We are a different kind of refugee. Charco-crossers of a different exodus.
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.
One of the best parts of this tenth anniversary is preparing to step forward sharing not just my own rematriation journey, but other beautiful journeys that I have been privileged to witness and that I have learned from and been expanded by.
The Puerto Rico Trench plummets almost 28,000 feet below the surface. This was spiritually given to me as metaphor for this work of excavating, uncovering, recovering and reclaiming our ancestral stories, lands, ways. The above video is about this project that I am so honored to have channeled, and that I am savoring every step of the way. Visibilizing our journeys, especially the intrepid journeys of Boricuas swimming against the currents, against the colonial conditioning to return and reclaim lost parts of ourselves, this is what fuels me.
a reflection on rematriation, birth, source and the black and brown ancestral matriarchs charged with the possibility of our existence here today.
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.
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.
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 