Electric Blog

After quickly saying her name, Peggy Robles-Alvarado announces she had just finished writing the poem she is about to perform earlier that day after researching Pedro Albizu Campos. She holds the slightly folded papers of her first draft and begins to read the excerpt of Albizu’s speech* that inspired her poem: “To the Women Albizu Campos Said Feel It In Their Bones.” His words, now recited in her voice, proclaim: “Puerto Rico will be free, sovereign, and independent when the Puerto Rican woman feels* free, sovereign, and independent.”

We ask “How am I DEFINING ME?!” against and beyond “these capitalist ideas …" We know individual human subjectivity was fetishized by those enslaving capitalists. We say no to their visions of achievement/excellence. We define our own. We theorize thriving! Our mouths are futures. Our mouths are rain.

The body is an archive, but what Rebecca illuminated was that the body also serves as a map. Where does this map go? Nowhere, it is a map to the self.

When Professor Yomaira Figueroa encouraged me to attend the Proyecto Palabras PR (#PPPR) and Yagrumo Study Away program in Puerto Rico, I was both excited and reluctant: my Spanish-speaking skills were limited; and the other most obvious explanation for my reluctance was that I was Black with no Puerto-Rican ancestry. What would I be doing there? Would this make me voyeuristic? How do I attend this trip ethically and responsibly?

I never read the book, so this series was nothing I could ever imagined. Lovecraft Country is a peculiar show, one with monsters, white wizard cults, and time-travel. It is a place where when you run from monsters, you actually run not tripping, not hollering, but running.

The absence of pride™ in 2020, a result of the onset of a global pandemic, prompted now-inactive user Meatsweatsx to tweet two pictures of himself with the caption “1 year ago: LA Pride.” The first picture was an innocent, if somewhat coquettish, selfie with a brush of rainbow highlighter across his cheek. The second picture, however, was a bit more risque: he was standing upright, wearing nothing but classic chucks, white socks, a backpack, and a black bandana binding his cock to his thigh, exposing only his neatly trimmed pubes.

I met Brenda in Puerto Rico in 2019 during a bombazo. This particular bombazo was organized by (my then bomba school in Puerto Rico) Taller Tambuye and La Escuelita de Bombera Corazon (my now bomba school in Chicago) to celebrate La Escuelita’s ten year anniversary. Brenda and I discussed how my transition to living in Puerto Rico was going since she was from the part of the island I was living in. Since that night, Brenda and I have been in bomba song and history classes, in the batey, and on community organizational meetings together.

I am a lover of words; therefore, I love Toni Morrison. I paused when I saw these photographs in a New York Times article. It immediately became the image on my desktop. And of course the screensaver on my phone. Hell, I even put it on my vision board. Toni Morrison was gettin’ it. Being free. Joy across her face. A joy that meets the camera. And I don’t know why these images caused me to pause and immediately smile. Still. Even in the midst of grief, health issues, a pandemic, and cold weather.

If 2020 gave us anything it was an Afro-Latinx vampire movie. I can write about the dembow or the garlic adobo being used as weaponry or the timb flying through the air, but I want these gifts to remain untouched. I do, however, want to think through the villains in these fantastic worlds.

For as long as I can remember, my grandma Shirley prepared holiday meals for our entire family—and our family is big as it is Southern. She would start cooking the night before and not finish until the next evening. In addition to slicing fresh cucumber and tomato from my Papa’s small garden, she simmered cabbage and turnip greens in pork broth, cooked pinto beans with fatback, and slow-cooked pot roasts with carrots, onion, and potatoes. “I really ain’t that good of a cook, y’all just like it because y’all love me,” my grandma would say. And maybe it’s true. We didn’t love eating at grandma’s just because of the food. We ate at grandma’s because it was a place to gather ourselves and remember who we were in the world.

With the passing of justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and the inauguration of Amy Coney Barret into office, anxieties mounted again over the preservation over people’s reproductive rights. However, for many, their reproductive choice has long already been curtailed through the closure of clinics, unreasonable abortion timelines, and overall lack of adequate healthcare, long before any new judge has been appointed.

This spoken word is a sonic engagement with King’s insistence that Black fungibility “represents a space of alterity and possibility, or what [C. Riley] Snorton calls ‘fungible fugitivity’ (The Black Shoals). Quoting Franz Fanon, Dionne Brand, and Lethabo King, this performance contemplates:This spoken word is a sonic engagement with King’s insistence that Black fungibility “represents a space of alterity and possibility, or what [C. Riley] Snorton calls ‘fungible fugitivity’ (The Black Shoals). Quoting Franz Fanon, Dionne Brand, and Lethabo King, this performance contemplates…Ultimately, this piece asks us: who/how can we be if we use our fungibility to our own ends?

Electric.Marronage wants to congratulate our curators, Drs. Jessica Marie Johnson and Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, on the publications of their first books. Thank you both for your leadership and for these phenomenal works.

After the ruling in the wake of Breonna Taylor, I went to bomba dance class exhausted. My teacher said we were going to “dance for Breonna tonight,” and played a yuba. A yuba is a rhythm of depth--pain, veneration, rage, courage and war. It is a complicated rhythm representative of the complications of colonialism, antiblackness, and transnational identities most Afro-Puerto Ricans broker daily.

Nigeria’s queer youth have also cited particular types of gender and sexual violence. The stop and search ordinance has further served state efforts to criminalize, punish, and outlaw genders and sexualities that aren’t cis-heteronormative. It can be argued that, the state has been able to leverage SARS to attempt to regularly enforce the 2013 Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act.