Theatre History Studies

Reading the Residues

Colonization takes more than land; colonization takes more than land, more than once. “Sponsored migration” (re)moves more than the people from that stolen land; sponsored migration (re)moves the people along with the histories, the archives, the memories, the embodied practices—the web of ephemeral connections that make a people, a people.¹ The agents of empire craft and deposit ideologies and institutions in place of what’s been forcibly (re)moved as if working with a blank canvas. The (re)moved peoples, and their (dis)placed misplaced descendants, then learn the histories, the archives, the memories, and the embodied practices of their ancestors from within the colonizer’s binaries and through the colonizer’s gaze, the colonizer’s textbooks, the colonizer’s laws, the colonizer’s media, and the colonizer’s language. Of course, we learn these things from our families too, but our families can teach only the lessons that have survived removal, punishment, and enforced assimilation.

As a light-skinned, bisexual, Puerto Rican born and raised in Boston with [End Page 185] minimal Spanish language skills, my sense of belonging to the Puerto Rican community has always been tenuous. My right to claim ownership is informed by intragroup cultural norms and a white supremacist heteropatriarchal colonial gaze measuring authenticity against sexuality, religion, geography, language, and skin color.² Only recently, through a concerted effort to unlearn coloniality (within the privileged walls of academia where I am paid to learn and think) have I been able to understand and appreciate the gravity of what’s been stolen and how. Through that self-study, I have come to understand my subject position—a Puerto Rican in the diaspora, a “diasporican”—as a shape I’ve grown into through centuries of colonization at the hands of Spanish and then US empire. Diasporican is a shape we’ve grown into while negotiating the hardened residues of colonial trauma.

In what follows, I narrate how and why I made sense of my place, my purpose, my feelings, and my responsibilities in the wake of Hurricane Maria—a category five storm that made landfall in Puerto Rico just two weeks after Hurricane Irma, also a category five. Admittedly, I was surprised by my emotional response to the real possibility that our modest Pabón family home in Trujillo Alto had been destroyed (a speculation that was confirmed by my visit in June 2018). But there it was: the feeling of devastation demanding to be acknowledged, asking to be held. I am the (grand)daughter of (re)moved women and although I am not on the archipelago, I am still of it—capable of experiencing physical and emotional trauma and grief from a distance. The residues of colonial trauma in, on, and of my bodymind refused to be invisibilized, silent, or smoothed over in the days, weeks, and months following the storm. Instead, they became sticky, demanding that I stick with them, analyze them, and understand them.The essay that follows is the result of sticking with those residues and a gesture of optimism: a hopeful contribution to building a collective historiography of the aftermath of Hurricane Maria as experienced and witnessed from the Puerto Rican diaspora—not to eclipse or prioritize the diasporican experience over the traumas of those who survived the storm firsthand (and continue to survive imperial neglect in its aftermath) but to add my voice to a collective and persistent call for decolonization.

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When Hurricane Maria made landfall, I had just turned my attention to a new book project on diasporic Puerto Rican subjectivity—telling my truths as best I could but in the limited environment of the academic conference circuit.³ Then, in September 2017, the urgency of telling...