Beyond the Bombing Range

Abstract

Mapepe: Sex and Death in Cold War Vieques By Bonnie Donohue and Katherine McCaffrey Fort Count Mirasol Museum Vieques, Puerto Rico July 2-November 14, 2011 Bonnie Donohue and Katherine McCaffrey's conceptually iniricate and emotionally challenging exhibition, Killing Mapepe: Sex and Death in Cold War Vieques. immerses viewers in a scandalous murder I hat unfolded nearly sixty years ago in an island municipality of Puerto Rico. The exhibition discloses the complicated power dynamics of sexual exploitation, racial inequality, and United States jingoism that collided one night in a local bar on Vieques Island. Utilizing the archive as a material source for the narrative structure, the exhibition presents riveting photographs, raw testimonies extracted from an investigation into the crime, video interviews, and four essays contextualizing the relationship of the U.S. military and Puerto Rico in the 1950s. Beginning in 1948, amid Cold War fears of nuclear escalation, the U.S. Navy semi-annually deployed up to ninety thousand soldiers to Vieques for war games lasting months at a time often overwhelming (he local population often thousand. On April 4, 1953, eight drunken U.S. sailors and marines on liberty leave arrived at Kl Bosque, a local bar, looking for drinks and women. The proprietor, sixty-nine-year-old Julian Felipe Francis, had a friendly relationship with the troops, making the bar a popular haunt for the servicemen. That night, however, Mapepe had been warned that the servicemen were provoking lights with the locals. A number of the men propositioned the young prostitute who worked out of the bar's back room, but she refused them all. A short time later, when three Puerto Rican marines entered the bar and negotiated their way into the woman's room, the rebuffed servicemen violently broke down her door. When Mapepe intervened on her behalf, the marines turned their rage upon him, beating him to death. One of the most compelling images in the exhibition is a large scale portrait of Mapepe taken later that night, suspended between life and death on a bed in the back room. Donohue painstakingly restored the visually stunning image unearthed through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and a tenacious search in the National Archives. Donohue's sleuthing uncovered a 140-page Navy investigative report into Mapepe's murder that was buried for over fifty years. It features crime-scene photographs and the conflicting testimonies of over thirty witnesses, and enabled her to obtain the service records and photographs of most of the men present that night. Donohue constructed larger-than-life black-and-white portraits of each man, meticulously layering their induction photographs with their service records. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] While viewing the portraits of the servicemen, there is an uneasy sensation that one is being inspected. The youthful faces are marked with the inky redactions of the FOlA censor. Names and serial numbers are visible, but the man and his service record are indivisibly one. McCaffrey, a cultural anthropologist, curated seventeen gripping excerpts from the investigative report to convey a Rashomon-like: narrative. The enlarged and fragmented testimonies, juxtaposed with the images of those who spoke them, expose conversations buried long ago. McCaffrey proposes a nuanced argument that complicates the narrative unpacking the sensitive issue of racial violence by U.S. marines toward Puerto Rican marines serving in the same uniform and under the same flag. …