THE ANTHEM
AND THE JAB
In Puerto Rico, I had always refused to perform it. I would play our anthem and then let someone else take over for the U.S. one. But this time, in Chicago, something shifted. There was something conceptually and politically potent; almost poetic, about a girl from Puerto Rico, standing in a boxing ring in North American territory, playing the U.S. National Anthem.
It felt like a reverse conquest.
I was coming from the so-called territory, now taking up space in the territory.
It was a symbolic inversion.
I played it with layers:
Gratefulness: because boxing had helped me rehabilitate my arms after injury and let me return to the violin.
Love for my coaches: Bill, Johnny, for the quiet dedication they gave to my education.
And complexity; because I knew exactly what it meant for me to be standing there.
Minutes later, with the same arm I had just used to hold the violin, I landed a jab and scored a knockdown.
Coach Bill taught me that jab like it was a violin scale: with patience, technique, and discipline.
And it landed —in tune.
Body Work
My body of work, "Body Work," is a conscious exploration of the hyper-mindful exercise that is living with chronic pain; of being constantly aware that I inhabit a body.
It is about that experience.
What does it mean to live inside a body?
To not escape it.
To fight it.
To fight with it.
To carry it.
To mediate it within itself—within its limits, and within the space it must negotiate with others.
What does it mean for the body to exist
freely?
Constricted?
Over-policed?
Judged in both the visible and the invisible?
What is performance—and what is performative?
As a chronic pain patient, I was left with no other option than to be brutally honest.
I couldn’t pretend body.
I couldn’t perform body.
And it was then; when I stopped performing — that I began to be judged as if I was.
What does it mean to be a woman living inside a body already put into question
now confronted with even more?
What is the fight?
What is the rest?
I found rest in the fight.
In boxing.
In the unexpected places where endurance becomes power.
Where movement becomes language.
Where my body writes back.
Boxing is that medium.
Performance Art is both: the form and the release.
The practice and the proof.
A space I can both inhabit and escape.