The Navy did not leave! We removed them. The Navy did not leave. The fighting community removed them and the struggle continues.

In loving memory of Mario Solis Solis who passed away while this page was being constructed. Thank you for all the help, encouragement and support of this project. Your memory will always live on in your beloved Bieke!

Photo: Mary Sefranek
Mario and I at the opening of Bieke, October 10, 2009

February 18, 2010

The wonders of technology have allowed me to share my art with so many others through this website for the past decade. Technology today also allowed me to be present, if only for a few minutes at the memorial event for Mario Solis which was held this evening at el Museo Fuerte Conde de Mirasol. I was told that my portrait of Mario was taken temporarily from the exhibit gallery and hung in the room where the activity was being held.

It is interesting that I have spent a decade and a half painting people that I admire. Most of them I have never met. I could idolize them through the stories I have heard, the books I have read, the histories kept hidden that I somehow uncovered and came to celebrate. I realize that this Bieke project is probably the first time that I have celebrated people, everyday people who have all reached super-person status because of the struggles they have been forced to endure. Many Viequenses were lost and continue to be lost and I painted some of those as cemies in blue hues against a dark background, representing the Taino/ Indigenous belief that the ocean is the resting place of our ancestors. Mario becomes the first person painted as a "valiente" against camouflage to now go on to the place of our ancestors. I mention all this because the most remarkable thing about this project was to have had the honor to sit and talk with each and every one of these incredible individuals before painting them. I have known that and I have honored them with these paintings, but now I am forced to reflect more on this since we have lost one of them.

Several weeks ago I was designing this page. I decided to add the above photo of Mario and I at the Bieke opening in October of 2009. In comparing the two images, I was taken aback by the difference between my painted portrait of him and his appearance that night of the opening. I knew he had fallen ill and that night he looked different than I had remembered. His hair was short. He was noticeably thinner and more pale than I had remembered. But none of that mattered as he still illuminated the same radiance of love for the history and people of Vieques that I had encountered when I first met him in November of 2006. Back then he was working at the museum. He walked me through the cases of the indigenous art pieces that have been collected from various sites in Vieques. We discussed how countless more pieces lied beneath the land taken by the US Navy and were possibly destroyed, blasted by their bombing maneuvers. He corrected me when I said the word "Taino," pointing out that it was a recent civilization (usually marked from 1200-1500 AD) and that to acknowledge that culture only, ignored the thousands-year old history of our indigenous ancestors in Bieke and all of Puerto Rico, like the 4,000 year old remains found of an indigenous man in Puerto Ferro.

By the time I finally got to interview him in April of 2008, we sat in the conference room, the same room in which his memorial was held this evening. Actually my video footage of him is not the best visual representation of him because I was mesmerized by the view of the fortress walls outside the window, the old canons and how they directed your vision to "la isla grande," the hills and thick rain clouds of the main island of Puerto Rico across a blue stretch of sea. Mario mostly appears as a silhouette against that gorgeous background. But I think he was alright with it. Focused on that scenery we hear his voice telling us of the importance of Vieques and the injustices he endured as a child. We hear his stories of self-defense, and how he as a little limpiabotas (shoe shiner) attached a rock to a string that he would use against the Navy men for the times they spat on his face and refused to pay him. There against the backdrop of Caribbean waters under an equally blue sky, you hear him talk of the dried waterfalls and creeks that once ran through Vieques and the other changes suffered by the environment of a land battered by bombs.

This is the man that greeted visitors to the museum--school children, clueless tourists, passionate Puerto Ricans. He encountered them with that intense stare that exploded into a speech of facts and lost legacies that he pieced together and shared, until he melted in a smile. In the end we were sent off with a warm feeling in our hearts knowing that we had stepped on sacred ground and knowing the legacy we had to carry and honor.

I began designing this page on a Friday. I compared the images and reflected on my conversations with him and even having danced plena with him during the Cultural Festival in Vieques in April of 2008. The following Sunday, I received an email with the news that he had passed on. Of all this Bieke project, Mario Solis becomes the person I must paint twice-first as a valiente, and now as a cemi, a sacred ancestor who has passed on, glistening in blue bioluminescence in the southern bays of Bieke by night, smiling down from the skies by day "y la lucha continua!"

© Copyright 2010, Yasmin Hernandez. Under no circumstances should any of the images or content of this site be downloaded, printed or reproduced without direct permission from the artist.