Nuyorican visionary: Jorge Soto and the evolution of an Afro-Taíno aesthetic at Taller Boricua

In this essay, I examine the cross-fertilization between visual and verbal tropes in the works of Jorge Soto. My discussion concentrates on analyzing the visual art produced by Jorge Soto in the mid-1970s to late 1970s, a period when the poets and artists at Taller Boricua and other spaces were most intensely engaged in defining the meaning of the term Nuyorican and determining how their works related to the art and poetry produced on the island. I argue that through reading the poetry of his colleagues, and experimenting with writing poetry on his own, Jorge Soto developed synthetic ways of picturing his bi-cultural background that mirrored the Nuyorican poets practice of fusing Spanish and English. I additionally examine the weaving of Afro-Taíno and Santeria motifs in Soto s works.