June 2010 Preface
This work was originally conceived as a collaborative effort with my brother to create an installation that would pay tribute to those battling cancer and honor the memory of those that have been lost to cancer. I was taken aback by the labels on the bags in which my brother’s chemotherapy drugs would come packaged in. I asked him to start collecting these bags so that I might use them for an installation. These are the bags he collected.

When I presented this installation in Vieques island in the fall of 2009, it was a solidarity piece between my brother battling cancer in New York and the disproportionately high number of people battling cancer in Vieques. But I now write this a month after my beautiful brother ended his own battle against cancer and joined the realm of the ancestors. As such he moves from the solidarity aspect of the piece of those battling cancer on both sides of el charco (the pond) to the other aspect of memorializing those we have lost.

The Installation
The word CONTAMINADOS was stenciled directly onto the gallery wall. Contaminados, is Spanish for contaminated or more specifically “the contaminated” (as in people). It is a reference to the chemical weapons that the US Navy experimented with on Vieques, the military debris, contaminants left in the environment, in the people and the resulting illnesses. In addition, I have wondered about my brother’s diagnosis. Multiple Myeloma, a blood cancer that affects the bone marrow, has been linked to asbestos exposure. My brother worked as a mason at Queens Hospital and Bellevue Hospital. We have wondered about the risks in such work or what other environmental factors might have contributed to his diagnosis. 9/11 rescue workers have been found to have an increasing number of Myeloma cases in younger patients, which like my brother is rare. There is still much debate about what other environmental factors might contribute to cancer in general, such as the foods we eat, no longer natural like that of our ancestors, and laced with chemicals and contaminants.

In the installation, I subvert the government use of caution tape and warning signs intended to keep civilians out of the property taken by the military. Within my work these symbols warn of the contaminants that persist in the environment. The Biohazard symbols on the chemotherapy bags imply the same thing. Moreover these bags and their contents are awfully familiar to too many Viequenses. Viequenses were expected to have their land and health jeopardized for the “national security” of Americans. Cancer patients are expected to undergo chemical treatments that destroy cancer cells but also destroy healthy cells along the way. In essence cancer patients aren’t just enduring cancer, but their bodies are also contaminated with chemicals and other substances that come along with medical treatment. This was one of my brother’s greatest dilemmas, trying to figure out how to battle cancer while resisting these substances. He agreed to chemo treatments, but resisted many of the drugs that would control the resulting pain, choosing to bear it instead.

I had initially intended to use popular fresh flowers like roses. However fresh flowers are hard to come by in Vieques. I had once purchased some for a memorial, at a souvenir shop on the co-opted malecon strip of Esperanza. But I refused to do that this time around. I remembered that I had associated papelillos so much with Vieques. Each time I’d come back to NYC after a Vieques trip, I’d always find papelillo petals mixed in with my belongings. Papelillos are flowers that seem to be made of tissue paper, hence the name. When they fall from the branch they retain their color as they dry. I collected these from Vieques bushes choosing purple ones to honor those still battling cancer, as my brother was at the time I created this installation in October of 2009. I also collected white ones in memory of those we had lost to this disease like my Mother in Law in New York and Milivy Adams Calderon, the Vieques girl who died from Leukemia at five years old.

The process of stuffing the flowers into the plastic bags was similar to the concept behind the first Basta installation (2007), containing a child and the natural landscape within a man-made razor wire and chain link fence to symbolize what the military maneuvers had done to the environment. I had intended on using fresh flowers that would wither without access to water or air inside the bags. However using the papelillos gave the piece a sense of hope. These flowers did dry, as with much of the land on Vieques’ eastern-end, however, they retained their color and shape, demonstrating their persistence and ability to endure, much like Viequenses themselves.

The cross shape is culturally used for spiritual protection and to memorialize someone we’ve lost. Crosses have also been used in the Vieques struggle for peace and justice to symbolize those that were lost to cancer or to military violence.

Puerto Ricans and Cancer
I have spent years studying the life and work of Don Pedro Albizu Campos the father of Puerto Rican Nationalism. In 2007, one year before my brother’s cancer diagnosis, I dedicated a painting to the controversy of the radiation experiments that Albizu was subjected to by the US government. I have also looked into how these experiments coincided with the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the resulting US government’s experiments on the Japanese victims of those disasters to test the effects of radiation on the human body. Other victims were US prisoners and soldiers.

Albizu’s relationship with the evil Dr. Rhoads predates the time in which he was subjected to these experiments. It was Albizu who worked diligently to expose the doctor when in 1931, while in Puerto Rico, Rhoads injected innocent victims with cancer. 13 people, among them children, died as a result. It should be of no surprise then that Albizu, who worked to expose the doctor’s evil plot after a letter had been found expressing Cornelius Rhoads’ distaste for Puerto Ricans and his desire to eradicate them, would later find himself as a victim in one of the doctor’s experiments.

For his experiments, the US government awarded Cornelius Rhoads with a position on the Atomic Energy Commission of course, and the American Association for Cancer Research named their award for exemplary scientists after him. Last but not least, Cornelius Rhoads headed up the Rockefeller Research Institute, associated with one of today’s leading cancer hospitals, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. My brother was a patient at MSKCC from June 2008 till April 2010, when he passed, becoming yet another Puerto Rican to be added to the file of our people’s role in the history of cancer experiments. Puerto Ricans are not new to experiments as contraceptive pills and foam were tested on our women, sterilization campaigns were piloted in our island and Napalm, Agent Orange, Uranium and countless other chemical weapons were experimented with on Vieques. To consider that my dear brother was a patient at the very hospital connected with the individual responsible for using Puerto Ricans, Japanese and thousands of American prisoners and soldiers as lab rats is the mind fuck of all mind fucks. After what I witnessed his body, spirit and mind endure, for however destroyed and broken my heart is, I find peace and solace knowing that my brother's spirit soars with the rest of our amazing ancestors in a limitless space in which evil has no place.

In loving memory of my big brother Joseph Hernandez June 20, 1966-April 27, 2010

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