Nevertheless, because the racial composition of the peasant class varied, race could not be the sole factor to explain the jíbaros’ subaltern status. Instead, it was the local environment and climate of Puerto Rico that determined and induced the jíbaros’ subaltern state. As such, it was crucial to detect their origin and establish how the land itself—the geography and topography of Puerto Rico—had historically shaped them.⁴⁸ Oller’s composition affords a view of the surrounding landscape of green and uncultivated rolling hills as if to punctuate the connection between the peasantry and the territory. Nineteenth-century Puerto Rican historian Salvador Brau, one of the most influential scholars of the period, wrote an authoritative analysis on the working classes of Puerto Rico that promulgated this notion. Brau did not pioneer the theory that climate and nature influenced the peasants’ character development. He merely subscribed and maintained the logic presented during the previous century by Alejandro O’Reilly, a royally appointed marshal whose 1756 report for King Carlos III stands out as one of the earliest histories of Puerto Rico. Brau relies upon (and directly quotes) O’Reilly’s tome in his work, Las clases jornaleras de Puerto Rico, which focused on the island’s working classes, specifically O’Reilly’s explanation of the population’s origin. O’Reilly argued that people who arrived on the island made use of the soil’s natural fertility, which in turn became the primary factor conducive to their laziness.⁴⁹ As per O’ Reilly, with just five days of work, a family had plantains for a whole year. Brau perpetuated this narrative: he described a Puerto Rican peasant class that had grown accustomed to getting by with small plots of land, one that could remain indolent and still carve out an existence.

The then-recent legal policies on the island appear to prove that ruling classes shared Brau’s views of an idle peasantry. Preoccupations with labor led to the 1849 imposition of the libreta de jornalero (day laborer’s notebook) regime, a vagrancy law that forced uneducated, able-bodied males who did not own more than two acres to carry a notebook proving employment status at all times. Jíbaros’ characterization as lazy and independent meant they could not be counted on for working the fields and expanding global commerce, which meant that hacendados required additional laborers. Slavery, although not abolished until 1873 in Puerto Rico, was slowly dismantled throughout the nineteenth century and therefore did not guarantee workers.⁵⁰ The broader strategic objective of the libreta regime was to foster the development of the hacendados’ commercial agriculture in Puerto Rico by imposing forced labor on supposedly free peasants.⁵¹ Throughout the twenty-three years that the law was in effect, it was abused to keep laborers under indefinite contracts, comparable to a suspended state of indentured servitude.⁵² The survival of the island’s expansive agricultural industry relied on an economic model that effectively prevented social mobility.⁵³

Significantly, the libreta regime promoted the widespread belief that the peasantry had to be forced into labor because they did not actually need to work to survive. To Brau, the natural physiognomy, specifically the natural fertility of Puerto Rico that allowed food to grow freely, intrinsically shaped the jíbaros’ disposition and character.⁵⁴ And although he pointed to the jíbaros’ greatest vice—laziness—as shaped by the land, he believed that same land accounted for their greatest virtue—generosity—since peasants recognized that the land always provided.⁵⁵ Even intellectuals who desired to help the peasants seemed concerned that without inducement, they might not be willing or able to commit themselves to a betterment of the nation via their individual contribution to the economy.

The belief that climate and geography played a pivotal role in shaping the character of a people was a widely accepted theory during the nineteenth century. By the eighteenth century, this theory of environmental determinism—taken as an objective scientific truth—had filtered through disciplines such as anthropology and geography. Environmental forces were considered so powerful that they not only determined human behavior but could also transform biology. In as little as two generations, colonizers of European descent became affected—that is to say, transformed—by local conditions.⁵⁶ Throughout the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, Europeans and North Americans characterized the Caribbean alternately as a productive paradise or a depraved territory, a dichotomy that paralleled the economic exploitation of the terrain and the populace.⁵⁷ The North American and European construction of the Caribbean landscape as a concept depended on a number of factors: lands cleared for agriculture could be seen as beneficial.⁵⁸

It would seem that these two seemingly contradictory visions delineated by foreigners could coexist in the minds of Puerto Rico’s intellectual elites.⁵⁹ Descriptions of how the peasants lived primitively amid lush and undercultivated lands presented them as vulnerable to the environment’s stimulus. Scholars differentiated themselves from their subjects of study. Their status as urban dwellers and educated people demarcated a clear boundary that separated them from peasants. They may have seen themselves as better equipped in their defenses against environmental determinism by way of their immersion in the human-built domain of the city. But more likely it was education—scholars’ preferred prescription for the betterment of jíbaros’ quality of life that they demanded for the sake of progress throughout Puerto Rico—that they assigned with the power to curtail the influence of the environment and force peasants to behave in more deliberate and controlled ways.

Were the rural dwellers in the painting condemned to be influenced by nature? The Wake does not seem to offer such a simplistic or defeatist thesis either. Its peasants embody the pathologies incurred by the environment pursuant to climate theory. It is not race that marks their pathological difference as social beings; in fact, one of the composition’s figures with the lightest skin tone is the priest, a person whose role as spiritual leader should preclude him from even being present at this ritual (fig. 6). Yet, like the revelers, he lacks self-control. Far from society’s judging eye, which may curb the basest of human behavior, the priest hungrily gapes at the roast pig rather than offering spiritual guidance to the crowd.⁶⁰ As a striking contrast, the Black man in the center appears unaffected by the debauchery of the scene and remains steadfast in his contemplation of the deceased child. The figure has been interpreted as a representation of a formerly enslaved man, which is why he wears an earring. This choice is significant, as Oller emphasized the humanity of someone whose humanity was denied until the abolition of slavery.⁶¹

The central Afro–Puerto Rican figure personifies the argument that each individual can overcome, at least in part, the will of nature. The racist tropes of the time identified people of African heritage as being closer to instinct and nature, so Oller’s contemporaries would have perceived that the environment’s influence was a doubly powerful force upon this man due to the combination of the rural surroundings and his African blood. The artist ennobles the man by emphasizing his refusal to partake in the revelry (fig. 7). But the Black man’s tattered clothing, notably different from the field clothing worn by the other adult males in the scene, marks him as a vagrant. Therefore, he remains a problematic figure; he is not a jíbaro, because he does not work the land. Despite his good character, he is an unproductive member of colonial society, able to circumvent the social and economic systems that might ensure the island’s development. If Oller intended to elevate the Afro–Puerto Rican man by way of underscoring his active capacity for empathy and reflection, he still positioned him as passively reliant on the generosity of others and the bounty of nature.⁶²

The positioning of the other Black figures reveals a similar unease. In the darkened corner, a Black baby and two light-skinned children have toppled over each other, a chaotic interaction charged with questions of race (fig. 8). The other Black figures remain at the threshold of the cabin, peering in or playing music, as if fostering the baquiné environment but segregated within the festivity. Thus, the artwork infuses—and motivates viewers to ponder—the question of race and its role in social order, much like the sociological studies of the period.⁶³

The Wake also evokes sociologists’ characterization of the peasantry’s lack of sexual restraint, as well as the consequences of sexual behaviors in their unstable family life. For scholars of the time, the peasants’ unstable family life was both the result and one of the causes of their poverty.⁶⁴ Their unrooted lifestyle, sociologists found, exposed them to vices like concubinage and laziness. Accordingly, they linked the insufficient stability of jíbaro family units with the absence of building blocks for a well-ordered Puerto Rican society. Thus, note the insistence in The Wake’s composition of depicting peasants as rejecting appropriately Catholic behavior, not just by participating in the baquiné but in their general comportment. The crowd takes advantage of the event to fulfill base instincts, as shown by the couple embracing in the shadows. It remains unclear whether the amorous couple is married or not, but regardless, their display breaks the rules of acceptable courting or marital behavior (and shockingly close to a priest!), implying that they are unlikely to follow the period’s normative expectations of a Catholic-sanctioned marriage.⁶⁵ Additionally, the deceased child’s parentage is unclear. The mother has been commonly identified as the woman who offers the priest a glass, presumably in her role as hostess.⁶⁶ But what of the father? The woman is surrounded by men, not one of them appearing to be decidedly the host in charge of the feast. The father may be the man immediately next to the woman or the older gentleman who stands next to him and is closest to the viewer. But the older man could also be the grandfather of the child. Such questions of kinship mattered, for they serve as reminders of the nonnormative sexual practices of the jíbaro population that sociologists identified as obstacles impeding the class’s progress.

The sexual behavior sociologists deemed inappropriate was, according to them, related to the influence of a fertile natural environment and the lifestyle it afforded, much as laziness was. According to Brau, promiscuity was nothing more than man’s character reproducing like the environment around him, since “in the midst of that lusty nature, in which all the engendering elements flourish without obstacles, it was impossible to pretend to voluntarily condemn men to sterility.”⁶⁷ So the lush environs, like the one Oller depicts lying just beyond the threshold of the cabin, were not merely influencing the formation of the jíbaros’ character, they engendered it.

The Exposición displayed not just the island’s resources but also the commodities available to consumers. An affluent visitor could have stood in front of a humidor and examined finely rolled tobacco before walking into another gallery to look at photographs and photography equipment, perhaps taking note of the rapid advancements in technology.⁶⁸ A diverse array of items addressed the fair attendee as a potential consumer, an active participant in the local economy.

In contrast, it is worth taking stock of the material world of the jíbaro recreated in The Wake to see how it deviated from a fair that marketed newness, innovation, and improvement. Comparing the articles that Oller depicted with those real items on display reveals the marked material difference between peasants and the cultured urbanite. It is not merely that the composition underscores the peasants’ poverty, it is that it includes details like the machetes hanging from the cabin walls or the maracas, objects that highlight the distinctiveness of the peasant lifestyle. Among these, perhaps the most significant is the low-backed chair called a duho, whose form is traced back to the Taíno—the Indigenous population of Puerto Rico (figs. 9 and 10).⁶⁹ The coexistence of this chair along with a Windsor chair in the jíbaros’ home invites a further analysis into material culture and customs in Puerto Rico. In 1907, the art critic Félix Matos Bernier reviewed The Wake negatively and listed the numerous faults of Oller’s painting. Among these, he includes the implausibility of some of the objects’ appearance in the peasants’ house, specifically the Windsor chair (he refers to it as a “Vienna imitation”) (figs. 9 and 11). The design of the Windsor chair, named for the English town of Windsor where it was traded as early as the eighteenth century, is particularly well-suited for the tropics.⁷⁰ Much like furniture with caning, the spindles of the chair’s back allow for air to circulate. Yet Matos Bernier argued that this was not peasant furniture and therefore did not fit the scene.⁷¹

In the painting, the Windsor chair is located next to the duho. Matos Bernier’s review pays no attention to the duho, most likely because its presence would have been typical in a jíbaro home. Duhos, in Taíno culture, were ritual seats that played an important role in the maintenance of political and ideological hierarchies. These objects were pivotal during important ceremonial occasions, as their presence and use separated their high-ranking owners from the rest of the community.⁷² By the time this painting was made, duhos were no longer ritual artifacts; their symbolic capacity was lost with Spanish domination. Yet the form—the swooping curve of the slinglike back resting upon short legs close to the floor—continued to exist. The solid stone or wooden duho of the Taínos was transformed into a chair of wood and leather that remained common in lower-class homes.⁷³ The duho in The Wake has a worn leather back, suggesting repeated use. It no longer confers owners a position of power within a community, rather it marks them as part of a marginalized population.

A visitor to the 1893 fair would have seen the display of archeological Taíno artifacts from the personal collection of Dr. Agustín Stahl (fig. 12). In that context, these artifacts represented the civilization that had been eclipsed by Spanish culture. Nineteenth-century narratives dismissed Taíno culture, stating that little of it was worth saving. Readers of Infiesta’s report would learn that, according to him, by the time Spaniards arrived, Taínos were in the “Second Stone Age.”⁷⁴ Whatever culture survived was diluted within the so-called proper Spanish culture that the fair celebrated, the culture that had supposedly propelled the island’s evolutionary scale forward. The presence of the duho in the painting marks the Caribbean setting and speaks to a residual pre-Hispanic influence. Moreover, it suggests that the jíbaro and the Taínos were similar: both behind on the evolutionary scale that positioned white Europeans at its most evolved end. The duho’s presence could function as an incentive for spectators to complete the work of Spaniards the fair’s narrative announced: that Spaniards effectively enlightened the Natives and that there was still much to be done toward enlightening them. It was likely not lost on the audience, however, that Taínos were not merely enlightened, they were extinguished.⁷⁵

As the duho has become less commonplace, it is worth examining in detail how, together with the Windsor chair, these seats set up a dialogue. The composition places the duho and Windsor next to each other, with the latter facing the duho, arms open, invitingly. The Windsor chair, greater in height, can be read as one of the European models overtaking the local. The imported model represents the Euro-centric normative lifestyle, and its presence might perhaps help the peasants ward off the worst of their environmental influences. Progressive thinkers had little doubt that peasants could and should be enlightened. The introduction of what Matos Bernier saw as an otherwise incongruous artifact speaks to this belief, allowing for the possibility that material life can exert influence upon the peasantry.

The Wake’s recreation of the peasants’ material world throws into relief the contrast of the counterculture and the normative culture modeled after Spanish standards. Considerations of material culture and the influence it could wield were deeply significant in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. Racial constructs in the Spanish Caribbean have been historically entwined with social class; thus, objects formed part of performances of identity. Granting such a degree of power to objects may read as a far-fetched proposition, but art historian Mia Bagneris notes how it was possible for a Spanish American mixed-race woman to “in large part, dress her way into whiteness” in the eighteenth century.⁷⁶ This pliable notion of race continues even today; it is perhaps best summarized by sociologist Jorge Duany: “the wealthier a person is, the more likely she will be classified as light-skinned or simply as white, regardless of her physical appearance.”⁷⁷ Jíbaros’ differences were not simply defined by their skin tone but by their material world and their behavior. Central to the boundaries of class-race was how they lived and their performance of so-called illegitimate forms of culture such as the baquiné.

Art historian Osiris Delgado Mercado reexamined the Windsor chair’s presence in the peasant’s home to argue that it was not, as Matos Bernier stated, unexplainable. He asserts that it was not uncommon for hacienda owners to either lend out some furnishings to peasants for occasions of importance or even to gift them furniture when they updated their home’s interior decoration.⁷⁸ Supporting Delgado Mercado’s hypothesis is the inclusion of the man on horseback in the background, interpreted as the hacendado, who appears to be departing from the cabin. Moreover, note the presence of another fine object depicted in the rural cabin: the lace-bordered tablecloth beneath the deceased child. The tablecloth is perfectly white, with visible marks of its folds that suggests that it is not frequently out on display. Yet it is too short for the tabletop, to indicate it is being used in an ad hoc manner. The elaborate lace trim is most likely mundillo, a type of torchon bobbin lace with deep cultural roots in Puerto Rico. This craft was made by women of every class. Middle-class and upper-class women could beautify their homes with their handmade wares and still perform in an acceptable and gender-normative activity. In turn, the work earned peasant women necessary wages and allowed them to contribute to the familial economy as it was traded within the piecework industry.⁷⁹ The width of the tablecloth’s lace makes it an extravagant object due to the many long hours necessary for its completion, so that even if it was the product of a peasant’s hand, it would have been made to be sold. So, like the Windsor chair, it is unlikely that such an item would form part of a peasant’s estate.

Both the tablecloth and the Windsor chair, be it an island-made imitation or an authentic import, speak of the island’s trade and commodity exchange in an expanding world market. They contrast with the small, time-worn duho befitting the spartan lifestyle of the jíbaros. The Windsor chair and the lace-trimmed cloth appeared so remarkably out of place in the eyes of contemporary viewers because they implicated jíbaros in commodity exchanges. The peasantry’s active participation was relegated exclusively to their labor rather than to conspicuous consumption. Jíbaros functioned as gleaners within the market of luxury imports and exports; their life remained dependent on the generosity of hacienda owners. Their survival was, to a degree, contingent on the close patron-client relationship with landowners, the same relationship that could explain such objects in a jíbaro home.

Returning to the Exposición, the event’s displays of fine crafts—objects that evidenced crafting skill and rich materials—demonstrated the existence of a market for high-quality craftsmanship but one that was out of reach for peasants. Urbane and wealthy Puerto Ricans could peruse the fine embroideries in the “Women’s Work” section and admire the luxury tram wagon manufactured in Puerto Rico with local materials and laborers.⁸⁰ In accordance with the progressive spirit of the fair, the organizers included a contest that showed their commitment to advancement for a greater part of Puerto Rican society. Among the sections for local and imported crafts, materials, and machines, there was a section dedicated to “Public Instruction or Education.” Various contests fell under that heading, including a reform-focused category that called for entries for “objects to better the moral and material conditions of the population.”⁸¹ It invited submissions for furniture, dress, and food distinguished by their affordability; a material culture that might help elevate the conditions of the peasantry. How people used material culture helped determine their place in Puerto Rican society—as part of the normative or subaltern population. The open call underscores the significance of elevating the peasantry by giving them the opportunity to be in contact with objects that might enrich their lives but also influence their behavior, diminish the influence of nature, and redirect their “instincts” toward Spanish-cultural models. But despite the contest, Infiesta lamented that there were no entries for this important section. While intellectuals wrote pamphlets and pursued sociological studies about the current circumstances and how these perpetuated the lowly conditions of the Puerto Rican peasantry, there was no equivalent in conceiving of practical material objects that might help transform the peasantry and their living situations. The fair’s narrative of progress excluded the jíbaro class.

The Wake’s current prominence and status as a national symbol speaks directly to the identification of Puerto Ricans with the figure of the jíbaro. Despite the contemporaneous interpretations of the artwork as a critical satire or those criticisms which found nothing but fault in the design, it retains ambiguity. The many disadvantages—lack of proper nutrition, footwear, or appropriate behavioral models—that the peasant class faced seemed to predestine the jíbaro to fall victim to the unmitigated influences of their rural lifestyle. Or it might have determined the improbability of jíbaros attaining what sociologists defined as progress. How could uneducated jíbaros be faulted for their behavior if even an educated priest could not overcome the influence of nature? How might peasants overcome their situation if they remained surrounded by few objects that could prompt new attitudes and forms of behavior? Perhaps, in time, those loaned artifacts may inspire them to perform in a way deemed normative.

Still, in light of Oller’s admission of the painting’s caustic social message, it is particularly powerful to note the “faults” in the artwork, that is, those aspects that undermine the tidy logic of the scene. The rowdy behavior—evidenced by toppled chairs, misbehaving children, and a man who appears to be yelling—can be easily understood by a viewer who expected these peasants to be intoxicated. Excessive alcohol consumption was but one more vice that Del Valle Atiles’s study attributed to the peasantry. But taking note of the refreshments and food shared at the wake, where are the many empty bottles or glasses that evidence hours of drinking? Looking at the composition, we can only find three people holding drinks—the man who tips his head back thirstily, another man in a darkened corner who brandishes the bottle to let its contents fall to the floor, and the woman, commonly identified as the mother of the dead child, who holds a drink. Yet even she appears to be offering a drink to the priest rather than partaking. There are two glasses within easy reach of the attendees: one is full, placed on a stool to the left of the composition; the other one is empty, abandoned or waiting to be used, and sits behind the dead child. Another bottle along with a glass are stored safely above the windowsill—seemingly reserved or set aside for a future occasion. There are over a dozen people present and no abundance of alcoholic spirits. Interpretations of the painting as a critical commentary relied on a circular logic: the peasants appeared to be drunk because that was what was expected of them. Rather than fully align with the contemporaneous sociological studies, The Wake’s ambiguity challenged sociological objectivity, the presumed “truths.”

The complaints regarding the excesses of the baquiné might have looked to the food present at the feast as well. There is little food to offer the congregants. The space where they gather serves as storage for a whole plantain bunch (along with what is left of another bunch of the same fruit) and dried corn that hangs from the ceiling’s wooden rafter. A bowl of what looks to be rice crashes onto the floor, the hungry child crying in response. Lechón (roast pig on a spit) is the only fare ready to be eaten at the wake. More can be said about the pork’s presence at the wake, since it was seen at the time as artistic license (fig. 13).⁸² As Infiesta reminded his readers, wakes take place at night, and roast pork is eaten during lunch—either the peasants are celebrating during the wrong time, or this wake lasted more than twelve hours.⁸³ The rustic cabin precludes the possibility of observing the corpse at any real distance from where food is stored, and there is no space to set the roast pork, with the exception of the table that holds the deceased. That the food is in the same room as the deceased child points to an absence of decorum and to sanitation that might be, at best, questionable, but overall appears to highlight the jíbaro’s lack of hygiene and morality. This lechón, brought in to nourish the crowd, is not the enormous size of roasted pigs, which range anywhere from ninety to one hundred pounds—such animals can feed dozens of people. Instead, Oller’s animal is stunted, its lower half wasted or consumed, seemingly as inadequate and improper as the baquiné itself.

A close analysis of the composition reveals numerous details that undermine the logic of the painting. We might return to the notable scarcity of alcohol and food that contradict the level of intoxication expected at the scene or the facile access to nature’s bounty. We can again note the furnishings that speak of an economy of poverty and dependence. Corn and plantains, both present in the painting, were the basis of the jíbaros’ diet and central to their survival. Plantains and bananas require very little manipulation or oversight once planted and therefore were perfectly suited for people whose primary job required them to labor elsewhere. The inclusion of the fruits in the scene evoked the studies that identified laziness as a primary flaw of the jíbaros. Yet, the health and vigor, or lack thereof, of Puerto Rico’s peasants were inherently tied to their poor diet.⁸⁴ There is little food present in these jíbaros’ life, and what appears available, was considered nutritionally insufficient. Finally, in discussions of the lazy or indolent character of the jíbaro, it should not be lost on the viewer that two of the men appear with their machetes, tools for their work. The figures’ identity as jíbaros is inherently bound to their labor.

The Wake’s presence in the Ateneo during the Exposición is further infused with symbolism. Oller and sociologists like Brau and del Valle Atiles, all of whom were critical of jíbaros, were active in the cultural institution. During the fair, Oller’s baquiné remained in the patio since its size did not allow it to fit inside the building. Perhaps, as the ritual diverged from the Spanish culture that the ateneístas valued, the canvas served more as an object of analysis rather than one of blind admiration. Siloed away from the rest of the fair, the painting’s jíbaro subjects appear divorced from the products of their labor on display in the Palacio de Santurce. Such a presentation parallels the era’s sociological studies, which isolated the jíbaros’ current conditions from the economic forces that largely determined their lives.

The painting’s “faults” are crucial to the artwork’s currency and prominence today. As a discipline, sociology has long since reevaluated the paradigms that defined the nineteenth-century studies of the jíbaro. Yet an analysis of the errors, many of which critic Matos Bernier described shortly after the artwork’s debut, directs our attention to how ambiguities in the painting were perceived in 1893. Such indeterminate elements belied the straightforward interpretation of the image. The lapses may have motivated questions regarding the objectivity of the period’s sociological studies, be they painted or written. It cannot go unnoticed that Oller portrayed the much-disparaged peasants celebrating a ritual that strengthened kinship bonds and sought to offer comfort in a moment of tragedy. The Wake reminds viewers of the significance of community in the face of strikingly absent material or economic assistance from the state. Here, the death of a child justifies an event that strongly affirms the jíbaros’ shared identity and commitment to one another. The baquiné highlights the multidimensionality of death, beyond the grief or the imposition of any regulations that attempt to define what can count as appropriate mourning. Most significantly, despite the condescending attitude of the elites toward jíbaros, the current status of The Wake reveals that Puerto Ricans recognize themselves in the image of marginalized people. The painting’s currency relies on Puerto Ricans’ lingering status as colonial subjects who remain unable to access power for the most part but who nonetheless resist attempts to fully assimilate into the dominating culture.

My thanks to Edward Sullivan, Natalia Vieyra, Jennie Waldow, Joseph Larnerd, Etta Bothwell, and José E. Colón for listening to my ideas and reading drafts of my work. I am indebted to Flavia Marichal Lugo and the rest of the staff at the Universidad de Puerto Rico’s Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte, who were kind enough to allow me to study El velorio while the museum was closed to visitors, as well as to the anonymous reviewers who provided invaluable feedback and bibliographic suggestions.