A Photo Essay on the Power of Dominican Salons in Puerto Rico

Words and photography by Ojos Nebulosos

A Domincan woman in a blue shirt is blowdrying another woman's hair in a salon.

Quisqueyanas: Ferminas Salón, Puerto Rico 2015

This was my first photo-essay for a Photojournalism class in 2015. I never released it due to the negative and racist feedback I got from my college professor at the time. Now looking back, it's probably one of my best pieces of work.

I wanted to show how Dominican women uplift and economically sustain themselves through opening beauty salons in Puerto Rico. Growing up mostly Dominican in Puerto Rico, I always found my Dominican culture and heritage being joked about. People making fun of my accent and making Sanky Panky jokes, as if that's all that there is to being Dominican.

A professor called the women in my photo essay, "ugly Black women that have no point in going to a salon, because they're still going to be Black with burnt hair."

I was one of only two Black women in the classroom. This experience actually made me doubt if photography was something I wanted to do and I felt destroyed as an artist. Here I was, showing how an entire community of Dominican immigrant women in Puerto Rico (which also involved family members) can have each other's back and promote self-love.

Being completely dragged by a white male photographer, I felt like I put the people I was showing love for in the position to be the butt of the joke again. It took me time to realize how much that moment affected me in my work space. It wasn’t until I got back into documenting rallies against the government that I actually found the love to photograph again.

Now I know that this experience was not a test of my actual ability in photography, but just how tolerant I had to be as a Black Dominican and Puerto Rican woman to racist bullshit. Now that I know all of this, I’m glad that I can share this with such an amazing and supportive community. I'm also grateful to come from a beautiful lineage of Resilient women from Quisqueya and I’m blessed to have them uplift me from that situation. Black is beautiful and it won’t be silenced. I will continue to show the beauty and strength of Black women from all parts of the world.