Being Important is Destroying the Arts

Being a Puerto Rican artist is a lonely road. Once you leave the Puerto Rican and Caribbean enclaves of the east coast, outside of Chicago, you are engulfed by the ever-present Chicano and Mexican Latino movements, and our status as an anomaly that few Latinos or Americans want to address, becomes clearer. During the Trump administration, we became a cause celebre because Trump insulted us, and so American liberals added us to the ammo they had against him, but the moment he left office, we returned to being an afterthought. Puerto Ricans, particularly Puerto Rican liberals who support independence for the island, are not welcome in a Latino movement dedicated to assimilation and appeasing white liberals. Worship of the American Dream and American Exceptionalism is the same with Democrats as with Republicans, with one key difference — the Republican version is Christian and white, while the Democratic version is multi-ethnic. This is talked about by politicians and television pundits alike who desire America to be a multi-racial democracy, which is not inherently a bad thing, but Puerto Ricans complicate matters because we are American citizens but solely so we could be drafted in wars (which we disproportionately were in Korea and Vietnam, two conflicts where we were sent to die more than any other American from any single state). Our citizenship comes from domination and genocidal efforts to erase our culture and our history. The list of American atrocities against Puerto Ricans is both long and easily Googled, so I won’t spend space here to elaborate, but needless to say we are not a welcome addition to the American Dream narrative. In Netflix’s reboot of One Day At a Time, a cast that was 2/3 Puerto Rican had to play a Cuban family, with the prerequisite episode detailing Cuban injustices and praising American citizenship.

Such a plot is required of any show, play, movie, or book that depicts Latinos in American media. We have to prove our loyalty to American “democracy” so white people welcome us into the family. But this insistence on emphasizing an immigration narrative over our common humanity is not unique to Latinos. Black people have their own version of this, but with race, and Native Americans, it’s a general injustice, usually involving sensationalistic violence. We are forced into these narratives because the only way to justify giving us opportunities is to make sure that whatever we do, it is “important”.

While it existed before, since the pandemic, the urgent need for BIPOC artists to assert their importance has only increased. It gives us access to government money, a lot of it, where we have to emphasize how marginalized and oppressed we are so that the higher ups can deign that we deserve support for our art projects. This attitude means that BIPOC are only incentivized to make works with a political lens. Being that BIPOC artists disproportionately come from poorer backgrounds without generational wealth, government funds are the best way to receive support for our art. As a result, we are not afforded the same sort of support a person like Kevin Smith received for his movie Clerks, which is a stoner comedy with zero redeeming social value, and yet he was able to raise tens of thousands of dollars to produce it.

Now, I like Clerks, and when I was a young man (like many in my generation) I loved his movies, especially Chasing Amy, Dogma, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Are any of those movies important? No, because they didn’t have to be. That is my point. White people get to be frivolous, weird, even stupid, and receive large sums of money to do so, yet BIPOC artists always have to make a statement.

I have a wealth of hobbies: Running, sports fanaticism, amateur historian, hiking, traveling, cooking, movies, wine, stand up comedy — the list goes on. I am also a father, a boyfriend, a cat owner, and above all else, Boricua de pura sepa (pa’ que los que sepan!) — in short, I am a varied wealth of the entire spectrum of humanity.

And so is every BIPOC person in the United States, and yet we are reduced to the causes that white progressives deem important enough. They don’t respect our full humanity, only the parts that make them feel virtuous. One of the areas this is most evident is the arts.

Let us make dumb stoner comedies. Let us make wild action movies and sci-fi adventures and romances and romantic comedies where we get to celebrate black and brown love, instead of forcing us to have a white partner so you can find us more “relatable”.

Back in 2015, my book Kings of 7th Avenue, about a group of Puerto Rican and Cuban friends making a name for themselves in the Tampa club scene, was rejected by a Big Five publisher (that is, one of the main NYC presses) because the white Acquisitions Editor didn’t find my Latino characters relatable. The book has a subplot about a Puerto Rican couple wishing to return to the island. The sole American-loving Latino was an abusive, sexist asshole who is murdered after sexually assaulting someone. No wonder the white editors hated it. The book found a small publisher, eventually.

And went on to win the Independent Book Award in 2017 for Best Southeastern Fiction.

We can find an audience if you let us. Also, fuck you. My existence is all the importance I need.