We are a different kind of refugee. Charco-crossers of a different exodus.
As she arrives a crescent moon, Venus and Jupiter anchor themselves in the sky, pulsing their light above the sunset. This is the hero’s welcome we receive when we uncross the journeys of ancestors.
Vulnerability in bravery means pushing forward with all your wounds, gripping a shovel tight with bloody hands, digging past the mud to find the spaces and hearts where our ancestral ways thrive, where new liberatory ways are being weaved into existence./ Vulnerabilidad en valentía significa seguir palante con todas las heridas, agarrando la pala, manos ensangrentadas, excavando la tierra para encontrar los espacios y los corazones en donde nuestras tradiciones ancestrales prosperan, donde se tejen nuevas existencias libertas.
We the colonized work to decolonize ourselves, then turn on one another from wounds too vulnerable, too raw to bear. We lash out at one another. The enemy is too far, too inaccessible. We realize. In shame, we retreat.
It is time to focus on the colonial classroom, the empire’s primary battleground. The threat goes beyond school closures. It includes the continued attack on the one public university system in Puerto Rico. It is embodied by a white North American secretary of education with an inflated salary, while her school children constituents are sacrificed at the austerity table of odious debt. It resounds in the arresting, pepper spraying and tear gassing of people protesting injustices like these. Ultimately the colonial battle is waged daily on the minds and on the psyches of the colonized, with schools cunningly crafted for the conformity and conditioning of the colonial subject.
My broken body colonized Was the space of incubation In which I myself Had to craft and manifest their liberation Through it I could envision doing the same for myself
Most moments of my day I’m trying to figure out a plan to acquire my own piece of land, to make my lifestyle completely sustainable, to embody the liberation that I strive to practice daily until we can acquire it fully. But sometimes the spirit needs to stop and look at the photos. Honor the moments, the memories, the lessons.
The vast expanse of charco that separates you from your loved ones dissipates in the glow of parranda lights. They serpentine through las carreteras del valle del pueblo de Moca and up this hill. The sound of sadness is swallowed by sirens that guide aguinaldo asaltos blaring music and song from barrio to barrio. Your... Continue Reading →
Saturday, August 20th, 2016 marked my 3rd birthday in Borikén. Yeah I write this in October, two months after that birthday. Island time is not about clocks. It is about pausing to process everything along the way. It is about pausing to greet passersby, the ones you know and the ones you don't know.... Continue Reading →
It happens at random, unexpected, un-welcomed times. It happens with flashes of images, of sites, of memories imprinted in your mind. Flash of a desolate Atlantic Avenue heading into Jamaica, Queens. Flash of bunnies hopping over ancestral graves in Cypress Hills cemetery where Schomburg, Houdini and your whole departed family are buried. Flash of the... Continue Reading →
I took a break from this blog… because deadlines happen; because other projects happen; because life happens; because sometimes you lose light and water. Here, we have an agreement. All work/ art/ architecture related deadlines coming through this home/ office/ studio space are to be completed the day before or earlier. We must allow at... Continue Reading →
Every migration has its push and pull factors. The current Puerto Rican migration narrative mostly speaks of a colonial fiscal crisis pushing people in droves to US cities in search of jobs and opportunities. My maternal grandparents were part of the last mass migration. They crossed el charco from Ponce to East Harlem in 1950.... Continue Reading →
It has taken me two years to do this. Two years to begin the process of opening up, sharing very intimate rants, reflections and revelations about my time here, my repatriation of Borikén. We arrived on May 15, 2014 from New York City-- my husband, a colombiano born and raised in Queens; myself, a boricua... Continue Reading →
Rematriating Borikén 