Puerto Rican Women Quotes

I dressed to their murmurs in the other room, their voices soft but strained, and I wondered if men ever talked like this, if their sorrows ever spilled into these secret cadences.

I would just as soon remain jamona than shed that many tears over a man.

On February 22, 1899, the New York Times ran an article headlined “Americanizing Puerto Rico,” describing Puerto Ricans as “uneducated, simple-minded and harmless people who are only interested in wine, women, music and dancing.

For decades the doctors in Barceloneta sterilized Puerto Rican women without their knowledge or consent. Even if told about la operación (the operation), the women were not informed that it was irreversible and permanent. Over 20,000 women were sterilized in this one town.4 This scenario was repeated throughout Puerto Rico until—at its high point—one-third of the women on the island had been sterilized and Puerto Rico had the highest incidence of female sterilization in the world.5 This campaign of sterilization stemmed from a growing concern in the United States about “inferior races” and the declining “purity” of Anglo-Saxon bloodlines.

Every so often in New York I was mistaken for Puerto Rican, Cuban, Greek, or Arab. In San Diego, where I lived for four years before moving to Michigan, I was almost always seen as Mexican.

Mrs. Armitage had been different, although she was old too. That was in New York at the San Juan Laundry on Fifteenth Street. Puerto Ricans. Suds overflowing onto the floor. I was a young mother then and washed diapers on Thursday mornings. She lived above me, in 4-C. One morning at the laundry she gave me a key and I took it. She said that if I didn’t see her on Thursdays it meant she was dead and would I please go find her body. That was a terrible thing to ask of someone; also then I had to do my laundry on Thursdays.

But as a Puerto Rican woman, she belonged to not one but two minority groups. New research suggests that her double minority status may have amplified the costs and the benefits of speaking up. Management researcher Ashleigh Rosette, who is African American, noticed that she was treated differently when she led assertively than were both white women and black men. Working with colleagues, she found that double minority group members faced double jeopardy. When black women failed, they were evaluated much more harshly than black men and white leaders of both sexes. They didn’t fit the stereotype of leaders as black or as female, and they shouldered an unfair share of the blame for mistakes. For double minorities, Rosette’s team pointed out, failure is not an option. Interestingly, though, Rosette and her colleagues found that when black women acted dominantly, they didn’t face the same penalties as white women and black men. As double minorities, black women defy categories. Because people don’t know which stereotypes to apply to them, they have greater flexibility to act “black” or “female” without violating stereotypes. But this only holds true when there’s clear evidence of their competence. For minority-group members, it’s particularly important to earn status before exercising power. By quietly advancing the agenda of putting intelligence online as part of her job, Carmen Medina was able to build up successes without attracting too much attention. “I was able to fly under the radar,” she says. “Nobody really noticed what I was doing, and I was making headway by iterating to make us more of a publish-when-ready organization. It was almost like a backyard experiment. I pretty much proceeded unfettered.” Once Medina had accumulated enough wins, she started speaking up again—and this time, people were ready to listen. Rosette has discovered that when women climb to the top and it’s clear that they’re in the driver’s seat, people recognize that since they’ve overcome prejudice and double standards, they must be unusually motivated and talented. But what happens when voice falls on deaf ears?

My Stuyvesant students were not satisfied. Why was I telling them stories of women from the Islands and Puerto Ricans and Greeks when the world was going to hell? Because the women from the Islands believe in education. You can demonstrate and shake your fists, burn your draft cards and block the traffic with your bodies, but what do you know in the end? For the ladies from the Islands there is one relevance, education. That is all they know. That is all I know. That is all I need to know.

North American LGBT activists, wedded to epistemologies of the closet, often implicitly or explicitly equate this culture of semivisibility with the Global South’s lack of progress. In Sirena Selena, the Puerto Rican novelist Mayra Santos-Febres parodies the North’s conflation of “developing” nations’ electrical power outages and their lack of sexual enlightenment through the words of a Canadian tourist in Santo Domingo. He sighs, “I don’t want to criticize, you know — with all the problems these islands have, it’s understandable that they’re less evolved. . . . You can’t compare our problems with the atrocities a gay man has to face in these countries. . . . It’s all hanky-panky in the dark, like in the fifties in Canada.

North American LGBT activists, wedded to epistemologies of the closet, often implicitly or explicitly equate this culture of semivisibility with the Global South’s lack of progress. In Sirena Selena, the Puerto Rican novelist Mayra Santos-Febres parodies the North’s conflation of “developing” nations’ electrical power outages and their lack of sexual enlightenment through the words of a Canadian tourist in Santo Domingo. He sighs, “I don’t want to criticize, you know — with all the problems these islands have, it’s understandable that they’re less evolved. . . . You can’t compare our problems with the atrocities a gay man has to face in these countries. . . . It’s all hanky-panky in the dark, like in the fifties in Canada.”5 But the “dark” or semivisibility of Caribbean same-sex sexuality can be something other than a blackout. It can also read as the “tender and beautiful” night that Ida Faubert imagines in “Tropical Night,” a space of alternative vision that nurtures both eroticism and resistance. The tactically obscured has been crucial to Caribbean and North American slave societies, in which dances, ceremonies, sexual encounters, abortions, and slave revolts all took place under the cover of night. Calling on this different understanding of the half seen, Édouard Glissant exhorts scholars engaging Caribbean cultures to leave behind desires for transparency and instead approach with respect for opacity: a mode of seeing in which the difference of the other is neither completely visible nor completely hidden, neither overexposed nor erased.6 The difference that Glissant asks us to (half ) look at is certainly not that of sexuality (since it is never mentioned) nor of gender (since he includes in his work a diatribe against feminism).

Seeing the society that the Cuban people were attempting to build inspired me to believe it was possible to arrange a nation’s priorities to meet the needs of the majority of its people instead of just those of its corporations and super rich.

At its best, the Young Lords offered revolutionary ideals and examples of movement-building strategies and tactics, and tough, hard-hitting, and painful lessons from its setbacks and failures.

We believed that the women’s struggle for equality was the ‘revolution within the revolution.

¡Río Grande de Loíza!...Mi manantial, mi río, desde que alzóme al mundo el pétalo materno; contigo se bajaron desde las rudas cuestas, a buscar nuevos surcos, mis pálidos anhelos; y mi niñez fue toda un poema en el río, y un río en el poema de mis primeros sueños. Río Grande de Loíza!...My wellspring, my river since the maternal petal lifted me to the world; my pale desires came down in you from the craggy hills to find new furrows; and my childhood was all a poem in the river, and a river in the poem of my first dreams.

Yo, fatalista, mirando la vida llegándose y alejándose de mis semejantes. Yo, dentro de mí misma, siempre en espera de algo que no acierta mi mente. Me, fatalist, watching life coming and going from my contemporaries. Me, inside myself, always waiting for something that my mind can't define. ("Momentos/Moments")

[…] she taken turpentine and she taken too much, I guess, and she died. She bled to death and died”. She was not alone. Prior to the 1974 Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision that a woman’s right to personal privacy gave her the right to decide whether or not to have an abortion, large numbers of women who died from illegal abortions were Black. In New York, for example, during the several years preceding the decriminalization of abortions, 80 percent of the women who died from illegal abortions were Black or Puerto Rican.

Why? You didn’t kill him. So tell me about you. Where are you from? What’s with the accent? You look like a black guy, no offense.” “I am a black guy. No offense,” he retorted but seemed a little thrown off in the way his eyes narrowed on her in a dissecting manner. Gaby was aware she had been sharp with her words to his condolences. She wondered if she offended him, or surprised him. A man like Power was probably used to women creaming at his slightest display of affection. “My father and his family are Belizean. I was born and raised in Belize. I lived there until I was 19-years-old. My mother is…was… a black American. My father, Belizean, yes. Still, I’m a black man.” “So Belizeans aren’t considered Hispanic?” Gaby questioned with a crinkled brow. “Belizeans, like most Central and South American inhabitants, are descendants of African slaves that were just dropped off along the way. But we were the only British colony in the region, the only Central American country where English is still the official language, although most Belizeans are trilingual, Elizabeth The Second’s the queen, the whole nine. But we’re of black ancestry even with Hispanic heritage. I see darker tones in my country than yours. Nicaraguans, Puerto Ricans, Brazilians, Costa Ricans, Columbians… most of them have more black blood than the black people in the U.S. That’s why it kills me when people ask shit like that. I mean…” He stopped short. “… not you,” he offered up but Gaby only pressed her lips together feeling slightly embarrassed knowing she was in fact, amongst the ignorant.

what manhood is. We know that under capitalism, manhood is defined according to the amount of money a male has. Puerto Ricans, since they are exploited by capitalists, have no money, and as a result no status or prestige. As Eldridge Cleaver puts it, our men are “deballed.” Since they can’t prove manhood economically, they try to do it sexually at the expense of their women.

Mennonite missionaries organized workshops that focused on child care and hygiene for Puerto Rican women, whom they characterized as “dirty and unkept.…

it was actually a graveyard—designed to break men and women, to kill their spirits, to grind them into drones, then animals, then feces and ash.

This “enlightened civilization” held some firm views about their neighbors. On February 22, 1899, the New York Times ran an article headlined “Americanizing Puerto Rico,” describing Puerto Ricans as “uneducated, simple-minded and harmless people who are only interested in wine, women, music and dancing.

The birth control pill was not created without controversy—the involvement of Margaret Sanger and her embrace of the eugenics movement; the enrollment of institutionalized women in trials by their supervising doctor without their consent; the Puerto Rican trial subjects recruited without the knowledge that they were receiving

She drove back to the harbor, where she had lived in Erie own all of her adult life. Across the bridge and into "the land of her people," Aunt Lizzie like to say. So ridiculous, really. Why shouldn't the Italians live with the Irish, and the blacks and Puerto Ricans, for that matter? The men worked together, and sometimes drank in the same bars. They all cheated on their wives, too, and the women kept putting up with them no matter how you pronounce their last names.

they call themselves patriots and fathers of the homeland. What idea of the homeland can they have? One that is egotistical, which begins and ends with them. They are everything.

women, by force of will and energy, are quite capable of doing certain jobs that they previously had been denied. This theory is constantly disputed by those who claim women's inferiority due to sexual difference, which, it is said, seems to be an immutable law of nature. But there is nothing more false than to attempt in this way to uphold the permanent superiority of men.

When I met Cha Cha [Jiménez] and other Young Lords, I was impressed with their political ideals and militancy–with their sense of urgency and need for action. (2009 speech)

Forty years ago, the Young Lords stepped to the forefront. They organized, advocated, took militant action to let the world know about the deplorable living conditions of Puerto Ricans and Latinos, they inspired Puerto Ricans and Latinos to organize and take to the streets in communities across the United States. (2009 speech)

The Puerto Rican Nation must continue. We must open our eyes to the oppressor's tricknology and refuse to be killed anymore. We must, in the tradition of Puerto Rican women like Lolita Lebrón, Blanca Canales, Carmen Pérez, and Antonia Martínez, join with our brothers and, together, as a nation of warriors, fight the genocide that is threatening to make us the last generation of Puerto Ricans. (From 1970)

Puerto Ricans don't like to talk about racism or admit that it exists among Puerto Ricans. Boricuas talk of an island free from racism, or they say that the amerikkkans brought it. Although the amerikkkans did make it worse, racism in Puerto Rico began with the Spanish. According to them, one drop of white blood meant you were white and better than your Black compatriot. Acceptance was given according to the "degree of whiteness." (From 1970)

My parents both arrived in New York City after World War II, at different times but for the same reason the search for work. They left a country they loved, but where they could not make a living. About half a million Puerto Ricans made the same journey fleeing economic despair, the result of the US colonization of the island. Government officials blamed the people for the disastrous economic situation claiming that the problem was "overpopulation." They promoted the mass exodus of Puerto Ricans and implemented policies that sterilized thousands of poor and working women. The Young Lords are the sons and daughters of this Great Migration. As young people growing up in the United States, we witnessed how our parents were exploited, degraded, and humiliated. We felt their suffering, and we too had experiences with poverty and racism. All of this propelled us into action to fight for justice.

Where is the voice of freedom, / freedom to laugh, / to move / without the heavy phantom of despair? (From "Farewell from Welfare Island")

We must study and reclaim our past so that we can move forward; so we understand why and how we came to be who we are, and where we are going. (2009 speech)

mind bogglingly, approximately a third of all Puerto Rican women were sterilized by the US government between 1933 and 1968.

mil gracias de todo corazón.

In 1898, Puerto Rico was invaded and declared a territory of the United States. At first, the island was ruled by a military government and later by a civilian one appointed by the U.S. Congress. In 1952, Puerto Rico became a Commonwealth of the United States, with its own gubernatorial and legislative powers. Although the Jones Act had granted American citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917, those living on the island still are not allowed to vote for U.S. presidents or members of Congress.

Jessica lived on Tremont Avenue, on one of the poorer blocks in a very poor section of the Bronx. She dressed even to go to the store. Chance was opportunity in the ghetto, and you had to be prepared for anything. She didn’t have much of a wardrobe, but she was resourceful with what she had—her sister’s Lee jeans, her best friend’s earrings, her mother’s T-shirts and perfume. Her appearance on the streets in her neighborhood usually caused a stir. A sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican girl with bright hazel eyes, a huge, inviting smile, and a voluptuous shape, she radiated intimacy wherever she went. You could be talking to her in the middle of the bustle of Tremont and feel as if lovers’ confidences were being exchanged beneath a tent of sheets. Guys in cars offered rides. Grown men got stupid. Women pursed their lips. Boys made promises they could not keep.