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.
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 leave you with this photo, also used for Episode 20 of the Podcast. Taken by my husband, that is us, crammed into the space between our refrigerator and stove, connecting our computers to that one power strip, plugged to about seven extensions running from our kitchen, down the side of our house, across our side patio, over the fence, across our neighbor’s side patio to their planta post-María.
a reflection on rematriation, birth, source and the black and brown ancestral matriarchs charged with the possibility of our existence here today.
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?
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.
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.
I started this piece as a tribute to the luminescent brothers whose lives were stolen in Minnesota: Philando Castile and George Floyd. It has morphed into a reflection on the battle for black lives and black breaths, that I've witnessed since childhood, and on one's political formation within the colonized communities of the US empire... crumbling.
May we release the need to measure ourselves by what we receive externally. May we become self-sufficient galaxies of love and nurturing before being allowed to reintegrate back into our communities for collective decolonizing and healing.
As a liberation practitioner, making the impossible possible is my profession. I desire a sanctuary on red earth of lush greenery./ Como practicante de la liberación, hacer posible lo imposible es mi profesión. Deseo un santuario en suelo rojo de abundantes arboledas.
It is more profitable to keep people dependent on medications to suppress symptoms of illness than it is to heal them. Like battling illness, storm prep is big business. Home insurance industry is booming. The hiker/ back packer business went booming with Puerto Ricans stocking up on water filters, freeze-dried fruit, protein bars and solar supplies. Gasoline business is booming with all the generators we are running. Bottled water has become the hottest commodity. It is not in the best interest of the powers that be to address the climate change that has us living through these threats.
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.
Rematriating Borikén 