We are a different kind of refugee. Charco-crossers of a different exodus.
If next time would be the fire, then that time is already here. We opened this year with a white, north American tourist setting fire to local businesses in Cabo Rojo, then fleeing back to the states. A few days later the Los Angeles area wildfires started burning. By the end of the month, two new administrations, here and there, had taken office and were burning everything down.
Hurricane María exposed the empire. She taught us, like nature, to reverdecer after the storm, sprouting, growing, flourishing again as a maximum expression of free, authentic life and purpose, versus responding to disasters, to injustice, with complacency, conformity and complicity.
A reminder that “wellness is the weapon”, that self-love, self-care and self-preservation must be prioritized before any ideal, any move. Let this be the energy we carry forward into the new moon cycle and post eclipses, together with gratitude for light exchanged and lessons learned.
We don’t get to romanticize rematriation while overlooking the role imperialism plays in our being forced out/ born/ raised abroad in the first place. We don’t get to separate rematriation from liberation—the one we struggle to practice daily; the one humanity must struggle for globally.
CucubaNación opened as an artspace in November of 2022 on la Calle San Vicente en el pueblo de Mayagüez. Born from the darkness of colonialism, climate change and apagones (power outages), CucubaNación channels liberatory lessons of Boricua bioluminescence.
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.
...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.
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.
Rematriating Borikén 