We are a different kind of refugee. Charco-crossers of a different exodus.
A reminder that “wellness is the weapon”, that self-love, self-care and self-preservation must be prioritized before any ideal, any move. Let this be the energy we carry forward into the new moon cycle and post eclipses, together with gratitude for light exchanged and lessons learned.
this is a dispatch from my own cave in this corner of Borikén to share that the Rematriating Borikén womb just gave birth to a lil podcast. Please help me nurse and grow this baby by listening, following, sharing.
We don’t get to romanticize rematriation while overlooking the role imperialism plays in our being forced out/ born/ raised abroad in the first place. We don’t get to separate rematriation from liberation—the one we struggle to practice daily; the one humanity must struggle for globally.
The Puerto Rico Trench plummets almost 28,000 feet below the surface. This was spiritually given to me as metaphor for this work of excavating, uncovering, recovering and reclaiming our ancestral stories, lands, ways. The above video is about this project that I am so honored to have channeled, and that I am savoring every step of the way. Visibilizing our journeys, especially the intrepid journeys of Boricuas swimming against the currents, against the colonial conditioning to return and reclaim lost parts of ourselves, this is what fuels me.
a reflection on rematriation, birth, source and the black and brown ancestral matriarchs charged with the possibility of our existence here today.
CucubaNación opened as an artspace in November of 2022 on la Calle San Vicente en el pueblo de Mayagüez. Born from the darkness of colonialism, climate change and apagones (power outages), CucubaNación channels liberatory lessons of Boricua bioluminescence.
I have been here nine years, but I have been Rematriating my whole life. From my Brooklyn birth to my move to Borikén. From my conflict with all things, my inability to fit anywhere over there. Hell, even for my inability to fit here. I have always been working to align to some ancestral dimension of another time.
How much ancestral medicine and personal decolonizing will it take to restore ourselves, restore how it was and what we were before conquest? And is that the mission? Or are we to envision something more expansive, born from what we now know on top of all the ancestral wisdom resurrected from their bones and our own?
...survival is a necessity and thrival is the mission. When every conversation becomes a battle, we have already burned ourselves to the ground. Many of us do this without ever having made it to the real battlefield. Extinguished by the impossible feat of fighting our own selves.
Like my indigenous Antillean ancestors saw our worlds flipped at night, black sea becoming sky, cosmos covered in sea-creature constellations, I too learned to see the inverse. To draw, paint, render light. Pull light from darkness as we are forced to do daily as children of conquest, colonialism.
...this year’s remembrance became sinister ceremony. Cast us back to that hurricane life of scarcity, lost lives, lost communities./ ...el recuerdo de este año se convirtió en una siniestra ceremonia de remembranza. Regresamos a esa vida de huracanada, de escasez, de vidas, comunidades perdidas.
To live liberation when the colonizers have long been experts at inflicting death and we the colonized have long been experts in dying. Embodying the archipelago is taking into our bodies and becoming the very transcendent expanse that this network of islands, water and wisdom have long been…. Embodying the archipelago, I become ungovernable, autonomous in my own essence.
Now more than ever I feel there needs to be a reclaiming of our ancestral land. Our island is being sold off for profit at the expense of too many local Puerto Ricans' livelihood.
Savage robots invade communities across the planet in a capitalist culture called colonialism. We call for the rematriation of our ancestral art, and of our people’s minds, bodies, and spirits to our sacred ancestral lands!
From contributing writer Javier Smith Torres: The expulsion that different peoples of the world have suffered from their homelands throughout history demonstrates that Puerto Rico is not the only nation to have an important part of its people refuged outside of the national territory.
Rematriating Borikén 