In the words of Juan
Sánchez:
I am a Puerto Rican connected
to many tribes, including Taínos, Spanish Moors and Jews, Africans,
Asians, and Central and South Americans. I am a descendent of Borinquen,
an island named by the Taíno Indians meaning "land of courage." I am
an urban "Neo-Rican" from the Caribbean diaspora in constant revolution,
reinventing and recontextualizing the Puerto Rican equation, but Operation
Bootstrap has dictated the paradoxical status of also making me North
American-born. I have experienced and witnessed, through the eyes of
my mother, brothers, and other Puerto Ricans, the "privileges" of a
second- class citizenship. Destined to become part of an exploitive,
cheap labor force and subjected to a disenfranchised existence, humiliation
has become a norm, rather than an exception in our lives.
The annually televised
Puerto Rican Day Parade camouflages a bleak reality. Despite some social
and political accomplishments of far-reaching impact, Puerto Ricans
remain an invisible, undereducated, and underemployed population living
under the devastation of racism, mistreatment, poverty, drugs, domestic
and gang violence, the AIDS epidemic, incarceration, and police brutality,
as well as the loss of culture and identity, and a misguided indoctrination.
Puerto Rican warriors of the past and the present are men and women
who have endured an "Amerikkkan" nightmare instead of the promised dream
and have fought for the sovereignty and the civil and human rights of
their people.
-- Juan Sánchez
