By Emily Oliveira, Latin American and Iberian Cultures PhD student

The challenging thing about processing Josefina Báez’ papers is that processing definitionally requires categorization—and Báez is a person who resists categorization. In no particular order, she is a sui generis Dominican dancer, writer, performer, Mantra Yoga initiate, actress, theorist, and teacher, among a sea of other equally valid qualifiers.

Many of Báez’ professional activities that appear in the collection defy categorization, too, in the sense that many of them belong to overlapping “types” of projects, appearances, or gigs that an artist might typically be associated with. To name one example, Dominicanish (1999) has its own series within the collection, but Dominicanish materials can be found in multiple series across the papers. Why is this? Dominicanish was performed and workshopped over a period of ten years and in many different iterations and contexts (on tour in New Zealand, at the American Museum of Natural History, on university campuses, at festivals, and at festivals on university campuses, to name just a few). Arguments could have been equally made for a given performance, then, to have been filed with other Dominicanish materials, other university-related materials, and/or other festival-related materials. Fittingly, the modus operandi for processing the collection ultimately took direction from Báez’ own practice of “seguir en lo mío desde la autenticidad” (keep doing her thing from a place of authenticity). This balance between imposing order and letting the materials speak for themselves about where they belonged was delicate. 

 

Báez had the habit of using presentation binders (binders filled with pages of plastic sleeves) to store materials. She started a new one for each new retreat, fellowship, residency, and/or extended international trip that she participated in. Encountering a binder resulted in an explosion of color, texture, and form—of notes and itineraries, as one might expect, but also of menus, calligraphy, dried flowers and leaves, sketches, and handwritten notes.

 The binders also contain particularly ephemeral ephemera in the form of faded receipts that, when considered jointly across the collection, demonstrate Báez’ ritual of buying incense, candles, and peppermint tea in the new places she would call her temporary home. For the purposes of making the collection as accessible as possible and of reducing wear and tear, I pulled out and unfolded materials from binders’ plastic sleeves that would’ve required removal by researchers in order to be read. In the cases of particularly full or very intentionally arranged binders, I felt it was best to not eliminate the binder itself as a unifying artifact, opting instead to indicate whenever select materials had been deliberately removed from their sleeves.

 

I had the privilege of having a conversation with Josefina partway through processing and feel compelled to note that she is exactly the spirit who she comes across as being in the papers. She is generous with her laughter and unabashedly joyful, jokingly apologizing that I had to “deal with” what I’d refer to as the expansive force of her creative energy. I assured her that it actually made my job more interesting and that she is clearly a beloved being with friends on many continents. We discussed healing and dharma creation as a central thread that runs through her body of work and thus the collection; “I direct energies,” she says, “not characters.” At this time in her life, she continues to work with longtime collaborators/close friends, describing such experiences as the act of “listening just as she has been listened to.” I described to her my impression that her career required a great deal of self-generated energy and wherewithal—so much solo traveling, performing, coordinating large numbers of people, generating funds, and thinking about what three meals a day (plus snacks) for over a dozen people over a weeklong retreat would look like.

 

Though Josefina then remarked that she is hyperactive (and though this might indeed be true), I speculated that she never “ran out” of creative energy because (1) wellness and healing is central to her practice (and, in her words, she “researches from her body”) and (2) she did not incorporate herself full-time into any preexisting institution that might’ve misdirected, misused, misunderstood, or squashed said energy. Taken as a whole, the collection points towards the fact that Báez’ career often unfolded in the specific directions that it did because she made and kept friends—artists of all kinds—all over the world. 

 

Another unique aspect of the Báez collection is, simply put, the language of its creator’s notes and drafts, scribblings and automatic writings, observations and lists. Some materials are fully in Spanish, others fully in English; many are in Spanglish, which would best be labeled instead as Dominicanish. As a native English speaker from a Spanish-speaking family, I shared with Báez how I saw in her a freeing alternative to my own self-consciousness around my accented Spanish. “Everyone has an accent,” she reminded me. Báez seems to document every little quotidian thing on any surface she can find—handwritten lists upon lists documenting glimmers of life and nonlife, of decay and bloom, that get caught in her discerning gaze. I marveled at Báez’ fluidity between the two languages (she moved to New York City from the Dominican Republic when she was 12 years old), which is one but many examples of the intentional interchangeability of theory and practice in her body of work.

 

Emily is a member of the 2025 cohort of the Columbia University Libraries’ Graduate Student Internship Program in Primary Sources.