Puerto Ricans

PUYA and the boomerican generation

While I was hanging out in NYU's CLACS department with economists working at the UN Cuban Mission, advisors to the Sandinists, and your run-of-the-mill academia babes and nerds, Puerto Rico was starting to see the bounty that came out of the assimilation wars of the 1980s.

As a teenager growing up in Puerto Rico during the 1980s you had to make a choice between the rockeros or cocolos.

As a rockera, I would have had to hold myself up as an English-only, gringo loving, boricua denying, wanna-be whitey. As a cocola, I would be reaffirming my negritude, paying homage to my family and my country's salsa roots and more importantly, upholding my country's cultural heritage as a Spanish-only creation.

I was one of those, just like the founders of Puya, who didn't see it as an either/or proposition.

Pa tí, pa mí by Puya (Album: Union)

Yet this cultural tension was very real and it happened for a very specific historical reason.

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Words to live by

In the Post article, Maryscott says at least one thing that is both true and wise, which is that her rage and her blogging are both "born of powerlessness." The problem is that Lord Acton's maxim is equally true in reverse: If power corrupts, so does powerlessness. It can lead to fatalism, apathy and irresponsibility %u2013 or to paranoia, rage and a willingness to believe evey loopy conspiracy theory that comes down the pike.

The difference, I think, between left and right is that the right has no rational justification to feel any of these things, and yet many, if not most, conservatives continue to wallow in the mindset of a besieged minority.

Liberals, much less radical progressives, really are a besieged minority in this country. So why is it suddenly considered front-page news that they're acting like one?

The answer, of course, is that if the Maryscotts of Left Blogistan are evidence of the corruption of powerlessness, the Washington Post is proof positive of Lord Acton's original argument. Given everything that's going on around us, it's hard to imagine that anyone would believe the former is more of a threat to the republic than the latter. But I guess that's what the corruption of power is all about.

— Billmon, blog publisher
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