Could you please tell me about your professional and academic background? How did you start working with photographic materials?

I started as a photographer pretty young, mostly in the music scene in Puerto Rico. I would take pictures of bands and document that world. Then I studied journalism and writing, and I kind of rejected what I felt was the constraining nature of the journalistic format. I figured that images were maybe a little more poetic and had a bit more power. So I started off as a photojournalist working in Washington, DC, where I studied. The earliest phase of my career was photographing US politics. I covered the White House and Congress, and I think that was very formative for me in terms of what happened later and what I decided to do with the rest of my career. Personally, it was a very enriching experience, but creatively, it fell short because I was documenting important decisions being made, but I wasn't seeing their effects on people. After I left Washington DC, and moved to New York, I became very interested in making work that spoke to the political processes and dynamics I saw in Washington, but in real life and how they affected people.

Could you provide a brief summary of the historical and political background for readers who may not be familiar with that period of Puerto Rican history?

Puerto Rico was discovered on Christopher Columbus's second voyage in 1493 and colonized by the Spanish. It remained Spanish territory for about 400 years, until 1898, when it was passed to the United States as a possession after the United States won the Spanish-American War. Since 1898, it has been under US control as a territory and colony. Puerto Ricans were granted US citizenship in 1917 and were quickly drafted into the First World War, which was partially the reason they were made citizens. However, they don't enjoy full citizenship. They can't vote for president and don't have an elected representative in Congress. In a way, Puerto Ricans are second-class citizens, and their ability to self-determine and create laws that respond to their particular reality is limited by Washington, which holds ultimate power over the island.

What's relevant to my project is all of that, but also the fact that even during the Spanish period, there was a pro-independence movement that sought to liberate Puerto Rico, much like many other Latin American countries did, and enter a decolonisation process. However, under the Spanish, this didn't happen. Later, starting around the 1930s, there was a strong and renewed interest in independence for Puerto Rico. The United States often responded to these calls with violent repression, which led to armed revolutionary movements, but also greater political fervour. This is what the surveillance program I’m studying was really after—it was created under the excuse of monitoring what they called subversive groups. What's interesting, historically, is that even though it was created to persecute these political groups—especially independence groups—under the pretense that they were subversive or advocated for communism or socialism, what you really see is the suppression and criminalisation of any political thought on the island.

How did you gain access to these materials? What was your working process like?

This project started more than 10 years ago, in 2013, when I was in DC. The Edward Snowden revelations had just come out, revealing that the US government was carrying out massive surveillance programs all over the world, including surveillance of US citizens at times. I thought it was relevant to revisit this history because it had happened in Puerto Rico, and in a way, these files provided a blueprint for what happened later and what still happens digitally. I started the project through word of mouth, finding files that people had collected from the government. When this surveillance program was revealed in the late '80s, the government of Puerto Rico decided that the files collected on people belonged to those who had been surveilled. So many people picked up their files, and a lot of them have these documents in their homes. I began by visiting these people, going through their files, and photographing them.

During my research, in 2015, all of the administrative documents and files that had not been picked up were unsealed at the National Archives. I visited the National Archives and spent years trying to negotiate access to these files. In 2022, I finally gained access and received a grant from the Magnum Foundation, which allowed me to digitize a large portion of the files, especially the photographic material, in exchange for using it in my book. Part of this project is about my book and rescuing this history, but it’s also about preserving it. This is a little-known history, and it's under threat due to its political nature and also because of the challenges of archiving in a colony, especially in the tropics. What I digitized has now been submitted into the archive, making it public and accessible for future use by other artists and scholars. Part of that digitized material is also being used in my book.

All the documents and photographs made by the surveillance system in your book appear very meticulously crafted and have a precise quality to them. It seems like it was a well-functioning, precise system. How does this kind of aesthetic influence the way you worked with these materials?

I think it's interesting that you say that because I think the photographs have a lyrical quality, almost a seductive quality, perhaps because of the material, the film, and some of them are technically very good. But the program itself was so large and produced such a high volume of material that, when I looked at the edit, it was almost overwhelming. In a way, I used the archive itself to guide my editing process. What's interesting about the archive is that both the photographic material and the files contain a lot of information, but much of it is quite banal and irrelevant. In the case of the text, a lot of it is completely made up. The system was essentially creating content to justify its own existence because the political threat was no longer there—and in some cases, arguably, it was never there to begin with, especially with the more recent material.

So, many of these photographic moments are less a product of the excellence of the police photographers and more a result of the sheer volume of material they produced. That shaped the way I edited the text and images together. If I had tried to do an aesthetic edit, I think I would never have finished the book because there were so many interesting images. Instead, I used a surveillance manual I found as the guiding thread. I used that as the main backbone of the book and then started looking through the archive for images that represented the gaze I felt was captured by the manual. In a way, the project is more about the system itself rather than the individuals involved—whether it's the people being surveilled or the ones doing the surveillance. It's about the visual culture and the culture of this gaze, which I think is a powerful tool for understanding political oppression and surveillance, and the way governments perceive political processes that might oppose their agenda.

The people being surveilled in a lot of the pictures gaze directly into the camera.

When I was looking through the images, those were the ones that made the strongest impression on me, because there's a narrative that this was a secret operation. And in many cases, it was. But there's a little bit of everything—there are people who knew they were being watched, and others who had no idea. What's interesting from the government's perspective is that they weaponised the camera and the act of creating imagery. So, these moments where people are staring back, to me, represent an acknowledgment or resistance. This counter-gaze is an amazing moment in reconfiguring the narrative.

I think many people involved in the movement knew this surveillance was happening—maybe not its full scope or scale—but there's something fundamental about being watched and knowing that what you're doing is considered criminal by the government. Those moments, I think, are particularly powerful photographically and very unique in the context of using photography to discuss surveillance.

How did the history of the liberation movements evolve?

I think it's evolved into a digital format. That's why it was important for me to include modern-day surveillance in the book towards the end, to show that while the scale of the operation is probably smaller and the unit no longer exists as such, the culture of surveillance, criminalizing political speech, and compiling dossiers on people through photographic and textual material is still very much alive in the Puerto Rican police department, the US government, and the Puerto Rican government. The official unit was disbanded. 

There was a deep sense of grief, betrayal, and confusion among many people. For those who picked up their files, they were often able to decode the informant codes, which revealed the identities of people who had informed on them. In many cases, these informants turned out to be friends, family members, or people they had trusted for many years, who had informed either for money or under coercion.

Being informed on and having a file often disrupted people’s lives. They couldn't hold down jobs, were seen as subversive, and, for many, lived under constant physical threat. The aftermath of discovering who these informants were—realizing they were often people you still lived and interacted with in society—was particularly painful. This project aims to unveil the inner workings of surveillance in general. I can show this anywhere—in certain Asian countries, European countries, African countries, and the rest of Latin America, where this culture is pervasive. In Puerto Rico, it's about revealing a system that was deeply traumatic, with wounds that still persist.

I think it does double duty in Puerto Rico to sort of create a conversation, to rescue certain aspects of this political process that I think are useful today and in the future as Puerto Rico finds itself in a particularly tense moment in its colonial history – which is a whole other history we can talk about, but it's certainly in a moment right now.

The book has its own kind of dictionary of definitions. Could you tell me more about how the textual part of the book came together?

I was always very intrigued with looking at the administrative documents, but a lot of them are kind of hard to find. A lot of that archival material hasn't been processed and archived. But in the last wave of research, I found this manual. I found a few manuals, but this one was particularly shocking.

There is the second edition of the book, and it comes in this folder. Inside the book itself, you can see the hand-made binding, and there's a little diagram here. This card is inserted into the book, and it’s the actual surveillance manual I found in the archive, which is crazy.

The first 30 pages or so are the actual manual. The object itself had this cut-out space to hide things, though I have no idea what was in there. When I found that object, I was intrigued by it. The manual is fascinating because it offers a glimpse into the training, the perspective, and also, in some ways, the incompetence of many of the officers. There are lines that say things like "don't be conspicuous," "don't hide behind trees like in spy movies," and "if you're too tall or your ears are too big, you can't be a spy or a surveillance officer." The manual also has a lot of typos and mistakes in the Spanish text, which I preserved. It’s a very telling object, both in its physical form and in its text, and it creates a structure for the images to exist and engage with this topic.

For me, the decision to include textual information from the archive was to give viewers the same sense I had in the archive—of discovering these processes, these gazes through images and text. I wanted to give viewers that firsthand experience of discovery and research, while keeping my own voice to a minimum. There’s a statement at the back that provides a little more historical and artistic context, and of course, the captions are in chronological order, though the images themselves are not. This offers an alternative reading of the images in historical context, rescuing key moments that contextualize the rest of the book.

In a way, the book tries to be as non-didactic as possible, presenting the evidence as it exists in the archive. Part of this decision comes from the fact that this is a very charged political history in Puerto Rico. Some people see the book as a celebration of the independence movement or an indictment of the government. While it certainly critiques the violation of the First Amendment, privacy, and the right to political opinion, it's not a book that promotes a specific political view. What it does is ask readers, regardless of their political stance—whether they want Puerto Rico to become part of the United States, be independent, or remain the same—to reckon with this history and acknowledge the nature of the relationship. The decision to present the material this way puts the responsibility in the hands of the viewer to ask, "How do I feel about this?" and "How do I negotiate this relationship of power with the United States and the Puerto Rican government, knowing that this is how they view me or certain people within Puerto Rican society?"

What kind of feedback have you received on the book?

A little bit of everything. I mean, I’ve gotten random phone calls from people who are in the book, saying things like, "Oh my God, I haven’t seen that picture in years," or "This is my friend!" All sorts of heartwarming stories of people remembering and sharing their histories, rescuing these memories, and then sharing them with their children. Sometimes, their children bring the book to them and say, "Hey, look at this book." And they’re like, "That’s me!" So I think there are really interesting conversations happening intergenerationally.

And then, obviously, I haven’t been contacted or confronted directly, but when the book was written up in the local paper, the comments were really interesting. There’s still this idea that the protest movement, the independence movement, or anyone who takes to the streets is some kind of criminal, subversive, or communist. One of my favorite comments by a reader was something like, "Oh, this socialist author is pro-independence and wants us to be just like Cuba, Russia, or China, where nobody can speak freely and everyone is surveilled." Then someone else replied, "That's exactly what this book is about; it happened here." I think people are not aware of this history and don’t contextualize it as part of a global trend of governments moving in this direction. I believe that participation should be horizontal and available to everyone, regardless of political views, as long as no one is being harmed. The use of surveillance and control by these apparatuses is dangerous in general for a healthy civic society around the world. The book is aimed at addressing that.

Otherwise, it's been great. It’s been great to be shortlisted in all these competitions. I won first prize for a photo book in PHotoESPAÑA. So, I think the book has been well-received within the industry. There's a trend toward thinking about the archive and revisiting it, especially by artists in places that have been traditionally misunderstood, and I feel included in that movement. In these places, traditional documentary practices or photojournalism often fall short. I believe rescuing archival work and political history in a way that hasn’t been seen before is a powerful tool for understanding places like Puerto Rico or Latin America, which have been misunderstood not only from the outside but also, sometimes, from within. In Puerto Rico, we certainly look to American media a lot, and the gaze we get in return is very specific and often doesn’t respond to needs within Puerto Rico nor reflect an autochthonous gaze.