Javier Arbona: For those of us who identify as Puerto Ricans in the United States, we have to ask ourselves when does our presence, or perhaps our memory, become important—visible—and when does our visibility, and our collective memory, not matter; why, how, and where, specifically, are we erased, and what are the geopolitics of that erasure, deliberately or not — even amongst radical allies?
Finally, let’s take for example the infamous Democrats’ Sit-In at the US Congress last week to promote war on terror measures that apply terror watchlists to gun background checks. This comical episode was, quite specifically and egregiously, an appropriation of queer geopolitical Boricua and Latinx lives to score political capital through the semiotics of gun control (and promote Dunkin Donuts), while the very same Congress, with the approval of the White House, is passing anti-Puerto Rican legislation — the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act, or PROMESA. Briefly, PROMESA (the fiscal control board legislation) will lower wages, privatize infrastructure, and prohibit public sector strikes, among more impositions. Needless to say, PROMESA is also endorsed by a diverse array of colonial elites, the governor, the Clintons, and Puerto Rican members of Congress …And, Lin-Manuel Miranda.
However, it is legitimized US military weaponry and expertise—immune from gun control—that has often been used against Puerto Ricans, Latinxs, and Latin American geographies. Congressional Democrats are not protesting the School of the Americas, for instance, or to end the War on Drugs that drags on and takes in so many Latinx and Puerto Ricans lives, queer and not queer (relatedly, see especially the work of Marisol LeBrón on neoliberal policing in Puerto Rico, and Zaire Dinzey-Flores on policed housing segregation). Or elsewhere, US politicians, to wit, are de facto in favor of an unfolding coup in Brasil (just as Hillary Clinton backed a coup in Honduras). By and large, the US political class, in spite of minor differences between GOP and Democrats, favors borderization and violent policing, while denying Latinx migrants their rights, running an immigrant detention gulag system. And this list could go on and on. I don’t mean to simply point out hypocrisy here; I mention these inconsistencies and contradictions because these are specifically structural ways in which Latinxs and Puerto Ricans, including queers, are expected to mobilize—including as, and sometimes especially as, selectively memorialized dead bodies—for US empire, all while they themselves—we ourselves—are expendable. More here.