Life at the feet of the sleeping woman
Text by Tara Rodríguez Besosa
Photos by Adnelly Marichal
I wake up with the fan, the breeze, and a view of the rainforest to the East.
Puerto Rico on a Tuesday in Santurce starts with my morning walk to a locally owned coffee shop a few blocks from my 1930’s Art Deco apartment building. The coffee shop belongs to friends of mine and every day I am in Santurce they serve me the same thing: black café colao and pan sobao toast with guava butter.
There are mornings when the place is hardly Puerto Rican.
Students on their “service” trips come for breakfast, with their Tevas and their sweatshirts from interchangeable US colleges.
White males in their thirties with a tropical business casual look usually come in pairs, discussing the latest piece of real estate or new entrepreneurial venture they are opening in this thrilling setting.
If I were to do a census of the people coming through the coffee shop,
I’d say Puerto Rico was being invaded by foreigners who like the local coffee, exotic guava butter, hipster vibe and capitalist prospects.
Puerto Rico is being invaded—
again.
Slowly but surely, as more of my friends and family are forced to leave the island in search of work, an open school for their kids, or a more reliable healthcare plan, others come to take their place. Between my apartment and the coffee shop there will soon open a bakery and “boutique hotel” (Airbnb building). Gentrification is crawling slowly up my block. (See this excellent piece in Society + Space, thanks to Noemí Segarra Ramírez for sharing.)
In 2015 a law was passed to incentivize two things: the exportation of goods and services from Puerto Rico, and the transfer of investors to the island(s).
“Few places on earth offer a return on investment the way Puerto Rico does. With an ever-growing array of services and emerging industries, part of your success will be directly attributable to the incentives available. In order to bolster a diversified economy, the local government has created an aggressive economic and tax incentives program with the purpose of helping operations on the island become more profitable to those companies who establish themselves here.
These incentives were created to ensure Puerto Rico’s competitiveness in attracting investments and they are an opportunity for companies all over the world, particularly those dedicated to state-of-the-art technologies and added value.” (Sotheby’s International Realty, Puerto Rico tax incentives)
No incentives have supported small and medium sized locally owned businesses, who pay up to 11.5% in taxes—the highest rate in the United States.
Puerto Rico is a US colony.
Puerto Rico is one of the few existing colonies in the Caribbean.
Puerto Rico is one of the oldest colonies in the world, conquered by Spain on Columbus’ second voyage.
Puerto Rico means “rich port.”
The island of Puerto Rico is actually the islands of Puerto Rico. It is an archipélago of 98 keys and smaller islands.
Many think it is just one.
What we know as the Rich Port was called Borikén by its original inhabitants, the Taíno. The name given to their land comes from the word “buruquena”—meaning crab. Some say the Taínos and their home were like crabs: light-stepping, calm, hermits, living within the land and water.
I leave the coffee shop and Santurce and the investors. I drive south about 45 minutes until I reach the mountain seen from afar as “the feet of the sleeping woman.”
There are several sleeping ancestors in our mountain ranges. There are Indigenous petroglyphs at the bottom of this mountain, its top shaped like the symbol of the “cemí,” triangular and pointing to the skies. The community is proud of the legacy left to them and has committed its community garden to being a living museum of the plants and practices of the ancestors.
I moved to a farm a couple years ago.
It was post-Hurricane María.
It was time.
The land I purchased is at the foot of the feet of the sleeping woman, in a community known as San Salvador, a more Christian name for what was once called Barrio Culebra (snake). I imagine the name Culebra from the many creeks and rivers that move through the barrio, that are one beginning of the watershed of the Rio Grande de Loíza - or just the windy roads the car takes to get here.
We live at OtraCosa: “Something Else.”
After being on the land for some months and not wanting to brand it with farm or hacienda as many lands on our islands are, there was a night when Jomi Curet—a father, poet, and pal of ours—was reading at his book release in Santurce and I heard it: “Otra cosa, somos otra cosa.”
To enter the land you wet your feet crossing a little creek. We like to tell people to wash away all the bullshit before they come up. It creates a portal we enter and exit. After walking up the hill you get to the first cement house constructed in San Salvador in the 1940s. Everyone in the community knows this as “La Casa de Jacinta.” Jacinta was the elderly woman who owned the food store, never had children, and whose husband is hardly mentioned. She was better off than most residents and said to be generous.
In the 1940s tobacco and cattle were the main crop and source of income for these mountains. The first harvest of tobacco was for “the Americans,” the second one could be sold locally.
Most of Puerto Rico was heavily deforested for agroindustrial crops like tobacco, sugarcane, and coffee, part of the exportation/exploitation of resources and goods for the “mainland” United States. Those crops were later replaced by factories, and today Puerto Rico is home to multinational biotechnology corporations and a few pharmaceuticals left from the 1990s. Local agriculture is producing less than 10% of what its residents are eating.
I wash this off as much as possible
as I cross into OtraCosa.
We began work on the land by clearing up the road from the creek to the house.
By hand.
Everything is done by hand.
Life on this piece of subtropical forest ecosystem is quite different from the morning walk to get coffee in Santurce.
No gringos here.
No coffee shops here either.
There is no electricity nor running water (except the creek). We harvest rainwater from the roof into a 250-gallon tank painted black. Dishes are done in tubs of water and biodegradable soap. The toilet has a funnel for liquid and a 5-gallon bucket for solids. Sawdust and coconut fibers are used to cover the “humanure.” Solar lamps get charged in the morning sun and used at night. Since we are nestled between the mountains, the sun doesn’t wake us up until after 7:30am, and leaves earlier than 6:30pm. The night brings stars, clouds, a cooler breeze, and many noises from our neighbors the coquí, river birds, and roosters.
OtraCosa is a collective effort, hard to say of how many. There are eight cats, two dogs, an adopted horse, a couple cows from neighbors who tend them daily, and many trees and birds. Us humans have helped to rescue the abandoned house which we’ve been little by little inhabiting, clearing tall grass and vines from around and inside it.
We have rescued mango, avocado, jobillo, breadfruit, soursop, higuera and guava from being completely covered in vines, after they were severely affected by the hurricane.
We have planted ylang ylang, jobo enano, gandules, corazón, maraca flower, ketembilla, consuelda, parsley, caimito, bananas, a wild strawberry variety, holy basil, papayas, tarragon, lemongrass, sugarcane, black sesame, yuca, malanga, amaranth, and more.
Most of the plants come from seeds and stories we have collected from neighbors, and we are collecting the seed from our own crops as well.
Our community and others around Puerto Rico have medicinal and edible plants alongside roads, sprouting through the cracks of sidewalks, and it is common to stop on the side of the road to forage. The more one learns of plants, the more you see and stop to harvest. Many of these crops from which we are saving seed, planting, and harvesting are not available in the supermarket, as they are more difficult to distribute once ripe or do not have a long enough shelf life.
Our meals at OtraCosa are mostly based on what we can harvest around us. The lack of refrigeration has introduced into my life the beautiful privilege of going into the forest to collect wild passion fruit or ñame, trade some herbs for fresh eggs from my neighbor across the creek, learn to climb trees to grab the ripest breadfruit, and brew fresh herb infusions for the day.
After working within sustainable food and farming movements for the past decade, for me, moving to this land has been the culmination of years of learning from others on their land, discovering the medicine that surrounds us and why our generation seldom grew up with it. (Plant medicine for our communities was shunned and considered “uncivilized” while, ironically, being used for making pharmaceutical products.)
My grandmother was the last in my family to grow up with plant remedies, replacing them with conventional western medicine as she grew older, not teaching her daughters or granddaughters anything related to botanical culture and practice. It was not until I was in my twenties that I was exposed to medicinal plants and food as medicine. It all started when I worked the table at the local farmer’s market, trading with other farmer vendors. Since then it has been a bittersweet relationship. As you learn more about plants and crops that form a part of your identity as a Puerto Rican queer woman, you also learn about the tragic consequences of colonialism and capitalism on the island archipélago you come from.
Our work with the land, cultural food heritage, local agricultural practices, and seed saving is always connected to our struggle against colonialism.
We do not farm organically because it is healthier or trendy. We farm this way because our soils have been exploited, our lands taken, our bodies (human, water, land) experimented on.
We nourish ourselves with local food, learn our ancestral medicine, reconnect with the land, and we cannot learn or listen or remember enough. Through our own bodies, what we use them for, what we put into them, and how we are together—we heal this traumatic past.
I go to bed in a hammock at the feet of the sleeping woman, feeling grateful for all the beings I’m on this journey with.
Gracias a Vero, Jana, Ali, Victor, Ángel, María, Lex, Delia, Daniella, Valeria, Noely, Carmen, Michael, Nati, Kike, Familia Oro, corilla cuir, y las canciones y enseñanzas de maestrxs.
Las plantas
A mí me dan medicina
A mí me dan medicina.”
www.eldepartamentodelacomida.org
#quenosepierdalasemilla (IG)
Tara Rodríguez Besosa (she/they/ellx) was born and raised mostly in Santurce, the oceans and magic of Puerto Rico. Tara graduated from Pratt Institute School of Architecture in her former life, and for the decade since has supported the design of El Departamento de la Comida.
Organizer, entrepreneur, and living resource within the sustainable + cuir food and agroecology movements, they have increased access to local food economies, spotlighting the value of farmers within economic transitions from extractive to regenerative practices. “I am constantly dreaming + weaving a web of consumers, cooks, restaurants, environmental organizations, policy makers, farms, community gardens, artists, medicine makers and elders, that together are decolonizing Borikén and other marginalized communities through food.”
Tara has been investing most of her time in OtraCosa, a queer collective rural homestead with other humans, a few cats, a dog (Chayote), a horse, beeeeeees, seeds, and fellow neighbors.
Visit El Departamento de la Comida to learn about and support their work in a variety of ways.
Adnelly Marichal is a Puerto Rican photographer and filmmaker currently based in Rio Grande, Puerto Rico. A graduate of Wesleyan University, Adnelly has previously lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York; Keene, New Hampshire; and New Orleans, Louisiana. She has worked on various feature documentary films including: "The Central Park Five,” "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History,” and "Going Blind." She has been featured in The New York Times and Public Radio International's Living on Earth. Her work has been published in CNN, Eater, and Mitú amongst others. Her clients include Erica Weiner Jewelry and Carleen. She is interested in exploring the intersections of social activism, agriculture and health through the mediums of video and photography.
Contact: adnelly.marichal@gmail.com