Juan Francisco Torres, originally from Lares, Puerto Rico, now carves and paints gourds and santos figurines at his home in Shirley. He learned the skill of gourd carving from a friend in Vieques twenty years ago; since then, he has gone on to develop new innovations and to adapt his craft to the Long Island environment.

Gourd carving originally came from the Taíno people native to Puerto Rico, who used the higüeras for maracas, containers, plates, and dippers called jatacas. From them, the tradition was passed on to the Puerto Rican jíbaros, or country people. Gourds were objects of everyday use for the jíbaros up through at least the 1950s, especially in the inland mountain regions where commercially made goods were not readily available. Musical instruments like cuatros were also made from these gourds. Gourds for household use had only simple decorations, like carved borders; but when the efforts of Puerto Rico’s Instituto de Cultura to rescue traditional arts created a market for such objects in the 1960s, artisans began to make ever more elaborate carvings.

Torres comes from an artistic family. His grandfather carved wooden handles for machetes and made güiros (a musical instrument made from a gourd); his grandmother crocheted blankets. Two aunts produce stained glass, while his mother and another aunt make embroidered collars. But Juan Francisco was always most interested in painting. When at a Hispanic World’s Fair in the mid-1980s he saw painted gourds from Guatemala, he decided that he too could further beautify the carved higüeras with the addition of paint. Today he decorates gourds with pictures of Puerto Rican wildlife, landscapes and carnival masks since, "I came to the conclusion that in order to project what I wanted to project about my culture and my nationality, I didn’t have to paint the flag. I could instead use other things from Puerto Rico. That way people will appreciate the culture, and at the same time people that aren’t Puerto Rican will accept it." Some other favorite motifs derive from ancient Taíno symbols, since Torres has a longstanding interest in archeology.

Though Torres still gets most of his gourds from Puerto Rico, he has found ways to use the long-necked gourds more readily available on Long Island. In his hands, they have become ducks, swans and even snakes escaping from baskets. In the future he plans on making them into percussion instruments called chékeres. He also recently started producing religious woodcarvings or santos, following instruction received by renowned carver Luis Raúl "Pichilo" Nieves Román. Each of Juan Francisco’s saints features blue eyes, in memory of his blue-eyed grandmother.

Torres is co-founder and vice president of Hermandad Cultural de Artesanos Puertorriqueños, a group that supports and promotes Puerto Rican traditional artists throughout the tri-state area from leather workers to mask makers to woodcarvers. Future goals include the creation of educational programs to teach youth about Puerto Rican art forms: "One of the group’s objectives is to keep promoting Puerto Rican culture through the plastic arts. One of the ways to do this is by teaching what we know, because we don’t want it to be lost."