We are a different kind of refugee. Charco-crossers of a different exodus.
I have been here nine years, but I have been Rematriating my whole life. From my Brooklyn birth to my move to Borikén. From my conflict with all things, my inability to fit anywhere over there. Hell, even for my inability to fit here. I have always been working to align to some ancestral dimension of another time.
How much ancestral medicine and personal decolonizing will it take to restore ourselves, restore how it was and what we were before conquest? And is that the mission? Or are we to envision something more expansive, born from what we now know on top of all the ancestral wisdom resurrected from their bones and our own?
...survival is a necessity and thrival is the mission. When every conversation becomes a battle, we have already burned ourselves to the ground. Many of us do this without ever having made it to the real battlefield. Extinguished by the impossible feat of fighting our own selves.
Like my indigenous Antillean ancestors saw our worlds flipped at night, black sea becoming sky, cosmos covered in sea-creature constellations, I too learned to see the inverse. To draw, paint, render light. Pull light from darkness as we are forced to do daily as children of conquest, colonialism.
...this year’s remembrance became sinister ceremony. Cast us back to that hurricane life of scarcity, lost lives, lost communities./ ...el recuerdo de este año se convirtió en una siniestra ceremonia de remembranza. Regresamos a esa vida de huracanada, de escasez, de vidas, comunidades perdidas.
To live liberation when the colonizers have long been experts at inflicting death and we the colonized have long been experts in dying. Embodying the archipelago is taking into our bodies and becoming the very transcendent expanse that this network of islands, water and wisdom have long been…. Embodying the archipelago, I become ungovernable, autonomous in my own essence.
Now more than ever I feel there needs to be a reclaiming of our ancestral land. Our island is being sold off for profit at the expense of too many local Puerto Ricans' livelihood.
Savage robots invade communities across the planet in a capitalist culture called colonialism. We call for the rematriation of our ancestral art, and of our people’s minds, bodies, and spirits to our sacred ancestral lands!
From contributing writer Javier Smith Torres: The expulsion that different peoples of the world have suffered from their homelands throughout history demonstrates that Puerto Rico is not the only nation to have an important part of its people refuged outside of the national territory.
En lo que estamos ocupados mirando hacia un Don Pedro, una Lolita, un Filiberto y un Betances, elles nos devuelven la mirada, esperando a ver que haremos para liberarnos de todo esto.
How do I, with two children, navigate these two realities: being forced to vaccinate one before we are ready, yet nervous sending my youngest to school unvaccinated? Neither option generated confidence in me, but there is a beauty to options, and a despair in debating options that don’t exist because they are being decided for you, either by your parents, or the government.
This land has been both my mother and greatest teacher so this anniversary is always a celebration of having returned to her womb. The video below captures my freestyle reflection/ meditation on these seven years...
...an internationalist liberation struggle shifts our gaze away from the falling empire to the north, turns our sights sideways and south to our greater Caribbean and Latin American family./ una lucha libertaria internacionalista aleja nuestra mirada del imperio estadounidense, reenfocándola hacia nuestra gran familia caribeña y latinoamericana.
Many say we cannot sustain ourselves here, yet many of us are not able to sustain ourselves stateside either. Why aren’t we talking more about this?
…these pandemic times of exponential loss, of losses still looming from government neglect. Of eyes threatened by quarantine, seldom breathing in daylight, seldom squinting at soaring hawks and clouds. Glued to the nearsighted-inducing numbness of devices and small screens. Tired eye muscles long scrolling with your newsfeed. Liberation never looked so lovely, so necessary.
Rematriating Borikén 