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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
...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.
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.
Now more than ever I feel there needs to be a reclaiming of our ancestral land. Our island is being sold off for profit at the expense of too many local Puerto Ricans' livelihood.
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.
Rematriating Borikén 