Entre mangles: Meditations on Ecological Solidarities
By Jennifer Mojica Santana
It was an early Monday morning in July when the Diaspora Solidarities Lab (DSL) Solidarity Fellows, community partners, and mentors headed from our home base at Limaní, in the town of Adjuntas, to the barrio Las Mareas, in the southeastern coastal town of Salinas. [1] On our first day of the 2023 Rememory Lab in Puerto Rico, we immersed ourselves in a recorrido through the community and its wetland ecosystem of mangroves. [2] Historically, Las Mareas was first populated by fishing families and salt workers who settled next to the centennial Salina de Monserrate, as well as sugarcane workers from neighboring haciendas. The community is characterized by its rich natural resources of mangroves, salt flats, and multiple bodies of water. With approximately 300 residents, Las Mareas is “una comunidad de gente que valora su patrimonio, despierta la sensibilidad e inspira la acción.”
Once we made it to Salinas, we were greeted with a warm welcome at Punto Educativo, Recreativo y Social, which as community leader Jacqueline Vázquez Suárez explains, was founded more than twenty years ago as a means to provide an alternative to the youth in the community. The Punto Educativo gets its name from the reclamation and reimagination of space. For over 30 years, there was a drug point directly across from the Punto Educativo, and Jacqueline along with other community leaders created the organization in response— “queríamos darle la alternativa… que los jóvenes entendieran que ellos tenían potencial, que ellos no tenían que estar en el punto de drogas, que habían oportunidades para ellos.”
This initiative is imagined, made possible, and sustained by the matriarchs in Las Mareas, and serves as an example of Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez’s worlds/otherwise, which “fashions new possibilities for Black life and ways of being in the world for both the present and the future… center[ing] Black women and femmes as the linchpins for salvation in the apogee of anti-Black and heteropatriarchal modernity” (Decolonizing Diasporas, 148). Through their (re)imagination and (re)creation of space, matriarchs—Black women from Las Mareas—broke a cycle of precarity for the community and offered different, better, opportunities.
[Nicole Hernández, “DSL Solidarity Fellows being led by a Punto Educativo guide on the beginning steps of the recorrido,” 2023]
During our time at the Punto Educativo, we embarked on an approximately two-mile journey through the rich wetland ecosystem that characterizes Las Mareas' history and culture. As we started making our way through the pathways along the mangrove forest, I felt uneasy and unprepared. It didn’t register in my mind until we started walking out of our classroom that I, along with my colleagues and mentors, would be setting foot through paths filled with mud, sand, water, and mangrove roots in a matter of minutes. I would be traversing through a path that didn’t just house a variety of natural resources making up the landscape of Las Mareas, and the town of Salinas as a whole, but one that also holds significant (hi)stories, ancestral memories, and ties to the land and the community. I was being welcomed into a space (re)envisioned and (re)created by the elders, matriarchs, and youth.
The recorrido was accompanied by the history of the salt flat workers at the Salina de Monserrate and the routes they took, the same ones we were walking through. As we continued along the trail, the landscape around me changed from one of almost bare soil to one lush with mangroves. Venturing deeper into the forest, we walked through a path of dense, pungent mud, and the guides shifted their lesson to one of ecology. They talked to us about the various types of mangroves—rojo, negro, blanco, botón— seemingly in sync with the topography that encircled us, as the mangrove trees multiplied with every step taken. Through this part of the recorrido, we learned about how mangrove roots stabilize and retain sediments that protect the coast from erosion and strong waves during a storm, how they provide a safe shelter to various species, among others. Stepping out of the muddy trail, we reached Playa la Quinta and headed along the coast, making our way through belly-deep water surrounded by Rhizophora mangle, and once we reached the sand we walked back to the classroom for lunch, provided by the matriarchs working El Fogón de Las Mareas.
As the Rememory Lab progressed, we had a DSL meeting to discuss our experiences around what we had learned from the trip. I remained quiet but continued to replay the question in my head since. I remembered my internal crisis of traversing through the thick mud in sandals, surrounded by the pungent smells of hydrogen sulfide released by mangrove forests as they undergo detritus. I also remember how, while on our break at Playa La Quinta, our guides encouraged us to enjoy the beach and refresh ourselves. But I resisted diving into the water, choosing to only soak my feet on the shore. Why was I denying myself a couple of minutes amidst the Caribbean Sea and their waves holding (hi)story, memory, and kin? Why was I hooked on replaying that sudden, messy, and overwhelming experience of walking through the mud?
[Nicole Hernández, “A photo collage of DSL Solidarity Fellows during the recorrido through the mangrove forest of Las Mareas,” 2023]
I now realize that through the experience of the recorrido, I was immersing myself in the process of witnessing and participating in a praxis of land as pedagogy—an indigenous form of gaining knowledge, whereby learning comes from the land and building a strong reciprocal and respectful relationship with her. In “Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation,” Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes about the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg story of Kwezens, a young girl who learns from and with the land by mimicking Ajidamoo’s (red squirrel) way of collecting tree sap, and further shares this lesson with the matriarchs and elders in her community who bask in joy and gratitude, also teaching Kwezens how to transform it into sugar. Reflecting on this story, Betasamosake Simpson states:
The land, aki, is both context and process. The process of coming to know is learner-led and profoundly spiritual in nature. Coming to know is the pursuit of whole body intelligence practiced in the context of freedom, and when realized collectively it generates generations of loving, creative, innovative, self-determining, inter-dependent and self-regulating community minded individuals (7).
In line with Betasamosake Simpson’s point, learning from the land and doing so in community was profoundly impactful for me. What started as discomfort, slowly transformed into a liberating and eye-opening experience about the power land holds and just how invaluable the lessons learned from her are. Initially, I found myself flustered and not quite grasping why we were walking through slippery, muddy paths, but over time, that confusion shifted into understanding how land holds many lessons the Western academy could never teach me: how it carries ancestral memories and (hi)stories that need to be listened to, felt, and acknowledged.
This is in direct contrast to the violence of (colonial) Archives that attempt to diminish and erase them altogether. Being there, traversing the paths in the company of both chosen kin sharing the experience and the young guides telling us the history of Las Mareas and the importance of the mangroves, felt like an ancestral calling to truly and consciously feel, listen, and pay attention to the ground I was walking on. Through these routes, I could also have a better appreciation of the land, which, “includes all aspects of creation: land forms, elements, plants, animals, spirits, sounds, thoughts, feelings, energies and all of the emergent systems, ecologies and networks that connect these elements” (15).
At Las Mareas, the elders, matriarchs of the community are who initiated the (re)imagination and creation of spaces and possibilities for the residents, fashioning worlds/otherwise for the next generations to come. They shared their (hi)stories and those of their ancestors, fostering their growth, learning, and community through storytelling which, as Aurora Levins Morales reminds us in Medicine Stories, is “a basic human activity, with which we simultaneously make and understand the world and our place in it” (115). These (hi)stories are carried over across generations, even engendering new ones as Betasamosake Simpson posits, and they become invaluable lessons that aid our understanding of the past and how it shapes the present, as well as letting us (re)connect and learn with and from the land that compliments them; allowing for the opportunity to heal, imagine, and create.
Notes
[1] The Diaspora Solidarities Lab (DSL) is a multi-institutional Black feminist partnership supporting solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies. This work is directed by Drs. Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez and Jessica Marie Johnson.
[2] The Rememory Lab was a week-long immersion experience for Solidarity Fellows and community partners to visit, learn, and interact with grassroots activists and community leaders across the archipelago. In 2023, it was held in partnership with Afro-Puerto Rican scholar and writer Mayra Santos-Febres and artist José Arturo Ballester, co-founders of YAGRUMO.
References
“‘Aquí hubo un punto de drogas por 30 años’: ahora es el Punto Educativo de Salinas.” El Nuevo Día, 2 Aug. 2023.
Betasamosake Simpson, Leanne. “Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3:3 (2014): 1-25.
Figueroa-Vázquez, Yomaira C. Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020.
Levins Morales, Aurora. Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
Cover Photo Credit: Suzanne Holland, “Walking the Mangroves,” 2019.
Jennifer Mojica Santana (she/her/ella) is a Puerto Rican doctoral candidate in the English Department at Michigan State University, with certificates in Chicano/Latino Studies and Journalism. Her research critically engages music, visual and performance art, and community organizing as practices of activism and sociopolitical and colonial resistance in 21st-century Puerto Rico. She is also a Solidarity Fellow in the Mellon-funded Diaspora Solidarities Lab (DSL), where she works with conducting, transcribing, and translating interviews for the development of a digital archive of femicide and gender-based violence in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and their diasporas.