{"id":173318,"date":"2026-03-24T15:09:16","date_gmt":"2026-03-24T15:09:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/173318\/"},"modified":"2026-03-24T15:09:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T15:09:16","slug":"new-york-public-library-exhibit-highlights-puerto-rican-comic-book-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/173318\/","title":{"rendered":"New York Public Library exhibit highlights Puerto Rican comic book history"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rich Tenorio | Edited by Patricia Guadalupe<\/p>\n

University of Puerto Rico graduate Stephany Moyano Ayala found a way to combine two very different fields of study: Drawing and Culinary Arts. She created comic books based on her experiences in the food service industry. Sometimes, working in restaurants was decidedly unsavory \u2013 a swarm of cockroaches, a directive to prepare rotten fish. Yet she found solace in a new job: Making pastelillos, or stuffed turnovers, in the coastal island town of Luquillo. In a comic book named after the Luquillo ZIP code of 00773, Moyano Ayala created whimsical, wordless art \u2013 pastelillos that take on human characteristics, smiling at the reader.<\/p>\n

Moyano Ayala and her work are part of a new exhibition at the New York Public Library that sheds light on the history and impact of Puerto Rican comic book creators. \u201c\u00a1Wepa! Puerto Ricans in the World of Comics\u201d is on display until March 8. Based on a massive and comprehensive archival donation of around 1,500 pieces, the bilingual exhibition goes back decades. Spanning 63 pieces in a 600-square-foot gallery, it traverses the themes of time and space as they unfold in comic-book worlds in Puerto Rico, New York, and even in science fiction.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted it to be a celebration, a celebration of all the legacies of contributions of the artists, some of them not very well acknowledged \u2026 and [to] bring those voices and contributions to the forefront,\u201d said co-curator Paloma Celis Carbajal, who organized the exhibition with colleague Charles Cuykendall Carter.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a groundbreaking comic book aimed at LGBTQ+ readers, Tales of the Closet by Iv\u00e1n V\u00e9lez, Jr., which debuted amid the AIDS crisis of the mid-1980s. Also represented is the late Bronx-born artist and writer George P\u00e9rez, who had his own achievements in the \u201880s: He was tasked by DC Comics with reinventing Wonder Woman. The new-look superheroine\u2019s origin story was changed, as her magical island birthplace transitioned into a more recognizable locale for boricuas. And there are more recent contributions, including from Iv\u00e1n Plaza, whose character Coqu\u00ed debuted in a 2021 comic book. The superhero was named after the beloved Puerto Rican frog with a distinctive call. Throughout the exhibition, creators address the island\u2019s indigenous Ta\u00edno heritage, the legacies of Spanish and U.S. colonialism, the impact of natural disasters such as the San Ciriaco hurricane of 1899 and Hurricane Mar\u00eda in 2017, and the Puerto Rican diaspora \u2013 one place in particular.<\/p>\n

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As Carter points out, \u201cAnother very important island in terms of Puerto Rican history and culture was, of course, Nueva York.\u201d<\/p>\n

The seed for the exhibition was a donation by Manuel Mart\u00ednez Nazario, a librarian in the Puerto Rican capital of San Juan. He had started to amass the collection in the 1990s, and in 2022, it arrived at the New York Public Library. Celis Carbajal, curator for Latin American, Iberian, and U.S. Latino collections, began thinking about putting some selections on display as an exhibition. She enlisted the services of Carter, an assistant curator in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, in part due to his passion for comics and expertise in videography. Eight video interviews with Puerto Rican comics creators became part of the exhibition. They are available online, along with a ninth interview, this one with Mart\u00ednez Nazario.<\/p>\n

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\u201cRight now, we underscore the contributions of Latinos, in this case, in the field of the comic book industry. It\u2019s very important in a moment [in which] we hear that Latinos are being deported\u2026 The constant presence of Spanish in the gallery, and also in the videos, is something we wanted to underscore,” as well as the fact that many comic book creators highlighted are people of color.<\/p>\n

Celis Carbajal \u2014 co-curator<\/p>\n

As V\u00e9lez explains in his video interview, he is the son of Puerto Rican parents. He himself grew up in The Bronx and became a cartoonist. Tales of the Closet was distributed to New York City public schools as a way to promote safe sex. It chronicled eight diverse high-schoolers in Queens. One character, Tony, is a Puerto Rican whose relationship with his father, Papito, was modeled after the cartoonist\u2019s relationship with his own father. V\u00e9lez went on to work for major comic book companies, such as Marvel, DC Comics, and the DC Comics subsidiary Milestone. At Milestone, he created Latine superheroes, including boricua stars for the Blood Syndicate series.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now, we underscore the contributions of Latinos, in this case, in the field of the comic book industry,\u201d said co-curator Celis Carbajal. \u201cIt\u2019s very important in a moment [in which] we hear that Latinos are being deported.\u201d And, she added, \u201cThe constant presence of Spanish in the gallery, and also in the videos, is something we wanted to underscore,\u201d as well as the fact that many comic book creators highlighted are people of color.<\/p>\n

Even after the exhibition closes, the archive can be viewed in the library\u2019s reading room. That includes Moyano Ayala\u2019s tribute to the pastelillos of Luquillo. One such pastelillo encounters an unexpected fate. A girl drops it, and one of Puerto Rico\u2019s ubiquitous stray dogs carries it to the beach for a snack.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Not] everybody is paying attention to the girl that drops her empanadilla, or what happens to it,\u201d Moyano Ayala tells palabra. In words that apply to the entire exhibition, she adds, \u201cAnd it\u2019s kind of magical if you just pay attention to those things that you usually wouldn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Read the original article on NJ.com<\/a>. Add NJ.com<\/a> as a Preferred Source by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Rich Tenorio | Edited by Patricia Guadalupe University of Puerto Rico graduate Stephany Moyano Ayala found a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173319,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[70655,6129,12381,70656,70654,9,11,10,24621,27215,19090,70653],"class_list":["post-173318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-comic-books","tag-dc-comics","tag-exhibition","tag-luquillo","tag-moyano-ayala","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-public-library","tag-puerto-rican","tag-puerto-rico","tag-stephany-moyano-ayala"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173318\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}