why i do not write about Puerto Rico 🇵🇷
Except for when I do.
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It’s very easy to tell that I am Puerto Rican: I have the stereotypical phenotype and two last names on my birth certificate. It’s not always easy to tell that I was born and raised here: People are often fooled by my accent (or lack thereof) and a host of other class signifiers they often mistake for indexes of race or ethnicity (how I dress, the music I like, etc). But I was born here, and I did all my schooling through high school in San Juan. During college, I returned to my childhood home during winter and summer breaks. When I moved to New York in 2018, I almost always spent holidays and a few weeks in the summer here. The longest I’ve gone without visiting is 2 years. I left New York last July and I’ve been in Puerto Rico for the past 10 months (although I am returning to NY in the fall).
My heritage is something you have to read between the lines for, and that is on purpose. If you don’t know me beyond my writing, you might not have caught onto the fact that I’m not even an American. I am obscenely proud of my heritage, so it shocks people, even those close to me, that it doesn’t feature more prominently in what I write for publication. I have built a career as a culture and technology writer because that is what I love to do. But still, people often ask: Why don’t you write about Puerto Rico, instead? As if you could only write about the world outside you (culture) or the world within you (identity), but not both (spoiler: they’re the same thing). Why don’t I write about my culture? As if it only consisted of Bad Bunny songs and hurricane damage.1
I learned early in my career that I needed to be prepared to answer these questions. The fact that I have several good answers only reassures me the reasons why I don’t write about Puerto Rico unless I really, really want to. I don’t write about Puerto Rico…
…Because I like writing about art and technology. My writing on technology prioritizes embodiment, it questions hierarchies and re-infuses the subject with a much needed sense of materialism and history. Because I write through myself, where I’m from and how I think about that will always be active in what I share. In case I’m mincing words I want to make it clear that my worldview and my writing are inherently Puerto Rican. But something else comes up when I read into people’s reactions — Puerto Rican! Art and technology? or art and technology! Puerto Rican? — that reminds me of how the industry treats writers’ personal lives as raw material.2 They see being Puerto Rican as a form of access to some rare natural resource I would be foolish to not exploit. They think of my being Puerto Rican is a totalizing difference that simply must dominate my writing.
…Because it’s harder to make a living writing about Puerto Rico. Puerto Rican-ness is so misrepresented and misread that I don’t gain anything from talking about it in passing. I am not in the business of exporting and translating my culture and I want to avoid trading in my otherness in a media economy that can only tokenize it at best and exploit it at worst (if there’s even a difference). I don’t think leading with my Puerto Rican-ness will open any doors I haven’t already walked through. Rare is the editor willing to pay for writing about Puerto Rico that doesn’t use up half the word count to explain where it’s located on the map and how its citizens can’t vote for president. Rarer still, is the editor that won’t shit all over whatever I file because they want me to talk about salsa dancing (I suck) and my abuelos (both dead, barely knew them). If I’m being honest, this is the no.1 reason why I don't write about PR: Few editors have shown me they earned the right to profit from such stories.
…Because obscurity is survival. I think Puerto Rican liberation, one of the things in this life I care about the most, will benefit from an enacted politics of obscurity. I think we need to make ourselves less hospitable and less legible in order to protect ourselves from exploitation and get closer to the practices that will ensure our futures. I don’t particularly care for “raising awareness” nor do I think I am sufficiently qualified to do so in any meaningful way. But most importantly: I am a very private and secretive person. When I think about Puerto Rico, I think about my childhood, my high school years and the many liminal months I’ve spent in the house I am in now. I think about my family and my friends. I think about all the ordinary things everyone else thinks about when they think about where they are from. I spend so little time in PR that what little I get I refuse to sell off to a mediocre bidder. I need what little doses of PR I get to stay with me, and only me, for as long as possible.
…But I do write about Puerto Rico, all the time. The fact is that I do write about Puerto Rico. The good editors might be rare, but they exist. And they pay me to write about contemporary Puerto Rican art and visual culture; the occasional personal essay and experimental works. And I intend to write about all of it for a book-length project in the very near future.3 Here is the definitive list of everything I’ve written about Puerto Rico:
profile: Cielo Felix-Hernandez 🔗
January 26, 2022
I love writing about contemporary Puerto Rican art. I am working on a big feature about the local art scene here in San Juan and it’s taken me into my archives. For how geographically small the archipelago is, for how impoverished our economy, and challenged our arts are, we have an unusually-high number of blue-chip artists. We are often famous around the world for our musicians and actors, but our artists are regular fixtures at major biennales and fairs. But most importantly, they make phenomenal art.
It’s this sense of deep nostalgia that inspired Felix-Hernandez’s exercise in time travel. As a diaspora child’s humble effort of preserving her homeland, “nieta” both remembers and dreams. “It takes place in multiple spaces all at once, both here in the mainland of the United States and in Puerto Rico,” she said of the work. “But it also takes place spiritually in other universes outside of both those lands, in a place that may not exist yet.”
essay: Other Clouds 🔗
March 1, 2023
This essay is about cloud motifs in Puerto Rican art and visual culture: carved into rocks, on weather reports during hurricane season, the Sahara winds, at Whitney Museum of American Art, cloud-based storage, and Silicon Valley’s techno-utopia.
I first became aware of clouds as something other than animal shapes in the sky through Catholicism. Catholic clouds are aspirational, it’s heaven, and thunder—adults would tell me—was just the sound of God and his angels rearranging their heavy and sumptuous furniture. In the book of Exodus, God guides the Israelites with the help of a pillar of clouds, he protected them and spoke to Moses through clouds. When Jesus was being nailed to the cross, God claimed him through the clouds and when Jesus was resurrected, he rose on a cloud. But my favorite Biblical mention of clouds comes from the book of Revelations, where angels made of fire and rainbows fly around wrapped in clouds—I’m imagining a Pride float.
[…]
There is a lot that we don’t know about our histories. We can’t ever scapegoat The Cloud for obscuring reality and making ourselves and each other harder to know and understand because The Cloud is just doing what it was designed to do. And before The Cloud, there have been centuries of technologies—including historical documents like Abbad y Lasierra’s—that have scrambled our past, especially pre-Columbian history, producing what I jokingly call: Taíno Mythology, the mythology about Taíno mythology, a product of the information-starved ouroboros of the neo-Taíno blogosphere.
Ephemera: A Rock Collection 🔗
June 6, 2024
One of my favorites. A rock collection in essay form for the Are.na Annual Vol. 5.
Before it was Puerto Rico it was Borinken, and before that it was a volcano—a big magma hole. About 190 million years ago, a volcano was formed near what we know today as the border between Ecuador and Peru. Then, eighty million years ago, it all began to drift northward and then eastward. Now, it’s a volcanic archipelago—between the Caribbean Plate to the south and North American Plate along the north. Even on the tectonic level, in the depths of its geology, North America encroaches on Puerto Rico: The North American Plate is drifting westward relative to the Caribbean Plate, gaining about two centimeters a year. According to a cervix-dilation chart, that’s about the size of a cherry. But the North American Plate is subducting, meaning it’s sliding down beneath the Caribbean Plate, a cherry a year. Could it kiss the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench—the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, wider than the Grand Canyon—420,000 cherries deep? Plate tectonics “determined the nature of all subsequent rocks on earth.” Not set in stone, but written in cracks.
desgarre/deriva/derrumbe 🔗
September 27, 2024
Wall text for Irene Alberty’s solo show at El Cuadrado Gris in Santurce.
Despite the lack of light and stillness, of something singular and solid to steady our feet, desgarre/deriva/derrumbe lodges itself deep within the grain of the video and the grout of the hydraulic tile.
Bypass Words, But Not the Body 🔗
October 10, 2024
In these repetitions, and through the many gaps they produce, there is the kind of truth that replicates itself everywhere. In train cars and through car windows, in the frames on a film reel, in the buttons on a keyboard, in the zeros and ones of a computer. In the saccades of the eyes as they read along a line of text, shifting left to right to left like paper shuffling out of a printer. In the beat between an eight count and in the faults along the Earth’s tectonic plates, in breaths and heartbeats, in neuron synapses and gene sequences.
The Sanrio Machete 🔗
October 17, 2024
I think this is one of the best things I’ve ever written, which is often the case when I’m writing for Daisy. I bought a machete, I had a lot of feelings about it and I keep returning to this essay to tease out lines and spin them into new essays. Spoiler: This essay was the inspiration for my next zine. More on that below.
When I held the machete for the first time, I had Cinnamoroll in my palm, the Little Twin Stars under my pointer and My Melody along the length of my thumb. It looked ridiculous and I felt ridiculous when I used it, but only as ridiculous as I would if I was using a regular machete. And yet, when I tried to hack away at some low-hanging branches, my swings left stab wounds and mangled branch stubs all along the trunk of my precious tree.
Telenovela Dreams 🔗
October 25, 2024
I did not grow up watching telenovelas but I love the glamour and melodrama. After years of watching “Novelas de Puerto Rico,” a highlight reel of sample footage of locally produced telenovelas from 1955 to 2006, I decided to write about it.
I came of age in a Puerto Rico that was enjoying the spoils of the pharmaceutical manufacturing boom that crumbled as soon as the tax incentive bill expired in 1996. Money was good; we dressed up for dinner and wore special outfits to church. In reviewing this archive, I’m almost addicted to fishing out small details—the postmodern interiors, the tile in the country mansions, the bright-white skyline of Condado Beach—for that glimpse into the other Puerto Rico, the one that could’ve existed had things gone differently in 1996, or 1952, or 1868.
I guess I’m writing this essay because I want to prepare my readers — but mostly myself — for the release of my latest print project: Tentatively titled, Borikiut, the zine is conceived as a bestiary of cuteness in contemporary Puerto Rican visual culture. All I can say about it now is that it will be radically different from my last zine, I will be working on it with a friend, and it will be very, very cute. ✨
I’m seeing him in PR this summer 😜; $3,000 in damages to our roof in 2017 after María, happy?
I notice this mostly affects women who are also: from a non-Western country, sex workers, and young mothers. Maybe it’s the Federici I’m reading but there is something about women-as-commons going on here.
Editors and publishers: 🦵🏽😘
borikiut 😭 it’s a perfect name!
Best writer