Lizania Cruz

In ¡Se Buscan Testigos! (2020–ongoing), Lizania Cruz mobilizes the banana as a charged cultural sign embedded within everyday language, food, and public discourse. Printed on a rice sack and installed in the landscape, the poster adopts the visual grammar of street announcements to pose a seemingly simple question: who is recognized as the author of the Dominican staple mangú? By invoking the plantain—so central to Caribbean diets—the work exposes how a ubiquitous food can obscure the histories of forced labor and Black knowledge that made it possible. The banana, here, operates not as a neutral ingredient but as a contested site of memory and attribution.

Cruz’s intervention foregrounds the plantain as a carrier of racialized histories that remain actively suppressed within the Dominican national imaginary. The reference to enslaved Black people situates the banana within the broader circuits of colonial agriculture and Atlantic slavery, challenging dominant narratives that detach national identity from African heritage. By placing this message in public space—and inviting responses via WhatsApp—the work transforms the banana into a prompt for collective testimony, turning everyday consumption into a point of entry for historical reckoning.

Through its direct, vernacular language and participatory structure, ¡Se Buscan Testigos! repositions the banana as both evidence and question. It asks viewers to reconsider not only what they eat, but what histories are digested, erased, or disavowed in the process. In doing so, Cruz reveals how the banana continues to mediate the relationship between visibility and erasure, functioning as a subtle yet powerful index of race, labor, and belonging in the contemporary Caribbean.