Paula J. Román

In Tengo Alas (2023), Dominican artist Paula J. Román transforms a cluster of green plantains into a fragile set of wings. The fruit, bound together with red thread, appears at once wounded and mended, evoking both the violence of suturing and the tenderness of repair. Below them, a single peel carries an embroidered declaration—TENGO ALAS—that insists on self-affirmation despite the absurdity of flight with such materials. The gesture is minimal yet deeply charged: flight here is not a physical act but a spiritual or imaginative one, born from constraint.

Román’s use of the plantain—so intimately tied to Dominican identity and Caribbean daily life—invokes the ambivalent notion of Plantain Power: a proud emblem of endurance and creativity, but also a reminder of the reductive stereotypes bound to the “Banana Republic.” In sewing together these peels, the artist revisits what it means to inhabit that legacy from within, reclaiming a symbol historically associated with exploitation and turning it into an agent of self-construction. The red threads function as veins, bonds, and borders all at once, materializing the constant negotiation between pride and pain.

Suspended between fragility and determination, Tengo Alas becomes both an object and an attitude—a literal manifestation of the will to rise beyond one’s inherited confines. The piece questions the very logic of mobility and aspiration under postcolonial conditions: Can one truly take flight when the materials of uplift are the same as those that grounded and marked the body? Román’s work does not answer, but insists on the act of trying—the poetic assertion that even wings made of plantain skin can dream of altitude.