Something unique is joining the floats during this weekend’s Puerto Rican People’s Day Parade: eight massive sculptures, made up of nearly seven-foot-tall letters, will spell out the Spanish word for “dignity” on the back of a flatbed trailer. The name of the piece is “DIGNIDAD.”
As the truck rolls down West Division Street alongside musicians and dancers on Saturday in Humboldt Park, artist Iván Argote and curator Carla Acevedo-Yates hope the simple message resonates, especially with it being in a language other than English.
“Speaking Spanish right now in the United States can be dangerous,” Acevedo-Yates said. “We need to treat each other with dignity regardless of our documentation statuses, regardless of our nationality, regardless of our identity, our gender identity. We need to have these values as part of the ways in which we move through the world.”
Each June, the annual Puerto Rican People’s Day Parade anchors a weekend-long festival with music, food and entertainment and more. The debut of the moving letters at the parade is part of the latest public art project commissioned by the Floating Museum, an arts collective making its name with moveable sculptures that invite curiosity and conversation.
The Floating Museum is a non-profit that receives funding from a combination of state and local grants, fundraisers and major foundation grants, including from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which supported this project.
“DIGNIDAD” is the fourth installment of the museum’s Floating Monuments series, which has previously comprised inflatable art pieces.
The project has been in development for about two years, according to those who worked on it. Changes in artistic vision, as well as current events, influenced its development. In that time, President Donald Trump began his second term and subsequently ramped up immigration enforcement across the U.S., including Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago.
The Floating Museum wanted to respond with art. “We were thinking a lot about how to meet the moment,” said co-director Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford. In the beginning stages, he reached out to Acevedo-Yates, a San Juan, Puerto Rico-born curator formerly at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Acevedo-Yates had existing relationships with Chicago’s Puerto Rican Agenda and with the Paris-based Colombian artist Iván Argote, who is known for large public art pieces.
“Doing something in Humboldt Park requires the buy-in and conversation of the community,” Acevedo-Yates said. She helped facilitate community meetings that included the Floating Museum, Argote, the Agenda and neighbors, including José E. Lopez, a longtime educator, activist and the founder of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, the group that organizes the parade each year.
As the artist, Argote saw that the Humboldt Park community faced issues similar to those in Colombia. Hundreds of young Colombians are protesting a far-right presidential candidate in the streets ahead of a June 21 runoff election, while others are migrating to the U.S. and other parts of the world amid the political upheaval.
“[The sculpture was] born from a lot of those Humboldt Park conversations and histories,” said Hulsebos-Spofford, the Floating Museum co-director. They asked questions like, “How can it be a monument to solidarity?” and “What does a drifting piece of poetry look like out in the world?”
Public art is a key value for the Chicago Puerto Rican community.
“Public sculpture has historically been extremely important for the self-actualization and self-determination of Puerto Ricans in Chicago,” Acevedo-Yates said.
In 1993, local community leaders sought to erect a monument to Pedro Albizu Campos, a Puerto Rican politician, lawyer, and key figure in the independence movement. Those conversations ended sourly, with no statue of Campos, but they led to leaders negotiating with the city in 1995 for the two steel flags that mark the strip of Division Street between Western and California avenues, symbolizing an immovable and permanent location for the Puerto Rican community and culture.
The conversations about a statue of Campos in Humboldt Park have recently been revived, this time by the Chicago Park District.
But for “DIGNIDAD,” it wasn’t until Argote presented an idea that connected the struggles of Puerto Rican political prisoners and Humboldt Park’s history as a refuge for undocumented immigrants that the pieces began to fall into place.
“It’s also a statement,” Argote said. “We will refuse to treat people without dignity. … Even if we’re not treated with dignity by others, we will always try to treat others with dignity as part of our values.”
The eight-letter sculpture is made of plywood and fiber mesh and coated in a thin layer of soft, pink-colored concrete. The heavy structure was covered in a light color to represent juxtaposing ideas.
“Part of the materiality of the work has to do with giving [it] some strength,” Argote said. The goal was to make the letters look “heavy,” “indestructible” and “strong,” but “also soft and sweet,” he continued. “This work for me is just like a celebration of our resilience and then a reaction of what we’re facing today.”
As a Brooklyn-born Nuyorican, studio manager Timothy Quiles said working on this project feels like a full-circle moment. Quiles, who has decades of carpentry work under his belt, worked on the letters at the Floating Museum’s warehouse on the South Side on a recent early morning. His job included applying and sanding down the concrete on each letter to achieve Argote’s desired texture.
“I love that I can be the artist’s hands, extended in this space,” Quiles said. “It’s a great way to speak to this evil that’s come against our community.”
When the parade concludes Saturday, the letters will spend a couple of hours outside of the Le Lo Lai Gallery at 2716 W. Division St. Chicago poet laureate Mayda del Valle will perform a poem written in response to Argote’s piece, and paradegoers can stop by for a public forum about the sculpture.
Then, the letters will travel a few doors down the road to La Sandwichera Cafe for an evening bombazo, or celebration of the Afro-Puerto Rican bomba and plena tradition, hosted by La Escuelita Bombera de Corazón. The sculpture will move out of Humboldt Park for a citywide drift on Sunday, making stops at places such as La Casita de Don Pedro and the National Museum of Mexican Art.
“I’m excited about this parade, but I’m also excited about what happens next,” said Floating Museum co-director Faheem Majeed. “This is on a set of wheels. We can move around the country.”