Nicolás Dumit Estévez

Founded in 2017 in his South Bronx home, Nicolás Dumit Estévez’s Museo del Mangú (2017 - present) is a living, virtual platform dedicated to plantains—and by extension, bananas—as carriers of memory, culture, and resistance. Conceived as an “organism” rather than a fixed institution, the project operates as a playful yet deeply critical archive of the fruit’s layered histories. Estévez, also known by the pseudonym Chiquito, describes the museum as a repository for “herstories/histories/theirstories/ourstories,” a reminder of how something as ordinary as a plantain can embody the entanglement of joy, nourishment, and the colonial violence that has marked the Caribbean and its diasporas.

The museum’s main stage is currently Instagram, where Estévez curates a dynamic mix of documentation, humor, and cultural commentary. Posts range from quick snapshots of discarded plantain peels encountered in the Bronx—tagged as “evidence of presence in the city”—to recipes like cinnamon-plantain, or biting observations on the rising cost of maduros. With sharp, witty captions, the Museo del Mangú captures the absurd ubiquity of bananas and plantains in everyday life, drawing attention to their persistence in both material and virtual landscapes. As Estévez himself quipped in late 2024, “we need a plantain emoji!”

Through this work, Estévez transforms the banality of the fruit into a prism for thinking about identity, migration, and belonging. By situating the banana and plantain within the hyperlocal context of the Bronx, the Museo del Mangú reclaims the fruit as a diasporic emblem—one tied to survival, creativity, and humor as much as to histories of exploitation. At once a digital archive and an invitation to community, the project resists the static authority of the museum model, instead offering a flexible, rhizomatic platform that grows outward through everyday encounters, social media, and lived experience.