A Letter of Power for Puerto Rican Day
My first time traveling to the homeland was in August 2020 during the Black Lives Matter uprising. I was shocked to find that even two years after the Hurricane, the island was still recovering, thanks to the natives that nurture it. Just a year after the island had gotten together to overthrow their governor Ricardo Rosselló, and at the finale of the Trump Administration, the island's proclamation for abolition had not subsided in the least. Murals decorated the city with Black and White Puerto Rican Flags, paired with names of Trans and Black Puerto Ricans murdered written in chalk. These memorials were met with dozens of candles, flowers, and an overwhelming sense of mourning. I thought about how similar our grief was from the states to the island, and what that meant to the overall feeling of Puerto Ricans worldwide.
I made this series based on abolition. A concept of defunding the government ran police departments and redistributing those tax dollars to trained workers to tackle specific human needs. The issue in the states and the homeland is that the police and the government have yet to see us as people worth protecting. This lack of trans protection is not even a money issue, it's an ethics issue. There is a massive Trans Health Care crisis happening not only in Puerto Rico but here in the state. This issue arises from a lack of physical spaces for trans folk to receive proper physical and mental health facilities but goes deeper. We are being attacked by the same people who are paid to protect us.
According to a study by Sheilla L. Rodríguez-Madera and the National Institute of Drug Abuse, out of 59 trans women studied, 83% have witnessed violence towards another trans member and from that percentile, 43% experienced violence from the police when reporting. This isn't the first study or documentation of the police actively ignoring trans violence on the island either. In fact, many trans locals refer to a section 2 miles off of San Juans Capital as an area where police take trans women to sexually assault them. This forces trans folk in the homeland to hide from the police, and practically erases any aid they could receive. In 2018 CBS News interviewed the PR Police Department where a panel of all women talked about how there are “No Numbers'' of trans people being abused by officers, and although this is true technically, it's a fault because the police abuse simply new documents their crimes according to local trans activists.
Ultimately, the trans health care crisis is an ethics issue, because the people in charge of protecting us don't meet our values. With a rise in Trans homicides in the homeland and the states, I just couldn't participate in another Puerto Rican pride that was in conjunction with these aggressors. Instead of marching beside police that'll wave flags during our parade and still sexually assault our sisters in the dark, I choose to be bold like my island and recognize they do not protect us. Instead of allowing colonists to move into my indigenous space and frack our land for natural resources, I choose to dismantle my island and overthrow any leader that doesn't protect us. Instead of sexualizing and pushing our trans & cis women for public display, I choose to be a warrior like my island and fight for the equity of all femme-identifying folk.
It doesn't matter if you are on the island, or in the states, you are Puerto Rican and you are strong. We over through our governor, we over through our president, and there is nothing we can't do if we unite. We can't wait for the states to keep us safe, we keep ourselves safe. This safety starts with love, intersectionality, unbiased community gathering, and living. So this Puerto Rican day, I want you to be as loud, black, trans, classic, indigenous, and as Boricua as you can. For the friends we lost, they live through us so make it worth it.
