Notes on Colonialism, Transterritorial Connections, and Method Making

By Aurora Santiago Ortiz

The colonial configuration between empire and metropole each have their own flavor. For instance, relations between the United States and Puerto Rico have typically been defined by “exogenous” domination since 1898. [1] This nonreciprocal arrangement is characterized by resource (natural, material, human) and capital extraction at the hands of external, private interests. The confluence of multiple factors—enabled by the archipelago’s subordinate relationship to the US—shifted the political-economic arrangement from exploitation to a hybrid form of settler colonialism.

In the case of Hawai’i, “outsiders” invaded, occupied, and settled the archipelago by violently overthrowing Queen Liliʻuokalani, sovereign of the Hawaiian Kingdom, and later annexing the islands via statehood through the Newlands Resolution and Hawaii Admission Act. The latter erased the distinction between territory and metropole through the assimilation and erasure of Kanaka Maoli people. [2] It is for this reason that Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) notes in Red Skin, White Masks that the organizing logic of this type of settler colonialism is the dispossession of “land” and “self-determining authority” for Indigenous people (57). In the case of Puerto Rico, the boundaries between exploitation and settlement are blurred. Here the US government and private capital interests assert control by both demanding work and demanding elimination in the archipelago. The government and climate disasters paved the way for a familiar, but simultaneously different kind of settlement in Puerto Rico. [3]

While foreign capital dominated the plantation-driven economy, a series of agrarian reforms and policies attempted to break the monopoly of US corporations over Puerto Rican land. [4] During the latter half of the twentieth century, migration to urban centers dramatically increased, yet land ownership continued to be unattainable or extremely difficult for non-elites to acquire. This continued dispossession, particularly for racialized and poor communities, endures to this day, aided by those that have political connections and wealth. [5]

These relations are important because Puerto Rican identity is contested, contextual, and fluid, transcending borders and geographic location. In a sense, the trappings of being archipelagic are part of the motor that fuels an identity-as-resistance, a form of survivance that challenges assimilation. [6] For some, this sense of belonging and territorial identity has been largely crafted by a state-sponsored nationalism anchored in Hispanophilic discourses that erase racial hierarchies and antiblackness in Puerto Rico. [7, 8, 9] However, a newer generation of antiracist, feminist, and anticolonial activists are working to dismantle the scripts that created calcified notions of Puerto Rican identity.

Although most Puerto Ricans have varying lineages and generational connections that stretch back to Spain, Corsica, the Canary Islands, and the Western African Coast, there are also linkages with internal Black Caribbean diasporic migrations and descendants of the Arawaks. The question of Puerto Rican identity is thus layered, complicated, and slippery. [10] While there is no doubt that a small population on the archipelago has ties to indigenous people, there is no state-based recognition mechanism and no unified or formal organization. As such, Indigeneity is the source of much conflict and disagreement. In my thinking about Puerto Rican claims to land and the settler colonial logics operating at this current juncture, I want to complicate notions of indigeneity. While I have no authority to adjudicate claims of indigeneity in the archipelago, land and place are crucial to understanding relationships, especially for those that the modern/colonial system seek to erase. Here I center Black and Afrodescendant, feminized, queer, and labor precarious people in Puerto Rico and the diaspora.

[Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, “Blackout” (2017)]

The events of the past fifteen years have accelerated the forced removal of Puerto Ricans, facilitated by both the US Congress-imposed Fiscal Oversight and Management Board and the local government. A series of tax incentives under the umbrella of Act 60 allows U.S. residents (from any of the fifty states) to relocate to Puerto Rico for 183 days out of a year and enjoy tax exemptions on interest and dividends, as well as other incentives. This act facilitated and accelerated the arrival, migration, and settlement of bitcoiners, influencers, and developers—all of whom are seeking land to exploit for their own ends. This current influx changes colonial politics, creating a more insidious, violent, and rapid form of colonialism, which necessitates a precarious workforce to remain in the archipelago. In “After the Hurricane: Afro-Latina Decolonial Feminisms and Destierro,” those that cannot remain are violently uprooted into what Yomaira Figueroa Vázquez, calls destierro, an exiling and banishment, that comes “with all its accompanying and impotent anguish” (4). To think about destierro is to think about land, “being torn from land,” and the “multiple forms of dispossession and impossibilities of home for Afro and Indigenous descended peoples in the modern world” (4). I am part of the most recent wave of outward migration from the Puerto Rican archipelago, having left the archipelago in 2014. My relationship to home is one of coming and going, of vaivén, living with one foot in the Puerto Rican mainland and another in the US diaspora. As a “colonial subject living on Indigenous lands in a settler state,” I contend with my own complicity in settler colonialism as I grapple with colonialism and ways to advance self-determination in my own place of origin (Figueroa Vázquez , 4).

Native scholarship and activism, from Hawai‘i and Turtle Island, can also help us think about Puerto Rico’s path toward self-determination and decolonization. In my own work, I engage with Indigenous and Native anti/decolonial methodologies and theories to ground my study of social movements and the popular pedagogies they produce locally in Puerto Rico and transnationally. Scholars, such as a Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, Sandy Grande, and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, have laid out the material and methodological pathways to decolonization. As Puerto Rico faces continued displacement, dispossession, and assimilation, such work is powerfully relevant. So, what can Puerto Ricans learn from indigenous struggles for sovereignty and self-determination? What, to echo Negrón Muntaner, are the alternatives to colonial and settler state sovereignty? [11]

José Fusté notes in “Repeating Islands of Debt: Historicizing the Transcolonial Relationality of Puerto Rico's Economic Crisis” that the territorial designation of Puerto Rico through the Insular Cases in 1901 was “reminiscent of how Native American communities besieged by settler colonial expansion had been similarly deprived of constitutional protections and full US citizenship” (95). He goes on to say that the US courts “had to invent a different kind of second-class… statutory citizenship” because “being born on the [archipelago] was not equivalent to being born in one of the fifty states” (96). These policies, according to Fusté, also served as a partial blueprint for insular colonization, even though applications widely vary.

Thus, rather than dismissing the points of convergence between Hawai‘i and Puerto Rico, we should seek out and learn about our parallel and connecting histories, as well as present contexts, to build archipelagic solidarities and webs of resistance. During the 2019 American Studies Association conference held in Oahu, Hawai‘i, I analyzed the deployment of claims to citizenship as a pathway to equal treatment or human rights in the aftermath of Hurricane María. However, discourses around gaining equal citizenship rights do not alter the unequal geopolitical and economic relationship between Puerto Rico and the US. In fact, they highlight, as Coulthard notes in “Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Recognition,” the way our “rights and identities have become defined solely in relation to the colonial state and its legal apparatus” (96).  However, there are many anticolonial activists, artists, and mutual aid organizations that counter this form of recognition through a praxis of self-determination that prefigures a “radical alternative to the structural and psycho-affective facets of colonial domination” (Coulthard, 100).

For instance, throughout the massive wave of #RickyRenuncia protests, which led to the resignation of former governor Ricardo Rosselló, activists and nonorganized people alike took to the streets to articulate a praxis of anticolonial self-recognition. [12, 13] These protests were premised on an identity politics wherein Black, queer, femmes took to the streets and put their bodies on the frontline to directly contest the colonial violence that deemed them disposable.

After the summer ’19 protests, we have yet to see the simmering cauldron of discontent boil over in the same degree, but nonetheless, anticolonial organizing continues. The privatization and sale of Puerto Rico’s electric company to LUMA energy has exacerbated the frequency of blackouts and with them, dissension. Protestors have also taken to beaches to object to the building of residential developments on protected and/or public land, which has caused irreparable damage to the fauna and environment. Privatization and dispossession are thus vehicles that accelerate destierro by aggravating an already difficult and precarious living situation in Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, a new wave of settlers from the US are buying land and buildings, while those living in Puerto Rico are themselves prevented from buying homes.

Yet, this form of hybrid colonialism is not being taken passively by those in the archipelago (or the diaspora). Resistance to this hostile takeover is taking place through mobilizations of space, place, sound, art, graffiti, protest, occupation, relationalities, and anticolonial sociabilities. As the anarchist graffiti collective GGK write: “El método es la libertad.”

[GGK, “El método es la libertad,” via Instagram]

GGK join other visual artists, along with political organizations, in creating unlivable conditions for the newest wave of settlers. This is accomplished by either naming the settlers or addressing them through visual media in public spaces.

[Courtesy of Aurora Santiago Ortiz]

[Courtesy of Carla Vita Piacentini]

El método es la libertad

Following both Katherine McKittrick and the Puerto Rico Reading Collective “P Fkn R,” I offer some concluding thoughts about method making and anticolonial commitments. P Fkn R is an inter- and transdisciplinary collective comprised of Puerto Rican scholars-activists-artists located in the archipelago and diaspora. We seek out liberatory forms of relating outside of the normative disciplinary cartographies by generating and gathering ideas that seek out liberation within our present system of knowledge. As McKittrick notes, in Dear Science and Other Stories: "the goal is not to find liberation but to seek it out” (47-8). It is in creative genres, memes, graffiti, and song that we create spaces outside of colonial scripts. These forms invite the spectator, listener, participant, and collaborator to witness, be present, and (re)interpret the text, song, or visual media before them.

Bad Bunny’s recently released concept album “Un Verano sin ti” invites the listener—whether from the archipelago, diaspora, or elsewhere—to his particular form of P Fkn R method making. From my own location within destierro, within the belly of the beast, the album has a different flavor. As a sonic communal space, it connects listeners, whether in or beyond Puerto Rico, to the collision of the melancholic, the joyous and euphoric, the painful, and the hopeful. Bad Bunny’s method making is firmly grounded in Black Caribbean sounds—from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and the Colombian Caribbean—and place. While his approach is not without criticism or contradiction, Benito’s method making directs the listener’s attention away from empire and towards the Afro Caribbean diaspora and archipelago. The album presents “lyrical and sonic critiques of colonialism, racism structural inequalities, and other forms of violence,” including gender-based violence (McKittrick, 50-1).

While a full album review is out of the scope of this essay, “El Apagón” (“Blackout”) is one example of P Fkn R as method that proudly proclaims that “Puerto Rico está bien cabrón.” Rather than highlight a fixed understanding of puertorriqueñidad and its cultural symbols that look to hispanismo, Bad Bunny highlights that this is the land of Black salsa players and rappers. This song is thus also an internal critique leveled against those that want to catch the Latine wave, yet lack sazón, batería y reggaetón. In the Puerto Rico that has potholes and blackouts, where the calentón is unbearable and our Taíno sun shines hard, there is no other place that Benito (and so many of us) would rather be.

“Apagón” reflects the joys and struggles of living amid exploitation, occupation, and settlement. It is not a call to resiliency, but a reflection of everyday resistance in the face of colonial violence. The lyrics highlight the sentiment of Puerto Ricans within and beyond the archipelago—being forced out of the archipelago because of neoliberal austerity measures and the dismantling and/or privatization of basic services, such as education, electricity, water, and health care. For instance, the outro, sung by Gabriela Berlingeri, is a declaration of resistance to the settler wave currently engulfing the archipelago, echoed in the graffiti seen all over the capital city of San Juan: “Que se vayan ellos/Lo que me pertenece a mí/Se lo quedan ellos/Que se vayan ellos/Esta es mi playa/Este es mi sol/Esta es mi tierra/Esta soy yo.”

Bad Bunny’s method making—albeit commercial and under capitalist market logics—captures and renders hypervisible the centrality of land in relation to Puerto Rico’s colonial present. The song, and album broadly, call attention to what many Puerto Ricans experience daily, namely, the threat of destierro, colonial and gender violence, precarity, and dispossession. Rather than looking towards a past that is configured by the coloniality of power and steeped in the organizing logics of racial, gender, class, and sexual domination, we can center anticolonial and Indigenous acts of self-determination, which are grounded in relational practices and conceive of freedom as method.

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Notes

[1] Lorenzo Veracini. “Introducing: Settler Colonial Studies,” Settler Colonial Studies 1:1 (2011): 1-12.

[2] Patrick Wolfe. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (2006): 387-409.

[3] Aurora Santiago-Ortiz. “Testimonio as stitch work: Undoing coloniality through autoethnography in Puerto Rico.” Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social 20:2 (2021): 122-148.

[4] Erika Fontánez Torres. Politica Juridica de la Propiedad en Puerto Rico: Un Abordaje Crítico Feminista en Busca de Igualdad y Equidad para las Mujeres, La. Rev. Jur. UPR, 79 (2010): 915.

[5] Hilda Lloréns. Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021.

[6] Gerald Vizenor. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

[7] Jorge Duany. The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

[8] Arlene Dávila. Sponsored Identities: Cultural Politics in Puerto Rico (Vol. 13). Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997.

[9] Isar Godreau. Scripts of blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and US Colonialism in Puerto Rico. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015.

[10] Isar Godreau. "Slippery Semantics: Race Talk and Everyday Uses of Racial Terminology in Puerto Rico." Centro Journal 20:2, (2008): 5-33.

[11] Frances Negrón Muntaner. “Our Fellow Americans: Why Calling Puerto Ricans ‘Americans’ Will not Save Them.” Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm. Eds. Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019.

[12] Aurora Santiago Ortiz and Jorell Meléndez-Badillo. “La Calle Fortaleza in Puerto Rico’s Primavera de Verano.” Society and Space. February 25, 2020.

[13] Marisol LeBrón. Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua/Contra Muerto Rico: Lecciones del Verano Boricua. Puerto Rico: Editora Educación Emergente, 2021.

References

• Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

• Coulthard, Glen. “Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Recognition.” Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism Across Indigenous Nations and Latinx America. Ed. Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2017.

• Figueroa Vázquez, Yomaira. “After the Hurricane: Afro-Latina Decolonial Feminisms and Destierro.” Hypatia 35:1 (2020): 220-229.

• Fusté, José. “Repeating Islands of Debt: Historicizing the Transcolonial Relationality of Puerto Rico’s Economic Crisis.” Radical History Review 128 (2017): 91-119.

• McKittrick, Katherine. Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.

Dr. Aurora Santiago Ortiz is a Social Justice Education scholar and Lyman T. Johnson Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on antiracist feminisms, decolonial perspectives, and participatory action research. Her work has been published in the Michigan Journal for Community Service Learning, the Italian Journal of Urban Studies and in Chicana/Latina Studies Journal. She has also contributed to Society and Space, NACLA, The Abusable Past blog of the Radical History Review, Electric Marronage, Open Democracy, and Zora magazine. She is also a co-founder and member of the community organization Colectivo Casco Urbano de Cayey. In Fall 2022, she will join the University of Wisconsin Madison as an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Chicanx/Latinx Studies.