Repairing La memoria rota: Feminist Oral Histories as Critical Memory Recuperation and Resistance
Evangelista Acevedo Torres
Recently, my brother posted a picture of my great grandmother on my father’s side. It was the first time I’d seen her. I could not stop staring into her eyes, trying to find myself in hers, trying to decipher her stoic expression, a thin smile on her lips. My paternal grandmother looked very much like her. Because it was a restored photograph, I couldn’t tell if her skin was the same tobacco hue as her daughter’s, who liked to smoke cigars every day and drink rum from a flask. I thought about all of this and felt a pang of melancholy not knowing my ancestors beyond two generations past.
As Puerto Ricans, we live with a broken memory, inflicted by colonialism and nation building discourses that uphold antiblackness and heteropatriarchy. These myths have erased our pasts, replaced by Eurocentric and US aspirations to wealth and whiteness. Those of us at the fringes of this thrusted amnesia resist through the act of remembering, as a way to build an archipelagic memory that has been denied.
Puerto Rican literary critic Arcadio Díaz Quiñones (1993/2007) referred to our historical memory as broken (79). By political design that seeped into cultural and educational production, elite sectors crafted a master narrative that weaponized a monolithic and simplified history that rendered invisible those at the margins (24). As early as elementary school, children are socialized into internalizing messages that dictate both racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies. Economic progress is seen as the ultimate goal, regardless of the pathways taken in an exercise that only proves profitable for the political class and elites. Meanwhile, dispossession operates as the norm of abjection for Black and racialized Puerto Ricans, particularly trans and cis women, and those that are part of the informal and working-class economies.
What can we gain from the ancestral and community knowledges and practices that are transmitted generationally through stories, kin networks, and land practices? How can these epistemologies, omitted from dominant narratives, provide us with the tools to disrupt what we’ve been taught about ourselves, our culture, and heritage still present in school textbooks and popular media? How can a critical recovery of history “be applied to the present struggles to increase conscientization” and move us toward a path of decolonization? (Fals-Borda 1991: 8). This is the imperative that drives my pedagogical work. I have a responsibility to expose and reveal what has been concealed by “national ideologies” (Godreau 2015: 69) and racial democracy myths.
During the 2019-2020 academic year, I taught a course at the University of Puerto Rico, Cayey (UPR-C) campus, a town located in the central-eastern mountainous region of Puerto Rico’s main island. The course was the combination of a social justice curriculum, a research method called participatory action research (PAR), and a critical dialogic methodology, intergroup dialogue (IGD). Beyond method, PAR is a form of knowledge production that seeks to transform the conditions of oppressed and exploited groups, by engaging in collective research among non-academics and academics alike. Students and I established a research collective with community partners in the urban hub of Cayey. I view the combination of my course’s elements as a pathway to building solidarity among differently situated individuals.
In this research collective, I looked to Black, decolonial, and women of color feminists to build solidarity across difference. Drawing on the notion of complex coalition-building as “steppingstones toward fashioning new futures that do not rely on shared understandings of oppression and resistance,” (Figueroa Vasquez 2020: 3), the work done by the collective sought to build a counter-archive that centered women from various class, racial, sexual, religious, and educational backgrounds.
A week prior to the Covid lockdown in Puerto Rico, students met with their participant prior to the oral history interview to break the ice and create rapport. With the pandemic impeding in-person interviews, the students used a recording app, transcribed the interviews, and chose fragments/sections according to common themes all participants discussed. Students also shared the transcript with the women they interviewed allowing them to add to or modify the text. The fragments/sections were uploaded onto an online platform that contained a rendering of the urban hub map.
This archive of resistance detailed life from the women’s perspectives, the ways in which they encountered and dealt with government expropriations, poverty, school closings, the role of the university, sexuality, and community, among other topics. The oral histories presented the joy, pain, hope, and resistance of a heterogenous group of women that feel a deep sense of belonging to their Cayey communities.
Screenshot of Historias orales cayeyanas
The oral history project, along with the other participatory action research projects, are accessible to the Cayey community and the broader general public. This horizontal diffusion of collaborative knowledge is a crucial element of the liberatory and solidary ethos of PAR, as it shifts the site of theorization from the classroom to the outside world, and paves the way for alternative, reciprocal relationships based on mutual aid and solidarity.
I think about my great grandmother and the grieving of collective memory loss many of us feel, especially those of us not from elite or wealthy families. Feminist oral histories are a powerful tool of collective memory recuperation, a way to find clues that unearth decolonial possibilities both in the present, and future.
References
Díaz Quiñones, A. 1993/2007. La Memoria Rota. Ediciones Huracán.
Fals Borda, O. 1991. “Some Basic Ingredients.” In O. Fals-Borda and M.A. Rahman’s (Eds.), Action and Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action Research. Apex Press.
Figueroa, Y. 2020. “After the Hurricane: Afro-Latina Decolonial Feminisms and Destierro.” Hypatia, 35(1), 220-229.
Godreau, I.P. 2015. Scripts of blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and US Colonialism in Puerto Rico. University of Illinois Press.
Aurora Santiago Ortiz is a Social Justice Education scholar. Her scholarship focuses on social inequities, particularly at the intersections of race, gender, and colonialism in Puerto Rico, the US, and Latin America. Her research links anticolonial, antiracist feminist and queer social movements in the Americas to community-based participatory action research. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a Juris Doctor from the University of Puerto Rico’s School of Law, and a B.F.A. in Film and T.V. from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her work has been published in the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, Tracce Urbane: Italian Journal of Urban Studies, and is forthcoming in Chicana/Latina Studies Journal. She has also published in Society and Space, The Abusable Past blog of the Radical History Review, and Zora magazine.