I harbour conflicting feelings for my land

I am an Independentist.
I believe Puerto Rico should be free.

But when confronted I cannot easily explain it. Europe and America are moving towards a union. I want my land separate.

And in part I think it has to do with identity. Who do you think you are? How do you define yourself? In 3 words, who are you? I mean, can you answer this? The part of your identity that belongs in the root.

And we cannot. Too much meddling. We have never been Puerto Rico by our own rights. The Taino times are lost in pre-history. We longed to be Spaniards for 400 years. For the last 100 we have longed to be gringos.

Do you know that in the last census, most Puertorricans claimed to be white?

Our put-down phrase, when someone is getting too uppity is " Se cree blanquito" or "He thinks he is white".

It irks me when a guy, born and raised in the mists of the mountains of Orocovis, proclaims himself happily to be an Estadounidense. Does he speaks English? Hell no. Does he speak Spanish? Not really, but close enough. What the hell does this guy think he is claiming for himself when he claims being a gringo?
He claims what he views as a superior existence, a better person.

The Americans are good. They brought us the welfare. They brought us the projects, and the manufacturing plants, and a lot of money for us to be happy.
And our island, blessed with fertile ground and abundant rain, became ghetto. The farmland grew wasted. We lost our pride. The son of our neighbor got tattoos and a golden grille for his teeth, imitating his foreign idols.

And I know there is a certain element of hypocrisy in my thinking. Too fine of me, to talk about this corruption, when my children are not dying of diarrhea and malnutrition.

But couldn’t we keep the pride? Surely, those things are not in conflict. Not the pride in the land, for the land is nothing but a rock protruding from the ocean, a dead volcano in a seam of tectonic plaques. I mean the pride in ourselves, each of us, in the fruit of our labor. The kind of feeling that sees beauty and wishes to add to it.

We see ourselves as a failed country. Every decision is made looking at Los Niuyores (The New Yorks, this is how people used to see USA. My cousin went to live at Los Niuyores. She could be in Ohio, for all they cared. She was in Los Niuyores.)

Don’t worry if you can’t understand this. It confuses me too.
Sometimes I love this island so much that I would not live anywhere else. Sometimes I truly feel blessed to live in such a beautiful place. People are generous and like to laugh. Waiting in line is just a chance to meet interesting people.

And sometimes I feel like I choke in here. I look around me and I see nothing but ugliness. Stupid people, lazy people, irresponsible people, all drowning in their drug of choice.

Puerto Rican people should be free.
At least that much I have clear.

I wonder if the FBI will come to get me now.

Taino Blood

As a rather weird outshoot of my interest in Urban Fantasy, I came to explore the folklore and myths of our own Taino Indians. First to greet Columbus and the hardest hit in a wave of slavery, misery and disease. Gone from the face of the Earth in no time at all, before Europeans took an interest in that which they were destroying and started to study it.

Except they didn’t.

Die, I mean.

You see, English colonization and Spanish colonization took very different forms. The English came to the Colonies with the whole family, expecting to establish them into a new home. They kept mostly within their own race, and viewed other races as somehow “dirtying” their own clean blood. The child of an Englishman and a squaw is Indian.

The Spanish men came alone, planning on getting rich and getting out. But needs of the flesh and all that, soon there was a big mestizo population. Also, Spanish blood seemed to cleanse all impurities. I read somewhere (how do you like that for accuracy?) that when a Spaniard married a Taino woman, she became automatically in all records a white woman. Their children were listed as white, and if a son married another Indian, the grandchildren were listed as white too.

Mitochondrial DNA studies show that the population of Puerto Rico is mainly Indian. Not bad at all, for a dead race.

“But if they are alive, how come we cannot see them?” I thought.
And I realized we are absolutely surrounded with signals from our indigenous past, only we underestimate them as signs of backwardness, of ignorance. I remember when my grandmother Juana sent me and my siblings to go and play in the batey. Why couldn’t she say patio like normal people?I thought back then. When she gave me a wooden bowl to help her, and she called it dita, while younger people called it simply a bowl.

My paternal grandmother knew how to make Casabe, the yucca bread of the Taino. She is gone now, so I cannot learn it from her. But they make it still in the Dominican Republic, so I’ll learn it someday.

Nah, Taino people are not dead. Just sleepy. Found a way to get in the cracks, wait in the seed. And when the conditions are right, we will grow a root so vigorous that we’ll crack the pavement and everyone who sees us for the magnificent Ceiba tree we are, will have to stop and admire us.

The Taino people live in us.

Goat Hyperinflation Bubble

Read this yesterday and had to share in case one or two readers ever stumble in a drunken stupor into this blog.
This has to be the cleverest explanation of a bubble economy ever.
Substitute goats for real estate, dot-coms, tulips... whatever!

Chickenshit

Let me say it out loud, in a public forum... I CANNOT DRIVE!!!!

Shameful on my part. Very embarrasing, like a Social Disease. Ugh.

At first it was lazyness. All my brothers and sisters are one to one-year-and-a-half apart in age. So there was always someone going through that stage of JUST GOT MY LICENSE when all mom had to do was mumble something about there being no milk and the newly licenced would volunteer to heroically make it all right again. So touching...

So I never HAD to learn to drive. There was, from my point of view, no incentive.

Then I got into college. My dorm was across the street from campus, and Paseo de Diego, a pedestrian-only street full of stores was a few minutes away. Again, there was no need to drive.

I met my Beloved Tormentor in college. He was the night security guard on my dorm. So whenever I could not sleep, I could just go down to the first floor and talk a while. No driving necessary. When things got serious and we were formally a couple, part of the mating dance was driving me places and showing me stuff. No need to drive, again.

A few years ago, my neighbor, a single mom I knew from college calls me. She is having and asthma attack. I tell her I cannot take her to the hospital since I do not drive. She tells me she does not need a driver, she needs a friend and someone to care for Baby. I agree, we get on the SUV and get rolling to the nearest ER. Auxilio Mutuo. She goes into the round driveway, stops the car, tosses the keys at me and wheezes "park the car" before leaving.

I am blocking the ER entrance, there are people watching and THERE IS A BABY IN THE BACK SEAT! Of course I drove the car. It jumped the curve, would not go straight and I got it to stop right when I was about to hit the water fountain. There I mustered whatever dignity I still had and asked for help from an ambulance driver. A real gentleman, he saw the entire thing and did not laugh at me.

The baby did not even wake up.

Anyways, I started to consider this driving thing might be useful someday... Then I promptly forgot about it.

Married now. We have different work schedules. He has to be there at 4:45 am. I start at 8am.

At first I took the bus. But my bus stop is located right in front of one of the refuges where they help drugaddicts. While I waited for my bus to arrive, I was surrounded by a group of men waiting for their bus to take them to ASEM to get their methadone treatment. No big deal, right? They were trying to do the right thing... Yep, I idiotically put myself in a dangerous situation.

The monday after Thanksgiving, as I was waiting for my bus, one of the guys was having a fit. It seems he had missed a few appointments on his therapy and they might cut him out of the program. He was telling his friend how the hospital staff HAD to give him the STUFF, and out he takes a knife.

HOLY-S***!

It was not a Rambo machete-knife. It was one of those plastic thingies they use to open boxes, with etching on the blade so you can break pieces of it off... Can screw you up just as bad.

The guy is doing a desperate little dance, waiving that knife around and telling his buddies how bad he was going to srew someone up at the hospital if anyone gave him grief. And I am watching the knife, watching the knife, 'cause if that dude gives one step in my direction I am gonna go WHOOSH!

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Anyways, my bus came, I got in, the driver tells me never to wait there again (cause in Puerto Rico we like to give unsolicited advise) but I don't mind the meddling 'cause , Man, he was right.

When my husband came to pick me up after work I told him of the incident, trying to make light of it, no big deal...

Now he takes me and picks me up from work. At 5 am he leaves me at a deli near my job and goes to work. As a result, he is getting in late everyday. Has been reprimanded a few times. And all because I had no incentive to drive.

Do I feel guilty?

You have no idea.

Will you think I am crazy if I told you that...

I am already planning my costume for Halloween.

I never got the chance to dress up for Halloween when I was a kid. I was raised Catholic, and our priest got into a hissy fit every year around the end on October.

Then I went to college, and I didn't dress up because I was t

oo broke/tired.

Later I married my Beloved Tormentor, who is squarely on the " Halloween=Satanism" side of the board. He won't take me anywhere to party on that particular date.

All of my former workplaces were anti-dress up. It made no sense to get a costume if I could not parade around in it for a while...

Then I got my current job, and they allow costumes for all positions that do not face the customers. Yay for being the Call Dispatch!

I was a geisha.

I am pretty happy with the costume, even though I never got even NEAR duplicating the geisha look. It cost me more than any of the dresses I actually wear once in a while, but this was my first Halloween and it was worth it.

Heh, I even got the wood geta and the tabi socks!

Man, I had fun.

For this year I am thinking, Chun Li. The cheonsang should not be outside my small capabilities as seamstress. I will have to modify it so that the slits don't show as much leg, but it is very doable.

All I want is a little house in the suburbs.

And let me say, right off the bat, that I am very impressionable.

If I read something about alien abductions, I will spend the next few weeks scanning the skies for weird lights.

If I read about the marvelous powers of the mind, I will spend weeks practicing how to use the Force.

And it is fun, for the most part. Though sometimes my husband gets a little impatient with my topic du jour and will tactfully inform me that any amount of interest he might have harbored in his soul when I began my quest to understand whatever it is I am raving about this time, it has been sated many times over. Very tactfully.

He has begun grumbling lately about the amount of interest I am investing in the survivalist movement.

You know, survivalists, the local gun nuts who are convinced the end of the world is around the corner and prepare for it by turning their homes into food wharehouses and bunkers.

Except lately the label has grown mainstream, attracting both loonies expecting the triumphant return of Quetzacoatl in 2012 and normal families trying to survive on a tight budget. Some of their preps seem beyond, WAY beyond ridiculous. And some seem so commonsense that I fail to understand how I never thought of it.

I am storing water. And I am buying more groceries than I used to, seeking to stockpile a bit. Not a year. Not even three months. Two weeks is OK, and I keep from scaring Carlos too much.

I don't have the bug-out-bags, but I am planning on preparing three. ( We don't have children; Koji, the cat, is going with us.)

We live in a first floor apartment that is not defensible at all and has no soil for gardening. I tried to make a container garden, but the space is simply too small. I am trying to push Carlos into buying us a house with space for a garden. Since we live in the tropics we don't even have to work too hard at it. Most of the time you just have to place the seed where you want it to grow and Mother Nature will take care of itself. Your main concern might be preventing the house from dissapearing in a tangle of fruit trees.

Carlos is worried. The government of Puerto Rico will try to fight the reccession by kicking out a whole lot of employees. No one has been named yet, but the air is tense.

So, no house for now. Just a little first floor apartment and a small cache of false safety in uncertain times.

Starting my blog

Whee!

First of all, be advised that my first language is Spanish. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, never traveled at all. Never had the chance of speaking English day in and day out.

Still, almost everything I read and watch is in English. I feel that my vocabulary is MUCH wider in it than in Spanish.

Plus, i am prejudiced against it.

I have come to believe, like Borges, that Spanish literature is somewhat retarded. (I would love to provide a link to this, but was unable to find it on the Net. I read it in some article a professor gave us, years ago.)

So cool, we get the crazy hidalgo. We get Macondo. We got El Cid.
Spanish literature is too tame!

Don Quijote fought windmills. Beowolf killed a dragon.

Macondo had decades of rain. Shakespeare had sex, drugs, violence and a choir of cross-dressers, all necesary ingredients for quality drama.

The most impressive thing El Cid Campeador does is take a loose lion and take it back to its cage. And when you think about it, the lion was probably captured early as a trophy, kept in a small, dark cage and badly fed. It might have been sick. Maybe the lion was so scared it actually wanted to go back.

Anyways, El Cid does not count 'cause it really happened.

What I would like to know is, where is our Hitchhiker's Guide to The Universe? Where is our Diskworld? Where our Arthurian mythology?

Where is our creative force?

I wish to become a writer someday. And of course I dream of writing something truly memorable. But this lack of collective creativity is so strange, that I sometimes wonder if Spanish lacks the vocabulary or flexibility that the literature I envision demands. (How do you translate into Spanish the word "parsec"?)

So, this is my half-hearted apology for going to the dark side and writing in English.