Blogging Puerto Rico

It's in moments like these that my love for dictionaries knows no end. Today is Epiphany Day. Here's what I found for the definition of epiphany :

epiphany |iˈpifənē| noun ( pl. -nies) (also Epiphany) the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles as represented by the Magi (Matthew 2:1–12).
• the festival commemorating this on January 6.
• a manifestation of a divine or supernatural being.
• a moment of sudden revelation or insight.

DERIVATIVES epiphanic |ˌepəˈfanik| adjective

ORIGIN Middle English : from Greek epiphainein ‘reveal.’ The sense relating to the Christian festival is via Old French epiphanie and ecclesiastical Latin epiphania.

Now, I've repeatedly said here how even though I am an atheist, I am strongly attached to many of the catholic rites I grew up with. This has to do with what Joseph Campbell called The Power of Myth. I love mythologies, I love the stories humans have created and propagated through millennia in order to justify our existence.

I've been missing "Navidad en Puerto Rico" for a long time. It is the perfect social expression of our mulatto culture and mythologies and it's nothing, and I mean, nothing like Christmas in New York or anywhere in the United States.

In Puerto Rico we call today El Día de los Reyes Magos. It's the day catholics all around the world use to commemorate the Three Wise Men's visitation of the baby Jesus in manger in the middle of nowhere in Bethlehem. That's where the "manifestation of a divine or supernatural being" comes into play on this day.

On this day we kind of do what anglos do with Santa Claus. On the evening of the 5th, kids gather grass and water dishes for the three kings' horses. Parents put together candy with a little "ofrenda" of rum. "The magic revelation" happens when the kids go to sleep.

My parents loved to get their Reyes Magos on and would go as far as get coconuts and, in an unironic Monty Pythonesque moment, clopclopclop their way around the house while scattering the grass, emptying the bowls full of water and washing down a coconut candy or two with the "ofrenda" they had left out for themselves.

I tried doing the same for my kids but it just doesn't work out the same. For one, all the kids in Puerto Rico wait eagerly for Los Reyes Magos. Here in New York? Not so much. Not even american catholics celebrate the day!

Yet what I love and miss about los Reyes Magos is that it marks the half-point of our Christmas festivities.

Yes people, we Puerto Ricans have to do things differently, especially if it involves partying. In Puerto Rico we don't have 12 days of Christmas. We have 22 days.

Sometimes you have to look into yourself to truly appreciate was around you.

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.

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

Mi silla en El Alambique, Isla Verde (Puerto Rico)

after i come back home from going home, i get this melancholy limbo of a feeling : that i have left a home behind in search of a home that is not there and yet is familiar and welcoming and soothing and incomplete for the lost years and the lost house because i have no real place to be home but the few couches and extra beds to crash on my families places and even my mother's house is this foreign, mold controlled zone in which my lungs collapse, my heart stops with the toxic molds that makes me feel unwelcomed and pushes me into the asceptic living of hotels with their climate controlled hells drowing the sound of coquis and the rustling of platain and palm trees in the middle of the night and making my body remember how to go to sleep.

after i come back home from going home, the place i come back to is so familiar and yet so removed missing the little bit of heart and soul and pain and laughter i left back in spanish with its ay benditos and ave marias and its tu sabes and its bochincheo with arroz con gandules and alcapurrias and habichuelas and sancocho de medio día and el cafecito para empatar.

8am in Puerto Rico

This is what, in theory, we have been doing for the past 7 days here in Puerto Rico. We have allegedly gone to the beach each day, played and enjoyed ourselves.

The reality is that, as part of the new working class, I have been squeezing in vacation time around my work schedule. I will blog about all the things I have been working on while here, but I just have to say that in spite of how difficult it is to have to work while being in a remote part of the island and alone with the kids, I am happy to be here. It's good to be back home.