By Carmen Bardeguez-Brown

The Beautiful Faces of My Black People

 Las caras lindas de mi gente negra

Rican Issues

(An excerpt from the poem Rican Issues from the book Dreaming rhythms:

Despertando el Silencio)

That I don’t look What ?

Oh , I guess I don’t look cafe con leche

mancha de platano

Mulata,

high yellow

grifa

By the way

I did not know that there was a puertorican look.

And what exactly is that?

That I just look more what?

Well,    Y    Tu   abuela   donde    Esta?

I should said abuela, tio, Tia, y to el barrio

Let me tell you something

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

Most Ricans are a mix of Africans, Spaniards and Native Americans called Tainos

By the way no one has seen a Taino in the last 500 years.

Sooooo exactly…you know what that means.

We are historical creatures and my story starts with the history of my ancestors, and as such I will start with my parents.

Both of my parents migrated to the United States in the 1950s. My father went to study engineering at Howard University and my mother was sent to live with a lady that somehow my grandfather knew and could help her find work for the Federal Government. According to Mami, it was her way of forgetting a love affair gone sour.

My parents had a serendipity encounter in a public bus in Washington, DC. She was on her way to work and my father entered the bus wearing his military uniform with a few of the soldiers from his division. One of the men in the group made a comment about how beautiful my mom was and she responded in Spanish. They were all surprised at the novelty of finding a Puerto Rican who spoke Spanish in a public bus in DC. They talked and exchanged numbers and on the next day, my father went to her place with flowers. Like they say, the rest is history.

My parents said they both liked the US capital. Upon graduation, my father served as Captain in the United States army. I believe that he served one or two duties in the Korean war. After a romantic courtship, he and my mom got married in a civil ceremony in New York and celebrated the event with a few relatives that were living in the Bronx.

They both had serious experiences of discrimination while living in the United States. At the time when they were in DC, members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, namely, Lolita Lebron, Andres Figueroa Cordero, Irving Flores Rodriguez, and Rafael Cancel Miranda entered the gallery of the US House of Representatives and open fired after the session on March 1, 1954. Five congressmen were seriously injured in the act which was a political act to call attention to the abuses and injustices perpetrated to the people of Puerto Rico.

Mami said that before the shooting inside the halls of Congress happened, she was reminded constantly that she was a “different kind of black, but she was black.” But after the attack, she experienced rejection for being Puerto Rican. Speaking Spanish became a serious threat to the Americans that she dealt with on a daily basis.

Dad only shared with me and my older sister one of his many experiences on discrimination. He said that one of his early experiences occurred after an arduous military training. He went out to eat with two of his friends at a local diner. He said that they were starving. They were all wearing their uniforms. As they entered the diner, they sat down and the waitress showed them the sign that said that they did not serve color people.

Dad said that they all felt humiliated and disrespected. He could not believe that they did not even honor that they were soldiers. I could still remember his restrained anger as he related the story to us.

In spite of the discrimination that they both experienced, my parents considered settling in DC as my father received several job offers after his graduation. The salary of the job offers was high and he knew that he will never earn that kind of money in Puerto Rico.

But they eventually moved back to Puerto Rico in 1955. My dad told us that he refused to raise his family in a country that legalized racism and discriminated against black people.

So my parents, then newlyweds, embarked on a new life back in Puerto Rico. They will have three beautiful girls. My older sister Arlene, who will later become a medical doctor and medical professor at Rutgers University, then me, a long-life poet and educator who dabble in social and political activism, and my young sister Debbie who studied agriculture in Mayaguez and worked for the USDA.

I know my family had a unique experience as black Puerto Ricans. It was a constant reminder when we participated in social events sponsored by the coveted Sociedad de Ingenieros de Puerto Rico. There were only two black families that participated in those events: the Walters and us, the Bardeguezes.

In Puerto Rico, everyone is mixed. You could “look” white but your father or mother or brother or sister or grandmother or grandfather is black. We come in the black-brown-white spectrum. The problem is that hardly anyone or a very small percentage of the population and the mainstream culture in general refuses to acknowledge their African heritage and accept themselves as a black or mestizo culture. As with many countries that were part of the African diaspora experience, we had institutional slavery until it was abolished in 1873.

Yes, my friends, there was slavery in Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and Cuba.

That indian/trigueno look is more a consequence of the black mestizaje than Taino mestizaje. Remember that the Tainos were killed 50 years after the Spanish invasion while the Africans have been living in the island for over 400 years.

The Tainos no longer existed. They were massacred by the Spaniards. Many Puerto Ricans have difficulty accepting this reality and prefer to dwell in the myth of a modern Taino nation.

We all have Taino ancestry in our DNA and our culture, but ours is historically a culture that is predominantly of  African descent.

I believe that our failure to accept this fact is part of the vestiges of slavery and a problem that affects our cultural understanding of who we are as people. This lack of self-knowledge influences how we understand political and cultural struggles that have the potential to support radical change in our communities.

Like the famous Puerto Rican saying goes: “Y tu abuela donde esta?”

Higher Education is still a problem of class and race. There are not too many “Black Puerto Ricans with professional degrees.”

The Black Puerto Rican experience has yet to be written and understood. My intention is not to document the history of all Black Puerto Ricans. Iam just going to share one my story.

I love my country but my appreciation and love for my black heritage was born from a combination of looking up to the African American experience and the love my parents instill in us of the many accomplished Black Puerto Ricans.

Afro-Boricuas like Ramon Emeterio Betances, Pedro Albizu Campos, Francisco Oller, Sylvia Del Villar, Juan Morel Campos, Rafael Hernandez, Ruth Hernandez, Arturo Schomburg, Jose Campeche, Juan Boria, Dr. Jose Ferrer Canales, Rafael Cepeda, Pedro Flores, Rafael Cortijo, Ismael Rivera, Rafael Cordero, Roberto Clemente. I remembered how people mentioned their names and celebrated their contributions to the Puerto Rican culture.

There is a different kind of racism in the United States and in Puerto Rico.  The most important fact is that we did not have to legalize racism like Segregation or “Jim Crow” and rampant decades of lynching. There was no KKK and rampant police brutality that was race-based.

In Puerto Rico, cultural discrimination is ingrained in the language that undermined any acceptance of blackness as beautiful. For example, this thought is revealed by a few of the common sayings or “dichos” such as:

Casate con una blanquita para mejorar la raza.

Ay pero que linda en su tipo.

Ay es negrito pero con facciones finas.

Ay nena esa nariz Africana.

The media perpetuates the misconception of the “Puerto Rican look.” There was once a commercial sanctioned by the Tourism department of Puerto Rico that had 3 light skinned Puerto Rican kids with blond hair and blue eyes wearing a Vejigante mask from Loiza. Everyone knows that Loiza is one of the most African-centered Puerto Rican towns in the island.

My parents were proud Ricans who knew and embraced their culture but they also experienced the Puerto Rican brand of racism which was very different from the one they experienced in the United States. They also loved and embraced the history and culture of the African Americans. They blended the best of both worlds and as such, raised us to be conscious of our place in Puerto Rico and prepared us for what will be our future reality of Black Puerto Ricans who migrated to the United States.

A few days before my father passed away, I shared my desire and plans to go and live in New York and crashed with my sister that was doing her medical residency in Queens. I will never forget his words. “Acuerdate, Carmin que tienes que ser mejor que ellos para que puedas echar para lante. Sea aqui o alla.” Wise words from my beloved father.

(About the author: Carmen Bardequez-Brown is a poet and teacher living in Hartsdale. Born and raised in Puerto Rico and educated in the US and Puerto Rico , she tackles the complexity and nuances of being a creature in both cultures of the East and West, the colonized and the colonizer, in her blog. The birth of this blog is brought about by Carmen’s desire to write and publish which is ushered in by the Aspiring Writers Mentoring Program of 2018. This is her second issue.) 

CARMEN SAYS

By Carmen Bardeguez-Brown

Iam

Iam a woman.

Iam Puerto Rican.

Iam Nuyorican.

Iam an immigrant.

Iam African descendant.

Iam Taino descendant.

Iam Spaniard descendant.

Iam an American citizen.

Iam an ancient soul traveling this life’s journey.

This blog is an opportunity to share my love and concern for my adoptive country and my fascination with my step-culture. I want to understand who “Iam” through the complex relationship that I have of being a Black Puerto Rican/Nuyorican living in New York.

I hope that you journey with me, as I share my view on issues that affect our communities. When I say our communities, I refer to the immigrant Latinos who live in New York. I welcome your feedback and hope that together, we can make sense of who we are as individuals and as communities that need to galvanize and help create a society that supports human potential.

We all have stories that unite us and struggles that may divide us. Let us create conversations that build bridges of understanding, one word at a time. Conversando.

Conversation is key to our understanding.  Por que, hablando se entiende la gente.

Iam

I was born and raised in the beautiful island of Puerto Rico. I never experienced the change of season as we only have one: summer all year long, and of course – the hurricane period from June to November.

The warm weather is always ameliorated by the occasional chubasco which is a short period of heavy rain during the middle of the day. Big warm droplets of water make the hot sun less harsh.

I always see mountains from every point on the island. The lush and colorful vegetation of our tropical paradise is part of everyone’s daily life. The breeze of the ocean kisses our skin from north to south, east to west.

The island is divided horizontally by the Cordillera Central which is a system of mountains whose highest peak is Cerro de Punta at 4,390 feet. This region of Puerto Rico is famous for the coffee plantations which have been the second most important export from the island.

The coast of the island used to have the sugar plantations which used the African slaves and later on, of the jornaleros. Sugar cane was the most important commodity under the Spanish and early American colonialism.

In the evenings, nature treats us to a relaxing musical concert by the coquis. These are small indigenous green frogs that only exist in Puerto Rico. They create the most beautiful symphony that soothes us at the end of the day.

The wrath of Irma and Maria

After Irma and Maria, the coquis’ melodic sounds had competed against the growling of electric generators, a sound that reminded everyone about the harsh “new normal” of daily life of living in Puerto Rico.

A seating president throwing paper towels to people struggling to rebuild their lives after one of the worst natural and man-made disasters in 100 years was a good reminder of the humiliating treatment Puerto Ricans had always received from the United States since its invasion in 1898.

The tragedy of the natural disaster of Maria was as ferocious as the financial hurricane that 100 years of colonial and self-inflicted corruption afflicted the country. A perfect storm had always been steadily created in the cauldron of modern capitalism with the United States government and its corporations using our land as its “bitch” without respect for the environment.

Academic studies show that almost every single river in Puerto Rico is now highly toxic and contaminated by all of the debris of the pharmaceutical companies that are located on the island, while the profits fly away to the mainland. 

Quieting of our Struggles

The nice manners and calm demeanor of many Puerto Ricans, to me, are a quiet way of carrying our history of massacres and constant surveillance of anyone who attempt to question or challenge the colonial system.

We have martyrs who gave up their lives trying to create a better life for the Puerto Rican people, but they are not celebrated like the US celebrates its founding fathers. We whisper the names of Albizu Campos and Ramon Emeterio Betances.

The continuous struggle for the country’s right to be independent is considered a marginalized note of a small group of people who don’t deserve to have their names remembered in history books.

A tropical island that imports most of its food is seriously a disgrace. As it is, the Jones Act of 1917 that establishes Puerto Rico as a “modern colonial model” by granting the Puerto Ricans American citizenship while eliminating any commercial venture of the island with any country that is not the United States.

So this Caribbean paradise, “La isla del encanto,” has been engulfed in a complex relationship with two of the most powerful empires of  the last 500 years, Spain and the US. The history of Puerto Rico has always been an afterthought or a just comment of the ancestry of celebrity singers.

Our Indigenous Narrative

Boriken, which is the original name of the island, was inhabited by natives called Tainos. Like the rest of the native population of the Caribbean, they were killed. They became extinct by the genocidal conquest of the Conquistadores led by Spain and other European countries.

Our country was “discovered” by Columbus in 1492. The Taino population was obliterated in less than 50 years. The Spanish empire brought West Africans to work in the plantations as part of the African Slave Trade. Like many countries in the Americas, the population in Puerto Rico became an amalgamation of diverse west African cultures, Tainos and Spaniards. The issue of controlled migration patterns is certainly an important topic that I would like to discuss in another article.

Puerto Rico was a colony of the Spanish empire from 1492 to 1898. The country was sold alongside the Philippines to the United States as a victory claimed of the Spanish-American-Cuban war.

The Puerto Rican people are unique. It is not an opinion, it is a fact.

We have been involved in the process of creating a national identity amidst the oppression of colonial occupation since 1492. Our character, history, and culture are a complex blend that illustrates individual and character development in spite of systemic efforts to destroy and suppress our growth and development as individuals as well as flourishing of our collective soul.

We were born from the lasting cry and struggle of our first inhabitants, the Tainos. They succumbed to the tyranny of a greed inspired genocidal conquest but their DNA is in our heart, blood and soul.

We were born from the creative spirit, sweat and struggle of the Africans who were kidnapped and enslaved for over 300 hundred years. We were born from the sweat of the Machetes of the jornaleros that cut the sweet sugar cane in the plantations. We were born from our desire to exist and thrive as a creative group of Caribbean people destined to be free.

I don’t pretend to explain or dictate what I think is the history of Puerto Rico. I just want to stress that it is essential to understand that historical conditions of one’s life influence who we are. As a  Puerto Rican of African descent who was born and raised in Puerto Rico and migrated to the United States in the 1980s, my life choices are better understood if I know the historical factors that contribute to the reality that continues to influence my life.

In order to understand who I am, I need to know the context of the history of my family and the history of my country and my culture. Only if I know the cultural and historical factors that contribute to shape and influenced my life can I have a better understanding of myself.

Only by knowing who “Iam” can I relate to the experiences that other people have. We all live in a small blue dot planet called Earth and it is only possible to coexist in a mindful way if we embrace our uniqueness in the majestic tapestry of similarities and differences that enrich our earthly life’s journey.

(About the author: Carmen Bardequez-Brown is a poet and teacher based in Hartsdale. Born and raised in Puerto Rico and educated in the US, she tackles the complexity and nuances of being a creature in both cultures of the East and West, the colonized and the colonizer, in her blog. The birth of this blog is brought about by Carmen’s desire to write and publish which is ushered in by the Aspiring Writers Mentoring Program of 2018.)