Puerto Rico’s Bigheads March Again With Peace, Plena, and Memory

In Old San Juan, the year’s loudest argument isn’t shouted—it’s danced. This weekend’s Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián brings back towering cabezudos and zancudos that honor Jacobo Morales, mourn violence, and plead for reefs and peace.

Where The Street Turns into A Civic Sermon

On the cobblestones of Viejo San Juan, you can feel it before you see it: the percussion of plena panderos, the crowd’s quick smile, the sudden shadow of a giant head turning a corner like a myth made practical. The cabezudos—those oversized papier-mâché figures that have become unmistakable icons of the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián—are not just decoration. They are a tradition that keeps insisting art belongs to the people, and that the people, in turn, deserve art that talks back to the world.

This year, the theater company Agua, Sol y Sereno is using its most beloved creations to make a set of claims that feel urgent in Puerto Rico right now: that peace is not a vague wish, that the environment is not an accessory theme, and that culture is not something you rent for a weekend. At the heart of the procession is a tribute to Jacobo Morales, the revered actor, filmmaker, poet, and animator widely regarded as the most influential film director in Puerto Rico’s history—an artist known for socially conscious work that explores the archipelago’s cultural identity and political struggles. His partner in life and work, Blanca Eró, an actor and producer who has supported him for more than seventy years, is honored alongside him, a reminder that creative legacies are often built as duets.

In the swirl of festival noise, this is not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. Morales appears in the Bad Bunny documentary “Debí tirar más fotos,” a detail that matters because it stitches generations together in a single frame: the elder chronicler of Puerto Rican identity and the global reggaetón star whose fame has forced the world to pay closer attention to the island’s name. The festival’s tribute, as described by participants, becomes a bridge between cinema and street theater, between high art and popular culture, between yesterday’s political imagination and today’s crowded reality.

Cabezudos With a Conscience and A Human Face

The list of Puerto Rican figures already immortalized as cabezudos is long and telling—names like Ismael Rivera and Tite Curet circulate through the festival not as museum labels but as living presences. The company behind these giant heads, Agua, Sol y Sereno, has spent decades treating the parade as a moving editorial page. Their director, Pedro Adorno, fifty-seven, told EFE that their work combines “the cultured and the popular,” a phrase that, in Puerto Rico, is more a political stance than an artistic slogan. It rejects the old hierarchy that says the street is only for entertainment while “serious” reflection belongs indoors.

Adorno is not only a director; he is also an artist, musician, and zanquero—one of the performers who animates the towering figures. Speaking to EFE, he described Jacobo Morales and Blanca Eró as a continuing source of inspiration for Puerto Rican creators because of their commitment to national identity, critical vision, social transformation, and a decolonizing perspective—while also embodying the human and ethical qualities the island values deeply. It is easy to romanticize that kind of praise, but in the context of Puerto Rican life—marked by debates over status, migration, austerity, and cultural survival—it reads as an insistence that art should carry responsibility without losing tenderness.

The company itself was founded thirty-three years ago by Adorno and his wife, Cathy Vigo, and it has traveled well beyond the island, performing in places like Chicago, Cádiz, and Madrid, a testament to how Puerto Rican culture moves—often because it must. Their cabezudos have also shared mainstream global stages: Adorno noted to EFE that the group accompanied Bad Bunny at the 2023 Grammys, with giant heads of artists such as Tego Calderón and Andy Montañez. Even the materials are part of the argument. These figures are made with ecological elements like clay, wood, cardboard, and papier-mâché, a craft approach that quietly contradicts the disposable logic of modern spectacle.

In a region where the most visible culture can sometimes feel packaged for tourists, the insistence on handmade, reusable materials—and on themes that cut beyond the party—signals something deeper: a belief that popular celebration can still be politically literate.

White Stilt-Walkers, Coral Drawings, And the Island Beneath The Island

On Sunday, the company plans a special procession with what Adorno called a “glocal” perspective—local and global at once—centered on “harmony and peace.” He explained to EFE that the idea is to answer violence and war with a pacifist proposal grounded in love, beauty, and community. The timing is not abstract. Puerto Rico, he noted, is living with violence in intimate forms, including what he described as one of the highest femicide rates in Latin America, while the wider world seems to be inhaling the “air of war.” In that context, a parade becomes more than a performance. It becomes a public ritual of refusal.

The procession will include zancudos dressed in white, carrying coral drawings painted by the artist and community cultural manager Kenneth Salgado, designed to denounce the reef bleaching crisis. The choice of corals is not decorative; it is a way of saying the island’s vulnerability is ecological as well as political. And Salgado’s work is tied to a broader artistic project, “Entre marejadas del vientre,” an expanded-graphics exhibition that premiered in June 2025, curated by Salgado and created by seven visual and scenic artists. The project aims to elevate ancestral memory, wisdom, and the close relationship with nature held by the island’s Indigenous peoples, including the huecoides, saladoides, and the Taínos, as described in the event’s framing.

Salgado offered an image to EFE that feels like a poem with teeth: he spoke of caves where shells are embedded in walls, where shark teeth appear, where sponges are carved into stone—evidence, in his words, of a “subaquatic memory.” The island, suggesting it once lay underwater, still carries the ocean’s archive inside its body. That’s why corals matter here: they are living record-keepers, and bleaching is not only an environmental crisis but a cultural amputation.

The tribute will also honor Javier Santiago, remembered as the founder of the Fundación Nacional para la Cultura Popular, with a posthumous salute that places cultural stewardship alongside artistic brilliance. In Adorno’s closing reflection to EFE, he returned to the question of what “popular” means now, especially after what he called Bad Bunny’s “residency” and the social energy surrounding it. He argued that the street connects worlds: that the plenazo relates to reggaetón, that direct lyrics connect with poetry, and that different classes and generations can approach each other through shared sound.

In Puerto Rico, that is not a small claim. It suggests the island’s culture is not fractured into separate audiences, but braided—capable of turning a festival into a forum, a dance into a diagnosis, and a papier-mâché giant into a reminder that joy can carry conscience.

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