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.