Return to Macondo
Susanne Ramírez de Arellano
Big is the Empire we battle, but bigger is our right to be free.
—Pedro Albizu Campos, leader of the Puerto Rican abolitionist movement
The plane glides low above the water and hugs the coast and its silvery ribbon of waves. I look out the window as we make the approach toward Luis Muñoz Marín Airport. The arrival never lessens my anticipation; it’s a bittersweet fragrance of mango and old love letters. I spy the rooftops among the mangrove swamps and the palm trees. I always imagine that if I stretch out just a bit—I can lay myself down in their green lushness. I can feel the heat, even inside this air-conditioned steel.
As we land, the passengers, mostly the sons and daughters of Borinquen returning home (and tourists dressed in tropical horror), applaud like mad. It is a loud, euphoric, I-am-finally-fucking-home applause. Like convicts being released after decades in solitary confinement. By the way, Borinquen is our real name.
This euphoria would never happen on a Virgin Atlantic plane landing at Heathrow, much less arriving in San Salvador in the midst of a civil war.
I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the Palestine of the Caribbean. It’s an island that has been passed around for centuries by colonizing powers, like the dregs of war, or one of those busty Victorian prostitutes on the BBC. You know the ones I mean. The ones you would never see in Downton Abbey having tea with Lady Mary Crawley.
Many people associate Puerto Rico with Macondo, that mythical village imagined by the great Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez—a pottage of colonialism, banana plantations, pirates, and revolutions.
My Puerto Rico is one of tastes and smells. I grew up cloistered with coconut kisses, guava and cheese pastries, tuberoses, and my aunts. Do you remember those mango trees just to the left of the front porch of Titi Margot’s house? The Reinita birds—“Little Queen” in Spanish—perched daintily on the laden branches, content to sing all day long, as the mangoes fell heavily down to the ground. Plop, plop, thump.
I undressed them one by one while keeping a rhythm in my aunt’s favorite rocking chair. Slow and quiet—like a mantra—back and forth, peel, back and forth, peel. The fruit was soft to the touch, and the shape of a woman about to give birth. The honeyed smell hung in the air as it was torn open—one bite transformed a mango into your madeleine cake forever, the juice sticking your fingers together like glue.
My other special place to sit was under a tamarind tree, its branches spread out until they almost touched the river below. Sitting under its shade, I would crack the hard, brown skin of the tamarind and bite down—a rush of lemon, apricot, and date.
At four o’clock in the afternoon—“merienda” hour—my aunt, when she wasn’t knitting or reading cowboy novels, would strain coffee in a sock and serve it in a big cup with mallorcas, sweet breads shaped like a snail’s shell that tasted of buttery egg, crowned with powdered sugar.
I’d pick them up ever so slowly so as not a grain of sugar was lost. Rice would be steaming on the stove and the beans soaking in salt water in a bowl on the counter, next to a platter of green bananas pickled in onion and garlic.
And at night, a beautiful gold and lapis lazuli statue of the Virgin Mary, with a silver crown on her head, safe from little hands under a crystal dome, stood guard on my nightstand. As long as she was there, all was right with the world. But I still had Yemaya, the African goddess of the sea and the moon, tucked under the bed to ensure more than just divine intervention. You can never have too much luck.
This is home. This is the center of all things, the core of me. An island with a deep-seated pride and a sometimes unimaginable magical reality, made even more phantasmagorical by our colonial history. A place where time flows, stops, and reverses and anything is possible. When I say “anything,” I mean anything—because in Puerto Rico the dead go to meet their maker dressed as Green Lantern or El Che. They also vote.
And what is the natural soundtrack to all of this? Our national pastime: politics. Endless debates on politics and the island’s status: is she or isn’t she a colony, a state (of the United States) in waiting, or—that love that dare not speak its name—independent. Round and round, the debates go, in the living room, at family gatherings, on the radio, and on television—morning, noon, and night.
In political terms, Puerto Rico is not a circus, because it can’t afford the tent. It sits stewing in a colonial limbo, hanging on a thread, eaten by men with money bags.
But this is not the Puerto Rico you read about in the United States of America. Not at all. We are, in the words of its fearless leader, a shithole nation.
We are billed as lazy, second-class citizens from an island in the middle of a huge ocean. A bit of “This is mine ’cause I won it in a crap shoot with those Spaniards, although what the fuck do I do with it?” Where you go in your imperial splendor (and that hair—it looks like a feral cat on his head) to throw bog rolls at people who have lost everything and where Wall Street is the United Fruit Company of its time.
My Puerto Rico sits in jarring contrast to the one portrayed in West Side Story by Rita Moreno, complete with exaggerated accent and swirling skirts, as she sings “America”—while the Sharks dance like mad urban urchins in the background.
Let’s stop here for just a bit of history to put it into context. Not much, just enough so you can see how fucking complicated this colonial thing is.
Puerto Rico was force fed four centuries of colonialism courtesy of the Spanish Crown and then shitkicked into modernity by the spit-shined boot of America. First sepias, then red, white, and blue were scratched on our national soul—in an attempt to forever alter the daguerreotype.
It was 1898, and General Nelson Miles of the US Army impaled us with the Stars and Stripes, telling the island’s inhabitants that the United States had arrived “to bring you protection, not only to yourselves but to your property, to promote your prosperity…and to give…the advantages and blessings of enlightened civilization.” Sure, especially to protect your property. The last time Puerto Rico was free and enlightened, the Taino were in charge.
The Americans called the invasion their Manifest Destiny. Something like a God-given right to take what wasn’t theirs. How that differs from imperialism, I will never know.
I never bought into the American Dream. It was a visceral reaction. This dream always had the rank smell of bullshit to me. I didn’t believe it, no matter what new toothpaste or amazing trip to the moon they were selling. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the shadow of the Cuban Revolution, Vietnam, Cerro Maravilla, and Martin Luther King Jr.—shit that would give you a sharp sense of the ridiculous.
Growing up with all of this around me made me a rebellious and opinionated colonial subject, one who devoured Pablo Neruda and El Principito and read the revolutionary writings of the Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez.
As they say at home, “Yo nunca me comí el cuento” (I never ate the story), that fable of the Land of Milk and Honey. It was too sugary and cloying, like the ending of a bad Hollywood movie. I could not see myself as a US citizen—and a lesser one at that. I knew somewhere there was a catch, but it was hard to discern where among all the convoluted explanations and justifications. I carried a US passport, but I was called an immigrant. I couldn’t vote in their elections, so therefore I had no representation, yet we fought their wars. Who can forget Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman—“Ah, Puerto Ricans, they make the best infantry men.”
I was expected to turn myself inside out, forget where I came from, and pledge allegiance to a flag that was not mine. But the Cubans had shown us that we could stand up, that we could be something more than just second class, more than “spics” in a movie, more than “savages” the Americans just had to civilize.
My father thought I was a Communist, referring to me as an air-conditioned socialist. To Don Lorenzo Ramírez de Arellano, the two were the same thing, and America was Mecca.
“Te voy a mandar a cortar caña en Cuba con los Guccis puestos,” he would say—I am going to send you to Cuba to cut cane wearing your Guccis. Because being sent to cut cane in Cuba in expensive footwear was the worst thing that could ever happen to a human being, especially a privileged Puerto Rican like me.
But I knew something was rotting in the Potomac. There was something off, discordant, not right. The beginning of my career as a journalist would provide the concrete evidence I was looking for, that truth buried inside the colonial explanations of my ancestors.
I arrived in El Salvador to cover the end of the civil war. Young and inexperienced, Salvador would teach me how to be a journalist. It would teach me fear—the cold sweat trickling down your back kind. Leaden drops of dread in a country that Washington heralded as a democracy.
Walking through the arrival gate at the airport, the heat hit me like a punch in the face. A fine mist wallpapered the air and stuck to everything—my clothes, hair, and face—and went right up my nose, making it hard to breathe.
Looking for my ride, I passed poster after poster of children with crutches or prosthetic limbs, victims of land mines supplied to the Salvadoran military by Uncle Sam. This way to hell, but watch your step.
How to describe the savagery that was El Salvador at that time, where the music of the day was gunfire and helicopter blades, slicing through death and heat? Where life was the cheapest I had ever seen it?
We were traveling to cover an exhumation, which would give me my first eyeball contact with brutality in this Central American nation since accepting the job of El Salvador bureau chief for the wire service United Press International. It took place in a town outside the capital San Salvador. The story was this: ten people had been executed in an attack. The FMLN, the Salvadoran guerrillas, claimed that the military had done it, that they had rounded them all up, tied them together, opened fire, and lobbed hand grenades at them. The military claimed that the rebels had done it, in much the same way. The dead had been interred for more than one week. Much like a Fellini film, the exhumation was being done by two of the town drunks, bottles in hand as they dug the bodies out.
Out of the blue, a Francis Ford Coppola–esque vision caught my eye. He was dressed all in black, classic Ray-Bans shading his eyes, unshaven, a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. His T-shirt read simply NAM. He was sitting on the side of a dirt road next to a makeshift bodega, a case of beer by his feet. Shouting and spraying spittle into a walkie-talkie, he directed the chopper traffic that was ferrying Salvadoran soldiers attacking a town close by. The dead and the soon to be dead.
I asked what he thought of the war. He smiled.
In a voice best suited to Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, he said: “Ah, best little war in town.”
I half expected him to follow it up with “You smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing in the world smells like that.” The gringos fucking love that smell. It validates them.
Fresh from their Vietnam acid trip, the United States felt it had the right to intervene in El Salvador. It financed and orchestrated the destruction of its civilian population, arming a right-wing government in its fight against Marxist guerrillas—to torch what it saw as a Communist contagion in the region. (God forbid, no more Cubas, no more Fidel Castros.)
More than 75,000 civilians died at the hands of government forces during twelve years of war, one fought via a diplomacy by death squads. The Americans taught the Salvadoran army how to kill like the Vietcong.
Today, despite the carnage, not much has changed in El Salvador. It is still one of the most homicidal places on earth. In 2015, 324,000 Salvadorans were displaced by crime and violence. Most Americans couldn’t find El Salvador on a map and couldn’t care less that Washington is the reason Salvadorans are fleeing to the United States in the first place. These Salvadorans are mostly women and children who risk everything to escape death at the hands of violent “maras”—modern-day death squads, born out of that little guerra and trained on the streets of Los Angeles that now visit terror on their own people.
Immigration is retribution; it’s payback for the killing fields of Washington. But the legacy of that little war is now small children held in cages in detention centers in Texas. The separation of families. As Trump moves to end immigration protection and build a wall to keep out what Uncle Sam wrought, 200,000 Salvadorans may be forced to leave the United States.
After my work in El Salvador, I got the Holy Grail, an opportunity to work with a US network, one of the most powerful and influential at the time. They hired me straight after my stint at the little war; they said they loved my work in El Salvador.
I had to sign a bunch of papers, tick a number of boxes (you know how Americans love boxes). There was one for African American, another for White, yet another for Hispanic, and then there was Other. Shit. I was Puerto Rican, so that was Hispanic; I was White, so that was not Hispanic—and Other? No, I didn’t think I was Other—although my background would suggest otherwise.
“What do I tick?” I asked the lovely man who was to be my boss.
“Oh, that’s easy,” he said with a crooked smile. “You are a twofer. You just sign here and here.”
A twofer, I thought. What the fuck is that—a disease? Or does this shit come with magical powers?
“No, you tick Hispanic and then Female. We get two for one in you—a real complete package.”
Bloody fantastic, the colonial schizophrenia of Macondo with which I grew up followed me everywhere. Thanks, García Márquez.
A colony sells its soul slowly, in increments, over time. Our past is relegated to oblivion, and we’re told (in my case, by the nuns) that the island had no history. But I never believed what the nuns taught. How could anyone take gospel from women dressed as penguins in the Caribbean sun?
Recently, Hurricane Maria demonstrated what the US thinks of Puerto Rico. Around 3,000 people died as a result of this catastrophic event—an American tragedy, supposedly.
As the late, great Anthony Bourdain wrote, “It has been six weeks since the hurricane, and 70 percent of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million American citizens are still without power. About 25 percent are without fresh drinking water—people are drinking from streams and other contaminated sources. They are burning their dead. This is, of course, unthinkable. And grotesque. It is also true.”*
But did the White House give a shit? Not a toss. Why? Because Puerto Rico is a colony and its citizens are mostly brown people—the “mass of mongrels…hostile to Christianity,” in the words of a US senator at the time of the conquest, those invisible men and women of Ralph Ellison.
Again, Bourdain (a Good Gringo in my book) wrote with eloquence and a keen understanding: “How American is Puerto Rico? How American do they want to be?
“And how does the rest of America feel about Puerto Rico? How much responsibility are Americans willing to take for their aspirations, their well-being, their basic rights as humans, as citizens? The answer to that last question appears to be: not much.”**
Even before Maria, we were in the crapper. Puerto Rico was already $73 billion in debt and bankrupt. Hurricane Maria made the situation worse. A record number of people have since left the island. Puerto Rico, once the US showcase in the Caribbean, is now a colonial embarrassment.
After Maria, all the pain and humiliation that cut a deep groove through the years molded into anger with a purpose, a sharper focus. It was a coconut of anger, designed to split open and reveal the truth when you threw it to the ground.
Colonialism has fucked us up. It feels like forced prostitution, a gulag of the soul. We’re left confused, like we landed in an alternate universe where we’re not us but what someone else determined we are.
And this is exactly why I hate West Side Story, and in particular the song “America,” in which the refrain, sung by Anita (played by Rita Moreno in dark makeup and with a cartoonish accent that Moreno later said made no sense at all), insists that Puerto Rico is an island that should sink into the ocean, and that we would all “like to be in America” because “everything is free in America.”
My riposte? The truth, as sung by Bernardo (played by Greek American George Chakiris, also in brownface): “Life can be bright in America, if you can fight in America, if you are white in America.” Now, that is more like the reality as it stands today.
America is now a place, as the Rufus Wainwright song goes, that has already been burnt down, a place that has already been disgraced. The world, who loved you well, is now tired of you, America.
But for Puerto Ricans who have an opinion and demand a say in their future, this is the Golden Ticket. For it seems that at this juncture the United States no longer needs the adornments of a colony. In fact, Puerto Rico, waterlogged, broke, and in the dark, is now seen by the White House as fit for a fire sale.
This is the time and place where it all should end. We must admit to ourselves—once and for all—that we are the masters of our own destiny. “Redemption,” “freedom”…these are words you can taste, as sweet as a mango. It is when people lose everything that they truly know their worth.
Above all, we are an island nation with a desire to be free of this colonial bullshit. Oh, that I live to see our self-determination. And may we always remain a bit like Macondo.
*Anthony Bourdain, “Bourdain’s Field Notes: Puerto Rico,” November 1, 2017, https://explorepartsunknown.com/puerto-rico/bourdains-field-notes-puerto-rico.
**Ibid.