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  Magdalena Gómez

Raped: Puerto Rican Diary

10/16/2017

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Years ago I was asked by a university history professor, a very dear friend of mine, to speak with his class on the internment (incarceration) of Japanese Americans that began in March of 1942, by way of Executive Order 9066, signed in February of that year by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Fellow American citizens permitted it, just as  we continue to permit the egregious Jones Act. Not all internments come with barbed wire. 

I showed students an old cartoon that was watched by children in 1942; one of many released that espoused hatred of the Japanese people.  In it, the character of Popeye the Sailor sang an excerpt from the popular Carson Robison song:  “We’re Gonna Have to Slap the Dirty Little Jap.” The students were stunned. This history had been previously unknown to them.

Like it or not, the political is personal, and reverberates through all of our lives. A legacy of patriarchal white supremacist entitlement condoned and encouraged an individual to brutally violate me. That same entitlement on a broader scale, contributes to the unchecked violation of our civil liberties and human rights by an increasingly despotic government. No “leader of the free world” has ever acted entirely on his own. In 1939, 20,000 U.S. Nazi’s gathered in hatred’s full regalia at Madison Square Garden, in New York City. I’ve attached the link to the footage below.

When I was twenty-three years old, I was held by an acquaintance against my will, raped and tortured for eighteen gruesome hours.  The man who did this to me lacked empathy, compassion or any ability to see me as a human being. He was privileged, always well dressed in suits and ties, studying medicine and law. He made sure I knew that women, “even the little old ladies” found him irresistible and that any woman who did not welcome his sexual advances must surely be a “lizzie”, his southern drawl slang for lesbian. When I tried to get away he put a gun to my head and told me “Darlin’ who’s going to take the word of a spic washing dishes for a living over a man like me? I could kill you right here, leave you in the stairwell and everyone in this building will blame it on a junkie. You’re in my apartment, that makes you just another Puerto Rican whore.”

We knew each other from school. He invited me over for lunch. We lived a few blocks apart. I knew my neighbors; those were days of daily face to face interactions with the people we made it our business to know. Cooking meals together, talking politics, remembering birthdays and celebrating significant milestones was an organic part of our lives. 

In all of my previous interactions with this man, which were public, he had always behaved like a “gentleman.” He held a well-paying job as a phlebotomist, aspired to a career where he could combine his interests in law and medicine, and was the “all American (white) boy”. In my naiveté, I perceived no threat, felt no sexual attraction,  and simply  believed I would be spending a quiet afternoon enjoying intelligent conversation with someone raised in a world very different from mine, who promised to make his specialty of Biryani rice.

It was the 1970’s, and rape was still seen as the victim’s fault, especially one who went to a man’s home. I would have been considered a “hot blooded Latin” who most certainly must have “asked for it.”  I had male and female friends I visited all of the time. In fact, most of my friends at that time were men, and several of them are still in my life as dear and loyal friends. No matter; I was then and to many still am, considered a spic. 

The rapist was right; he could kill me and get away with it. I was a nobody in the eyes of a society where religion had cursed women as “instumenti diaboli” and Puerto Ricans were represented in media as junkies, dealers, whores, welfare cheats and in general a worthless criminal element. Our globally relevant achievements in all fields, our vast literary contributions, inventions, arts, and s/heroes were denied, erased or buried and the very mention of “Puerto Ricans” in films, conversation, in the news, was nearly always tinged with the underscore of a disgusted sneer or filthy joke. It was a time when we had the lowest per capita income of any “hispanic” group, but scarce public dialogue about the predatory colonial relationship forced by the United States that caused it. 

To date, even among the so-called “educated” in the U.S. we are referred to as immigrants. A recent New York Times article revealed recent polling results that only 54% of “Americans” know that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. In terms of mass public perception and sneering attitudes towards Puerto Ricans, little has changed. Our global celebrities, in particular those who are politically safe and lighter on the melanin scale, are doing very well.  My thanks to those who are giving from their abundance. My respect to those for whom their giving is an act of love and sacrifice.

The rapist viewed the totality of my life as a soulless, meaningless body easy to dismiss, to brutally violate and just as easy to kill. Now, Puerto Rico gets the same treatment, with special abuse and neglect in locations where Afro-Boricuas, the poor and elderly reside. Puerto Rico has been raped since 1898, its just now in wider public view and the rapist comes with supporters who are looking the other way, silent, except for forcing on us their “Merry Christmas”, two words that disguise a deep disdain and disregard for difference; two words coined to obscure Pagan beliefs and that have evolved into commercial expedience. There is no Christ in Christmas; there never was. 

Puerto Rico, Rich Port. Port for the Rich. The rapist changed my name too. He called me Madeline. This Magdalena is Borikua. The island of my mother’s birth is Borikén.

​We are not in debt. We are owed everything, beginning with our name.

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/542499/marshall-curry-nazi-rally-madison-square-garden-1939/

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Death by Omission

10/9/2017

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The United States is an icon driven culture.  On the side of angels, we have the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. whose name and image are invoked as the emblems of the Civil Rights Movement. It was a long and deep struggle before another icon, Rosa Parks took her seat on the bus. Millions of school children have been deprived of the real history of the interminable sacrifices made for Civil Rights, as well as the true history of the United States.  Those children have grown to become uninformed adults.


On the side of depraved indifference and pernicious intent, the current “leader of the free world” is not alone in his pursuit and propagation of humanity’s demise. When referring to “our friends on Wall Street” he reveals and reminds us of the legions that by shadow manipulate his flesh. There have always been idiots and despots among the brilliant and the brave. 45 is the distraction from the entrenched evils that hearken back to the romanticized period of our very foundation.  Fourteen of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders; the ambiguity of their legacy never fully shut the door on patriarchal white supremacy as the dominant feature of U.S. politics. What distracts us now from the bigger picture of our original and ongoing infamy is a soulless puppet on whom we can focus our rage while the puppeteers keep shortening the strings.


In a recent ad, Dove Soap felt entitled to scrub a Black woman into whiteness. There is no acceptable apology for this - how was this even possible? What was that "creative team"  thinking? Did anyone say NO? And if they did, where are they now?  In history as in advertising, there are people behind the scenes we never see; the rebellious and the compliant. The dove icon has always been white, as if the black dove did not exist. From Woodstock to peace movements, to representations of the Holy Spirit; even good people fall for the insidious nuances of white supremacy. Take it from me, the perennial black sheep of my family.


Iconic summaries have by omission resulted in a sound bite vocabulary of a generalized   and revisionist history lacking both content and context.  A truncated education, reinforced by corporately controlled media, a popular culture of rabid consumerism and a sentimental patriotism that ignores our maltreatment of veterans and manipulations of the altruistic and the poor, have exponentially inflated the ranks of the blindly obedient. A cracked monocultural lens has by inference, exclusion and erasure, reinforced the counterfeit ideal of white supremacy.


Previous White House administrations got away with murder and now they can make themselves look good by hugging a Puerto Rican or other hurricane victims. Current leadership is such an abomination that even George W. Bush looks good by comparison. Wall Street and Big Banks got away with murder. They are the oil spills that lit the faces of the poor on fire. Murder by intentional negligence and inefficiency are now evident in the federal government’s response to Puerto Rico.


Don’t get distracted. Don’t forget. Thousands of freight containers of urgently needed food, water and medicine sit on the San Juan docks and tarmac - as American citizens die on our watch. Refuse to be a victim or an accomplice.  Widen the lens and shine light where shadows rule.

​Hold all elected officials accountable; its a start.
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We interrupt this...

10/1/2017

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We interrupt this...

María, I don’t blame you.
Your name chosen with malicious intent 
you are the West Side Story girl
default name for all of our women
when bigots drink too much.

You are the twin of José
the mother of El Niño.

María, you are not a hurricane.
María, you are the distraction 
from deeper meanings of destruction;
the history of abuse
and involuntary sterilizations.
Scapegoat of imperialism
and colonial thugs.

Muh-ree-uh.
The use of your name
insidious blame
that we have somehow
done this to ourselves.

The village idiot of the world
defiles you
sees in you a woman
he can “grab by the pussy”
as security detail obediently
avert their eyes.

María.
You have been repeatedly
gang-raped then called a whore
by rapists who hide behind
the village idiot of the world
too stupid to know he’s their fall guy;
the unzipped lout
gurgling with profanities
and primary school adjectives
who abhors the sound of Spanish.

María.
you have been robbed
of your riches
by parasitic thieves 
who call you a deadbeat.

Predatory scavengers
have long been with us,
defecating in once clear waters
bloody talons digging through fertile soil
to grow unnatural things
calculated contaminations mutating
all semblance of justice.

Erosion by malicious negligence
ethnic cleansing 
of we who are called 
cockroaches
by  deviant exterminators
counting their bounty by death
their doughy flesh coddled 
in brass tacked leather
made of skins
peeled from the backs
of the silenced.

Top shelf cocktails swirl
into hurricanes.
Tightly rolled cigars
with names the smokers
mispronounce
burst into aberrant flames.
Ice cubes clink against the Baccarat
flaring up the Richter Scale.

My eyes refuse to close
despite my weary body’s pleading.

There are parts of us 
that cannot be touched
or harmed, or killed
or forced to sleep;
as evil is legion 
so is love.

As greed replicates
so does resistance.

Like the pelican
offering its throat
to feed its young,
like courageous hands 
wielding machetes
to clear impassable roads,
like scarce water shared
in the presence of death
history pours
its waterfall of wisdom
upon the next generation
to take back what is theirs
beginning with their names.

Borikua.
María.
José.

Magdalena Gómez, Copyright, 2017, All Rights Reserved

I began to create this poem with the shorter one I wrote and posted on FB on September 26, 2017 at 9:40 a.m.

I rename this hurricane 45
I rename this hurricane PROMESA
I rename this hurricane Imperialism
I rename this hurricane Colonialism
I rename this hurricane Avarice
I rename this hurricane Wall Street
I rename this hurricane Big Banks
I rename this hurricane Big Pharma
I rename this hurricane Negligent Bigotry
I rename this hurricane Erasure
María is the victim, not the perpetrator.
My name is Magdalena Gómez and I stand with all victims 
of Tyranny and Unnatural Disasters.


Magdalena Gómez, Copyright, 2017, All Rights Reserved  Magdalena Gómez and I stand with all victims 
of Tyranny and Unnatural Disasters.

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    Author

    I've been called a provocateur-always by people I respect.  It has been meant as an affirmation and compliment, and that is how I receive it.   To be provocative is a  necessary component in the creation of art.  If not to move people, then what?  I don't create to be liked, I create to provoke thought, to evoke visceral response and ultimately to inspire positive action  for social change.

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​Magdalena is the Co-founder and Artistic Director of Teatro V!da:
www.teatrovida.com
Learn more:  
www.latinapoet.com
www.latinapoet.net
"Don't despair, create art and take action."