Toeing the Water

Written in Jan of 2023 and posted in Aug of 2024. It took me just a little longer to come out of hiding ❤️

I’d removed my blog from my webpage for a while because I had an incident with someone exhibiting stalking behavior towards me. It’s a vulnerable thing, to write what you know and feel and put it online. I commend everyone who is brave enough to share their hearts and stories with others, with the small and greater risks that might come with that. At the inspiration of some folks who’s bravery I admire, I’m feeling called to come out of hiding and try writing again.

Time isn’t what it used to be. Our perception of time changes as we age, seems to get faster, but time “post”-COVID feels like a different animal. The collective hardships we’ve faced over the past couple of years have decimated and grown us as a species in ways that haven’t been on my radar before in my lifetime. It’s certainly grown me, and it’s hard to remember sometimes what life felt like before 2020. I’d like to share three sets of work/perspectives that came to me during the pandemic, who have helped to shape how I see things, helped grow me up, and made time feel far more precious than perhaps it ever has to me.

Rosa Clemente and Bianca Graulau- Puerto Rico is considered by many to be the oldest colony in the world. My paternal line comes from the island, a place I’ve had the honor to visit two-handfuls of times in my life. Even without having explored much of PR, or Borikén as it was originally called, I can tell you how special the island is. It’s no wonder that any colonizing entity that’s had power over PR in the past 400 years hasn’t wanted to let it go, and that applies up until today.

Bianca Graulau is from PR, grew up there, and left when she went to the US for university, where she later became a news anchor and journalist for both English and Spanish-speaking networks. After the devastation of hurricane Maria in 2018, many adults who had left PR previously returned to the island to assist family and friends, to live in community, and try to rebuild the infrastructure of the island in a grassroots way. But also, to protect it.

Like any colony, Puerto Rico and many of its people has suffered from extraction, experimentation, and exploitation at the hands of the US since it was seized in 1898 from Spain. We’re talking 1/3 of the women on the island were forcibly sterilized between 1925 and 1976 in a eugenics campaign. Before that, blanqueamiento was a brutal process used by colonizing powers to rape and whiten the bloodline of Black and Indigenous Puerto Ricans, to erase them and take their land. This is the history of the island and my family, a lost history to me until I found storytellers like Bianca and Rosa who have carried these stories forward.

There was more to this post, but I decided to publish it where I stopped writing. More reflections soon.