Olga Dies Dreaming(65)
“A few weeks later, I got another letter. She was curious what I thought about the books, and she invited me to write to her. She gave me a name and address of a person—I don’t remember who or where, because it would always change—but she had people willing to receive mail for her. She instructed me not to use a return address, and to mark the envelope with a small black triangle, so that this person would know the letter was for her.”
“And so, you wrote to her?” Olga asked, flatly.
“I wrote to her. I had been really moved by her letter, by the essays, and mostly by the poems. I read Puerto Rican Obituary at least a hundred times and I was embarrassed to see myself in it. I hated the way we lived when I was a kid, piled into a fucked-up apartment in the Bronx, cleaning up after people, the only things to show for it some scratch-off tickets, everyone dreaming of going back to some island I’d barely known. I wanted the American dream. I wanted the house on Long Island, I wanted to be on the all-white block. I didn’t realize I was rejecting myself, my own heritage.
“I wrote her all this and she sent me more books and the letters and things continued for a while—for years, actually—”
“So you became pen pals? You and my mother.”
“At first. Then, after that whole thing happened and I began to publicly claim my heritage more, she sent me a note. She felt it was time for me to go beyond general education and become more proactive. She told me to reach out to Karen.”
“My aunt Karen?”
“Yes. So, this is how I know Karen. I went to pay her a visit and it was actually Karen who told me about the Pa?uelos Negros. Who invited me to join.” He went to take another sip of his rum, but Olga stopped him before he started talking again.
“What the fuck is that? Black bandanas?” She shook her head but did not raise her voice.
“Well, you said you didn’t want me to get political in talking about this.”
“I just wanted you to talk to me like a fucking person, whose life this affects, not like you’re trying to recruit me into a revolution.”
He looked at her and shrugged.
“Lo mismo, ?no?”
“Reggie, just fucking tell me what this thing is.”
“The media wants everyone, especially people on the island, to think that an independent Puerto Rico is a fringe fantasy that only radicals subscribe to. That the real force is behind the centrists who want statehood.”
Olga was at the end of her patience but promised herself not to interrupt until Reggie was done.
“And with good reason. In the eighties and nineties the government, in cooperation with complicit Puerto Rican sellouts on the island, systemically stymied a strong and growing independence movement. They imprisoned all of the leadership, branded them terrorist organizations, drove people underground. Those they couldn’t imprison they drove into hiding in the mountains of the island. But, as you know, Olga, the wealthy and powerful are lazy, and think that if you can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Back in oh-five, the Feds finally managed to assassinate Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, the most visible revolutionary that Borikén had known in modern times. He’d evaded their capture for nearly fifteen years, in small towns, in the mountains, sometimes in the bigger cities. With his assassination, every leader of every public movement for independence was either dead or in jail. Or so the government thought. And with no visible resistance, they were able to further pillage and sell off our island to the highest bidder.
“This was the White Man’s fatal flaw. They murdered Ojeda Ríos, thinking that the idea of the revolution lived within one man, without ever stopping to consider how he had evaded them for so long. Do you understand what I mean?”
“The people,” Olga said. “The people helped him hide.”
“The jíbaros. The regular country people, for years, shrugged their shoulders when agents would come around asking about this man. ‘No sé, no sé,’ they would say. They adored him, they took pride in his ability to evade the law, because they knew this was foreign law that was looking for him. They understood that he was standing up for them, even if they couldn’t articulate it. It didn’t have to do with him and his personality, it had to do with an idea.”
Reggie’s argument had become abstracted again; she was on the verge of losing patience.
“The people who followed Ojeda Ríos were devastated by his loss and all of Puerto Rico was mourning. We were too blind with grief and anger to see that the revolutionary spirit had already taken root on the island. But not your mother. Your mother saw the opportunity there, and despite putting herself at risk of the law, she made her way back to Puerto Rico to help her people. Revolution, in the past, was meant to be armed. Acts of war and protest claimed by an organization—FALN, the Boricua Popular Army. Your mother, however, understood that such public organization only put a target on our backs and that revolution in the digital age could look different. This is how the Pa?uelos Negros were born.
“Our name comes from the bandanas we wear whenever we might be out in public. We don’t even really want to know who our own membership is. Perhaps your mother is the only one who knows every member of our movement.”
“So, if you aren’t violent, what do you do?”
“I didn’t say we aren’t violent, Olga. I just said that revolution is different now.”