How Chocolate Cortés is Celebrating Puerto Rican Culture with Chocolate & Superheroes

Editor’s note: Cortes recently announced they will be opening a chocolate restaurant in NYC.

Chocolate Cortés’s chocolate bar packs quite a punch. A superhero-sized one. The brand has teamed up with Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez and his comic book superhero creation, La Borinqueña, to raise funds for youth arts programming in Puerto Rico in the program, Activate Your Powers With the Arts (Activa tus poderes con las artes). The company manufactured four special bars with La Borinqueña, a female Puerto Rican superhero, on the front of the wrapper with four special edition comics printed on the inside.

It’s a merging of a 92-year old Puerto Rican chocolate company, best known for its hot chocolate, with a new superhero. People associate Cortés’ chocolates with “nostalgia and memories of family and heritage,” explained Carlos Cortés, Creative Director at Chocolate Cortés and fourth generation of the Cortés family.

Miranda-Rodriguez describes collaboration as bringing together a legacy brand with a new one. It’s “a project that's connecting the 9 million Puerto Rican from the island to the diaspora in a beautiful celebratory manner,” Miranda-Rodriguez explained.

The collaboration came out of the work that both Chocolate Cortés and Miranda-Rodriguez were already doing. Since 1929, Chocolate Cortés has been producing chocolate as the largest chocolate manufacturer in the Caribbean and supporting the arts. “It's almost in our blood,” explained Cortés. Notably, one Chocolate Cortés project in the 1950s and 1960s involved printing little storybooks inserted into the chocolate bars that taught people how to read in parts of the island. In their company restaurant, Chocobar Cortés, there’s a display containing examples of these booklets as well as a letter from Ana Mendez in Brooklyn thanking them for creating these books that helped her learn to read.

Now the company has established a nonprofit, Fundación Cortés, in 2012 that supports and provides arts education to school children. They work with teachers on different subjects —math, history, social justice, identity— to create programming that works with their current exhibitions. “What's powerful about that is that a lot of these kids...have never been to a gallery or have never been to a museum,” Cortés said, “It really is a powerful experience that can be transformational for them.”

The building also hosts gallery space and they’ve hosted 12 curated exhibitions of contemporary Caribbean art, said Cortés. And most recently, that included an exhibition on La Borinqueña.

For Miranda-Rodriguez, he was inspired to create La Borinqueña in the wake of the announcement of the worsening debt crisis in 2015 (and beyond). “I was inspired to create a project that could kind of engage audiences to talk about Puerto Rico, using popular culture,” he explained. Miranda-Rodriguez had grown up reading comic books and “always loved the potential that the stories had to inspire heroism in real life.”

For some people, comic books are about escapism but he wanted comic books to reflect the real issues that were happening in the present day. From this, Marisol, an Afro-Puerto Rican woman, became La Borinqueña in 2016. It “was an opportunity to reconnect to the activism of my youth, and truly bring this story of Puerto Rico's colonial status history and its people into a different packaged discussion,” Cortés said.

But La Borinqueña is more than a comic book. Thanks to a successful collaboration with DC Universe, Somos Artes, Miranda-Rodriguez’s company, was able to establish a grants program for nonprofits in Puerto Rico. On top of that, Miranda-Rodriguez won the 2019 Eisner for his humanitarian work through the comic anthology Ricanstruction: Reminiscing & Rebuilding Puerto Rico to raise funds and awareness. Working to raise funds for youth arts seemed only natural.

The collaboration came from a series of “beautiful coincidences,” Miranda-Rodriguez noted. Brooklyn-based Miranda-Rodriguez and his family was visiting Chocobar Cortés, the chocolate restaurant of the company, he happened to see Adelisa González-Lugo, Directora Ejecutiva y Educadora Principal of the Fundación Cortés, and decided to talk with her. He made an off-the-cuff remark looking at chocolate bars that maybe they could collaborate, like putting La Borinqueña on the label.

Months later, Gonzalez-Lugo reached out and suggested Miranda-Rodriguez talk with Carlos Cortés. The idea evolved from just printing on top of the bar to including the four special edition comics, Miranda-Rodriguez explained.

The four comics feature La Borinqueña and her friend La La Liu, a Dominican Chinese Latina who becomes a superhero in her own right, learning about the process of making chocolate and the importance of art. Comics include history about the company and a celebration of Puerto Rican culture. 

In addition to the special-edition chocolate bars, there is an exhibition at the Foundation that features original drawings, La Borinqueña objects including the official costume that was debuted by Stephanie Llanes at the Puerto Rican Day Parade in 2016. It was a wonderful celebration of the comic, which just finished its first major story arc with the publication of the third comic book in the series. (The exhibition is open until June 2022).

The special-edition bars have been doing very well, Miranda-Rodriguez explained. They started selling in Puerto Rico first but found that it was so popular that they were selling bars set aside for the rest of the United States market. The bars and other merchandise can be found on the Cortés website and retailers throughout the US.

“I hope that people will see the chocolate bar, see La Borinqueña on there, and feel represented. They feel that we have our own female Puerto Rican superhero, especially little girls. I hope that they will see that and feel inspired and feel like they can be a superhero too,” Cortés said. He also hopes that people throughout the Puerto Rican diaspora will learn about the heritage brand and feel some pride about the history, culture and entrepreneurship that the brand represents.

So raise a cup of Cortés hot chocolate and read some comics for a good cause.