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.
515- Rematriation anniveraries and parenting
Ten Years In
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.
Rematriating Boriken Portrait Series
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.
Reclaiming Sovereignty- CucubaNación
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.
Darkness as Canvas
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.
Embodying the Archipelago-8 Years In
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.
A million black breaths reclaimed
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.
Home: The Hero’s Welcome for the Rematriating Mother
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.
Vieques Praises/ Alabanzas a Vieques
Vieques continues to be a portal to some other decolonial dimension, and I am ever grateful./
Vieques sigue siendo un portal a alguna otra dimensión decolonial, y vivo siempre agradecida.
More Colonized than the Colony/ Mas colonizadxs que la colonia
She spreads me whole as a quilt beneath the sun like the sands at her shore. I cannot lay down my burdens, neither there nor at the riverside. Though heavy, there within lie the keys to my liberation./
No puedo dejar mi carga ni ahí, ni en las orillas de sus ríos. Aun siendo muy pesada la carga, dentro de ella están las llaves de mi liberación, pues cargo con ella.
Rematriation and Soul Saving/ Rematriación y la salvación de la almas
Politics and colonialism, like borders are man-made constructs. I no longer believe in another’s fantasy of having jurisdiction over me. We die too much, too quickly to let that be.
Rematriation Manifesto- 5 years in Borikén
We the survivors of genocide, who swam through fallopian tubes not yet tied, but soon to be cut. We set out with babies in tow, in search of the violated womb because if we return to her, we can wage reciprocal healing. We wade, swim, swallow salt waters whose currents still mark the road maps of our ancestors taken, our ancestors fleeing.
We flee.
Oct 30- Sacred Jayuya and Sacrilege
Not knowing, not honoring our history is hella dangerous territory. It leaves us celebrating the heroes and tenets of our colonizers, while stomping on the graves of our own. It is not dollars we are needing, but dignity.
Miseducation of a Nation
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.
Repatriate your body
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
Rematriating Borikén 