Rematriating Borikén is a multidisciplinary project centering the journeys of those of us returning to our ancestral lands. We reclaim the motherland from a colonialism that works to render it uninhabitable to its people. Recording our own stories, telling our own truth, rematriation is a liberatory act, reclaiming our authentic, ancestral ways.
Rematriating Borikén:
Uncrossing el charco/ Reversing the migration
Visibilizing our journeys/ Demystifying rematriation
-collecting decolonial narratives anchoring our ancestral wisdom in our lived liberation practices towards holistic liberation for the collective
-demystifying the rematriation process/ liberate it from a web of colonial myths/ raise it from being buried under layers of systemic/ imposed self-loath
-centering healing, love, safety, integrity, sustainability, joy, freedom—tenets necessary to thriving
-rejecting the notion that our worth and survival are contingent upon our successful mimicking of the colonizer, or incorporation into the colonizer’s republic
-lifting the voices of another exodus seldom shared and celebrated: the return to our ancestral lands
-lifting rematriation as an underutilized, underexplored answer to the colonial problem of depopulation in Puerto Rico–a problem which the colonial government has failed to address through retention strategies and its failure to encourage and incentivize the return of its children of the Diaspora
-visibilizing those that dare reverse the travels of our ancestors to recover their wisdom and ways suppressed by racism and colonialism
-foster community and support through the transition of rematriation
-lift our collective wisdom, ancestral wisdom and the wisdom of our natural environment to craft new aesthetics and strategies in transcending climate change and colonialism
“We are a different kind of refugee. Charco-crossers of a different exodus….
The American dream that others covet has long been our Babylon….
We wade, swim, swallow saltwater whose currents still mark the road maps of our ancestors taken, our ancestors fleeing. We flee.”
-excerpt, Rematriating Borikén Manifesto
Rematriating Borikén 