“？Salud! This will make us both feel better.”
She took a sip, but he took a swallow.
“A few weeks after you ended things with us, I got a package in the mail to my home. It had no return address—”
“My mother.”
“Yes. It was not a terribly long letter, but I was shocked to get it. You had told me small bits about her, but honestly, that she had tracked me down weirded me out. Still, the letter, it was very poignant to me. No one had spoken to me that way before. She started by telling me that she didn’t feel I was appropriate for you, because you were a brilliant mind who had been raised for liberation, while I, like so many Puerto Ricans before me, was an anchor for our people. My mind had been colonized. She went on to articulate what she thought someone like me, who clearly had the ability to visualize futures for themselves that seem impossible, could do if they could look beyond the White Man’s goals. She didn’t say anything else about it, but she enclosed three books. One was a collection of essays by Hostos, a biography of Che Guevara, and a book of poems with Julia de Burgos and Pedro Pietri.
“A few weeks later, I got another letter. She was curious what I thought about the books, and she invited me to write to her. She gave me a name and address of a person—I don’t remember who or where, because it would always change—but she had people willing to receive mail for her. She instructed me not to use a return address, and to mark the envelope with a small black triangle, so that this person would know the letter was for her.”
“And so, you wrote to her?” Olga asked, flatly.
“I wrote to her. I had been really moved by her letter, by the essays, and mostly by the poems. I read Puerto Rican Obituary at least a hundred times and I was embarrassed to see myself in it. I hated the way we lived when I was a kid, piled into a fucked-up apartment in the Bronx, cleaning up after people, the only things to show for it some scratch-off tickets, everyone dreaming of going back to some island I’d barely known. I wanted the American dream. I wanted the house on Long Island, I wanted to be on the all-white block. I didn’t realize I was rejecting myself, my own heritage.
“I wrote her all this and she sent me more books and the letters and things continued for a while—for years, actually—”
“So you became pen pals? You and my mother.”
“At first. Then, after that whole thing happened and I began to publicly claim my heritage more, she sent me a note. She felt it was time for me to go beyond general education and become more proactive. She told me to reach out to Karen.”
“My aunt Karen?”
“Yes. So, this is how I know Karen. I went to pay her a visit and it was actually Karen who told me about the Pa?uelos Negros. Who invited me to join.” He went to take another sip of his rum, but Olga stopped him before he started talking again.
“What the fuck is that? Black bandanas?” She shook her head but did not raise her voice.
“Well, you said you didn’t want me to get political in talking about this.”
“I just wanted you to talk to me like a fucking person, whose life this affects, not like you’re trying to recruit me into a revolution.”
He looked at her and shrugged.
“Lo mismo, ?no?”
“Reggie, just fucking tell me what this thing is.”
“The media wants everyone, especially people on the island, to think that an independent Puerto Rico is a fringe fantasy that only radicals subscribe to. That the real force is behind the centrists who want statehood.”
Olga was at the end of her patience but promised herself not to interrupt until Reggie was done.
“And with good reason. In the eighties and nineties the government, in cooperation with complicit Puerto Rican sellouts on the island, systemically stymied a strong and growing independence movement. They imprisoned all of the leadership, branded them terrorist organizations, drove people underground. Those they couldn’t imprison they drove into hiding in the mountains of the island. But, as you know, Olga, the wealthy and powerful are lazy, and think that if you can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Back in oh-five, the Feds finally managed to assassinate Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, the most visible revolutionary that Borikén had known in modern times. He’d evaded their capture for nearly fifteen years, in small towns, in the mountains, sometimes in the bigger cities. With his assassination, every leader of every public movement for independence was either dead or in jail. Or so the government thought. And with no visible resistance, they were able to further pillage and sell off our island to the highest bidder.