“The Muslim’s ‘X’ symbolized the true African family name that he never could know. For me, my ‘X’ replaced the white slavemaster name of ‘Little’ which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears.”
–The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965.
It’s almost a rite of passage. The bright-eyed Diasporican arrives in Puerto Rico to “find themselves” and discovers the brutal reality of their estrangement. This lament is an experience familiar for most diasporic peoples. How we engage with our cultural identity and our mother country (mother’s country), continues to be fraught with tension and trauma for both the diaspora coming from the United
States and Puerto Ricans who continue to live underUS colonial occupation. This text is an attempt to sketch out an anti-colonial and anti-imperial politic in alignment with Puerto Ricans at a time when the diaspora is the target market alongside white settlers,for both cultural tourism and land appropriation in the wake of the 2017 Hurricane Maria, as well as the neoliberal austerity measures imposed by the fiscal control board of PROMESA (“Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act”). The land grab is facilitated through what is called Act 60, formally called Ley 20 y 22. Instituted by governor Luis Fortuño in 2012, it allows settlers to reap financial benefits while Puerto Ricans are subjugated under the US- imposed fiscal control board, who brutally oversees the economic
governance of Puerto Rico. Very much like the Homestead Act of 1862, which accelerated the settlement of the western lands seized by the United States by granting white settlers 160 acres of surveyed public land, Act 60 promotes the relocation of settlers or individual investors “to stimulate the economic development [of Puerto Rico] by offering nonresident individuals 100% tax exemptions on all interest, all dividends, and all long-term capital gains.” What in 1862 was a ground invasion under the philosophy of Manifest Destiny is expressed today through “Dictatorship for Democracy,” the philosophy of PROMESA.
US colonialism has forced Puerto Rican migration onto the stolen indigenous lands of Turtle Island, where it continues its racist genocidal settler colonial project internally and its imperialist project of world domination abroad. The creation of the diaspora is rooted in this tragedy and this violence is what sends its descendants off into the world searching, looking for an origin. But what Stuart Hall lays out so perfectly, is that there is no fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute return. The Puerto Rico my grandmother left in 1957 is long gone. The children she gave birth to and their own children, are further and further away from the innumerable transformations Puerto Rico has undergone with the passage of time. The cultural differences between us supersede
our commonalities. I have more resonance with the descendance of Jim Crow South that parallel the Puerto Rican migration triggered by Operation Bootstrap than I do with my second cousins in Cayey. In fact, Nuyoricans (the diaspora from New York City) and Black people from New York share a unique cultural hybridity, manifested for instance in the co-creation of hip hop culture. And this is what we are. A hybridity. Suspended between the violence of dispossession and the violence of the internal colonies on the periphery of the empire. We occupy a different positionality as “arrivants,”as Jodi Byrd names it as opposed to settlers; however, we are not innocent. We live as settlers on stolen land, and yet there is no avenue for repatriation to Puerto Rico that wouldn’t be stained with colonial and imperial violence. There is no way out for us. As a diaspora, we must contend with this reality. We cannot claim Puerto Rican “heritage”
through a parent born on the soil. We cannot borrow Puerto Rican identity from the migrants who raised us like one borrows a pair of shoes. They don’t fit, we cannot walk in them. Their nostalgia is not ours. The tragedy of being born in the empire as a result of US colonial occupation which triggered the migration of our parents, or our parent’s parents, means that we carry with us this imperial footprint.
To ignore this reality is to ignore the uneven power dynamics that one carries with them coming from the United States. Diasporic claims of heritage in this way are akin to notions of “birthright” to Puerto Rico. When we consider how this ideology pairs with the latest settler invasion Puerto Ricans are currently enduring under Ley 60, we find this thinking dangerously close to the zionist settler colonial logic. This is how we arrive to Puerto Rico as owners, partners, and intermediaries in disaster capitalism alongside the massive influx of
cryptocurrency investors taking advantage of Puerto Rico as a tax haven, while engaging in predatory land grabs to create air bnb businesses. Revisionism by way of precolonial identification is another mistake which creates a violent relationship with the archipelago. This is the attempt to look passed the history of genocidal colonial violence and claim indigeneity via the Taino people. Veneration
for the Taino forms part of Puerto Rican identity and has always been present. Myths about “las tres razas”– the three races forming the “perfect” Puerto Rican mixed identity (the Spanish colonizer, the Taino Indigenous, and the African Enslaved) – needs to be continuously challenged as a form of colorblindness that negates the rampant antiblackness on the archipelago. The Taino revivalist movement also engages in this antiblackness as it seeks to reinvent the Taino race through historical revisionism. Although these revivalist movements have come and gone since the 1970 into the 1990s, it emerged institutionally in 2015 via the non-profit organization with a P.O. box in New York City. The United Confederation of the Taino Peoples which describes itself as an “indigenous representative institution” to “promote the self-determination and protection of the human rights, culture, traditions, and sacred lands
of Taíno and other Caribbean Indigenous Peoples.” Behind the organization is Robert Múkaro Borrero, a self-described kasike (chief) of the so-called Guainía Taíno Tribe and the former Senior Programs Coordinator for Public Programs in the Education Department of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The museum is a violent institution with a recorded history of promoting the science of
eugenics, which they were forced to apologize for after years of sustained pressure from the group Decolonize This Place. AMNH currently holds the skeletal remains of over 12,000 humans, a significant portion belonging to the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island which they have yet to return. The error these Taino revivalists make is to believe that anything about their project isn’t in and of
itself a colonial violence. They seek to erase the brutal reality of the genocide that set in motion the creations of new world diasporas made up of enslaved Africans, colonizers, settlers, and the very small percentages of indigenous survivors whose world ended as they merged with those people who would eventually become Puerto Ricans. There is no record of the Taino people that isn’t mediated by the
colonizer’s reports, therefore, the entire construction of the Taino revivalist movement is based on deciphering racist colonial interpretations.
The danger in these revivalist practices is that they position themselves as an authority. As generations of diasporicans come to embrace ideas of decolonization, they often turn towards African spiritual technologies, itself an indigenous practice, and they begin to seek out what they can learn about the Taino, only to encounter this new age cosplay by Barrero and his network of so called taino tribal affiliates. This is a wrong turn into a kind of identity politics that seeks to uplift afroindigeneity while excluding the presence of the colonizer in our history. This erasure serves no one. We must not practice it. The Présence Européenne to invoke Stuart Hall once more is part of us whether we like it or not. The question Hall poses is whether we could ever recognize its irreversible influence, while resisting its imperialist eye is what we must contend with. A direct consequence of the violence done onto us, for centuries. There is a clarity in
this approach. We honor the Tainos when we acknowledge that we emerge from the decimation of their world. In this way, they are present for useven in their total absence. It also forces us to reckon with the fact that this violence has never ended. That settler colonialism is structural and appears again and again, recruiting a multitude of agents across identities to carry out its aims, including
the descendants of those who emerged from the recipients of the original violence.
There is no way to reverse it. The diaspora cannot return to Puerto Rico to become Puerto Ricans. This is what colonialism has taken from us and we must accept it. It bears a similar heartache rooted in the impossibility of the descendance of chattel slavery in the US to trace their ancestors back to Africa. The trail ends at the bill of sale, with the name of a plantation owner whose last name they carry. Hence, why Malcolm Little became Malcolm X before becoming El Hajj Malik El Shabbazz. Embrace the X. Embrace that as arrivants we are part of the collective body of the dispossessed, which grows each day, as war, neoliberalism, and climate crisis to just name a few continues to destabilize the planet. Adhere yourself to the collective body of the dispossessed, making home inside empire. Together we are poised to dismantle the beast who has consumed us all from inside its entrails, so that Puerto Ricans, and all peoples under the yoke of empire, can better position themselves to free themselves. This is our political role as the lost diasporic children who cannot return. Let us realign our relationship to the Archipelago. With clarity.