A Flower on the Head
The writer, Ana Teresa Toro. Illustration by Lorraine Rodríguez. Haz click aquí para la versión original en español.
My mom put a flower on my head when I was five years old. It was a required and indispensable accessory of the Puerto Rican wardrobe. Flowers are always at the service of folklore and symbols — of a memory that, after jumping from head to head so many times, no one can fix either in time or space. A memory in which we adorned ourselves with the land because we felt it to be our own, although it was always occupied by others who were not like us. They did not speak, eat, drink or understand the world like we did. Since we were children they taught us, “them and us”. Like an irrefutable truth. We were the girls who wore flowers on our heads.
Like all the girls at school, they dressed me in jíbara attire for Puerto Rican week. My grandmother made me a flowery skirt and a white blouse with exposed shoulders. My mom took care of the accessories:colorful beaded necklaces, clip-on earrings and a huge red flower on my head — similar to those that grew in the schoolyard, and in the backyards of the houses of all the abuelas I knew.
I had already been dressed as a flamboyán — with a huge crown of fiery orange flowers on my head — at a similar event, so I could say I had experience with this type of dress-up. My mother put red lipstick on me and off I went to the small stage that had been set up on the school's basketball court.Together with my entire class, I followed a choreography that consisted mainly of moving our skirts from side to side, a few steps forwards, few steps back and a 1–2 spin with a male classmate — usually dressed in crisp white linen shirt, black shorts, a red handkerchief and a pava straw hat — to the beat of a jíbaro song. I think it was a Seis Chorreao. Then, a group would come to dance Sevillanas, another to dance Bomba and one would do some representation of our Taíno ancestors. Every year we would have to represent a different group. Of course, we would dress up as jíbaras every year on November 19, the date when it is better to celebrate our puertorriqueñidad than any discovery by a Spanish conquistador. We dressed like this to go to school on that day because that was the “official” costume, the most important one, the one that contained all the other ones. Mestizaje [mixed races] as a meeting point, as the only friendly space in which the breeding ground that we are was so curdled and so cooked that there was no way to break it into pieces. What they forget is that the breeding grounds never finish curdling.
This is not a special memory. It is reproduced in the remembrance of entire generations of Puerto Ricans who taught us very early that being Puerto Rican was just that: mestizaje. They instilled deep in our core the idea that we were an unquestionable mix. We were the picture of the couple, her with an amapola on her head and him with a pava under a flamboyán tree, a static image of an idolized grass field in which all of us were supposed to fit. The reality is that it’s never been like this. We’ve always been created by a multitude, of much more than three races, in movement and contradiction. Our history does not culminate in that hallowed trinity. Although, to be fair we would have to admit that the romanticized myth worked and made a deep impression on all of us; and, at some point, it served a purpose of national refounding. What happens is that it’s impossible to sustain the foundations of a country — much less re-found it — without the indispensable pillar of its independence.
Nowadays, these costumes of jíbaras and jíbaros are available at Kmart.
For many, the resistance to that kind of ideological mestizaje with two flags and two hymns, with that strange idea of belonging to but not being part of, was to build and affirm an otherness, a concrete threat. At home, those others were called los federicos. Resistance came in small gestures. My parents taught me the revolutionary anthem before La Borinqueña, and they scolded me for saying parking instead of estacionamiento, among other hiccups in the language I learned in school. Misis Martínez and Misis Rodríguez were trying to teach us English, and it gave me an incredible sense of guilt trying to learn it. I would never tell my father about my victories in the spelling bee because he could not bear the other word that he had in his eyes: traitor.
Today the word parking appears in Spanish dictionaries, but sometimes I still find it difficult to say because I still have a trace of guilt for having wanted to learn the language of others. In the best of cases, I say it and underline it as an intimate transgression against the father, the one who instilled in me to reject everything that came in English, even though he boasted of being the best salesman of all the United States for the company he worked for. I am aware of the great absurdity in all of this, the colonial logic on which an experience like this — of rejecting a language — is framed and the certainty that this has been thought of much more deeply in the colonies as well. But it would take years to know the history of Calibán, it would take a long time to understand that it was not necessary to resist any learning, since it was clear what my identity was. The English language could not take anything away from me.
Perhaps I was aware of that truth before I even understood it. At 15, with the money I earned by tutoring, I signed up for the internet at home and began to speak in English and Spanish interchangeably with people from around the world. Then, that otherness became more complex.
Pollito Chicken, Gallina Hen is a Puerto Rican children’s folk song. Illustration by Lorraine Rodríguez.
Over the years I understood that for a long time, this protected Puerto Rican community — and it is fair to say that with good reason — hasn’t fit in a single language in its manifestation. I also understood that there are others for whom not speaking Spanish has caused the same stresses that the process of resisting to learn English did for me. After all, there are those who affirm that language is the great homeland — and for a long time I believed it and lived it that way, especially when the encounter with any Latin American occurs. But I think, or should I say, I suspect, that in the colonies where siege is the law of the day, that a sense of pride for one's land is built more from memory than words. And the truth is, you have the right to reminisce in whatever language you want.
What is one’s homeland, if not a starting point, a set of shared memories around a place? What is la patria, if it is not a way of being and doing in the face of living? a filter, a pair of glasses from which we can look at the world in the same tune from anywhere in the world? What is the homeland, if it is not certain that this starting point is made of a land and also of bodies, of people, of affections? What is the homeland if it is not that living social body that we invoke when we say “Puerto Rico”? And whatever is living has to move and change. A living country does not fit in a folkloric picture.
But, they insist on telling us that our homeland is a static thing, the fixed picture — the jíbara with the flower on her head — a single place, a single language, something that does not resemble the country that we are:| always on the move, in an endless back and forth, “en vaivén” as migration expert Jorge Duany says.
It's fair to understand the whys to all of this. The multi-centennial process of resisting the imposition of a different filter has been extremely hard. But understanding the reasons for that resistance should not prevent us from being able to assume — and do so with pride — the way in which Puerto Ricans have responded to our experience as a nation. There are countries that can speak from certain absolutes. We do not and it is time for this to stop being problematic. How are we going to have the audacity to say to the millions of sons and daughters of our diaspora —who love a country whose land they may have never set foot on, and whose language they probably won't talk — that their love and their attachment to Puerto Rico doesn’t make sense? How are we going to tell them that the memories shared by their parents and grandparents don’t belong to them? How are we going to tell the sons and daughters of those who had to leave the island so that those of us who stayed would have a country (because the social project was never big enough for everyone) that their life experience is not valuable enough, that it isn’t part of who we are? How do we say to those who are leaving now (because, what they experience is practically a policy of expulsion) taking with them their island in their suitcase, that they have lost a penny of their puertorriqueñidad? What does not make sense is to reject the brotherhood that we have forged in our memory, against all odds and in the face of constant harassment.
The image of the young Jasmine Camacho-Quinn, with her afro, her red flower on her head, Olympic gold medal hanging from her neck, bawling in English as she talked about her love for Puerto Rico, best exemplifies this complexity, and in turn, the simplicity of the contemporary Puerto Rican experience in all its immensity. The daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and an African-American father, she has remembered us with her commitment as an athlete, her courageous decision to represent Puerto Rico. The tenderness behind that red flower is a gesture, a wink of love and complicity with Puerto Rico. We cannot — nor would it be fair to do so — think of puertorriqueñidad as an experience disconnected from the diaspora. We cannot continue to be tied to a static image that is no longer in harmony with our reality. This does not have to mean that our community will dilute or disappear, or that our folklore will be eradicated. None of that. It is about celebrating the fact that puertorriqueñidad — like that flower — is planted and flourished in the loving terrain of our collective memory. For Jasmine, it was the voice of her mother, the root of one’s body and primal love as poets have already noted. For me, it is the certainty that, in that plastic flower, bought on Amazon and carried in a suitcase to the other side of the world, there is much more Puertoricanness than in the green coquíes made in China that are sold in Old San Juan or in the voice of many people who claim to love Puerto Rico but cannot find a way to love Puerto Ricans.
After all, it was never about denial, it’s always been about memory, but most of all, about love.
Ana Teresa Toro
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