In the first and last panels, the artist plays with words, riffing off variations on “protest” or else experimenting with alliteration by linking related words all beginning with R. The second chart starts with the imperative to sigh in huge letters and ends with “scream” in tiny ones, reversing the expectations of the words’ connotations in relation to their dimensions, while at the same time acknowledging that the need to protest often begins with something as mundane as exasperation. The third chart, which is the only complete sentence, humorously negates itself, undermining the senses of hearing and vision in the context of an eye exam.

These text pieces insert themselves into a tradition of South American conceptual art that often-used cryptic words and symbols to decry U.S. American intervention in Latin America or to protest the dictatorships that swept through the region from the 1960s to the 1980s. Antonio Dias’ 1968 Anywhere Is My Land—a title that recalls Navarro’s—superimposes a grid over a starry sky and prints the English-language title on the surface of the piece (the artist was Brazilian). The division of the space into quadrants alters the message from a potentially dreamy affirmation to a colonialist gesture fraught with violence. The Chilean Lotty Rosenfeld, a founder of the collective Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), transformed lines on a deserted street in Santiago into crosses by placing white tape over them (1979). This simple gesture of reclaiming public space was a silent mode of resistance against the Pinochet regime, both an affirmation and an act of mourning. In 1983, CADA launched the celebrated NO+ campaign, which incited the public to finish the sentence “No more…” and imagine alternative futures. Alfredo Jaar’s A Logo for America (1987/restaged in 2014) inserted the negation “This is not America” over a map of the United States. Navarro follows in the footsteps of these and other artists, who marry the artistic and the political in unexpected and irreverent ways.

The bold letters of the charts contrast the subtle list of Caribbean rebellions, which are sandblasted on the glass that encases the palm tree. Navarro chooses events that in many cases are little known and celebrates acts of resistance and rebellion by Black and Indigenous people of the Americas. Arguably, the most famous occasion etched on the vitrine is “Haitian Revolution, 1791-1804.” It is, nonetheless, one whose scope and significance for hemispheric history and geopolitics cannot be overstated. According to a recent article by Howard French, “It’s one of the most remarkable stories of liberation that we have as a species: the largest revolt of enslaved people in human history, and the only one known to have produced a free state” (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-10-10/the-west-owes-a-centuries-old-debt-to-haiti). Titled “The West Owes a Centuries-Old Debt to Haiti,” the story demonstrates how this extraordinary event produced a chain reaction in the Western Hemisphere that resulted in the transformation of the United States from a “vulnerable, coast-hugging collection of former English colonies to a continental power” through the Louisiana Purchase, or the sale of France’s North American holdings to the United States. In other words, the world as we know it would look very different had there been no revolution in Haiti. Indeed, it may have had an equal significance in world history as Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, but whereas the October 12 date of “Columbus” Day (renamed Indigenous Peoples Day or Día de la raza in some contexts) is widely known, few people are aware that the Haitian revolt began on August 21, 1791. I have argued in other writings that “Latin” America has deliberately constructed itself in opposition to Haiti, isolating it while defining its own identity in the image of the West and as a European diaspora. Regional projects of mestizaje, or racial mixing, and blanqueamiento, or the encouraging of European migration, sought to whiten local populations, assimilating Indigenous people and erasing the stain of slavery and with it the Afro-descendant populations of any given country and especially those along the Pacific coast, from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego. As such, Latin America as a regional construct is predicated on “white normativity,” or what African American philosopher Charles W. Mills has described as “the centering of the Euro and later Euro-American group as the constitutive norm” (C. W. Mills, “White Ignorance,” in S. Sullivan and N. Tuana, eds., Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, Albany: SUNY Press, 2007, 25).

By evoking Black and Indigenous acts of rebellion, Navarro recognizes that these histories are intertwined with those of white and mestize settlers like himself. Black Latin Americans are a demographic that is frequently erased in national imaginaries and hemispheric histories—the delineation of the non-hispanophone Caribbean as a separate region from Latin America is part of this tendency. Indigenous people, meanwhile, cannot be divorced from the continental territories they continue to inhabit. Rather than regarding them as historical agents, however, they are popularly seen both as passive and submissive and as a vanishing minority. In acknowledgement of the obscured pasts of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples of the Americas, Navarro’s timeline could not be more understated; he nonetheless highlights their heroic achievements for those who wish to broaden their knowledge and challenge the “epistemologies of ignorance” that Mills sees as characteristic of white supremacy. In a Miami urban site marked by continuous displacement of first the Seminole and later the impoverished communities who lived in nearby neighborhoods, Navarro calls attention to the violent history of the Americas as one of both dispossession and rebellion. But he also reveals how erasure is enacted through reoccupation. Their land became our land, and it is only by looking for what most people will ignore that we not only begin to see, but we also become aware of our own complicity.

Iván Navarro has been working with neon light as his primary medium over the past two decades. Born in Santiago, Chile in 197, just prior to the advent of the military coup. His move to New York in 1997 determined the direction of his art, but Chile has always remained close to his heart and mind. Although Navarro’s light sculptures tend to dazzle the eye and evoke multiple associations—ranging from spirituality to commerce and technology—the work is always political.