“La historia va a recordarnos porque iniciamos algo,” writes Nicole Cecilia Delgado in Apenas un cantaro, her 2017 poetry collection, published in Puerto Rico and later circulated throughout Latin America. History will remember us because we started something.
The two poems and post-Maria crónica(a Caribbean and Latin American narrative subgenre) that we have assembled for this folio remind us of the United States’ imperial production, its exportation of cruelty, and how the thrust of American individualism infiltrates daily language of life within and outside of its borders. A decades-long debt crisis in Puerto Rico—fabricated by the ever-present invisible hand of the American market economy, the refusal to tax the rich, and a transference of the costs of social services onto Puerto Ricans—has been well-documented by Rocío Zambrana in her recent study Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico. Zambrana writes:
Neoliberalism’s transformation of liberalism is thus not merely an inversion of the relation between the state and the market, but the transformation of political rationality that binds them. The state no longer merely carves out a space for the market to function, placing its authority behind private property. Rather, it actively constitutes the market. It does so by extending an economic rationality to the social domain, tying the rationality of government to the action of individuals. Instead of ensuring the freedom of exchange, it promotes a “constructed freedom” with its view of the self as an enterprise. It produces subjects responsible for self-management, hence responsible for modes of self-control that make possible economic success. (27-28)
It is precisely this neoliberal shift of governmental economic responsibility onto the individual—a logic that posits each Puerto Rican as an enterprise in charge of their own success or failure, life or death—that makes this a moment crucial for writers who have long documented the violences of colonialism as the systematic destruction of ecosystems, biospheres, care networks, and relational models.
This folio gathers three of our most powerful contemporary writers. Each lives in a different region of the archipelago and writes in a marked style. Xavier Valcárcel captures the contradictory negotiations of narrating our collective traumas, questioning who we are writing for, especially during an era when so many U.S. editors and scholars have developed a violent, predatory relationship to our grief. But he doesn’t stop there; his crónica asks us to look at those difficult days when writing felt impossible and to read our survivals with compassion.
In translating (or rethinking) Ginsberg’s “America,” Delgado’s “History” is forged by an imagined collectivity we continue to create as writers despite hurricanes, austerity, displacement, surveillance, and the continual devastation we must face on a day-to-day basis. Her words also remind us that the word “historia” in Spanish means both “history” and “story,” leaving ample room for the possibility that our storytelling, our own stories, will someday come to replace official accounts of who we are.
Rubén Ramos Colón’s “Propuesta de Financiamiento para el Plan de No Hacer Nada/Funding Proposal for the Do-Nothing Plan” mimics the governmental language of large-scale projects and proposals that lead nowhere—and are often abandoned—positing that leisure time and non-productivity are in fact necessities for working-class Puerto Ricans, unlike the supposedly productive mega-constructions the government undertakes in favor of private corporate gain.
Despite the obvious differences between these writers, all three seek to counter the loneliness and exploitation of U.S. capitalism, while celebrating a kind of quotidian pleasure, refusal, and pleasure in refusal that remains somewhat illegible, even in our most passionate and careful attempts at translation.
As editors, we agreed not to impose our particular readings of these texts, since we feel they are written for a history of the future, one that needs no explanation or justification. Qué viva la literatura puertorriqueña. May we always write against empire and in honor of whom we love and are.
Editor’s note: The folio unfolds this week.
