Decolonization is Imminent: Notes on Boricua Feminism

Abstract:In Rican feminist thought, decolonizing is not merely an approach, method, or exercise, but an ongoing way of life. From Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebron's cry that she "came to die for Puerto Rico" to the signal from Boricua author Elizabet Velasquez that "staying alive, well, that too is Puerto Rican history," Rican women have long struggled, resisted, and endured against colonial time. This "ongoing performance of bodily endurance" (Sandra Ruiz, 2019) under US colonialism, most recently marked by Maria, economic violence, the coronavirus pandemic, and femicide is a decolonial yearning, documented in the cultural work of Boricua women writers, artists, and activists. Boricua feminist thought, however, is largely absent in the academic feminist canon. In this paper, I argue Boricua feminism is not often interpolated as feminism since it does not resemble the expected, and particularly, Western, view of feminism as "women's struggles against men and patriarchy," though multiple patriarchies hinder the lives of Puerto Rican women and gender minorities. Rather, anticolonialism is at the forefront of Boricua feminist and queer struggles and subjectivities, yet is dislocated by these same lenses, and interpellated as not properly endemic to gender and sexual identity formations. Yet Boricua feminism is vital to decolonial feminist imaginings.