We are a different kind of refugee. Charco-crossers of a different exodus.
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!
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.
Vieques continues to be a portal to some other decolonial dimension, and I am ever grateful./
Vieques sigue siendo un portal a alguna otra dimensión decolonial, y vivo siempre agradecida.
But for all the ways we have been controlled, all the ways we die at their hands, they still claim ownership over our own deaths. They don’t believe the numbers when the bodies are brown and black. They don’t believe us when we have lost hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions. To do so would be to admit to the crime of genocide.
This is the kind of epic shit that only eclipses and cosmic currents bring. The revolution went down and is going down. The best part (or worst for some) is that none of us who dreamed about it or worked towards it for decades can take credit. That’s the beauty. Liberation is a practice and a praxis. You don’t vote for it. No empire can grant it. There is no trophy or prize that you get to cash in on in the end. There’s not even an end. Just a beginning and the process.
If to survive is to overturn genocide then living fully, authentically, abundantly, fearlessly, boldly, truthfully and joyfully is the most radical expression of revolution that we can wage on this planet. If conquest and the resulting lovelessness are the source of our oppression, then loving ourselves back to healing and wholeness must be our greatest purpose here./ Si sobrevivir es resistir al genocidio entonces vivir completamente, auténticamente, abundantemente, sin miedo, audazmente, verdaderamente y alegremente es la mayor forma de revolución radical que podemos hacer en este planeta.
She spreads me whole as a quilt beneath the sun like the sands at her shore. I cannot lay down my burdens, neither there nor at the riverside. Though heavy, there within lie the keys to my liberation./
No puedo dejar mi carga ni ahí, ni en las orillas de sus ríos. Aun siendo muy pesada la carga, dentro de ella están las llaves de mi liberación, pues cargo con ella.
Politics and colonialism, like borders are man-made constructs. I no longer believe in another’s fantasy of having jurisdiction over me. We die too much, too quickly to let that be.
We the survivors of genocide, who swam through fallopian tubes not yet tied, but soon to be cut. We set out with babies in tow, in search of the violated womb because if we return to her, we can wage reciprocal healing. We wade, swim, swallow salt waters whose currents still mark the road maps of our ancestors taken, our ancestors fleeing.
We flee.
Vulnerability in bravery means pushing forward with all your wounds, gripping a shovel tight with bloody hands, digging past the mud to find the spaces and hearts where our ancestral ways thrive, where new liberatory ways are being weaved into existence./
Vulnerabilidad en valentía significa seguir palante con todas las heridas, agarrando la pala, manos ensangrentadas, excavando la tierra para encontrar los espacios y los corazones en donde nuestras tradiciones ancestrales prosperan, donde se tejen nuevas existencias libertas.
We embody the ironic conflict of acting out a fear of death by bringing ourselves and others dangerously close to it. What if we took a collective pause, stepped back to assess what we are raging against. Is it death? Is it life? Is it ourselves? Maybe if we begin to demystify death, unlearn the fears taught by our oppressors, tap into the ancestral wisdom flowing in our blood, then we can begin to heal some of this conflict. We can begin to step through fear, closer to love and liberation and living fully.
Not knowing, not honoring our history is hella dangerous territory. It leaves us celebrating the heroes and tenets of our colonizers, while stomping on the graves of our own. It is not dollars we are needing, but dignity.
We the colonized work to decolonize ourselves, then turn on one another from wounds too vulnerable, too raw to bear. We lash out at one another. The enemy is too far, too inaccessible.
We realize.
In shame, we retreat.
It is time to focus on the colonial classroom, the empire’s primary battleground. The threat goes beyond school closures. It includes the continued attack on the one public university system in Puerto Rico. It is embodied by a white North American secretary of education with an inflated salary, while her school children constituents are sacrificed at the austerity table of odious debt. It resounds in the arresting, pepper spraying and tear gassing of people protesting injustices like these. Ultimately the colonial battle is waged daily on the minds and on the psyches of the colonized, with schools cunningly crafted for the conformity and conditioning of the colonial subject.
My broken body colonized
Was the space of incubation
In which I myself
Had to craft and manifest their liberation
Through it I could envision doing the same for myself
Rematriating Borikén 