Puerto Rico is Basically White People Now.
Sure...I'll tell you EXACTLY what's wrong with that.
El Día de Tres Reyes is a fucking HUGE holiday.
It’s an extension of Christmas, celebrates the day gifts were brought to the baby Jesus, and is paraded loud and proud in the streets of Puerto Rico.
It’s also been successfully turned into a Hallmark consumerist holiday.
My neighbor, an older woman with her fair share of health challenges, will sometimes ask me to accompany her on a store trip if it is particularly long. She gets tired and anxious and of course it’s nice to have good company. She will usually drive out, I will take on parking duty in the massive mall parking lot, and I will then drive home after she’s all wiped out from the activity.
You may not associate a large shopping center with Puerto Rico, but trust me.
We got ‘em.
She had a pretty good game plan in mind where we would start on one end of the mall to see what gifts she could find and then end at a Wal-Mart on the other end where I would then retrieve the car after shopping was done…and we were out of there like a Puerto Rican Batman in the night.
Okay.
Stage is set.
The first thing I noticed is something I hate more than anything in the world.
It’s people avoiding eye contact at ALL costs.
That shit - IS FUCKING WHITE.
I hate looking over at a person, catching them look back, and then watching as they pretend to be looking at the ceiling, a bird, a car, or even worse…a consumer product.
I could see it all over the fucking mall.
A once powerful Puerto Rican culture now enmeshed in consumerist behavior. Ready to pay hundreds for sneakers that will be grown out of in the span of a year. Shopping for brand names. Looking for deals.
If you see nothing wrong with it…you’re in it.
You’re not bad for it. But you’re certainly a slave to it.
No one interacting without a product in between them.
The conversation was not about the holidays or people they love.
It was about the products they felt obligated to buy for the people they love for the sake of letting those people feel the ‘value’ those products bring to them.
It’s fucking gross.
Fuck a mother fucking brand name.
A white-corporate sneaker frosted with the culture it’s marketed to.
A 50 dollar tee shirt.
They look nothing like us.
They do not create what we create.
They do not party and celebrate life like we do.
They are not alive.
WE MAKE THEM LIVE WITH OUR BLOOD AND ENERGY.
They trick us into thinking we will be happier with them.
What does this have to do with white people?
Everything.
Quick note:
It’s not your ‘white-ness’ that is upsetting. This is all to make you understand that it’s MOSTLY the white cultures that propagate this behavior.
It’s ironic because there is great wisdom and understanding of human behavior that comes from Freud, Jung, and Bernays.
The white brainiacs of our time.
I always find it upsetting when a great discovery is made, and that discovery is then placed in the hands of evil men and women.
Trust me.
I know there are some real pieces of shit who are Asian, Black, Puerto Rican, etc…
Sorry if I made you feel singled out in the course of this post.
But the fact still remains…Puerto Rico is being invaded and Puerto Ricans can’t even see it.
Even the ones singing Bad Bunny’s…
Just like the average American couldn’t ‘see it’ when they were being sold a pack of cigarettes.
And those that DO see can’t combat the monster that has taken over because they feel powerless to attack it.
Oh and Fuck Donald Trump and Jennifer Gonzalez.
Stop making fucking deals with hotels and YouTube celebs, separate from the US dollar, print Puerto Rican currency (We HAVE the Federal Reserve IN PUERTO RICO…in case ya didn’t know.), and MAKE PUERTO RICO RICH WITH LOCAL ENERGY AND TRUST.
WE HAVE THE MEANS.
In case you were wondering what it was that might have started all this for me…
It’s gonna get messy. Take it slow.
I watched white people aggressively speak English to people in Puerto Rican businesses under the assumption that it’s a WHITE STATE…it’s not. And fuck you, gringo. You can’t Google a couple words in Spanish? Fucking kill yourself.
Note: Shout out to the white people that actually try and show love, give protest against the evil on our land, and make efforts to speak Spanish. May you eat tasty food, enjoy beautiful sunsets, and have sex with the hottest Boricua you can find.
To add to the note…I can visibly SEE some Puerto Ricans feel ‘cringe’ when white people try to live within our culture. They get upset at a white guy/gal that makes an effort to respect the culture. Those Puerto Ricans are basically honorary Gringos. You fucked up, bitches.
On my shopping trip with my neighbor, I watched a fellow Puerto Rican yank a shirt right from in front of her as she was contemplating buying it…this is Black Friday white-corporate victim consciousness all over again.
That was categorically NOT the core of Puerto Rican behavior.
Now, if you know me…you know I will always speak up when I see some bullshit if I have to.
But this surprised me SO much that I literally had to laugh as I processed a Boricua acting like a greedy Gringo.
It was like watching a stock broker in a suit take a dump in the middle of the street and proceed to eat his own shit.
Guys…what the FUCK are we doing???
I have also been seeing a lot of Puerto Ricans take on elitist attitudes.
And I’m not talking about the general anger at white people that show up to restaurants. I’m still processing that. But I strongly believe the customer is NOT always right. So if you act like a dick at a PR business…you SHOULD get treated like trash.
I’m talking about the need to play status games.
The need to be better than someone else. The need to buy a name brand not because it’s cool…but because that brand name MAKES you ‘better than’ someone else.
I’ve BEEN treated like shit by other Puerto Ricans who wanted to play control games with me because their own life was essentially outside of their own control.
The dynamic created by the need to constantly chase money, pay (fraudulent) taxes while navigating torn down towns and cities with hardly any local government care, dodge debt/police tickets, and basically survive an invisible white system in a brown country.
BUT I FUCKING SEE IT.
Want me to REALLY blow your mind?
I was born in WISCONSIN.
When I was younger, I was convinced that I was white.
My introduction to racism was realizing I was NOT white.
I was crying because I was treated differently.
I was fighting the fact that my blood came from THIS island.
I really thought I was a Wisconsinite and white like the rest of them.
I cried out as a child…
‘But I’m whiiiiite!’ - tears streaming down my face…
My father realized something needed to change.
He got me into a mostly Latino private school in Milwaukee, WI.
Since then, I had settled into my identity a little bit.
But I also would grow up to be followed around at stores, be called a dumb spic, get denied jobs, be harassed by police, and a few other general ignorant mistreatments growing up.
This is NORMAL in Wisconsin.
And if you think it’s bad for the brown community…
Wisconsin is FUCKING RACIST.
Which brings me to my next point.
There are a LOT of racist Puerto Ricans.
I’ve over heard Puerto Ricans talking shit about Chinese and Dominicans, and even just AREAS of Puerto Rico they consider unsafe because the ‘darker people’ are there.
(This would include people in my own family…that really fucking sucks to know…)
I had a ‘white’ Puerto Rican follow me around in a store due to my color.
I’m talking she was less than 5 feet away.
She did this twice.
I left a scathing review and no longer shop at Farmacia Rincon…
Let me wrap this up.
The very thing that we say we are trying to avoid is STILL happening.
Rich white people are taking the land.
They are building on the beaches.
They are blocking off areas to keep it white.
I have walked these areas and seen the looks given to me like I WAS SOMEHOW THE ONE WHO WAS OUT OF PLACE.
There are…RIGHT NOW…white people who DO NOT WANT PUERTO RICANS IN PUERTO RICO.
They are ACTIVELY STEALING LAND and blocking beaches.
I heard a racist Texan once that said:
“Puerto Rico is an amazing place if you don’t count all those Puerto Ricans”…
Personal opinion:
If a Puerto Rican pulls a gun and pops someone for taking land…it’s PATRIOTIC.
Do I WANT that to happen?
Obviously not…but I also don’t want to watch one of the greatest places in the world get butt fucked by people who want have a Pumpkin Spice Latte on the beach while being served by an underpaid Puerto Rican slave.
Gringo…GO FUCKING HOME.