Agueybaná, Bayaguex, Guanina, Salcedo (2021)
From the archives this Indigenous Peoples Day 2025
I wrote this back in 2021, still in the throes of Wicked Flesh and beginning to think about the book I am currently writing. Beginning to think about what a land of women means and what it means to be a child of Utuado many times removed, many parts unknown.
In 2021, my mother’s mother, María Matos, was still alive.
Sharing that piece again here as I reflect on Indigenous Peoples Day and on all the complicated connections, missed connections, erasures, and missed memories that attend it for those of us belonging to the African diaspora, the Caribbean world, the Puerto Rican diaspora; the children of the survivors of overlapping hurricanes of slavery and conquest and Discovery.
It is important these days to name the fight, the way it extends across Black-led cities (one by one occupied or attempts being made to occupy or usurp them) to the Black South to Puerto Rico to Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Palestine and beyond. The struggle is against empire. And, with the planet itself under siege, the struggle is against extinction.
May we continue to fight. For the next world and for the world our children children’s children will inherit.