Let us discuss coloniality/colonialism in the19th Century and make it relevant for us today – for our struggles today. I pursue this invitation for us to take a look at the subaltern, without presuming its immediate and automatic application to our day-to-day lives. Nonetheless, underscoring that what we consider to be ourselves is included/linked/connected to that “other”. That “othering” process, and by default the creation of our identities, shifts through time and space. It constitutes the realities that we as a human species have lived and continue to live. The vicissitudes constitutive to our existence will not be overcome by a simple acknowledgement of the toxicity of this “othering” process or by the discursive juggling of simply stating “all of us are us, the other does not exist”. These epistemic and discursive shifts should be made conscious and we should strive to do so, but these epistemic and discursive shifts, in and of themselves, will not change lived reality.
The remembrance invitation I am extending is the underscoring of the births of two valiant activists from that northeastern Caribbean archipelago that has come to be known as Puerto Rico. These two men are Don Ramón Emeterio Bentances (born in April 8, 1827) and Don Segundo Ruiz Belvis (born in May 13, 1829). Yes, they were Puerto Ricans. They embraced a vision of a people that came to be known as Puerto Ricans. Their vision was not nationalism for nationalism’s sake. Without arguing or underscoring an absolute pristine foresight, their struggle and the movement that they dedicated their lives to, strived to liberate a people.
Nevertheless, their struggle, although centered on the Puerto Rican colonial reality, strived to transcend it. They were men of their time, identifying injustices that ran havoc throughout day-to-day existence and framed them to create a movement that would advance the liberation of humanity because they understood well what has become more common knowledge today – exemplified in Nelson Mandela’s teachings: “I am not truly free if I am taking someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.” Thus, they struggled to break the colonial bondage imposed on people from the Caribbean and Latin America. Nonetheless, they did not naïvely encapsulate the struggle through an underscoring of homogeneity. The abolition of slavery, and the racial repression underlying it, was part and parcel of their quest for decolonization.
Slavery has been abolished. Formal colonies, per se, do not exist. Legal (overt) racism, exclusion has been eliminated. Nonetheless, we still see and experience suffering, repression, exclusion throughout the world. This is true in the so-called “developed” and “developing” world. Of course, the specificities of these exclusions vary. They are different. But we need to be cautious of becoming over-complacent with supposed successes. These successes have an intrinsic toxic “othering” process. I am not dismissing the insights that can arise from comparisons across time and space, but what I would highlight as dangerous is deducing from those comparisons better and worse exclusionary outcomes. They should be categorized as different for understanding and subverting purposes, but we should not think of them as better or worse. Doing so would basically truncate our possibility as a species to transcend our exclusionary fragmented realities. We would also be doing a disservice to our imagination of experiencing a deep and strong walk through this so-called thing known as life.
Thus, by remembering Don Ramón Emeterio Betances and Don Segundo Ruiz Belvis, we do remember a past struggle. We do remember the 19th Century. We do remember the Caribbean. We do remember Puerto Rico. But beyond that, we should remember them in context and in connection with humanity’s continuing struggle and quest for liberation and addressing the challenges that each generation is confronted. And maybe the epistemic and discursive shifts will start to become more than just an intellectual exercise and become constitutive of our experienced and reflected lives as part of that fragmented proto-family known as humanity and its plethora of fragments. And let us not forget what Jacques Derrida once stated, “Every culture is colonial in its origins.” Our walk through life continues. Let us just remain mindfully present while we walk.
