Decolonization is Imminent: Notes on Boricua Feminism

Decolonization is Imminent: Notes on Boricua Feminism

Heather Montes Ireland

In Rican feminist thought, decolonizing is not merely an approach, method, or exercise, but an ongoing way of life. From Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebron’s cry that she “came to die for Puerto Rico” to the signal from Boricua author Elizabet Velasquez that “staying alive, well, that too is Puerto Rican history,” Rican women have long struggled, resisted, and endured against colonial time. This “ongoing performance of bodily endurance” (Sandra Ruiz, 2019) under US colonialism, most recently marked by Maria, economic violence, the coronavirus pandemic, and femicide is a decolonial yearning, documented in the cultural work of Boricua women writers, artists, and activists. Boricua feminist thought, however, is largely absent in the academic feminist canon. In this paper, I argue Boricua feminism is not often interpolated as feminism since it does not resemble the expected, and particularly, Western, view of feminism as “women’s struggles against men and patriarchy,” though multiple patriarchies hinder the lives of Puerto Rican women and gender minorities. Rather, anticolonialism is at the forefront of Boricua feminist and queer struggles and subjectivities, yet is dislocated by these same lenses, and interpellated as not properly endemic to gender and sexual identity formations. Yet Boricua feminism is vital to decolonial feminist imaginings.

Keywords: Anticolonial / Boricua / Decolonial / Feminism / Puerto Rican / Queer

and that ever since Mami moved to New York

she’s spent her life just trying to survive the day.

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 18 –29

& if you think about it, really think about it, staying alive, well, that too is Puerto Rican history.

—Elisabet Velasquez, When We Make It (318)

In demanding space within the future, I also ask Latinx studies to continue remarking its spots, even if such markers land us on X. As a via negativa through the living death of colonialism, Ricanness is an intersubjective relational type of dreaming of an otherwise.

—Sandra Ruiz, Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance (29)

Puerto Rican independence ghter and revolutionary Lolita Lebrón stormed the US capitol in 1954. She aimed her gun not to shoot anyone, but at the housetop, where the sound of shots rang out from above the congressional chamber. Then she famously cried, “Viva Puerto Rico Libre!” while she and three other independence-movement comrades unfurled the Puerto Rican ag, the beloved and once outlawed emblem of a colonized people,1 to display boldly in the very seat of US empire. When apprehended, Lebrón was asked why she participated in the shooting. Lebrón stated that she did not come to kill anyone, rather she “came to die for Puerto Rico,” her homeland. Dressed rather ceremoniously in heels, a skirt suit, and pearl earrings, she was anticipating her own death, offering up her life in the ght for her people’s liberation and for her own freedom from colonial subjectivity in this life.

Though Lebrón’s actions were framed as an act of unjusti ed terrorism and feminized madness by United States imperialists, news media, and others sympathetic to US colonial pursuits, Puerto Rican studies scholar Sandra Ruiz (2019) disrupts these framings to expose how instead this act of de ance “shakes the very leveling ground of democracy, gender, race, sexuality and humanity [. . .] to transcend unsovereign oppression” (39). As Ruiz notes, Lebrón came to the capitol without harmful intent, “but to free herself of colonial domination” (35). Ruiz’s re-reading of Lolita Lebrón’s anti-colonial, revolutionary performance magni es the offering of her life as a colonial subject as that “prime example of those contingencies between death, colonial pathology, liberation politics, gender performance, and bodily endurance, as they sit at the center of Ricanness” (38). Lebrón and her death drive, according to Ruiz, is an act of a feminist revolutionary dealing a blow to the seat of US colonial power.

I begin with the story of Lolita Lebrón, one of the most revered Puerto Rican anti-colonial revolutionaries, and Ruiz’s re-reading, to illustrate the ways in which Puerto Rican feminism takes shape beyond the bounds of Western feminist interpolation. Throughout this essay, I argue that Puerto Rican feminist

thought, which I refer to as Boricua2 feminism, is not often interpolated as feminism when it does not resemble the expected, and perhaps moreover Western, view of feminism as women’s struggles against men, sexism, and patriarchy— although multiple patriarchies hinder the lives of Puerto Rican women and other gender minorities, and critiques of patriarchy are certainly vital to Boricua feminism. Rather, as anticolonialism is so often at the forefront of Boricua feminist and queer subjectivities, it is dislocated by these markers and indexed as not properly endemic to gender and sexual identity. Yet coloniality has been, and remains, pervasive in structuring gender and sexual formations, underlining, as critical Indigenous studies scholar Joanne Barker (2017) writes, “the importance of a critical address to the politics of gender, sexuality, and feminism within how sovereignty and self-determination is imagined, represented, and exercised” (7). Decolonization that does not account for the colonial gender/sex system will not serve the Puerto Rican women in the colony and throughout the diaspora who have long struggled, resisted, and endured against heteropatriarchy and/in colonial time. This “ongoing performance of bodily endurance” (Ruiz, 2019) under US colonialism, most recently marked by Hurricane Maria and other disasters,3 the coronavirus pandemic, austerity, privatization, economic violence, and femicide, is a decolonial yearning documented in the cultural work of Boricua feminist writers, artists, and activists. As Carmen Lugo-Lugo (2010) writes, “Puerto Rican women writers constantly reveal in their works the hidden connections between feminism and Puerto Ricanness” (118). Whether illuminated in poetry, prose, literature, and other cultural works, or through anti-colonial action and independence efforts, Puerto Rican feminists have exposed the speci c struggles of gendered colonial subjugation.

Boricua feminism further resists any misconceptions that coloniality is a thing of the past. As colonialism is a persistent and ongoing regime, it is a present reality in the lives of Puerto Rican women, gender-expansive, trans, and queer people. Nor is it solely a state of mind, but rather points to decolonization as an urgent, daily, embodied struggle. Bianca Graulau (2022), an independent Puerto Rican reporter and truth-teller, describes by video the experience of navigating colonial infrastructure amid consecutive climate disasters:

It’s day three without electricity in Puerto Rico, things in my fridge are starting to rot. [. . .] it’s too hot. I can’t turn on a fan; there’s no running water so going to the bathroom is a hassle. Can’t cook. And it reminds me of an interview I did after Hurricane Maria where someone said, “We’re used to not having these basic services at times, but when it’s everything all at once, your life and your day becomes about surviving.” [. .] People here are expected to afford their already costly lives, and on top of that, afford generators, the fuel for the generators, water reserves . . and, also, take these constant losses; there are people in the South [of the island] right now that lost everything.

In her video, “Sólo el pueblo salva al pueblo” (“Only the people can save the people”), Graulau further highlights the work of Puerto Rican community groups creating “community kitchens to feed their neighbors, handing out solar lamps [. . .] out of love.” It is this form of anticolonial love, creativity, and persistence that sustains the life of Boricuas in the colony, while colonial power produces conditions amenable to death and loss.

I contend that decolonizing is not merely an approach, method, or selfcontained exercise in Puerto Rican feminist thought, but an ongoing way of living, existing, persisting, and theorizing anti-colonial not-yet-futures. Decolonizing is not metaphorical4 (Tuck and Wang 2012) in Boricua feminist contexts, but rather is an embodied persistence and pressing-on, an imagining and enacting decolonization in circadian rhythms. Here, I point to decolonization within Puerto Rican feminist contexts, speci cally the ways Boricua feminism insists that decolonization happen now and in the not-yet-but-imminent decolonial future. The Puerto Rican queer and trans decolonial project Center for Embodied Pedagogy and Action [Descoloniza PR] (CEPA) explains that, for the colonial subject, decolonization “is a process that begins as a personal questioning of one’s conditioning (what we value, how we learn) and ends with the autonomy of our lands. Our body is the rst territory we can decolonize” (Rosario and Pat). Decolonization is a set of collective and individual embodied practices and theories within Boricua feminism that destabilize every facet of colonial power.5

Boricua Feminism’s Decolonial Critiques

Boricua feminism is vital to anti-colonial feminist struggles and decolonial imaginings. Boricua feminist thought, however, is largely absent in the academic feminist canon and has not been institutionalized along with Chicana/Latina studies, though Puerto Rican feminists have been writing for decades both alongside other feminists of color and within a Puerto Rican anticolonial literary tradition historically.6 While there is certainly much to offer decolonial feminist formations through questions of de-canonization itself, the absence of Boricua thought is glaring. These works are both there, and not there, as Puerto Rican feminists are always, already writing from places deeply attentive to overlapping issues of power and coloniality, gender and sexuality, race, geopolitics, and capitalism in generative ways that should inform feminist decolonial knowledges.7 According to Lugo-Lugo, Puerto Rican feminist writers “re ect the status of the island and the effects such status has on them as writers and as women” (110). And she says further: “In fact, these women are writing from overlapping subordinate positions, as women and as colonial subjects, where they experience a double dose of silencing and double invisibility. Moreover, it is also important to talk about the economic positioning of the island globally, the repercussions of such positioning for women on the island, and the ways in which contemporary women writers document this positioning in their works”

(2010, 110). Lugo-Lugo points out that the subjugation of Rican gendered colonial subjectivity is dually implicated, and as colonized women, an experience and critique of the “overlapping subordination” of colonialism and patriarchy is germane to Rican feminist theorizing. Yet, she also gestures to the ways the very silencing of colonial subjects through the colonial relation itself may also function in the suppression of Rican feminist thought. Perhaps it may be posed that if the subaltern is speaking, yet no one is listening, how might the condition of coloniality reify a silence around, and the abjection of, Puerto Rican feminist theories and subjectivities.

Puerto Rican feminist theory and cultural work is perhaps, as I have asserted, not always interpolated as feminism because of the centrality of colonialism to Puerto Rican subject formations, and similarly, there may also be ways that interpretations of coloniality and decoloniality operate to cover the revolutionary anticolonial8 imaginings of Boricua feminists. In this way, how we conceive of the colonial and decolonization will also change what is revealed. The anticolonial impulse is, as Torres writes in her examination of queer Puerto Rican memoir, also bound up for multiply minoritized colonial subjects with other affects, like shame, that are produced of colonization. The decolonial endurance that Ruiz speaks of is also an awareness of how shame “implicitly and explicitly conditions the articulation of Puerto Rican identity” (2009, 84), and that this is manifest in the ways that “Puerto Ricans are placed in a context where we are perpetually responding to shame” of colonial domination and a history of often forced, mass migration to the US (2009, 85). This co-thinking of shame and colonization, rather than replicating the longstanding pathologization of colonial subjects, it is instead a way forward in understanding how colonialized people live under generations of oppressive conditions which produce speci c Puerto Rican gender, sexual, and material formations, and how we might understand these as anticolonial.

Boricua feminism also expands the category, and proper objects, of feminism in nuanced ways, underscoring the mutuality and co-constitution of colonialism and heteropatriarchy. El Comité de Mujeres Puertorriqueñas, centering anticolonial and independence struggles in their work, demonstrates how critiques of ongoing US colonialism as oppressive to women are distinctive to Boricua feminism. In the essay, “In the Belly of the Beast: Puertorriqueñas Challenging Colonialism,” El Comité writes:

Our work has at its roots the conviction that to address issues affecting Puerto Rican women, we must seriously and systematically challenge the colonial relationship of the United States with Puerto Rico. Our understanding of the exploitation and racism that result from this colonial relationship shapes our political development and our consciousness as oppressed women. The oppression faced by women both in Puerto Rico and in the United States is a direct consequence of the political, economic, and military interests of

the US government. There is an urgent need for other women living in the United States to grasp this understanding and to join us in the struggle. (125)

Writing, as they also note, in a broader Latin American revolutionary anticolonial tradition, this Puerto Rican feminist collective explains the simultaneity of colonial, racial, and gender oppression for Puerto Rican women. In so doing, they call for US feminists to recognize, or “grasp,” not only their struggles as women under colonialism but, indeed, the struggle against US colonial rule and imperialism as a feminist struggle.

In their statement, El Comité also call upon an anticolonial feminist genealogy which includes writers and activists Luisa Capetillo, Julia de Burgos, and Lolita Lebrón—Puerto Rican women who have been “active voices in the national struggle against US presence and control in Puerto Rico” (131). In their expansive notion of feminism, they express and theorize how colonialism is responsible for the oppression of women, a paradigm that can be found articulated in the work of other Puerto Rican women writers as well. “Even though Puerto Rican women are in a precarious predicament vis-à-vis politics and the economy,” as Lugo-Lugo notes, “they have been active challengers of their unequal status, always resisting the structures that contribute to their subordination” (103) through writing, activism, and cultural work.

This distinctive Boricua feminist theorizing is also demonstrated in diasporic social and racial justice movements of Puerto Rican women in the US mainland, and as I would suggest, in the documents of the Young Lords movement. Puerto Rican women in the movement placed a critique of heteropatriarchy prominently in the organization’s 13-Point Program and Platform from its rst draft in October 1969, as they understood a uniquely gendered, colonial, and racial struggle from the very inception of the movement. Then, between the time of the original statement and the revised November 1970 platform, Puerto Rican women’s issues took an even greater prominence in the mission of the Young Lords organization, with the addition of this statement:

WE WANT EQUALITY FOR WOMEN, DOWN WITH MACHISMO AND MALE CHAUVINISM.

Under capitalism, women have been oppressed by both society and our men. The doctrine of machismo has been used by men to take out their frustration on wives, sisters, mothers, and children. Men must ght along with sisters in the struggle for economic and social equality and must recognize that sisters make up over half of the revolutionary army; sisters and brothers are equal ghting for our people.

FORWARD SISTERS IN THE STRUGGLE!

The focus of Boricua feminist activists and writers has linked colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, economic justice, with gender and racial injustices.

To further distinguish the Puerto Rican feminist tradition within a broader Latina feminist body of work, requires us to look for the “multiple insurgencies”

that Chicana historian Maylei Blackwell (2015) articulates, and to recognize the ways that colonialism has been and remains a gendered and sexual project. In Irene Vilar’s memoir Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict, she writes of sexuality, multiple pregnancies, abortions, and intergenerational trauma. For Vilar, the granddaughter of Lolita Lebrón, whose own mother died by suicide when she was only eight years old, colonialism is a main point of contention in her book as she discusses how frequently she sought abortion care, beginning when she moves to the United States as a teen. In a relationship with a man much her senior, she diverges from a neoliberal feminist narrative of individualized, private matters of reproductive choice to situate her story in the context of American imperialist exploitation of Puerto Rico, the intergenerational shame of gendered colonialism, reproductive injustice, bodily sovereignty, and the manifestation of layered forms of oppression against Puerto Rican women.

Colonialism and Boricua Queer Thought

Boricua feminist thought is also distinct from, though closely connected to, other Latina feminist traditions and theorizing. Examples of this are particularly salient in the contributions of Chicana work around sexuality, such as Chicana lesbian/queer feminist writings, as compared with Puerto Rican queer scholarship and cultural production. As Lourdes Torres (2009) points out, “a proliferation of writings by Latina lesbians has theorized issues of intersectionality; however, missing still are the voices and analyses of Puerto Rican lesbians who articulate the speci city of Puerto Rican gender, sexual, racial, national, and class dynamics similarly to the way that writers such as Moraga and Anzaldúa and others have done for the Chicana lesbian experience” (84), particularly as we think, theorize, and teach in the interdiscipline of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies.

Sexuality and queerness have operated as generative categories of analysis within Latina feminist formations. Chicana feminists have theorized sexuality in their work in dynamic ways.9 Queer Chicana writers, like Anzaldúa and Moraga, confront the pain of being marked an outsider to one’s nation as a Chicana lesbian subject. Chicana lesbian feminist thinkers have resisted the conventions of patriarchy as earlier Chicana feminists, while also railing against the nationalist constructions of the patriarchal family and the ways Chicana lesbians were seen as betraying the heteropatriarchal family. Where Anzaldúa (2012) writes of a queer borderlands consciousness that is developed from geopolitical and psychic borderlands, queer Puerto Rican lmmaker and scholar Frances NegrónMuntaner portrays the transformation into queer consciousness, simultaneously sexual and diasporic, of the Puerto Rican lesbian in her lm, Brincando el Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994). In an experimental mix of documentary and archival footage, ctional story, and soap opera-style vignettes, the lm tells the

story of Claudia, a light-skinned Puerto Rican woman and visual artist living in the United States. Negrón-Muntaner describes Claudia’s search for community and identity as a diasporic, queer Puerto Rican: “[h]ence what forces Claudia into a diasporic condition is [what] seemingly proves her the worst of the worst, a lover of women. La más mala” (516; emphasis in the original).10 She continues, describing Claudia’s queerness as exceeding the prevailing Western notions of the gay coming-out story: “Brincando el Charco is the rst narrative lm to have created a space for lesbian subjectivity in Puerto Rican cinema. Yet this subjectivity is not narrated as self-generating. Instead, it is radically impure and repeatedly fails to look at itself in a mirror and joyously exclaim, ‘It’s me! I’m out!’ Quite the contrary” (Negrón-Muntaner, 513). Where Chicana lesbians have been ostracized, seen as vendidas and traitors to the race and to family, Riqueña queer women have been propelled out of the homeland, as sexiles,11 to become diasporic subjects as have many other Puerto Ricans before. This Rican queer identity formation bares the shame of multiple expulsions, as queer and colonial subject.

A scene from Brincando al Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994) illustrates how colonialism is often at the forefront of Boricua queer struggles and identity formations, and how this interferes with the ways they are expected to de ne their sexual identities:

The protagonist of the lm, Claudia, is talking on the phone with her editor: [Claudia is in the dark room, exposing photographs, the phone rings, and she moves to pick it up]

Editor: Claudia, you know I’m really committed to increasing the visibility of gays and lesbians of color. And I truly like some of your stuff . . .

Claudia: But . . . ?

Editor: Well . . . well, the problem is if your genuinely interested in marketing yourself as a Latina lesbian artist, you’re just going to have to have to let go of certain issues.

Claudia: Like . . . ?

Editor: Well, for example: I can tell you that my readers are not concerned about colonialism. Unless, of course, they’re interested in the political implications of S&M relationships.

Claudia: [Frustratedly] What?

Editor: [Scoffs] Alright. This, this is exactly what I mean. I don’t know why you would start your book with an image of a seemingly straight man, carrying an American ag. What does that have to do with you as a lesbian? [Cuts to a screen with the question, what does that have to do with you as a lesbian?, repeated in white writing on a dark screen.]

Puerto Rican feminism and queerness must be understood as cohering around anti-colonialism, such that colonial oppression is theorized and understood as a racialized heteropatriarchal project.

Latina feminist philosopher Maria Lugones (2007) has explained how colonialism gave rise to a modern/colonial gender system, with attendant social and racial identities that permeate our lived existences, with a colonial state built as a power structure that created hierarchicalized gendered categories, upheld by heteropatriarchy, as a tool of social control. And as “gender itself is a colonial introduction” (Lugones 2008), and Puerto Rican feminisms, derived from the experiences and the enduring struggles of colonized women and gender/sexual minorities, are erupting from that place of enduring under gendered colonialism and bringing the anti-colonial into existence. As Lugones also cautions, this again does not intend to convey a move “to add a gendered reading and a racial reading to the already understood colonial relations” as she “proposed a rereading of modern capitalist colonial modernity itself” as a radical decolonial (re)arrangement of understood social power relations.

Analysis and issues of sexuality have also been pivotal to the composition of Latina feminisms broadly and are key, as well, to decolonial feminist formations.12 Today, queer Latin@ critique is emerging as a strong successor to these discourses and interventions. Conceivably, queer Latin@ studies will help shape the future of Boricua feminism, as well. In queer of color critique, the role of colonialism as shaping gender, sexual, and racial formations and systems is now a distinctive feature of the eld and a key intervention. Yet, this intervention has not necessarily been integrated wholly within feminist, gender, and sexuality studies and theories. Ruiz reminds us, though, that Ricans are still enduring, bringing an anti-colonial futurity into the present moment, and well as the notyet-here, despite the present moment that “is a site of terror for queer, Brown, minoritarian, colonized, Rican subjects” who are queerly situated while “engulfed by heteronormative strategies run by colonization, racialization, and sexualization” (29). As Ricans endure (under) colonial time, temporality is remade as “queer ways of being-in-the-world disorganize and reorient heteronormative ways of existence” (28). This reading reminds us that through Rican anti/decolonial and queer feminism and cultural work, decolonization is here, though it is notyet-now, it is imminent. It is in the “refuge” found in the “resilient dreaming” of Boricua feminists, along with and perhaps beyond the pain of now, as “time and its anxious residue sit at the very interior of queerness” (Ruiz 2019, 28). I offer these notes as a way of thinking about Boricua feminism and decoloniality. And with the traces of theorizing “from the glum reality of the present in a hopeful stance toward something better,” as Ruiz (2019, 29) remarks on the work of Jose Esteban Muñoz, it is with this moment’s hope that conversations on decolonial feminism will eventually always include the existence and theorizing of the colonial “unwanted being[s],” Puerto Ricans, enduring (anti)colonial time and creating our futures otherwise.13

Heather Montes Ireland (she/ella) is an assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and is af liated faculty in the Critical Ethnic Studies Program and the

Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. She is a queer CaliRican migrant to the Midwest, where she has lived for the past decade. Her research is focused on the interstices of racial capitalism, intersectional economic justice, anti-colonialism, poverty nance and welfare policy, and women of color studies. She is writing a monograph examining the cultural formation of entrepreneurialism as it has shaped anti-poverty policy, bearing consequences for the lives of low-income women of color in the United States and transnationally.

Notes

1. For approximately a decade beginning in 1948, Law 53: La Ley de la Mordaza or “Gag Law,” made it illegal to own or display the Puerto Rican ag, and to participate in independence activities.

2. Boricua is an anticolonial, de ant term for Puerto Rican people that expresses a uniquely Puerto Rican heritage, cultural identity, and relationship to the land and our ancestors pre-conquest. Derived from the Taíno word Boriken, this was the original name of the archipelago prior to the arrival of European settlers.

3. In September 2022, ten days post-Hurricane Fiona, hundreds of thousands in Puerto Rico are still without power, particularly in the south of the island. Five years after Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans living in the archipelago contend with daily power outages and the broken promises of the privatized power grid, LUMA Energy.

4. See Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s (2012) article for more on the topic of settler colonialism and a critique of decolonization as merely a metaphor for social justice. They write, “we want to be sure to clarify that decolonization is not a metaphor. When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future” (3).

5. Boricua feminist and queer decolonial practices are often manifested through creative ways of imagining a decolonial present and future otherwise. Practices include artistic and creative expressions, material and physical rhythms and bodywork, relationality with the land and food, Indigenous and African spiritual traditions, diasporic returns, political movements, communal care, pedagogical and theoretical insights, truth-telling, and many additional practices, in the archipelago and beyond.

6. Joanne Barker (2017) also describes how critical Indigenous studies has different origins from other ethnic studies, critical race, and diasporic studies elds, which “originated primarily with activists engaged in civil rights movements” (9) while Indigenous studies was concerned with “Indigenous peoples’ efforts to secure collective rights to sovereignty and self-determination [. . .]” (9). Learning from Barker, Puerto Rican studies’ central focus on the colonial condition crosses these intellectual and genealogical boundaries.

7. While Puerto Rico has imagined itself as a “racial democracy,” the legacies of colonialism and its highly strati ed Spanish racial categorization and “blood purity” ideations have bestowed the archipelago with a potent color caste system. Constructions of race and racism in the archipelago, and the Caribbean more broadly, have taken very different forms than in the United States with its policies of segregation, Jim Crow laws, and redlining, and therefore, US notions of race cannot be easily mapped onto a Puerto

Rican context. Additionally, many Puerto Ricans travel between the colony and the United States, which also impacts racial identity development. There is a robust body of scholarship on the politics of Puerto Rican race and ethnicity that is germane to my analysis here. For more on this topic, see Duany (2000), Negrón-Muntaner and Rivera (2007), and Rivera-Rideau (2015), among a growing body of literature.

8. As Ruiz makes clear, as we create paradigms and explicate de nitions, “[r]egardless of pre x, there is no get-away plan that erases the historical intensity and discursive practices of colonialism’s aggressive force” (2).

9. Chicana writers (Castillo; Lopez; Cisneros) have long theorized around sexuality, disrupting the iconography of Mexican/Latina womanhood as portrayed through the image of la Virgen de Guadalupe, for instance.

10. Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. “When I Was a Puerto Rican Lesbian: Meditations on Brincando El Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican.” GLQ New York. 5 (1999): 511–526.

11. See Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes “Queer Diasporas, Boricua Lives: A Meditation on Sexile” for a complete discussion of this queer Caribbean Latinx migrant formation.

12. Indeed, my hope is this essay will also open up space here to think/complicate the ways we conceptualize current forms of colonialism as extractive or settler, as technologies of current-day (extractive) colonialism, such as austerity policy and tax code, are producing colonial modes to approximate other forms of settler-colonialism (in places like Hawaii and Puerto Rico, as examples.) The Puerto Rican tax code at this time is designed to create what many Boricuas are calling “a Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans,” encouraging and incentivizing wealthy settlers to purchase Puerto Rican land. This has created not only dispossession but entirely different ways of relating to the land, as Puerto Ricans see the land, such as beaches, as public, while colonial actors know only privatization and pro t.

13. This essay’s decolonial efforts to highlight Boricua feminism are also written with an aim to “open possibilities of political solidarity against US and Canadian [and European] imperialism and colonialism” with colonized islanders and Indigenous peoples inside of the Caribbean and South and Central America (as well as outside, including Native Hawaiians, Pasi ka peoples, Native Americans and American Indians; as this is by no means an exhaustive list) in the heterogenous, collective, feminist and queer decolonization.

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