Lithograph from Puck magazine (1898), advocating US intervention in Cuba. Image courtesy the New-York Historical Society

In New York throughout the nineteenth century, new immigrant communities were formed. The numbers were still small — in the early 1860s, we learn, about 1,300 Spaniards and Latin Americans lived in New York — but they grew. Poets, intellectuals and politicians joined the merchants. A Spanish publishing industry developed as well. (An 1872 Spanish guide to New York is shown here.)

The nineteenth century’s Latin American revolutions even seemed to begin in New York, with many people fleeing oppression in Cuba and Puerto Rico. A red, white and blue flag hung here is a reproduction of the one raised by The Sun newspaper in Lower Manhattan in 1850 (the original is said to be in Havana): it was destined to become the flag of an independent Cuba, though in this case it was meant as a call for its conquest.

New York, we see, became a locus for Cuban debates for half a century, with advocates of liberation, Spanish loyalists and proponents of conquest jostling for supremacy, until the Spanish-American War overturned the playing board. Biographical sketches of major figures are imposing: José Martí, a supporter of Cuban independence, came to the city in 1880 and worked as a journalist, while establishing New York’s Spanish-American Literary Society and writing poetry.

— Edward Rothstein reviews Nueva York (1613–1945), an exhibition at El Museo del Barrio, in the New York Times. The show, which runs until 9 January, 2011, explores the Hispanic cultural influence on the development of New York City over four centuries, and the roles of visitors and immigrants from South American and the Caribbean.

Rafael Ferrer c. 1969. Photograph courtesy Da Wire

When a critic referred to his style as “faux primitivism,” Ferrer objected that the characterisation was based on a prejudice about the people he depicted rather than on his way of painting them. “They can call the people in the paintings natives or they can call them inhabitants of this place or the other, but I call them neighbours.”

Actually, some of the first paintings Ferrer made after his return to the medium do betray a certain primitivism. I’m thinking of works like El Cuarteto (The Quartet) or Melida la Reina (Melida the Queen), both from 1981, which almost seem like elaborations of his paper-bag mask fantasies. But by mid-decade his style had become distinctly more sophisticated, settling into a sturdy Modernism that would not have looked outrageous to any of Ferrer’s early twentieth-century heroes but with a personal inflection that could never be confused with anyone else’s. Ferrer’s brush is tough, unsentimental; he prefers to show things bluntly rather than suavely coaxing them into visibility. His pictorial space can seem almost hammered into place — as if an imprint of his work as a sculptor. His use of the word “neighbours” to describe his subjects is quite precise. In painting the people who lived near him in the Dominican Republic, he was painting neither familiars — it is telling that although Ferrer has done self-portraits, he has rarely painted his family or close friends — nor complete strangers. Wariness and curiosity register in the faces of many of Ferrer’s subjects, although others appear more ingenuous. There is no false familiarity here, but rather a distance to be negotiated. And it can be negotiated.

— Barry Schwabsky reviews Retro/Active, a retrospective of work by the Puerto Rican artist Rafael Ferrer at El Museo del Barrio, in the September 13 Nation. The exhibition, curated by Deborah Cullen, opened in June and closed on 22 August.