“This was the White Man’s fatal flaw. They murdered Ojeda Ríos, thinking that the idea of the revolution lived within one man, without ever stopping to consider how he had evaded them for so long. Do you understand what I mean?”
“The people,” Olga said. “The people helped him hide.”
“The jíbaros. The regular country people, for years, shrugged their shoulders when agents would come around asking about this man. ‘No sé, no sé,’ they would say. They adored him, they took pride in his ability to evade the law, because they knew this was foreign law that was looking for him. They understood that he was standing up for them, even if they couldn’t articulate it. It didn’t have to do with him and his personality, it had to do with an idea.”
Reggie’s argument had become abstracted again; she was on the verge of losing patience.
“The people who followed Ojeda Ríos were devastated by his loss and all of Puerto Rico was mourning. We were too blind with grief and anger to see that the revolutionary spirit had already taken root on the island. But not your mother. Your mother saw the opportunity there, and despite putting herself at risk of the law, she made her way back to Puerto Rico to help her people. Revolution, in the past, was meant to be armed. Acts of war and protest claimed by an organization—FALN, the Boricua Popular Army. Your mother, however, understood that such public organization only put a target on our backs and that revolution in the digital age could look different. This is how the Pa?uelos Negros were born.
“Our name comes from the bandanas we wear whenever we might be out in public. We don’t even really want to know who our own membership is. Perhaps your mother is the only one who knows every member of our movement.”
“So, if you aren’t violent, what do you do?”
“I didn’t say we aren’t violent, Olga. I just said that revolution is different now.”
He paused.
“You mother reorganized all of the supporters of every other independence group—those both above and below ground. She quietly began recruiting people like me to her cause—strong people with influence who had not turned their attention to what was happening to our gente. She went after the students—the angry and the disaffected, the brilliant chemists, engineers, and computer programmers forced to leave the island because there was no work for them at home anymore. Quietly, over the past decade, your mother has assembled a decentralized organization all over the diaspora, hungry for revolution, just waiting for the right moment to rise and topple a hundred and nineteen years of American colonial rule and take back our land.”
Olga took a sip of her rum and then found herself giggling. The giggle became a laugh and the laugh overtook her until she was doubled over in her seat. Reggie did not join her.
“Reggie, wow.” She finally calmed herself enough to talk. “I know you aren’t making this up, but wow, has my mother got your number if she’s convinced you that somehow she has amassed an underground revolutionary army gearing up for independence. The rational businessman in you has got to know how fucking nuts this sounds! If there are so many people interested in a free Puerto Rico, why the fuck did these homies not vote for independence in this last election? When was the plebiscite? May? Where were these ‘revolutionaries’ at the polls?”
“Olga, revolution cannot happen on the terms of the oppressor. The very idea of the plebiscite is flawed.”
“So, then when is the time for revolution, Reggie? Tell me. Because the last I saw the whole island was in the dark.”
Reggie smiled at her. “Exactly, Olga. Our network of Pa?uelos Negros is broad, their commitment deep, but as with everything in our history, nothing happens without the jíbaro. The Yanqui is currently doing the work that we, the leaders of revolution, could never do quite as effectively. They are letting the jíbaro know that they are seen as a piece of trash, dispensable. Between PROMESA’s austerity and PREPA leaving everyone sitting in the dark, the island is finally recognizing what the Yanqui thinks of them. The Yanqui has counted on us being asleep for years, but their neglect and exploitation is slowly waking up all of Borikén, and when they rise from their nap, we will be there.”
They had pulled up outside of Olga’s building. The rain was coming down in sheets over the car. Olga looked at Reggie and a smirk took over her face.
“Why now? Since I was thirteen, I’ve gotten nothing but some fucking self-righteous letters. Literally, nothing but one-way conversations. She never sent me an address to write to her. Never felt, for all these years, that I needed to know all this. So, why does she send you now?”