The Alienation of a Puerto Rican Veteran
Alienation, according to Marxism, is to dedicate your life to something whose benefits will never touch you directly. Because you lack ownership over your work, your value as a person is tied to your labor rather than the fruits of it. In this way, the identity of the company and the owners of that company are never tied to the thousands of laborers who made the company possible. Yet the laborer defines him or herself by the work they do for the company. The gap between the image of the company and the relationship the worker has with it, creates an isolation in the soul of the worker that can only be overcome by overthrowing the system so the worker can be tied to the fruits of their labor.
The veteran experiences this same dynamic. The soldier/sailor/marine/airman will spend the rest of their lives defined by their service, while the branches of the military will never be defined by them. If that wasn’t depressing enough, the veteran experiences a dual alienation, since they serve a country whose existence is tied to military success, yet the citizens of the country will never define themselves as such. In fact, in America, many people go out of their way to not associate with the military at all, less they start to feel pangs of culpability for military exploits as well as being culpable for the wounds veterans carry around from those exploits. For a Puerto Rican, you face a third alienation, serving the country that actively colonizes and exploits us.
When I was in the service, we spoke of the civilian world with disdain. I heard from more than one fellow soldier how tempted they would be if a foreign power invaded, to turn their back on the ungrateful masses, quoting from Watchmen (which in turn was quoting from the Bible) “I will hear their cries for help, and my answer will be ‘no’.” While I was in the service, I insisted that I disagreed with this worldview, but when I got out and felt shunned by the civilian world, particularly being a liberal and an artist, the disdain began to make more sense.
My life since leaving the service eight years ago has been full of ups and downs, some personal, some professional. Being a veteran has been the loneliest experience of my life. You can’t talk about it without offending someone’s political beliefs or offending their capacity to hear about human suffering. Even having not been to a warzone, my time was violent and tragic. But the biggest tragedy of all was to step off base and be an alien on your own planet. Sometimes when I talk to another veteran I feel seen, but then when we express differences in our experience, the loneliness seeps in once again. Of course everyone is different, and you shouldn’t police those differences, but it would be nice to share something from that time aside from how much the world shits on or ignores us.
My biggest internal struggle in these eight years is trying to fit in a society that has little use for me. Being Puerto Rican in Colorado is to be reminded, constantly, that you are far from home and you are also not welcome here. When I tried to join the theatre community, I was shunned by the Latino theatre company here, who told me directly, “We don’t do Puerto Rican stories”, and I was also told that there aren’t enough Puerto Ricans here for me to find an audience. Yet my play brought out a lot of Puerto Ricans, who were thrilled to see our community represented. When I tried to extend that success to help others, I was shunned again by the Chicano establishment, when I was told they didn’t want to work with me because I’m “not from here”. The other Puerto Rican artists I’ve met here have faced similar discrimination. Notably, with the exception of three people, my closest friends and allies in Denver were not born here. My friends have talked about their own sense of alienation here, and how much Coloradans emphasize whether or not you are ‘native’ as a way of shunning anyone who doesn’t fit that category.
I will never define the Army, but the Army will forever define me. I will never be of Denver, but my being in Denver has defined me as unwelcomed, undesired, and on Veteran’s Day, that dual alienation hits even deeper. I was the wrong kind of veteran — a liberal. I am the wrong kind of Denverite — a Puerto Rican. Yet much like the factory worker continues to do their job even though the company will never recognize their efforts, I continue forward, trying to find my corner where I can exist, and that existence be positively impacted by the work I do here.