Ramón López
Nearly a decade ago, in Chicago’s Puerto Rican neighborhood, a new way of making and displaying the Puerto Rican flag emerged. It was late May when the street vendors—those familiar sellers of body adornments with Puerto Rican themes—T-shirts, hats, necklaces, keychains—added something new to their inventories: necklaces made from plastic beads, with rectangular pendants woven in the unmistakable pattern of the single-starred flag. The new item was an instant hit. Not only was it worn around the neck as a bold public declaration of Puerto Rican identity during June’s Festivals and Parade, but once the celebrations ended, it was hung from rearview mirrors, securing a place of permanent visibility.
The beaded flag, strung together with fishing line, became a runaway trend. No one knows who made the first one. Even now, it remains an anonymous craft, born in the domestic spaces of the community, sold in shops and at street stalls by the makers themselves or by middlemen who bought them by the dozen to resell at a markup. Prices ranged from $5 to $10.
Men, women, and children wove flags as a way to earn temporary income for their families. Some set up small, intermittent businesses—buying beads by the pound and supplying them to weavers, who crafted the pieces in exchange for a share of the sale price. Often, a family would run its own sales stall—always featuring a mix of mass-produced goods alongside homemade crafts—and while some sold, others wove in the family car or van. Beside the chair, the clothesline of T-shirts and trinkets, the display table and boxes of stock, there was always a bag of home-cooked food to sustain the street workers.
The craft technique was simple: a threading of beads, with roots tracing back to ancient Egypt, spread across the world over millennia. In Chicago, this familiarity had many sources: traditional Catholic rosaries, Santería necklaces, Native American beadwork, and craft magazine patterns. For a Puerto Rican people long accustomed to rosaries, Santería beads, and countless industrial and handmade necklaces as part of their daily adornment, it was easy to embrace the national flag transformed into a beaded pendant.
From the start, people accepted the beaded flag as their own, despite the fact that beadwork couldn’t reproduce the precise five-pointed star. Instead, diamonds and other simplified shapes took its place. The red stripes were woven with red beads, but for the white, transparent beads were more common than true white ones. As always, the triangle appeared in every shade of blue available on the market.
The seed of craft sown that first year bore abundant, unexpected fruit in the years that followed. We don’t have space here to catalog all the subtle developments, but we can sketch out the main trends. The rectangular flag multiplied in form, appealing to different tastes. Some flags, made with large, heavy beads, became favorites among bikers and gang members, who saw in the oversized necklaces a way to flex their machismo. Others, miniature flags woven with tiny beads, suited more discreet wearers and made delicate earrings favored by women. The rectangles varied in their proportions; some necklaces featured many little flags instead of a single pendant. Soon, someone crafted a flag in the shape of a heart, and others followed, creating hearts in all sizes. A necklace appeared with twin heart-shaped flags—perfect for couples.
The beaded flag became the fashion of the moment. Its pulsating cultural symbolism grew ever more visible; if you stood on a corner in the neighborhood watching the cars go by, the number of rearview mirrors sporting beaded flags was astonishing—though this proud display also made occupants more vulnerable to racist reactions from whites, especially traffic police.
And it didn’t stop there. In later years, the craft diversified even more. Shorter necklaces emerged, designed not for the neck but specifically for car mirrors. The Lares flag made its spontaneous appearance, lighting up people’s sense of history, identity, and patriotism. The weavers, emboldened, began to stitch an entire way of life into flag forms: flags shaped like cuatros (the Puerto Rican guitar), twin and cubic flags like dangling dice, fringed flags, flags waving instead of rigid, flags forming Christian crosses, flags shaped like the map of Puerto Rico, flags made into chairs, tables, sofas. In a bold creative flourish, someone even crafted a flag woven after the intricate design of the monumental flags on Chicago’s Paseo Boricua. A tricolor pendant also appeared bearing the acronym “P.R.”—the pi-ar of shared Spanglish.
It kept evolving. The flag’s colors invaded the design of rosaries, merging with one of their source traditions. At the same time, the trend crossed cultural borders, blending its colors into the logo of Chicago’s once-invincible Bulls basketball team—bringing the craft into contact with the city’s broader society. Then something fascinating happened: new designs appeared—México-Boricua flags—acknowledging the Puerto Rican community’s coexistence with Chicago’s largest Latino group and creating flags for the mixed-heritage children of these interethnic pairings. Cubano-Boricua and Dominicano-Boricua flags soon followed, expressing the deep cultural and Caribbean kinship of the Antilles.
Here, we should consider a new angle. Spurred on by the captivating Puerto Rican trend, other Latino communities in Chicago began weaving their own beaded flags: first Mexicans, then other Central American, Caribbean, and South American groups. Before long, stalls and shops were offering beaded flags from many nations, and in non-Puerto Rican communities, the newly invented tradition took root and spread. Today, in 2001, you can find hybrid flags in all the combinations allowed by the city’s Latino demographics. However, these sell far less—representing smaller, still-growing groups. Meanwhile, these beaded flags have traveled to other major Latino cities in the U.S., where they compete with the flood of mass-produced ethnic trinkets.
It is significant that in a city as multiethnic as Chicago, the beaded flag phenomenon has remained distinctly Puerto Rican and Latino. African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and groups of European, Mediterranean, or Arab descent have not adopted their own beaded flags. This is not an adaptation of a trend imposed by corporate commercial culture but a grassroots initiative that faces the assimilating mainstream with an affirmative response of Latinx diversity. Nor is it a folkloric tradition from the homeland—it’s an innovation born of migration itself, marking the migrant community as a cultural producer with its own distinctive voice.
One remarkable exception deserves mention: a Puerto Rican woman who owned a shop took things further and created a collection of beaded flags featuring the designs of Puerto Rico’s municipal flags. The project didn’t succeed—there weren’t enough customers to sustain 78 different flags. Moreover, many Boricuas don’t even know their municipal flag.
This is telling. The cultural success of the beaded flag lies in the shared recognition of an icon that stirs such pride it’s displayed with energy and abundance—so much so that intellectual and cultural elites sometimes bristle at this contagious affection, dismissing it as disrespect for “national symbols” or as charrería—tacky, lowbrow kitsch. But what this creative flourish from the ordinary people of Chicago teaches us is that only a universally recognized image can serve as a vehicle for spreading community pride. What’s more, the people claim national symbols in their own way. Unlike ruling elites, they don’t place them high on poles, in monuments, or in special, inaccessible spaces out of the people’s control—they plant them at the heart of daily life, especially on the personal body, which is the freest canvas for symbolic expression.
What’s astonishing about the beaded flag phenomenon is its breadth and richness of expression. Here we see proof of the enormous capacity of ordinary people to speak to one another—and to the watching public—by weaving a symbolic language that gathers, transforms, and announces the essential aspects of culture. I do not exaggerate. Review the explosion of flag forms and you’ll find the presence of patriotism, history, spirituality, love, music, luck, language, ethnicity, domestic life, gender dynamics, migration, Latin American-Caribbean identity, sports, commerce, racism—and above all, the people themselves as protagonists of their own cultural work.
The many forms of the flag—combined with other visual cues—are an excellent way to illustrate the exuberant complexity of Puerto Rican popular culture in the United States. The flag’s constant metamorphosis maps out the social relationships that knit together a way of understanding and making life for a diasporic people who refuse to lose their identity and, instead, reproduce and transform it with the fierce pride of shared cultural strength.
