Time For Diasporicans To Weigh In.

Bad Bunny's Short Film and American arsonist sets fire to several businesses in Puerto Rico.

Often times I feel like I’m in the center of a circle of people who are all arguing with each other over how I should identify. While I stand silently in the center of the chaos, I’m watching a new invasive species take over the island of Puerto Rico. I can see them in the near distance sneakingly moving borders with their bulldozers. Driving ATVs on the beaches where endangered species have returned for generations. Crushing sea turtle shells with the wheels of their dune buggies, American flag tied to the roll bar and flaccidly flapping in the wind as they zip by. Quintessential 90s Cobra Kai mullet villains in oversized Jose Canseco Polarized specs. And all with the approval of the people in government who look exactly like them.

Their extremities move like vines and swallow up everything in sight suffocating native species until even the ruins are destroyed, forgotten and used as a foundation for the new civilization who will inevitably excavate pieces they’ll display in a museum built on the site.

The few locals who do notice just stand by and smile so they can be accommodating in the way Puerto Ricans are known for being “so warm and welcoming.” Or, maybe they’re just too tired from the constant battle of colonialism the way I have turned my head from reading listening to the news because it’s been a constant source of a mysterious abdominal pain since 2016. For the most part, no one else around me notices because they’re too busy arguing over the dividing lines of an antiquated caste system, furthering the assignment of the colonizer some 500 years later. “She’s Puerto Rican. She’s not Puerto Rican.” “She’s Black. She’s not black.” “She’s Afro-Boricua. She’s not Afro-Boricua.”

Puerto Rico. A complicated place with a complicated people who cannot be categorized within the confines of the neat and tidy structure of ink-filled squares on paper.

Diasporicans are not often invited to the Boricua party. Every year I watch my social media mutuals get invited to the Puerto Rican Day Parade. Most of whom don’t live in New York. I’ve never been invited. We do not get to contribute to the conversation of what happens to the island. An island not unlike Hawai’i, but an island unlike anywhere else. An island with complexity and beauty.

I try to remember my happy place when I find myself in the middle of the crowd and I want to scream, “Fine! Fuck it!” in response to being shut out and shut down when vowing my love for my mother’s homeland.

We want the same things. We want a Puerto Rico that belongs to Puerto Ricans who don’t treat the island like a business acquired by a private equity firm. Why bother to waste time fighting each other over who is more Puerto Rican? Do we not both deserve to decide the future of Puerto Rico?

After this person and I exchanged some words in the thread, she left me a private message:

"Because we make a U.S. salary, us [Diasporicans] buying land or homes [in Puerto Rico] is actually causing the cost of housing to go up. It’s just something to think about."

My thoughts? The shit is gonna get bought up any fucking way. Some of us know that the people in power aren’t going to acquiesce to guilt and stop buying up land…why should we?

Then I was called a “gentefier.”