I. Afro/Latina Decolonial Feminisms

In her essay, “Enrique Dussel's Etica de la liberación, U.S. Women of Color Decolonizing Practices, and Coalitionary Politics amidst Difference,” Laura Pérez argues that a decolonizing politics

The practice of “introducing, engaging, and circulating” peripheralized knowledge or otros saberes is contingent on intellectual and praxical generosity. In using the term otros saberes I am referring to the epistemological break that occurs when devalued or othered knowledge comes to be understood and valued as other ways of knowing.Footnote ³ At their best, decolonizing projects subvert the ways in which colonial knowledge practices produce hierarchies of knowledge and being that produce oppressive human taxonomies. At their weakest, such liberation projects can fail to see the deeply entangled forms of oppression faced by different groups of people under modern/colonial and settler colonial regimes. Thus, not only is it important to center the lived experience and knowledges of those who “survive and more” the afterlife of colonialism, slavery, and coloniality, but we must locate one another along our paths of resistance (Sharpe Reference Sharpe2016, 18).Footnote ⁴

Kristie Dotson's metaphor for this kind of locating suggests we consider oppression as “millions of miles of ivy” that we all are tasked with pulling down.Footnote ⁵ She considers that we cannot see how others, miles away, are pulling down the ivy, but insists that we must trust and understand that others are also on the task of subverting oppression in conceivably different ways. Indeed, in locating one another and ourselves along our varied modes of resistance to oppression, we stay alive. Decolonial feminist thought is located in various temporal and spatial locales. One strand of US queer women of color decolonial feminism, in particular Chicana/Latina decolonial feminism, understands modernity as having emerged in the fifteenth century with the rise of colonization in the Americas, Indigenous dispossession, and the transatlantic slave trade. Framing the modern/colonial within these spatiotemporal contexts means that decolonial scholars within this strand understand that the peoples who confronted imperialism and slavery in the long sixteenth century represent those on the underside of modernity.Footnote ⁶ Furthermore, Chicana/Latina decolonial feminist scholars have made critical correctives to modern/colonial sex-gender politics (see Maese-Cohen Reference Maese-Cohen2010). This includes articulating and centering forms of racialized gender and sexual violence that are endemic to colonization. One such contribution is María Lugones's concept of the coloniality of gender.Footnote ⁷ Decolonial feminism thus requires an “analysis of racialized, capitalist, gender oppression,” or the coloniality of gender, in order to “understand the oppressive imposition as a complex interaction of economic, racializing, and gendering systems in which every person in the colonial encounter can be found as a live, historical, fully described being” (Lugones Reference Lugones2010, 747).

I am interested in tracing emerging Afro-Latinx feminist methodologies that exist within and across intersections of diasporic identities, experiences, and politics.Footnote ⁸ I am empowered by the ways that decolonial feminist ethics recognizes the intersectional subjectivities and lived experiences of women of color as necessary for liberatory practices and the transformation of human sciences and relationality. Perhaps the most challenging and fruitful part of Afro-Latina decolonial feminism is the practice of challenging the colonial difference through relationality or what Audre Lorde calls relations across difference.Footnote ⁹ I envision US Afro-Latinx decolonial feminist works as embodied knowledge or “theory in the flesh” that are likewise intellectual, political, and spiritual praxes that bring to the fore the histories, living legacies, and racialized gender dimensions of chattel slavery, diaspora, dispossession, and resistance to these multivalent oppressions (Moraga and Anzaldúa Reference Moraga and Anzaldúa1981, 24). These violent phenomena are always already linked to the histories and lived experiences of Indigenous women of Turtle Island and Abya Yala, Black women across the diaspora, and other communities of color on the underside of the modern/colonial project that resist forms of ongoing colonization.Footnote ¹⁰

II. A Lifetime Pursuit

The project of women of color feminisms, as articulated by the Combahee River Collective, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, M. Jacqui Alexander, Michelle Cliff, and others is one where relations across difference and complex coalition-building are the stepping stones toward fashioning new futures that do not rely on shared understandings of oppression and resistance. In their 1978 statement, The Combahee River Collective declared that they not only understood oppressions to be interlocking, but also believed that Black feminist thought and political organizing could combat the oppressions faced by all women of color:

This collective of visionary African American and Afro-Caribbean lesbian feminists articulated a politics of relationality that has resounded in the work and organizing of women of color feminists over the last three and a half decades. In her essay “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” Audre Lorde tells us, “The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference” (Lorde Reference Lorde2012, 123). She argues, “we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals,” and because of this we stand to be fractured from one another and ourselves (115). This project of relations is a “lifetime pursuit,” one that women of color feminists have kept alive as a politics and a quotidian practice (115). In using the term quotidian I am referring not only to everyday practices or to home in a domestic sense, but rather I am hailing Tina Campt's articulation of the quotidian as a site of resistance or a “practice of refusing the terms of negation and dispossession” (Campt Reference Campt2017, 96).

Relationality is a methodology of complex coalition-building, of learning one another's histories, and of understanding why difference can fragment communities in search of liberation. My intellectual and political work considers Afro-Latinx diasporas and the varied intersections with other Black, Indigenous, and people of color. My commitment to this work stems from my lived experience as a descendant of African, Indigenous, and European peoples, from the experiences of being a colonial subject living in the entrails of a settler colonial nation, and from the experience of existing on the periphery of several discourses in the academy. It is necessary to continue the difficult conversations about colonialism, to reject settler-colonial narratives of belonging, and to challenge the ongoing forms of dispossession affecting those who are both citizens and colonial subjects of a settler nation. Yet even with these guiding ethics, questions remain: How do our liberation struggles as Afro-Latinas actively engage with yet also undermine the struggles of our Indigenous and African American immediate and extended communities? How can we acknowledge and build solidarities and constellations of love and resistance that also bear witness to our collective and respective intergenerational wounds? What are some of the kin wounds that we share and how do we begin to imagine decolonial futures from within and beyond these spaces?

III. It Comes with My Bones

In Days of Awe, Achy Obejas's protagonist explains, “In English, destierro always converts to exile. But it is not quite the same thing. Exile is exilio, a state of asylum. But destierro is something else entirely: it's banishment, with all its accompanying and impotent anguish. Literally, it means to be uprooted, to be violently torn from the earth” (Obejas Reference Obejas2007, 309). At the FEAST conference I chose to discuss the concept of destierro, an untranslatable term for exile in Spanish, which is akin to being torn from land, because destierro remains a relevant and precarious condition for Black and Indigenous peoples. In wrestling with the term, I turn away from its bourgeois underpinnings and instead understand it as a vector of dispossession constitutive of colonial modernity. My point of entrance was Hurricane María, which tore through Puerto Rico in September 2017. In effect a colony of the US for one hundred and twenty years, and Spain for four hundred years before that, Puerto Rico has withstood dispossession, genocide, sterilization, diaspora, and recently, vulture capitalists intent on collecting an odious debt of seventy-two billion dollars.Footnote ¹¹ There are now more Puerto Ricans living in the US than on the island, and this is yet another a process of dispossession by design. Speculators boast that the effects of the hurricane will further empty the island, leaving more land in American and corporate hands, more Puerto Ricans displaced onto settled lands. Puerto Ricans living in the diaspora contend with multiple forms of colonialism and domination. Second-class-citizen colonial subjects living on Indigenous lands in a settler state—this is to say nothing of how Puerto Ricans in the diaspora fall at the bottom of almost all social indexes for education and employment.

In light of these political, ecological, and visceral realities, I contend that Afro-Latinx decolonial feminisms can help us think through multiple forms of domination and dispossession in diasporic and exilic contexts. I argue that destierro is a term that can capture the complex and multiple forms of dispossession and impossibilities of home for Afro and Indigenous descended peoples in the modern world. Thinking about and through destierro enables us to push decolonial thought further toward liberatory practices, and map different forms of dispossession and resistance across intersecting identities.Footnote ¹²

The longue durée of colonialism leaves a palimpsest of dispossession and genocide in its wake. If modern capitalism is the accumulation of land, resources, labor to the extent that it enables the accumulation of capital, then the act of tearing peoples away from their land and land-based practices is the precondition of capitalist world-systems, particularly as they developed in the fifteenth century. For Indigenous peoples facing genocide and dispossession across Abya Yala and Turtle Island, African slaves forcibly removed from their lands, and generations of their descendants, destierro has taken multivalent forms.Footnote ¹³ Imagining destierro as a palimpsest of overlapping histories, lived experiences, ties to land and land-based practices, and multiple movements, the afterlives of slavery and the migration of dispossessed peoples to dispossessed lands enables us to become faithful witnesses to the layers and forms of being forcibly ripped from the land while also seeing the resurgence of the land-based practices and resistance to dispossession. María Lugones describes faithful witnessing as a political act that is aligned with feminist and decolonial epistemologies and is a method of collaborating with oppressed subjects who are often silenced and ignored (Lugones Reference Lugones2003). Thus, this decolonial feminist philosophical concept is a strategy through which oppressed peoples form coalitions in order to combat multiple and systematic oppressions (Figueroa Reference Figueroa2015).

Destierro can become a decolonizing tool if in calling attention to how it is a constitutive part of exile and diaspora, it also focuses on the long legacies of self-determination by peoples on the underside of modernity. Holding that dialectic central to understanding the phenomenological, ontological, and epistemological experience of destierro is critical if we are concerned with not only documenting suffering but also foregrounding resistance. Black and Indigenous marronage, literary poetics, art practices, communal, tribal, and political and cultural organizing including Idle No More, #NoDAPL, #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords Organization, the Black Panther Party, the Chicano Movement, MOVE, and the Black School are some examples of these forms of resistance that emerge amid and against destierro.Footnote ¹⁴ These forms of organizing and activism call attention to some of the structures of destierro, which often seek to invisibilize themselves through nativist and settler colonial trappings.Footnote ¹⁵

On the 2017 album “The Navigator” by indie band Hurray for the Riff Raff, lead singer and songwriter Alynda Segarra included two songs (“Rican Beach” and “Pa'lante”) that are political statements about Puerto Rican history and contemporary struggles for self-determination. The song “Rican Beach” is particularly poignant in that it underscores ties to land and the generational effects of dispossession of land, language, and cultural practices. In telling a story about colonialism as a necropolitical imposition, Segarra (Reference Segarra2017) underscores the humanity of Puerto Ricans who've struggled to maintain ties to culture, land, and language practices:

The chorus of “Rican Beach” reveals a reckoning with the history of theft and dispossession and ends with an expression that underscores how one's life is intimately tied to one's land or homeland.Footnote ¹⁶ The lyrics make clear that the theft of a home/land can never be a clean transaction for it comes with “my bones” or rather, human material, corporeal, and affective ties to the land.

In my research I turn to cultural productions such as this song in order to point to the ways that music can disclose often unspeakable trauma, grief, and even the intergenerational impacts of dispossession. “Rican Beach” offers us a way to imagine what it means to be torn away from a place and still have your bones, your matter, your body, be an essential part of the land/scape. Even as subjects condemned to destierro, our bodies remember home.Footnote ¹⁷ This is particularly powerful in the context of coloniality and ongoing forms of colonialism that require forgetting and erasure. Thus, in time/place where we are encouraged and even given metaphorical cookies for forgetting, it is rebellion to remember, to tell stories about land and land practices, and to make claims to home/lands in the face of dispossession. Likewise, it is heresy to claim that the land remembers you: “Rocks hold memory. Land holds memory,” water, M. Jacqui Alexander tells us, “will call you by your ancient name, and you will answer because you will not have forgotten. Water always remembers” (Alexander Reference Alexander2005, 274). Enriching our scholarship with artistic and cultural productions that complicate and elucidate the preoccupations and phenomena we study give us the opportunity to expand our approaches to philosophical inquiry. In fact, the studia humanitatis, as discussed by Sylvia Wynter, is key to reimagining the human and as such, literary humanities and arts practices are part of the intellectual and political project of a new science of human systems.Footnote ¹⁸

A complex understanding of destierro would be attuned to exile, dispossession of land, removal, contestation, multi-diasporas and other forms of being torn away from land, land-based practices, and socioeconomic resources. These conditions, to which Afro and Indigenous descendant peoples are subject, are phenomena birthed by modernity and intersect across temporal and spatial planes in such a way that they are intimately tied to the histories and experiences of other peoples on the underside of coloniality. In order to understand the ontological impacts of destierro, it is imperative to have a critical and relational understanding of its processes and its impacts in a relational context.

The works of women of color feminist thinkers are necessary theoretical and practical tools to aid our understanding of the complexities of destierro in relational contexts. That is, their works—political, personal, and poetic—have made clear the stakes and difficulties of working in relation to other oppressed peoples more broadly and within our own matrix of relations (see Moraga and Anzaldúa Reference Moraga and Anzaldúa1981; Rose Reference Rose1993; Levins Morales Reference Levins Morales1998). Alexander's work, for example, challenges women of color to continue the difficult work of relating across difference, and in particular, calls attention to the relationships between Black women across the diaspora. She goes on to ask, “What kinds of conversations do we as, black women of the diaspora, need to have that will end these “wasteful errors of recognition” (Alexander Reference Alexander2005, 274)?

Alexander argues that peoples in exile/diaspora “have grown up metabolizing exile, feeding on its main by-products—alienation and separation” (274). She asks us to think specifically about the problematic position of being “African American and exiled on the spot where one is born. To be Caribbean and exiled on foreign soil producing a longing so deep that the site of neglect is reminiscent of beauty” (274). Here she underscores the ontological and phenomenological aspects of being exiled and dispossessed in multigenerational contexts. The consequences of “alienation and separation” as a birthright generate forceful bouts of nostalgia and unwavering longings for home, belonging, and embodied practices that connect us to the land—even amid the potential edificial, political, and social ruins of our homelands. Such forms of destierro necessarily intersect with, and are overlaid onto, continued Indigenous dispossession and the afterlives of slavery and colonization.Footnote ¹⁹

In these contexts, destierro can be understood as processes of gendered racialization and dehumanization that are contingent on the dispossession or tearing away of a person or peoples from land, land based-practices, and epistemologies. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson argues that “being tied to land also means being tied to an unwritten, unseen history of resistance” (Simpson Reference Simpson2014a, 20).Footnote ²⁰ For decolonial political projects and discursive analyses, this term requires a reckoning with the longue durée of modern colonial knowledge systems and a faithful witnessing to how the longing for, and act of, remembering home/lands are acts of resistance. Resistance to destierro through decolonial land, knowledge, and other embodied practices undermines the process of coloniality, settler colonialism, and neocolonialism that attempts to further sever our connection to land and land-based knowledge and practices.

The archive of destierro can be found in the stories that force us to be faithful witnesses to varying forms of dispossession and divergent forms of dispossession. My work, deeply rooted in the literary poetics of the Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone diasporas, reaches toward practices of relationality that seek to unsettle the permanence of settler colonialism and to subvert structural and epistemological forms of ongoing colonization. In the diasporic Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone literary and cultural productions that I study, I track how destierro takes form as a dispossession of spiritual syncretic practices, alienation from the body, refusal of memories, and the physical deprivation of land. Across these works, the act of remembering and awakening the memories of home/lands, land practices, and resistance to uprooting are tools of resistance against destierro.