The Decolonize Puerto Rico T-shirt
organizing beyond the echo chamber
Taking a cue from our maraca plants, the end of a cycle doesn’t have to mean the end, entirely. Seeds inside the plants pods can be used to make musical instruments, giving life to something that continues long after the lifespan of any individual plant.
We’ve been here before; the end of a year, the end of a flowering cycle, the end of a season, the end of a friendship or relationship, the end of a particular type of work. None of it was really an end, end. More like, a beginning that arrived shrouded in opacity, obscuring the path ahead.
“Clarity is not easy when the force of these structures are such that we are intended to be muddled up[…] In Wretched of the Earth, the chapter on violence—which is probably one of the most recognizable chapters [Fanon] has, for many reasons—I've come back to it over and over and over again where he warns primarily of confusion mongers[...]
When he says clarity, he's also talking about a militant attention to material reality. But in the end, clarity means the starting point for us is; this is a settler colonial regime and settler colonial regimes rely on particular mechanics and have done so for 76+ years. That's why, when we locate genocide within that, we can see [it] as a logical extension of the process of annihilation, because settler colonialism doesn't come in to just buddy around, it comes in to ethnically cleanse and replace an entire people. [To] delete any memory of the fact that it actually was a settler colonial project. Like the settler colonial projects, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, so on.”
-Lara Sheehi, The Trouble with White Feminism: Ep 5 Unpacking Zionism
2024 Reading list:
The Trinity of Fundamentals by Wisam Rafeedie Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times by Jasbir K. Puar I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti Neither Settler Nor Native by Mahmood Mamdani A Theory of Birds by Zaina Alsous The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist by Emile Habibi Fanzines para todos by Camila Gonzalez Simon Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East by Rashid Khalidi Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States by Kevin Bruyneel Subjective Atlas of Palestine edited by Subjective Editions For Palestine edited by Ebb Magazine The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories edited by Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni, and Sari Hanafi A series of pamphlets edited by Learning Palestine Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East by Rashid Khalidi
Earlier this year we did an in-person workshop and laid out all of our research across two long tables. The other half of that research came from our 2023 reading list:
The Decolonize Puerto Rico T-shirt
This year, Yellow In Spite of Myself is part of our puzzle, people (multiple entire generations of families) bombed to toxic dust funded by our tax money is another piece, genocides driven by the rare earth minerals powering the devices we are writing you from, another. We all have to choose which fights to throw our soft bodies at, we are finite beings and can’t possibly take it all on as individuals.
One of the reasons we pivoted our efforts this year, we’ve been here before. We’ve seen folks organizing for likes, watched priority be given to white/privileged voices, seen how far zero accountability gets, and have been stunned by defensiveness in the face of open/honest communication. No gracias.
"Mutual aid involves neighbors helping neighbors, supporting one another in meeting basic needs. It also involves a reimagining of the social fabric where we see ourselves in solidarity with others—where meeting someone's needs is meeting our collective needs."
-Kimberly Bender, Denver University's School of Social Work
Earlier this year, upon getting back from an anti-colonial protest in the metro area, we were confronted by our neighbor, Junior, about our “Decolonize Puerto Rico” shirts—made some years ago in collaboration with Guardnflags. Junior’s response was really surprising in the moment. “¡No,” he insisted, “no voy a descolonizar a Puerto Rico!” (I will not decolonize Puerto Rico!) What followed was a 15-minute conversation that completely shifted how we organize.