I’m too much of an Artist to ever be an Activist

When I was sixteen I wrote a story called Karla and the Enternal Nothing. As you can tell from the title, I was pretty emo. ‘Eternal nothing’, as a phrase, embodies teenage theatricality almost too perfectly. The story was about a young woman having a nervous breakdown, and while I haven’t read the story in 20 years, I have no doubt that my boy brain did a laughable job of depicting the psychology of a girl.

Funny as that is, that story is an accurate representation of the type of story I love to tell. My four books as a solo author all deal with subjects like depression, exploitation, a failed capitalist system, and people whose hopes and dreams are corrupted by their own shortcomings, and more often than not, external and internal violence. My play Puerto Rican Nocturne takes a police shooting and its aftermath and uses it to make a case for why a god of vengeance, rather than a god of love, is the one humanity deserves. My latest play, Empire of Solitude, is a sort of complementary piece to Karla, as it is about misogyny and its isolating affects on the female spirit. This time I’m being a lot more aware of my need to talk to women to accurately write them, but that’s beside the point of this essay.

My work is dark, pessimistic, unforgiving at times, and not what a typical Latino is supposed to write.

What I am supposed to write is based on marketability and the potential for profit. What I am supposed to do, as a “marginalized” writer, is to adapt my subject matter according to whatever topic white audiences feel is acceptable for my people. Not only can white people be the source of oppression, we are supposed to allow them to dictate how we express ourselves. We then go onto our social media channels and contort ourselves into so many pretzels to explain that we protest white supremacy and colonization, while our work is the by-product of our unwillingness to speak the truth — that to be ourselves will not attract a white audience, and we need to make money somehow (but definitely not from our own people).

Greed is why we worship white people to begin with, and aside from war refugees, the sole reason to migrate to the US is greed. We have to make money from our work in order to justify dedicating our time to an otherwise leisurely pastime.

BIPOC artists of all types will align themselves with the righteousness of activist causes because it covers up their inherent greed and willing subjugation by the system to yield a profit. By aligning themselves with activism — a profession with little financial gain while enduring incredible scrutiny and risk to their well-being and that of their loved ones — allows the academics and meek introverts who have overwhelmed the arts world to feel brave, while they sacrifice the one noble thing about them — artistic integrity and authentic vision — in the hopes of cashing a check.

This is the basis of the Latino arts movement. Protest just loud enough that nobody hears the chime of your Venmo account. If money is the motivation, then hope is the product Latino artists are tasked with selling.

But I am not a typical Latino, I am Puerto Rican, and we like to be different. We have a place in this world where it is a responsibility on our part to call out the bullshit on all sides, and this essay is all about that. I have longed to be accepted by the Latino arts world, but my Puerto Rican nature makes it impossible if I am to be true to myself.

My work focuses on the sad expanse of the universe, where the dealings of small people matter very little, where desperation is underneath every plea to be loved and seen, where disappointment, failure, and fear reign supreme. The existential and very real angst of my characters has no place in phrases like Viva la revolucion or Viva la raza or Si se puede or any other lie the leaders of the world tell us so we won’t burn them at the stake.

The righteous activism that permeates not only social media accounts but also the stories we are allowed to tell, in my work is depicted as the dealings of charlatans and con artists.

And we are, in fact, conning our audiences into believing that if you migrate somewhere you will be successful, if you become an American you will be successful, if you marry a white person you’ll be successful, if you go to college you’ll be successful, because success is a formula, and if somebody is poor and nothing goes their way and they fall into addiction, well, there is a simple ABC way to change that. Si se puede.

Si se puede, in fact, is also a lie. The Chicanos who use it as their anthem mistranslate the phrase as Yes, we can, yet for anyone who knows Spanish knows that si without an accent doesn’t mean yes, it means ‘if’, and se doesn’t mean ‘we’, it is a collective, reflexive pronoun in the third person that changes in meaning depending on how it is used. Se puede means ‘it could’ or ‘one can’. The most accurate translation is “If it could be done” or “If possible”. It is an indecisive phrase, a shrug of the shoulder, which is how the world reacts to our “game changing” activism.

My dislike for so many Latino plays that promote the American Dream and pretend to be progressive while promoting right-wing American propaganda has only gotten worse as my own people have been sold out by American Latinos who want Puerto Rican Statehood and bash Spanish in exchange for English. To be a Puerto Rican patriot in these times is isolating and frustrating.

There are Latin American and Spanish novels that deal with depression and personal struggle and view the world through a dark lens. How I wish Latinos could do the same. As a person who grew up a nomad, from a dysfunctional and broken family, I can’t relate to the Latino arts world where everyone had a happy childhood, no economic strife, where their parents loved each other and were noble and kind, and where their ancestors weren’t drunks, criminals, or abusive. Amazing how everyone descends from brave, courageous, noble, loving people, except for me. Or maybe I’m just the only being honest.

I believe the role of art is to depict reality as it is, and that means dealing with failure and frustration. Art shouldn’t be superficial or simplistic. It should be perilous and messy and emotionally daring. Art can be entertaining but it is also separate from mere entertainment. And sure, you can make money from being an artist, but it shouldn’t be tied to branding yourself and trying to appeal to people by lying about yourself in the hopes of making a buck.

Activism is about seeing a wrong in the world and trying to remedy it, and it often is quite black and white, and the work of activism is emotionally fraught and more difficult than anything an artist does to create their own work. It is based on a level of self-righteousness and certainty that art should not have (even though it frequently does). The activist has no doubt that if their cause is achieved, that everyone will prefer the world they wish to live in.

Art should be self-aware, self-critiquing, searching, a bit lost but also seeing beauty in that. I am not willing to lie about being a good person in order to convince others that my way of doing things is the best way. I question too much and doubt too much.

Perhaps that is as it should be. I always loved the Groucho Marx quote, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member” and so I ought to view my outsider status in the Latino arts world as a badge of honor. Maybe when the tides turn and Latinos become punk and nihilistic, I’ll write a sweet story about my abuela. Until then, let me be your dragon, living in the depths, with fire in my soul.