Hello all,
I have didn’t write new posts for my blog for some time. I haven’t gotten back to flowers in a while due to the exigencies of my work life. HOWEVER, I feel compelled to put out some thinking on what I am calling Boricua Futuristics or how to think about the future of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. I am compelled because of the dire situation that Puerto Rico is in.
In a “Back to the Future” kind of way, I reflect upon this, thinking of some young man and some woman who, because of economic hardship, are or are planning to leave Borinquen. They may come to meet here in the USA and they may have children. Those children may come to have children. Amongst those children of children, there may be a boy who grows up and dreams.
I am speaking as that boy. A person that is the child of a child of a migrant. My abuelos came to this country 91 years ago because of an economic crisis in those days. An economic crisis that happened 26 years after the invasion of Puerto Rico by the United States in 1898 and 8 years after the USA legislated that all Puerto Ricans were US citizens. A child that was born in the year 1898 and a citizen in 1917 could have been the parent of my grand parents and probably were. There was very few opportunities for them in those days because of a vast economic transformation grinding poverty was rampant and they came to NYC to make a better life. Their child was born about 17 years before another upheaval caused the big wave of Boricuas to come to NYC and other destinations.
91 years later I am observing a similar situation. A vast economic transformation is causing migration. People are leaving in droves. The economics calls upon us to contemplate the politics and sociology and indeed the future. This is what I’m going to do.
One future I can imagine is a Puerto Rican dystopia where the island is depopulated and non-Puerto Ricans become the majority. You might see it as transnational gentrification, the whites move in to the neighborhood the original residents can’t afford anymore.
This would be the beginning of the end of Puerto Ricans…with no cultural anchor…the culture will disintegrate and pass into the dustbin of history. Kind of a cultural extinction event. Cultures, like species can become extinct.
There are other peoples that have been driven off their land. Just ask Palestinians and Native folks. The continuance of their cultures is a real issue. We are talking about glacially slow, but inexorable processes.
This is all happening in the era of the meteoric rise of the 1%…the “Masters of the Universe” that are in control of many more planetary resources than ever before. The city, state and national bankruptcies are just the footprints of the behemoths striding across the globe. The various cities in the USA (in Detroit and other small municipalities, Stockton CA) States such as Illinois and nations such as Puerto Rico and Greece. We have to think, not just about how we got here, but where are we going.
I’m going to try to do a little bit of that.
pepitothinking 