About twenty years ago, I purchased a copy of Boricuas: Influential Puerto Rican Writings – An Anthology which is a wide-ranging collection of essays, speeches, fiction, and poetry by some prominent Boricuas that includes Pedro Albizu Campos, Luis Muñoz Marín, Julia de Burgos, and Miguel Algarín to name a few. I remember that I purchased it on a Thursday night, started reading it on a Bronx bound 2 train and by Sunday night I had read it cover to cover. Edited by Roberto Santiago, I was drawn in by his introduction where he detailed his own explorations of what it meant to be a Boricua through the constant contradictions in his education.
Racism either makes you withdraw from yourself, hate yourself, or discover yourself. It was in the solitude of the Aguilar Library on 110th Street between Lexington and Third Avenue that I discovered myself through an odyssey of pain. Driven to book by the hatred and ignorance all around me, I read to survive.
Every few years I return to this book, and it is often because of the hatred and ignorance that seems to be overwhelmingly amplified lately. I wanted to share some of my favorite passages and quotes with hopes that you are inspired to buy a (printed) copy and increase and spread your book wealth and improve your mental health!
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The United States controls our economy, our commerce, Puerto Rico must determine a price for its products that is acceptable to the United States, while the United States issues their products to Puerto Ricans at a rate that is comfortable to its own manufacturers and not the Puerto Rican consumer. The result is exploitation and abuses perpetrated at will, resulting in poverty for our people and wealth for the United States.
-Excerpt from a 1936 speech given before the Associated Press by Pedro Albizu Campos and translated by Roberto Santiago titled, “Puerto Rican Nationalism.”
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Los Macheteros agree that they are first and foremost revolutionaries of the mind. They are at war with the personal consequences of colonialism, and their actions cannot be understood until we recognize that they are reacting to the images — of the inferior, impotent, docile Puerto Rican.
The Korean War had absolutely no bearing on any islander’s life; Puerto Ricans had no right to vote in the federal elections that elected the representatives who decided where they were to risk their lives; and politicians like Albizu Campos told anyone willing to listen that Puerto Ricans were being shipped to Asia in numbers way out of proportion to their percentage of the total population. That islanders were used as cannon fodder in Korea is still a very touchy topic among independentistas. Yet Puerto Ricans not only showed up to fight, they consistently received awards for heroism in the service of American interests.
That sheepishness, turned upside down, is the self-destructive behavior manifested by the old-line nationalist movement.
– Excerpts from “Los Macheteros” by Ronald Fernandez
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The first thing we must realize is that the Puerto Ricans have been exploited for hundreds of years. That strangers have been knocking at the door of the Puerto Rican nation for centuries, always in search of something, to get something or to take away something from Puerto Ricans. This has been done many times with the forceful and openly criminal way of the pirate.
Pirates with such tragically “illustrious” names as Cumberland and Drake. In one of those pirates’ assaults around the middle of the seventeenth century, the bells of the cathedral in San Juan, Puerto Rico, were stolen and sold by one of their buccaneer ships in a little town known as New Amsterdam, just being built along the shores of the Hudson River.
So, in the words of one of my Puerto Rican friends, when one of those 200 percent Americans asks us why do Puerto Ricans have to come to New York? We can answer: “We come to take back our bells.”
– Excerpt from “How to Know the Puerto Ricans” by Jesus Colon.
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I was born a white girl in Puerto Rico but became a brown girl when I can to live in the United States.
In the animal world it indicates danger: the most colorful creatures are often the most poisonous. Color is always a way to attract and seduce a mate. In the human world color triggers many more complex and often deadly reactions.
– Excerpts from “The Story of My Body” by Judith Ortiz Cofer
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Courtesy is a characteristic of the Puerto Rican. And here I was — a Puerto Rican — hours past midnight, a valise, two white children and a white lady with a baby on her arm palpably needing someone to help her at least until she descended the long concrete stairs.
But how could I, a Negro and Puerto Rican, approach this white lady who very likely might have preconceived prejudices against Negroes and everybody with foreign accents, in a deserted subway station very late at night?
– Excerpt from “Little Things Are Big” by Rene Maques
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Juan
died waiting for his number to hit
Miguel
died waiting for the welfare check
to come and go and come again
Milagros
died waiting for her ten children
to grow up and work
so she could quit working
Olga
died waiting for a five dollar raise
Manuel
died waiting for his supervisor to drop dead
so he could get a promotion
Is a long ride
from Spanish Harlem
to long island cemetery
where they are buried
– Excerpt from “Puerto Rican Obituary” by Pedro Pietri
Edwin Roman 