Flamboyán Theatre’s Mission: Uniting the Diaspora
Growing up in the Southeast, I struggled connecting with the media that involved Puerto Ricans. Every time there was a Puerto Rican actor, singer, or movie with Puerto Ricans I liked, it was always based in New York. JLO, Marc Anthony (even though isleños try to overlook the fact he is Nuyorican and didn’t learn Spanish nor did he visit the island until he was an adult), Ricky Martin — the 90s were a prime time to feel Boricua pride, and yet the Puerto Rican experience on TV and radio reflected a reality I couldn’t truly relate to. When I first read Pedro Prieto and Miguel Piñero, the New York-centrism of their works were both exotic and alienating. I wouldn’t visit NYC until I was 23, and yet every time I told people I’m Boricua, they’d ask if I grew up in the Bronx or in Spanish Harlem. Because I didn’t grow up in a Puerto Rican community in the States, I always identified with the island itself, which I visited often. Even though I didn’t go to school on the island, my abuela’s house in Fajardo was home for me in a way my own home in the States never was.
Even with that island connection, I was acutely aware that my story was not the “right” story. There weren’t supposed to be Puerto Ricans in Georgia, or South Carolina, or the brief time we were in California. We lived in places that, if you’re Latino, you’re Mexican. So if I couldn’t be a Nuyorican, or a Mexican, then I would go hard for the island itself, but having only visited there, I couldn’t really claim that either.
Now, I am an incredibly defiant person. I refused to be excluded or told I was less than Puerto Rican. In fact, nowhere do I feel more at home than swimming upstream. As much as I enjoy comfort in my interpersonal relationships, when it comes to my relationship with the world, comfort is the last place I want to be, and my career in literature and now in theatre has shown me how common it is for Latinos to feel that sense of swimming upstream, and also how common it is for people to give up.
I wanted to give up many times, living in Colorado, where Mexican and Chicano culture dominate. I was told a number of times that there was no audience for Puerto Rican stories. I was told nobody would show up or be interested in hearing our version of the Latino experience. Even my defiant spirit grew tired of trying to be accepted for being myself. That experience wasn’t unique to Colorado, but it was a microcosm of what I had gone through trying to get published in NYC, or get a script produced in LA.
Americans and American Latinos are not comfortable with the Puerto Rican story, because you can’t talk about us without talking about colonialism. And not one that is in the distant past or the other side of the world.
We are a colony. Of the United States. No other Latin American country can say that. This is unpopular to point out, since “colonialism” has become an overused, little understood word, and every person of color is suddenly ‘colonized’ whether or not that’s actually true — but for Puerto Ricans, colonization is not just a term that gets you likes on social media, it is a daily reality.
Yet the most nefarious part of colonialism is how it alienates the colonized from each other. This has been done politically — whether you want the status quo, statehood, or independence dictates a lot about what circles you run in and who you cut off from your family. Being an independentista, I had multiple relatives warn me about being “too Puerto Rican” and “loving the island too much” for fear that I could be surveilled by the FBI (to anyone who thinks this sounds absurd, or something from the past, protestors on the island are still videotaped at rallies and harassed by authorities). My play Puerto Rican Nocturne, about the Cerro Maravilla murders and their aftermath — told from the estadista and the independentista perspectives — was turned down by producers in Chicago and New York because doing an independentista play would offend estadista patrons. These political resentments and fear prevent us from not only studying our history, but also from talking to each other, and seeing that we all want what is best for our people. And that we are above all else, a family.
Beyond the political, the media representation of Puerto Ricans that centers Nuyoricans above any other diaspora community creates alienation. When I first started to get published, I would be asked if I could change the location of my stories from Georgia and Florida to New York. Though this was not as bad as when I wrote a book set in Puerto Rico and was asked by an agent if I could change the setting to East LA and while the characters didn’t have to be Mexican, could they at least be “ambiguously Latino” or “race neutral” — whatever that means.
Even though I had to put up with that sort of ignorance (and far more clownish ignorance, like the person who asked a relative of mine how long it takes to drive to Puerto Rico), I at least had my connection to the island. I always identified as an isleño. Living in the South, my family could at least find Caribbean ingredients. Plane tickets were affordable and the trip was short. There was a sense of being far away yet reachable. And when I finally did spend time in NYC, I made so many Nuyorican friends and easily connected with the community. I had access that allowed me to build a bridge where my experience and their experience could be celebrated equally instead of being yet another division.
What about those who aren’t so lucky? What about those who are so geographically remote that the island is more myth than reality, if it is talked about at all? Where the only Latinidad on display is Mexican, and every other cultural reference is inescapably white?
That is what I found in Colorado. I was able to independently produce Puerto Rican Nocturne in 2022, and 60% of our audience were Puerto Ricans. They were overjoyed to see a play about themselves. It was also clear that there was a large number of us without any awareness of each other. The U.S. Census Bureau in 2021 named Puerto Ricans as the second largest Latino group in Colorado. Many of us are veterans, many more of us are refugees from Hurricane Maria, who settled here instead of Orlando. I have been told by several western Boricuas that they feel forgotten and lonely.
There is a presence, albeit a small one. We have a couple food trucks like Areyto and La Lechonera. We have Raíces Brewery, who Flamboyán has a partnership with, which is co-owned by a Puerto Rican but has a pan-Latino mission, since the owners recognize that we aren’t the only Latino group who is overlooked in this region.
The western Boricuas I have befriended have experiences that are radically different from Nuyoricans or Florida Ricans or even Chicago Ricans, where there is a community that nearly rivals the one in New York. Their story is one of resilient melancholy, and deserves to have its own bridge to connect to the rest of the diaspora.
Unifying the various segments of the diaspora is the ultimate act of decolonization. We have all heard the phrase “You don’t look/You don’t act/You don’t talk like a Puerto Rican”, we have all been told we aren’t enough as we are. This message has been imposed on us, and instead of rejecting it, we have adopted it to do the colonizers work of pushing our own people away, instead of bringing us closer.
The only way we can change this is by what stories we tell. Not stories to sell or market, but the stories we tell ourselves. That means ending the shaming, the division, the borders we have placed on our minds. Puerto Ricans are especially equipped to do this by embracing the very word we use to describe our culture in Spanish — Criollos—you’ve heard that word in relation to the Louisiana Bayou, that is, Creoles, a term that means a fusion of cultures and languages developed by different groups in order to communicate. Criollo culture speaks to the human desire to connect at all costs. So why do we keep insisting that being Puerto Rican is one thing that is closed off when the very nature of Puerto Rican-ness is to be a hybridization of humanity no matter where we roam?
For the stories we sell, that is to say, the art that we make, we need to change the narrative of our identities. When I say I want western Boricua stories, I am not just talking about literal stories of their families and upbringings. We should have those, but we should not be limited to them. Cultural expression is about the intersection of our influences and our identity.
Two of my first books are about Puerto Ricans in the South. No matter that I never identified with Southern culture, it absolutely influenced me, and setting the stories there allowed me to express those influences of southern gothic fiction, southern humor, southern food and manner of speaking, and the overall energy of that part of the country underneath the stories of Puerto Rican characters navigating that space, just as the Nuyoricans had done for New York.
One of those books is a murder mystery, the other is a mix of genres, including a horror story about Hurricane Katrina. Even while working in genre, my life experience of being in the South was as present as my Puerto Rican identity. You can tell any story, what makes it yours is your perspective, that includes influences from a wide array of pop culture, other cultures outside of the ones you live in, books, movies, anecdotes, jokes and all the other things that make being a human so peculiar yet so relatable.
Western Boricuas have their own hybridization, with the Mexican and indigenous influences of the Southwest, with cowboy culture, with the attitudes and energy of the Mountain West influencing how they tell stories, and those stories are as Puerto Rican as ones set in Loisaida and Santurce and everywhere in between.
The stronger we build the bridges that connect the island to all of the diaspora communities, so we are one giant criollo nation, the more that the changes we need in order to improve the future of our people will be possible. Flamboyán is just the beginning.