This piece appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
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Plaza Antonia Martínez, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, 1993. That was where I met the poet, artist, and filmmaker Carla Cavina. We were the only redheads among the students walking to class. We were also the shortest. When I looked into her eyes, I recognized a kindred spirit who understood the complexity of being a freckled redhead in Puerto Rico—inhabiting whiteness without wealth. We came from Bayamón (Carla) and Trujillo Alto (me), municipalities in the metropolitan area adjacent to San Juan but belonging neither to the imagined remoteness of “the island” nor to the political and economic power centers of San Juan and Guaynabo. Carla was selling her first poetry anthology, Corredora de sueños (1993), collected in a handmade book she designed and assembled herself. It was the first time I had met an author and seen a book made by hand. I wanted to buy it, but I had no money. I wanted to talk with her, but I felt intimidated.
In the years that followed, beyond our intermittent encounters on campus, Carla and I would run into each other on weekends in Old San Juan, before the banker Richard Carrión moved there and before Sila María Calderón became mayor in 1996. Back then, the nights in San Juan belonged to teenagers and university students. We were welcome in every bar; we drank in every corner and spent hours in the streets and along the walls of El Morro from late afternoon until dawn. Not all of us were the same. We moved in tribes organized by class and musical affinities. After 1996, however, the police began clearing us out with batons. We ran to avoid harassment, abuse, and arrest. We rushed into bars before owners could close their doors to avoid police raids on their small establishments.
As the 1990s faded and life carried us in different directions, I stayed in touch with Carla through social media. It took me 20 years—and a pandemic—to reach out and try to build a deeper connection with her. Carla does not know this, but her photo series #RetoCuarentena, published on Instagram, gave me a breath of relief that helped me survive each day during that time when I thought humanity might be coming to an end. The series became an embodied narrative that began with themes of confinement and evolved into an antithesis between a body under restriction and a body in motion. That antithesis guides my writing now as I reconnect with Carla. This time, I approach her through her practice as a photographer.
Motivated by a desire to reconnect with the community Carla and I shared at the University of Puerto Rico in the 1990s—revived in my memory through Instagram and the isolation of the pandemic—I turn to Carla’s photographic series #RetoCuarentena (2020), which unfolds against the backdrop of the long history of militarization across the Puerto Rican archipelago. Within a context marked by the imposition of a police-enforced curfew that effectively confined residents to their homes, Carla responded to #RetoCuarentena, a prompt launched on Instagram by the photographer Lluvia (@colerablues). Each day, Lluvia posted a word, and participating artists responded with an image shared on the platform. Faced with the catastrophe of an environment marked by material and emotional isolation, Carla created photographs and self-portraits that play with oppositions to explore her masculinity through a feminine lens. After two extended conversations with Carla, and through close analysis of the images, I weave together the photographer’s personal and philosophical reflections on the interplay between body, space, and time. I see that intersection shaping her creative practice while also opening onto additional tensions beyond those put forth by the artist: the representation of the confined body and its unpredictable movements, and the collapse of social space alongside the painful opening of the intimate.
The Power of Algaretismo: Embracing Uncertainty
In this perennial contradiction, in the loosening and tightening against enclosure, in the movement between fragments that the writer Antonio S. Pedreira described as la nave al garete, a ship adrift, there emerges an art that challenged not only the quarantine but also the enduring confinement imposed by U.S. militarization on the Puerto Rican archipelago. The expression nave al garete is central to Pedreira’s 1934 essay collection Insularismo. Within what were the patriarchal, racist, and classist anxieties of the cultural essay genre that sought to define a nation’s collective consciousness, Pedreira’s primary concern was the stagnation of the island’s insular condition. The Puerto Rican nation, he argued, had become disconnected from a glorious past and trapped in a defeatist pessimism about the future. The present, for Pedreira, unfolded through a condition of improvisation he described as a ship adrift: navigating without a clear origin (the great Hispanic cultural tradition) or a fixed destination (the necessary utilitarianism of the United States): “We entered the 20th century with a handful of useless residues and a significant number of social deficiencies … At the same time, life becomes corrupted within … the plebeian intellectual impoverishment to which it has been subjected by the vulgarity of the present.” Even so, he believed Puerto Rico stood at an inflection point from which it might still move toward greatness. What was needed was a compass capable of guiding the people through what he imagined as the metamorphosis of a butterfly. Although this transformative state lent the essay a tone of hope, anxiety about stagnation persisted in its urgency to move quickly beyond the transitional moment. The butterfly had to take flight.
Carla’s response to the quarantine challenge was not to fly like the butterfly. Through the images selected for this study, I propose a visual composition: a half-closed dragonfly navigating, with a broken helm, a ship in the form of the masculine/feminine. While Pedreira sought firmness as a way out of the colonial enclosure shaping Puerto Rico’s history, Carla’s photography embraces the algaretismo that so unsettled the voice of Insularismo. It is precisely through this state of drift that her work tears open militarized confinement.
Militarized Condition
Within an archipelago shaped by colonial militarism, the imposition of a quarantine enforced by National Guard troops underscored the fragility of civil governance in Puerto Rico. The government declared a state of emergency that allowed it to act through executive orders exceeding existing legal statutes. A curfew criminalized movement in public space, whether on foot or by car. Arrests rose to unprecedented levels. The possibility of imposing martial law further narrowed access to public space. Beyond direct violence, the consequences of confinement included a sharp increase in mental illness, reflected in rising suicide rates. As in other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, feminized bodies suffered disproportionately higher mortality, confined within unsafe domestic spaces structured by intimate-partner and family violence. While many places around the world turned to lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic to prevent contagion, the history of the Spanish military stronghold and later the installation of one of the largest U.S. naval bases in the world intensifies the enclosure the archipelago has endured for centuries.
From the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898 to the present, and especially at the height of its military expansion, the colonial regime established 11 major military bases across the archipelago. Through them, colonial authorities planned and developed Puerto Rico’s infrastructure to serve the needs of U.S. Armed Forces in the Caribbean. A social and economic complicity also took shape between the island and the military, producing dependence on the Armed Forces for both civilian and military employment. The most infamous of these installations was Roosevelt Roads on the island municipality of Vieques, one of the largest U.S. naval bases in the world. The Navy’s constant bombing of Vieques had devastating consequences for the island’s ecology and economy, as well as for the health of its population. After a bombing killed a Puerto Rican civilian employee at the base in 1999, the struggle that Vieques residents had sustained for decades against the Navy became a mass movement that mobilized the entire archipelago. Since the Navy’s withdrawal from Vieques in 2004, both the population and the land have continued to suffer the long-term effects of militarism. As I write these lines in 2026, Roosevelt Roads has been reopened under orders from President Donald Trump in 2025, with the mission of monitoring Caribbean waters for vessels suspected of drug trafficking. In a sea where migration has flowed back and forth for centuries, it is likely—though impossible to confirm— that many of the boats sunk by military attacks carried people seeking refuge.
This militarization of the archipelago has also ensured the reproduction of hyper-masculinized bodies—not only for the Armed Forces but for policing institutions as well. Many of these recruits come from poverty and are drawn by the promise of free education after service and the prospect of a military career. Yet these bodies, like those of the populations they are deployed against, remain marked by the violence and death they have experienced in wars waged against the most vulnerable communities of Puerto Rico and other territories colonized and invaded by the United States.
Quarantine Challenge and a Community on Instagram
It is from within this militarized entrapment that the artist Lluvia’s urgent call emerged on Instagram. Because Lluvia’s account (@colerablues) has since disappeared, I cite artist Jo Cosme to explain the project:
@colerablues invited me and a number of other #PuertoRican #artists (whose practice is mainly #photography) to document our #daily life during the #COVID_19 times through the page and Collective: @quarantinedeyes. This project is intended to keep us being creative even when #confined in our homes. … There’s a new idea each day and everyone makes a post with their interpretation of it. … We are also inviting you all to be a part of this Collective as an extended family through the hashtag #CollectiveContainmentBlues. I hope this project helps you find #solace in these trying times as much as it has for us. (@jo.cosme, March 22, 2020)
What began as a community of artists, primarily photographers, gathered under the now-defunct alias @quarantinedeyes in an effort to survive confinement expanded through this call. Under the hashtag #CollectiveContainmentBlues, the initiative shifted its focus from a small circle of acquaintances to many others, perhaps still unknown and to be encountered at some indeterminate future moment. Notably, posts under the hashtag date back to 2020 and have continued through this year, 2026.
Looking at the body of images gathered under #CollectiveContainmentBlues, it becomes clear that it does not necessarily include all the photographs produced by those who accepted the challenge. Carla’s images, for example, are not there. Another observation is that the collection resembles a multitudinous flow of images that have come together almost accidentally through partial or inconsistent uses of the hashtag. Alongside artistic and everyday photographs of the pandemic in Puerto Rico appear images related to a spiritual healer, event promotions, and photographs of group activities outside the archipelago or its diasporic communities. As the choice of Instagram as a platform suggests, the ambition of the call does not seem to have been the creation of a stable archive but rather an urgent attempt to connect with others through images shared and circulated on a highly accessible virtual platform. I also speculate that the call was issued in the hope that everyday photographic techniques—such as the selfie and the snapshot— might help build a horizontal artistic community within a social network where easy image editing allows for virtually endless experimentation before publishing the final result.
Carla’s photographs produced for the challenge initially draw on the snapshot aesthetic, as can be seen in the first two images I analyze here. Although the snapshot emerges from events structured by social conventions—family or institutional celebrations—its value has always resided in the unexpected, in what escapes the photographer’s intention. On Instagram, however, that value has been trivialized amid the proliferation of images that deliberately present themselves as imperfect. What interests me in Carla’s use of the snapshot is how an apparently casual image can reveal the relationship between the experience of everyday space—transformed into a prison—and the temporality of its effects, both on lived experience and on the image itself.
A Half-Closed Dragonfly Navigates a Ship with a Broken Helm
For the first prompt of the quarantine challenge, “window,” Carla produced a snapshot of a window crossed by the typical screen used in Puerto Rico to keep insects out. Almost completely closed, a narrow opening reveals an urban San Juan landscape where vegetation seems poised to swallow the buildings. The trees, along with the bright blue sky, suggest a day outside—perhaps one of leisure. In that sense, such a day could unfold within a temporality of seemingly infinite extension. The nearly darkened window, however, points us back to the imposition of quarantine within militarized enclosure, marked by its own equally endless temporality.
Between the narrow opening of the outside space and the darkness of closure, a dragonfly appears. It may be alive, stalking mosquitoes and flies with its nearly 360-degree vision. Or it may be preserved—appearing alive in death. Within the context of the challenge, the scene stages the impossibility of totality through a series of oppositions: neither closed nor open, neither urban nor rural, neither alive nor dead. From that uncomfortable in-between space, the image demands that we inhabit its character—alive/dead—in order to confront the terror of time under confinement while longing for the leisure suggested by the landscape beyond. There is no possibility of transformation here, unlike the hope represented by Pedreira’s butterfly. Yet, as its symbolism suggests across popular traditions, the dragonfly instead points us toward an intimate movement—minimal, slow, and without a triumphant ending.
When the word “water” appeared on day 13 of the #RetoCuarentena challenge, Carla responded with Amores de papel, in which a paper boat floats in the water of a sink basin. Boats, with their masts, evoke the phallic. Yet the angle of the photograph can also suggest the form of a vagina. Masculine/feminine intertwine, and as in Ventana, a tension emerges between openness and closure—here expressed through movement across water that is artificially contained. The element of water deepened the proposal I had already glimpsed in Carla’s image of the dragonfly at the window: a sense of flow within containment. There is no final liberatory gesture. Masculine/feminine remains fixed in that seemingly motionless boat. Yet we know the material itself is slowly unsettled as it floats. The fragility of paper reminds us of the risk inherent in constant flow within containment—that is, the erosion produced by time accumulating all at once upon life. The illegible red typography near what would be the base of the mast, together with the word amores in the title, points toward that closed/open interstice between the masculine and the feminine. As Carla suggests elsewhere, it is the emotional force that connects us to the world—what persists even after wear. Amores de papel initiated an exploration of water that would run through Carla’s work during the challenge and continue afterward.
When Carla ran out of objects at home, she turned the camera toward herself. At that point, the challenge became a series of self-portraits that, as she told me, marked a critical moment:
You and I belong to a generation for whom looking into the camera and talking about what we do is not exactly cool. The moment I turned the camera toward myself coincided with a time in my life when I was connecting with my masculine side without losing my feminine side (vulnerability, receptivity, empathy). With that awareness, I began to explore what felt like a masculine kind of sexiness in me, even the conflict of the masculine within me.
It seems significant to me that, in speaking about the series of self-portraits she produced during the challenge, Carla describes the act of the selfie. After all, the challenge unfolded on Instagram, the platform most associated with the vanity and banality of the supposedly spontaneous selfie. Whether or not to make herself visible—to herself and to others, spontaneously or otherwise—between the masculine and the feminine became tied to a set of family stories recounting the journey of Carla’s father, a young Italian campesino, from his village to Puerto Rico. After training as a refrigeration technician, he spent many years working in ship boilers, an environment shaped by heat and the roar of machinery. In speaking of her father, Carla reflects on his strength, gentleness, generosity, and the smell of grease from his work.
Her father’s figure resonates in the self-portrait Caballero de Copas, where Carla holds a fragment of a broken ship’s wheel while raising a cup before a digitally rendered seascape. As she told me, she found the ship’s wheel—covered in grease—in Vieques, the island municipality that for decades served as a U.S. naval base and has now once again has become one. Carla confesses: “I have always wanted to be a sailor. I have always wanted to navigate. I love that my father arrived by ship.” She also told me that the helm in the photograph is especially meaningful to her. I commented on the beautiful connection I perceived between her and her father in the helm. She told me she had not noticed it. I cannot believe her. There lies the unexpected quality of the snapshot: what escapes the artist and is recovered only through the community of conversation.
For Carla, the roots of Caballero de Copas lie in her spiritual study of myth and astrology, as well as her work with astral charts and tarot. The question guiding her search has been: “When did someone decide it was cool for women to do one thing and men another?” From there, she has focused on examining feminine and masculine archetypes in order to emphasize, through her photography, that “we all carry both feminine and masculine energy.”
Caballero de Copas thus works as a visual synthesis of what might be called a Cavinian aesthetic. As Carla explained to me, the Knight of Cups represents water—the element of creation, transmission, and reception. It is the element most associated with feminine energy, and her Knight of Cups is feminine. Its mission is to find the Holy Grail in an endless journey that moves between history and legend. It expresses a desire to grasp what cannot be grasped. For that reason, the Knight of Cups sometimes struggles to move forward.
The text Carla adds to the work reinforces this synthesis:
I am a King of Wands, pure fire and passion. But too much fire creates deserts. By connecting with the energy of water I study the King of Cups … Cups represent water, emotions, and the subconscious. Knights represent action, but in the suit of cups there is a tension between great dreams and the passivity born of fear of failure. It takes a bit of fire, earth, and air to make them real. Recalibrating inward.
To recalibrate inward here is to mark the friction between stopping and moving forward. In her way of thinking and making art, Carla transforms the enclosure imposed by the state-imposed quarantine into a space where that still dragonfly embraces its half-helm and navigates the intimate world from the threshold between inside and out. It is a learning shaped through water—with a bit of fire, earth, and air—about the constant displacement between the feminine and the masculine.
In Carla’s work, I perceive a powerful potential in what Pedreira called la nave al garete in the 1930s. If in Insularismo a compass was needed to steer the ship toward greatness, in the #RetoCuarentena series Carla instead embraces being adrift. Pedreira’s longed-for butterfly does not flutter through these images. Like the dragonfly, it persists in the discomfort of an (im)possible synthesis of opposites. It is within algaretismo that we glimpse a sovereign art that challenges the militarization of the Puerto Rican archipelago.
Translated from Spanish by NACLA.
Judith Sierra-Rivera researches and writes on literature, art, and culture in the Caribbean and the Caribbean diasporas in the United States. Her publications examine militarism and reproductive care in relation to constructions of monga or fragile masculinity that operate against patriarchal norms.