the battle for paradise
meditations on puerto rico, the world's oldest colony
i’m about to board a plane to miami (if i make it past standby, of course) and it’ll be the first time i visit with no home and as more of a visitor in transit. the anticipation leading up to this trip revealed to me that i spent a lot of time grieving miami, finding solace in my own shortcomings of the dreams i had of saving miami from austerity measures, crypto-opportunists, and climate collapse. so much of my heartbreak around home mirrors my sense of loss as a puerto rican in the diaspora who from afar has become accustomed to watching and learning of the ruptures impacting the social/cultural/climatic/political reality of boricuas on the island.
this week i visited the new exhibit, no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the whitney museum in new york. emotionally and somatically, it was a tough one to move through. my dear friend hope (who is also bori) and i found ourselves half-silently comforting one another with gentle hugs when our independent wandering would lead us to the same installation room. it’s a particular silent somberness that is so loud.
one of the short film screenings showed images of mountainous towns while a voiceover of a family described what hurricane maria was like for them. “here, even the prettiest and toughest was scared shitless, everyone was scared shitless, because no one expected something like this,” those words brought tears to my eyes as i flashed back to the memory of sitting around in a circle of plastic chairs in the carport of my my aunt and uncle’s apartment in levittown, the warm medalla hitting my tongue just as these same words entered my ear. looming down above our impromptu family reunion was the hurricane’s high water mark, a jagged line imprinted five feet off the ground so real that, if stared at long enough, created the uncanny sensation of being submerged in a storm surge. “pero bueno, hay que seguir en la brega,” is how most of these traumatic story-shares abruptly end - “well, you gotta stay in the grind.”
the mountains and rainforest of puerto rico have gifted me so much clarity and have always sown the seeds of hope, renewal, and beauty in me. trees enveloped in humid moss, gentle waterfalls cascading down a rocky slope, a painting of every hue of green colliding and mingling with one another, flocks of colorful birds dancing and flirting with the sky. i feel so safe there. it is the landscape that comforts me, that forgives me, that loves me and tells me to keep going. she is the one that reminds me that my people come from a lush land of revolutionaries, of freedom fighters, of teachers unionizing and protecting public schools, of queer and trans activists using perreo combativo to oust a neoliberal governor, of artists battling the flattened narratives of who we are.
on another end, i have a subdued but ever-present resentment that while puerto ricans have consistently proven to be some of the most prolific cultural producers of and for the spanish speaking world, there is a void in terms of solidarity from those same people who love consuming boricua culture, and at times who exploit and profit from it as well. just this week, i caught a popular perreo party account on instagram making a distasteful joke about puerto rico’s electricity crisis, likening it to their party speakers blowing out and joking that bad bunny’s song el apagon (the blackout) was actually written for them. imagine thinking of a people in such candidly disposable terms. i have learned to suppress, minimize, and intellectualize my rage for years, in order to not be depicted as irrational, too much, or undeserving. as if what so many have endured and as if the trauma that courses through our generational lineage and in our bodies are not entitled to feel this rage. in the words of lama rod owens, in his book, love and rage, “i have had to learn to invite my broken heart to dine with me at the table. It is meaningless to run now. my broken heart is not a judgment or a crime. it is a detailed record of how I have tried to meet the violence of the world with as much openness as possible.”
for most, puerto rico is a paradise that is a “blank canvas for innovation,” as our since ousted governor announced to investors in 2018. it is an island where you don’t pay taxes, where english speakers are abundant, where people are there to serve you as a tourist, somewhere convenient to spend the holidays to escape the brutal winter cold. and all only a domestic flight away from the US. this cringe commercial ricky martin did encapsulates a lot of this clownery.
earlier this year, for my birthday, i took some days in solitude in the mountains of jamaica and read oscar lopez rivera’s autobiography, “between torture and resistance.” to us, oscar is more than a political prisoner who endured decades of torture/imprisonment/solitary confinement for fighting for puerto rico’s freedom and independence. he is the embodiment of revolutionary imagination and the wherewithal to insist on the possibility of a new world against the odds. in his words, “it is much easier not to struggle, to give up and take the path of the living dead. but if we want to live, we must struggle.” for so long, we have been told that we should hate ourselves, that we should seek to be anything but puerto rican, to abandon our rituals and land, and that we should give profound thanks to the American empire for choosing us to occupy. that occupation has brought genocide, environmental destruction, sterilization of women, bombs, the attempt to strip our identity, displacement, hunger, but somehow we’re the ungrateful ones.. FOH
this upcoming monday, i’ll return to the island to ring in the new year, visit the rainforest resonating with coquí chants, connect with friends/artists/organizers, weep in the atlantic ocean that has held so much pain, dance salsa and reggaeton alike, drink too much coquito (is there such a thing?), and begin capturing early footage of my next short film project tracing the threads of debt, colonialism, anti-Blackness, patriarchy, climate, resistance, and everything in between. similar to the coquí, who can survive in many places of the tropic, but who loses their ability to sing when taken out of puerto rico, i dream that we find our song back home each day.
as actor benicio del toro said during an iconic bad bunny concert in PR, “a nosotros nos sale natural ser leyenda, porque al final no hay orgullo más grande en cada logro que el de decir yo soy de P fucking R” - “for us, its natural to be legends, but at the end, there is no greater pride in each achievement to be able to say, I’m from P FKN R”
i decided to borrow the title for this note from naomi klein and her work around uncovering disaster capitalism in puerto rico. you can watch her short film, titled The Battle for Paradise here.
as always,
pa’ lante.
niki x
