Today is 5.15, our eleventh anniversary here in Borikén and one year since I painted this piece of the same title. Marking our journey through the growth of our children, this painting is a double portrait of our first son. It captures him at five years old, his age when we moved here and at fifteen, his age last year when we celebrated a decade in Borikén. Earlier today I posted this photo of us that his father took. Towering over me, his exponential growth makes the date of our arrival seem so distant. But in many ways, he is still that baby who arrived on a plane ten years ago, wearing his fleece Lightning McQueen blanket around his shoulders.
There is a whole life lived between those two painted figures. So many events, so many changes, transformations, so much growth for him, and for his parents. There have also been drastic changes for this place. So much lost, so much at stake, and still so much hope held in the eyes of our youth. As his history teacher said in a recent speech, this is the generation of hurricanes, of earthquakes, of the pandemic. They are the generation that will inherit the aftermath of the unrelenting unraveling of so many of our sacred structures by the empire and the colonial government here.
Today the two restaurants we had considered for lunch were closed so instead my inner child indulged in everything my youngest learns of and gets excited to try. We had bubble tea, mochi and Dubai chocolate for lunch. I miss the days when everything was a wonder for these children. A shore, a river, a patch of land to run in and dig dirt from. With our youngest now at thirteen, I know that there is much more that their brains are craving. The greater context, the connecting of dots that will allow them to keep sacred the preciousness of their experiences. That they will never be taunted and pressured to trade in the purity of their lived experiences, their environment, in pursuit of some imposed illusion.
They each wanted an angler fish featured in their portraits. These ferocious looking fish with their pointy teeth are the females. I imagine that hovering
fish I painted as the many iterations of mother I have had to be from here to New York City. In New York we live guarded always. Everything it seems can be a potential threat. So I created a sanctuary for my babies in our Queens apartment. That was our nest, my she-wolf den where I kept them safe. Playtime was in concrete playgrounds, and the only green was up on the trees except for when leaves fell, forming winter. Here Hurricane María taught me that my momma sanctuary could be broken into by forces of nature that would knock your door down, blow your windows out. That earthquakes could literally shake you all out of your beds midsleep and that the pandemic could creep its way into your lungs and spread like wildfire through the whole family. It is humbling to say the least.
I recognize that the history I salivated over from New York is so accessible to them now that it becomes normalized, a common backdrop not registered as monumental like I swore it to be from New York City. We are still managing the dynamics of two polarities, the isla babies and their NYCity family. The two or three dots that I thought were stars in my New York Sky have become a vast expanse of cosmos above us. Of blood moons and meteors shooting green towards the horizon. A comet pointing south over Desecheo Island in the darkening sky following a Rincón sunset. Some say the contracted awareness is here, the jíbaro innocence of over-romanticized campo-fied yesterdays. But I would say that the sprawling sight from our Moca terraza, broadened by the chopping down of termite infested trees behind us in the valley, widened by trees María took down, bringing a view of the sea, trained us to see beyond what is in front of us.
I know that tenements and skyscrapers crowd us in and cut us off from the skies. I
know that this archipelago has a collection of creatures that glow through darkness. I know, like that angler who carries her own linterna, that we Boricuas bring light through every damn apagón to the pit of the Puerto Rico Trench. I know that living on two sides, across lands and waters of this expansive nation means that we mark stars of infinite constellations. I know, through the seeming impossibility of these times, that we chose to be here right now to flip these very challenges and have been training for lifetimes and generations.
Yasmín Hernández is a Brooklyn-born and raised/ Borikén-based artist, writer and activist. Her work is centered on liberation themes. CucubaNación is her Mayaguez-based art studio/ gallery/ community space dedicated to the liberatory light lessons of Boricua bioluminescence. With Rematriating Borikén she documents and celebrates the journey back to our essence.
Rematriating Borikén 
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