Nadie la tiene: Land, Ecology and Nationalism
¿Puedes venderme tierra, la profunda
noche de raices; dientes de
dinosaurios y la cal
dispersa de lejanos esqueletos?
¿Puedes venderme selvas ya sepultadas, aves muertas,
peces de piedra, azufre
de los volcanes, mil millones de años
en espiral subiendo? ¿Puedes
venderme tierra, puedes
venderme tierra, puedes?
La tierra tuya es mía.
Todos los pies la pisan.
Nadie la tiene, nadie.
Can you sell me the earth, the deep night
of roots, dinosaur teeth and the scattered lime
of distant skeletons?
Can you sell me long buried jungles, dead birds,
fishes of stone, volcanic sulphur, a thousand
million years rising in a spiral? Can you
sell me land, can you
sell me land, can you?
The land that is yours is mine.
Everyone's feet walk it.
No-one has it, no-one.
Nicolas Guillen, from ¿Puedes?
noche de raices; dientes de
dinosaurios y la cal
dispersa de lejanos esqueletos?
¿Puedes venderme selvas ya sepultadas, aves muertas,
peces de piedra, azufre
de los volcanes, mil millones de años
en espiral subiendo? ¿Puedes
venderme tierra, puedes
venderme tierra, puedes?
La tierra tuya es mía.
Todos los pies la pisan.
Nadie la tiene, nadie.
Can you sell me the earth, the deep night
of roots, dinosaur teeth and the scattered lime
of distant skeletons?
Can you sell me long buried jungles, dead birds,
fishes of stone, volcanic sulphur, a thousand
million years rising in a spiral? Can you
sell me land, can you
sell me land, can you?
The land that is yours is mine.
Everyone's feet walk it.
No-one has it, no-one.
Nicolas Guillen, from ¿Puedes?
1
Spring 1995. I sit on the shoulder of our family mountain, one of the highest in this part of the Cordillera Central of Western Puerto Rico, in the pine forest that rises like a Mohawk haircut off the smooth deforested slope to the east, a profile easy to recognize from miles away. Sitting on the slippery reddish needles in a green shade, I look out between the straight trunks of Honduran pine over rolling miles of cleared land planted in bananas, coffee, oranges and drenched alternately in full tropical sunlight and the quick moving rain showers of the season. Each time my brother Ricardo or I return to this farm where we spent the most important years of our childhoods, we make pilgrimage to this exact place where, after the fire in the early sixties, the forestry service paid us to plant pine seedlings. They wanted to start a small timber seed industry and our farm became part of the test acreage. In fact, it was Lencho who planted the trees, not us. Hundreds of seedlings in black plastic bags spaded into the blackened hillside. Lencho had been doing odds and ends of agricultural and other work for our family for several years. In the midst of the Korean war my communist parents called the land "Finca la Paz," Peace fFarm, but Lencho called it "Monte Bravo"--fierce mountain.
In 1966, my father was denied tenure at the University of Puerto Rico where he had been teaching biology. He had been an active participant, as a professor, in the 1965 student protests against the war and it was his unpaid teaching of Marxism and organizing, his trip to Cuba the previous winter, his egalitarian and innovative way teaching of biology in a stodgy department that lost him his job. Because he was in essence blacklisted from teaching on the island, because of my approaching adolescence in a rural community with inadequate education and a high rate of pregnancy among my friends, because my mother wanted to go back to school, my father accepted a job in Chicago and we moved there.
The day we left, the pine trees were still spindly, seven foot saplings, but somehow the knowledge of how they grew without us, how the farm continued to flower and decay, sustained my brother and me. The memory of it, the smells and sounds and colors, was one bouyant piece of driftwood in the shipwreck of our intense culture shock. We sent our spirits there for imaginary refuge from the harshness of our new lives and invoked it at night so we could sleep among the alien noises of Chicago. I dreamt of walking up the path into the farm every night for years.
Now we return to it as if checking on a buried treasure. Our ownership of these thirty-four acres preserves the land from clear-cutting, and the fact of that ownership is balm for exile. The colonial economy, the lack of the kind of social and political community we now need, the structures of our personal lives all keep us from coming here to live, but we need the knowledge of that deep valley full of rain, protected from bulldozers. Ownership is a foothold in a slippery place of identity and longing, of necessity and choice.
From my bedroom thousands of miles from here, this piece of earth and the land stretching out around it become a kind of amulet against dispossession. I imagine the rain falling on it, the hawks circling above it, the lizards skittering across it like a chorus of affirmation that I am rooted. That in spite of generations of shifting nationality and loss behind me, in spite of the unpredictably changing jobs, relationships, rented houses, I have a home on earth. The land makes me safe.
But whenever I sit here listening to the wind in the trees, the haunting cry of lizard cuckoos in the valley proclaiming the coming downpour, smell the sun-baked ferns and decaying banana leaves and feel the dense clay under me, the symbolism begins to unravel. Slowly, as I listen to it, the land becomes itself again. Not mine, not anyone's. Talking to me, yes, but not any more than it talks to the fire ants building their nests or the bats bones becoming humus or the endlessly chirping reinitas twittering among the señorita flowers.
Spring 1995. I sit on the shoulder of our family mountain, one of the highest in this part of the Cordillera Central of Western Puerto Rico, in the pine forest that rises like a Mohawk haircut off the smooth deforested slope to the east, a profile easy to recognize from miles away. Sitting on the slippery reddish needles in a green shade, I look out between the straight trunks of Honduran pine over rolling miles of cleared land planted in bananas, coffee, oranges and drenched alternately in full tropical sunlight and the quick moving rain showers of the season. Each time my brother Ricardo or I return to this farm where we spent the most important years of our childhoods, we make pilgrimage to this exact place where, after the fire in the early sixties, the forestry service paid us to plant pine seedlings. They wanted to start a small timber seed industry and our farm became part of the test acreage. In fact, it was Lencho who planted the trees, not us. Hundreds of seedlings in black plastic bags spaded into the blackened hillside. Lencho had been doing odds and ends of agricultural and other work for our family for several years. In the midst of the Korean war my communist parents called the land "Finca la Paz," Peace fFarm, but Lencho called it "Monte Bravo"--fierce mountain.
In 1966, my father was denied tenure at the University of Puerto Rico where he had been teaching biology. He had been an active participant, as a professor, in the 1965 student protests against the war and it was his unpaid teaching of Marxism and organizing, his trip to Cuba the previous winter, his egalitarian and innovative way teaching of biology in a stodgy department that lost him his job. Because he was in essence blacklisted from teaching on the island, because of my approaching adolescence in a rural community with inadequate education and a high rate of pregnancy among my friends, because my mother wanted to go back to school, my father accepted a job in Chicago and we moved there.
The day we left, the pine trees were still spindly, seven foot saplings, but somehow the knowledge of how they grew without us, how the farm continued to flower and decay, sustained my brother and me. The memory of it, the smells and sounds and colors, was one bouyant piece of driftwood in the shipwreck of our intense culture shock. We sent our spirits there for imaginary refuge from the harshness of our new lives and invoked it at night so we could sleep among the alien noises of Chicago. I dreamt of walking up the path into the farm every night for years.
Now we return to it as if checking on a buried treasure. Our ownership of these thirty-four acres preserves the land from clear-cutting, and the fact of that ownership is balm for exile. The colonial economy, the lack of the kind of social and political community we now need, the structures of our personal lives all keep us from coming here to live, but we need the knowledge of that deep valley full of rain, protected from bulldozers. Ownership is a foothold in a slippery place of identity and longing, of necessity and choice.
From my bedroom thousands of miles from here, this piece of earth and the land stretching out around it become a kind of amulet against dispossession. I imagine the rain falling on it, the hawks circling above it, the lizards skittering across it like a chorus of affirmation that I am rooted. That in spite of generations of shifting nationality and loss behind me, in spite of the unpredictably changing jobs, relationships, rented houses, I have a home on earth. The land makes me safe.
But whenever I sit here listening to the wind in the trees, the haunting cry of lizard cuckoos in the valley proclaiming the coming downpour, smell the sun-baked ferns and decaying banana leaves and feel the dense clay under me, the symbolism begins to unravel. Slowly, as I listen to it, the land becomes itself again. Not mine, not anyone's. Talking to me, yes, but not any more than it talks to the fire ants building their nests or the bats bones becoming humus or the endlessly chirping reinitas twittering among the señorita flowers.
2
I am an ecologist's daughter. I grew up in a house where the permeable boundaries of other worlds criss-crossed our own. At night you could hear the termites munching inside the walls and the slow trickling grains of digested wood. Rats ran in the attics, and if we ventured into the kitchen after hours they stared offended at our intrusions. Lizards hunted daily on the glass fields of our windowpanes, stalking moths and wasps, and hummingbirds, momentarily stunned from crashing into those windows would lie in our hands, then shoot back into the hibiscus bushes. Around the ripening bunch of bananas that hung from the kitchen ceiling, clouds of fruit flies rose each time we pulled off a piece of fruit. Autumn evenings of rain, a single tree frog would sing from the moist crevices under the sink. In my parent's bedroom, a long tendril of jasmine that had crept between roof and wall, and wound sinuously across their shelves of paperbacks. It was never our house.
My father would take me walking sometimes, show me the last fading scar of the old road, the Camino Real, poke into the holes of rotten tree trunks, peer into the cups of flowers to see the teeming insect life. I grew up in a place where a tree might fall and within a week, new seedlings sprang from the dead wood. The mountain slid and shifted under the heavy autumn rainfall, the garden left untended grew lush and tangled overnight and it was never the same place for long. How can you own something that changes under your hands, that is so fully alive? Ecology undermines ownership.
I am an ecologist's daughter. I grew up in a house where the permeable boundaries of other worlds criss-crossed our own. At night you could hear the termites munching inside the walls and the slow trickling grains of digested wood. Rats ran in the attics, and if we ventured into the kitchen after hours they stared offended at our intrusions. Lizards hunted daily on the glass fields of our windowpanes, stalking moths and wasps, and hummingbirds, momentarily stunned from crashing into those windows would lie in our hands, then shoot back into the hibiscus bushes. Around the ripening bunch of bananas that hung from the kitchen ceiling, clouds of fruit flies rose each time we pulled off a piece of fruit. Autumn evenings of rain, a single tree frog would sing from the moist crevices under the sink. In my parent's bedroom, a long tendril of jasmine that had crept between roof and wall, and wound sinuously across their shelves of paperbacks. It was never our house.
My father would take me walking sometimes, show me the last fading scar of the old road, the Camino Real, poke into the holes of rotten tree trunks, peer into the cups of flowers to see the teeming insect life. I grew up in a place where a tree might fall and within a week, new seedlings sprang from the dead wood. The mountain slid and shifted under the heavy autumn rainfall, the garden left untended grew lush and tangled overnight and it was never the same place for long. How can you own something that changes under your hands, that is so fully alive? Ecology undermines ownership.
3
My parents bought this farm in 1951 for $4000. It was ninety acres of abandoned coffee plantation that had fallen back into wilderness after the coffee market crash of 1898, the hurricanes of 1899 and 1928 and the economic devastation of the '30s and '40s. Near the house I grew up in were the ruins of cement washing tanks and a wide drying platform where we rode our bikes: the last remaining evidence of the coffee boom of the last century when immigrants from Corsica and Mallorca, and refugees from the Haitian Revolution, carved up the mountains into landholdings and turned the subsistence farmers, who had for centuries cultivated where they pleased, into landless laborers. Climate, soil, expertise and work combined to produce the best coffee in the world for wealthy patrons in Paris, Vienna and New York.
When my parents bought it, the coffee had gone wiry, wild ginger choked the pathways and bitter orange, grapefruit and bananas flowered untended under the imported shade trees, brought in to protect the precious crop. My father, unabashedly speaking Brooklyn high school Latin, would stand at the counter of the tiny roadside colmado drinking beers with the coffee workers until he had enough Spanish to talk politics and begin organizing. My mother used the Agricultural Extension Club to get women out of their houses and learning about leadership and organization at the same time that they learned how to sew and make lard cans into stovetop ovens. After a couple of years my parents sold off half the land at prices the landless or nearly so could afford, and for years people would come around trying to buy land from the Americano who didn't know better. But how else do communists own land?
They raised chickens and the vegetables my father peddled from their battered red truck. He worked as a lab tech at the hospital in Castañer and taught in San German while my mother took science courses, farmed, raised me and my brother, washed all the diapers and sheets and work pants by hand, cooked, cleaned and tended the machete wounds and cooking burns of the neighbors at the first aid station. The week my parents married the Korean war had broken out. They had come to Puerto Rico uncertain what the consequences would be. But he was declared unfit for service, and they stayed, raised children, made a life and loved the land for its beauty and peace.
My parents bought this farm in 1951 for $4000. It was ninety acres of abandoned coffee plantation that had fallen back into wilderness after the coffee market crash of 1898, the hurricanes of 1899 and 1928 and the economic devastation of the '30s and '40s. Near the house I grew up in were the ruins of cement washing tanks and a wide drying platform where we rode our bikes: the last remaining evidence of the coffee boom of the last century when immigrants from Corsica and Mallorca, and refugees from the Haitian Revolution, carved up the mountains into landholdings and turned the subsistence farmers, who had for centuries cultivated where they pleased, into landless laborers. Climate, soil, expertise and work combined to produce the best coffee in the world for wealthy patrons in Paris, Vienna and New York.
When my parents bought it, the coffee had gone wiry, wild ginger choked the pathways and bitter orange, grapefruit and bananas flowered untended under the imported shade trees, brought in to protect the precious crop. My father, unabashedly speaking Brooklyn high school Latin, would stand at the counter of the tiny roadside colmado drinking beers with the coffee workers until he had enough Spanish to talk politics and begin organizing. My mother used the Agricultural Extension Club to get women out of their houses and learning about leadership and organization at the same time that they learned how to sew and make lard cans into stovetop ovens. After a couple of years my parents sold off half the land at prices the landless or nearly so could afford, and for years people would come around trying to buy land from the Americano who didn't know better. But how else do communists own land?
They raised chickens and the vegetables my father peddled from their battered red truck. He worked as a lab tech at the hospital in Castañer and taught in San German while my mother took science courses, farmed, raised me and my brother, washed all the diapers and sheets and work pants by hand, cooked, cleaned and tended the machete wounds and cooking burns of the neighbors at the first aid station. The week my parents married the Korean war had broken out. They had come to Puerto Rico uncertain what the consequences would be. But he was declared unfit for service, and they stayed, raised children, made a life and loved the land for its beauty and peace.
4
For my ancestors land had different potency. When Eusebio Morales died in 1802, the lands that were measured for division among his heirs stretched between landmarks like "the old ceiba on the slope above the river." But what lay between those markers was money. Money extracted from the land by slave labor and the so called free labor of the landless. They grew coffee and tobacco, raised cattle and grew sugar cane and rice. Land and slavery stood behind the petition of Eusebio's grandson Braulio to found a new town, behind the club of wealthy men who rotated among themselves the offices of mayor and militia captain, marrying their children to each other so obsessively that I am descended from the same patriarch by six different lines of descent.
Land and slaveholding still stood behind my grandfather in the Depression. When he worked as a janitor and then as a stock clerk in a New York City public school cafeteria. When he fed his family on food the supervisor pretended not to notice he was taking home. It was there in his certainty of his own rightness, in the phrase "por lo derecho" that meant that he lived righteously, with dignity and correctness, not like all those wrong-living títeres that surrounded them in Harlem.
My grandmother Lola expressed that pitying sense of superiority even more overtly than my grandfather. She would speak of some African American neighbor who was "so nice, poor thing." Although she complained that the Morales' thought her not good enough, her own ancestors had all taken their turns administering class power. It was the service of her ancestors the Díaz brothers leading the militia against the English invasion of 1797 for which her family was rewarded with lands in Barrio Anones. Although her father had gambled away the family store and she did garment work in New York, although she distanced herself from her relatives and liked the bustling anonymity of New York, she still wore her "buena familia" like an especially nice perfume and was sorry for those who didn't have it, until at the end of her life it became a weapon against the staff of one nursing home after another where she reduced the dark skinned, working class nurses’ aides to angry tears.
For my ancestors land had different potency. When Eusebio Morales died in 1802, the lands that were measured for division among his heirs stretched between landmarks like "the old ceiba on the slope above the river." But what lay between those markers was money. Money extracted from the land by slave labor and the so called free labor of the landless. They grew coffee and tobacco, raised cattle and grew sugar cane and rice. Land and slavery stood behind the petition of Eusebio's grandson Braulio to found a new town, behind the club of wealthy men who rotated among themselves the offices of mayor and militia captain, marrying their children to each other so obsessively that I am descended from the same patriarch by six different lines of descent.
Land and slaveholding still stood behind my grandfather in the Depression. When he worked as a janitor and then as a stock clerk in a New York City public school cafeteria. When he fed his family on food the supervisor pretended not to notice he was taking home. It was there in his certainty of his own rightness, in the phrase "por lo derecho" that meant that he lived righteously, with dignity and correctness, not like all those wrong-living títeres that surrounded them in Harlem.
My grandmother Lola expressed that pitying sense of superiority even more overtly than my grandfather. She would speak of some African American neighbor who was "so nice, poor thing." Although she complained that the Morales' thought her not good enough, her own ancestors had all taken their turns administering class power. It was the service of her ancestors the Díaz brothers leading the militia against the English invasion of 1797 for which her family was rewarded with lands in Barrio Anones. Although her father had gambled away the family store and she did garment work in New York, although she distanced herself from her relatives and liked the bustling anonymity of New York, she still wore her "buena familia" like an especially nice perfume and was sorry for those who didn't have it, until at the end of her life it became a weapon against the staff of one nursing home after another where she reduced the dark skinned, working class nurses’ aides to angry tears.
5
My great grandfather Abraham Sakhnin also grew up on a farm his family owned. This was in the southern Ukraine, up the railroad line from Odessa. In his old age he painted his memories of it: the horses, the cellars full of pumpkins, the harvesting of wheat. The Sakhnins had come from Lithuania in the days of Tsar Nicholas the First when Jews were promised draft exemption if they settled on the borders as a buffer against the Turks. They were given land and taught to farm it by German settlers imported for the task. For five generations they did so. But land, for Jews, in Eastern Europe, was not the foundation it was for Catholic hacendados in Puerto Rico. My great-grandfather fled the farm in 1904 rather than fight in the war against Japan. Pogroms were on the rise along with revolutionary violence, and although the family were Bolshevik sympathizers and some stayed to take part in the revolution, Abe left for Canada and then New York, his first cousin Alter went to Buenos Aires and his sister married and left for Siberia. In 1942, the entire settlement, known as Yazer, was destroyed by Nazis. Land was no guarantee.
My great grandfather Abraham Sakhnin also grew up on a farm his family owned. This was in the southern Ukraine, up the railroad line from Odessa. In his old age he painted his memories of it: the horses, the cellars full of pumpkins, the harvesting of wheat. The Sakhnins had come from Lithuania in the days of Tsar Nicholas the First when Jews were promised draft exemption if they settled on the borders as a buffer against the Turks. They were given land and taught to farm it by German settlers imported for the task. For five generations they did so. But land, for Jews, in Eastern Europe, was not the foundation it was for Catholic hacendados in Puerto Rico. My great-grandfather fled the farm in 1904 rather than fight in the war against Japan. Pogroms were on the rise along with revolutionary violence, and although the family were Bolshevik sympathizers and some stayed to take part in the revolution, Abe left for Canada and then New York, his first cousin Alter went to Buenos Aires and his sister married and left for Siberia. In 1942, the entire settlement, known as Yazer, was destroyed by Nazis. Land was no guarantee.
6
Land is no guarantee, but in the myth-making of exiled and dispossessed nationalisms it becomes a powerful legitimizing force. The central symbol of Puerto Rican nationalism, the phrase most often used to mean that which is struggled for, is "Madre Patria," usually translated as "Mother Homeland." Just as the enthusiastic propagandists of the 1898 US invasion feminized and sexualized the land describing "her" as well endowed, fruitful and docile, a young girl who "surrenders herself graciously to our virile marines," so, too the Nationalists have portrayed the colonized country as a captive woman, the "madre tendida en el lecho" (stretched out upon the bed) in the hands of foreigners who rape her.
The idea of "patria" is deeply rooted, like patriotism itself, in both patriarchy and it's raison d'etre, patrimony--the inheritance passed from father to son. And the basis of that inheritance is land. Under the rhetoric of "madre patria " lies that which is most despised and exploited in practice, most ignored in nationalist programs, most silently relied on as the foundation of prosperity for the future republic, the basis for its industrial development and for a homegrown class of owners. The unpaid and underpaid labor of women, the labor of agricultural workers and the generous and living land itself, these, in nationalist rhetoric, become purely symbolic sentimental images, detached from their own reality.
Nationalism has tremendous power. It mobilizes just rage about colonial oppression toward a single end. It subordinates all other agendas to that end. It silences internal contradictions among the colonized, postpones indefinitely the discussion of gender, sexuality, class and often "race," endowing nationalist movements with a kind of focused, single-minded passion capable of great force. But although that force draws its energy from the real pain and rage and hope of the colonized, nationalism does not attempt to end all forms of injustice. Nationalism is generally, both in the intent of its leaders and in its results, a one point program to capture patrimony for a new group of patriarchs.
Land is no guarantee, but in the myth-making of exiled and dispossessed nationalisms it becomes a powerful legitimizing force. The central symbol of Puerto Rican nationalism, the phrase most often used to mean that which is struggled for, is "Madre Patria," usually translated as "Mother Homeland." Just as the enthusiastic propagandists of the 1898 US invasion feminized and sexualized the land describing "her" as well endowed, fruitful and docile, a young girl who "surrenders herself graciously to our virile marines," so, too the Nationalists have portrayed the colonized country as a captive woman, the "madre tendida en el lecho" (stretched out upon the bed) in the hands of foreigners who rape her.
The idea of "patria" is deeply rooted, like patriotism itself, in both patriarchy and it's raison d'etre, patrimony--the inheritance passed from father to son. And the basis of that inheritance is land. Under the rhetoric of "madre patria " lies that which is most despised and exploited in practice, most ignored in nationalist programs, most silently relied on as the foundation of prosperity for the future republic, the basis for its industrial development and for a homegrown class of owners. The unpaid and underpaid labor of women, the labor of agricultural workers and the generous and living land itself, these, in nationalist rhetoric, become purely symbolic sentimental images, detached from their own reality.
Nationalism has tremendous power. It mobilizes just rage about colonial oppression toward a single end. It subordinates all other agendas to that end. It silences internal contradictions among the colonized, postpones indefinitely the discussion of gender, sexuality, class and often "race," endowing nationalist movements with a kind of focused, single-minded passion capable of great force. But although that force draws its energy from the real pain and rage and hope of the colonized, nationalism does not attempt to end all forms of injustice. Nationalism is generally, both in the intent of its leaders and in its results, a one point program to capture patrimony for a new group of patriarchs.
7
In nationalist rhetoric, land does not move. No wonder it is so often portrayed as a mother. Eternal, loyal and patient it waits for its exiled children to come home. It would know them anywhere. But the real land, made of soil and rocks and vegetation, is never still. In the United States the average acre of land loses five tons of soil every year, blown by wind across property lines and fences, municipalities and national borders, washed by rain into river systems that drain a thousand miles downstream. Even massive shapes like the Grand Canyon shift and collapse and move continually. Each autumn in Puerto Rico the water running off our mountain turned a heavy orange and flowed away downhill leaving the silt of our property spread over hundreds of square kilometers of flatlands and leagues of sea.
This fact has occasionally been used as part of imperial reasoning. In the late nineteenth century, one US statesman claimed the Cuba was naturally theirs because it must have been formed by mud washing out of the mouth of the Mississippi. It was literally US soil. But "national soil" is a nonsensical statement. Places have history, but soil does not have nationality. Just as the air we breath has been breathed by millions of others first and will go on to be breathed by millions more; just as water falls, travels, evaporates, circulates moisture around the planet--so the land itself migrates. The homeland to which Jews claim to have returned (land of the Canaanites before them and many others since) is not the same land. The earth that lay around the Temple could be anywhere by now. So what exactly is it we've been dreaming of for so long?
In nationalist rhetoric, land does not move. No wonder it is so often portrayed as a mother. Eternal, loyal and patient it waits for its exiled children to come home. It would know them anywhere. But the real land, made of soil and rocks and vegetation, is never still. In the United States the average acre of land loses five tons of soil every year, blown by wind across property lines and fences, municipalities and national borders, washed by rain into river systems that drain a thousand miles downstream. Even massive shapes like the Grand Canyon shift and collapse and move continually. Each autumn in Puerto Rico the water running off our mountain turned a heavy orange and flowed away downhill leaving the silt of our property spread over hundreds of square kilometers of flatlands and leagues of sea.
This fact has occasionally been used as part of imperial reasoning. In the late nineteenth century, one US statesman claimed the Cuba was naturally theirs because it must have been formed by mud washing out of the mouth of the Mississippi. It was literally US soil. But "national soil" is a nonsensical statement. Places have history, but soil does not have nationality. Just as the air we breath has been breathed by millions of others first and will go on to be breathed by millions more; just as water falls, travels, evaporates, circulates moisture around the planet--so the land itself migrates. The homeland to which Jews claim to have returned (land of the Canaanites before them and many others since) is not the same land. The earth that lay around the Temple could be anywhere by now. So what exactly is it we've been dreaming of for so long?
8
Land and blood. Mystical powers that never change their identity so that a speck of Mississippi mud and an individual red blood cell are both seen as carrying unalterable identity, permanent membership in human cultures. This is the mysticism that allows fascist movements to call up images of long-dispersed and recombined ancestral peoples like the ancient Aryans and Romans, or entirely mythic genetic strains like White Race, and then scream for genocide to return them to a state of purity.
The reality is that people circulate like dust, intermingling and re-forming, all of us equally ancient on this earth, all equally made of the fragments of long-exploded stars, and if, by some unlikely miracle a branch of our ancestors has lived in the same place for a thousand years, this does not make them more real than the ones who have continued circulating for that same millenium. All of us have been here since people were people. All of us belong on earth.
So what about the stealing of land? What about all the colonized places on earth? What of indigenous peoples forcibly removed by invaders? The crime here is a deeper and more lasting one than theft, akin in some ways to enslavement. Before land can be stolen, it must become property. The relationships built over time between the land and the human members of its ecosystem must be severed just as ties of family and village and co-humanity were severed so that slavers could enslave. The indigenous peoples of the Americas did not own land in the European sense. They lived with and from the land and counted it as a relative. The blow that cracked Hawaiian sovereignty was the imposition of land ownership. At gunpoint, Hawaiians were forced to divide sacred and common land, to comodify it, price it, allot it. In Europe itself, it was the enclosure of the commons, the grazing lands and great forests from which people subsisted, that created a massive class of landless laborers to fill the factories and transport the goods of industrial capitalism. Earth-centered cultures everywhere held our kinship with land and animals and plants as core knowledge, central to living. The land had to be soaked with blood and that knowledge, those cultures shattered, before private ownership could be erected. It wasn't just theft.
Land and blood. Mystical powers that never change their identity so that a speck of Mississippi mud and an individual red blood cell are both seen as carrying unalterable identity, permanent membership in human cultures. This is the mysticism that allows fascist movements to call up images of long-dispersed and recombined ancestral peoples like the ancient Aryans and Romans, or entirely mythic genetic strains like White Race, and then scream for genocide to return them to a state of purity.
The reality is that people circulate like dust, intermingling and re-forming, all of us equally ancient on this earth, all equally made of the fragments of long-exploded stars, and if, by some unlikely miracle a branch of our ancestors has lived in the same place for a thousand years, this does not make them more real than the ones who have continued circulating for that same millenium. All of us have been here since people were people. All of us belong on earth.
So what about the stealing of land? What about all the colonized places on earth? What of indigenous peoples forcibly removed by invaders? The crime here is a deeper and more lasting one than theft, akin in some ways to enslavement. Before land can be stolen, it must become property. The relationships built over time between the land and the human members of its ecosystem must be severed just as ties of family and village and co-humanity were severed so that slavers could enslave. The indigenous peoples of the Americas did not own land in the European sense. They lived with and from the land and counted it as a relative. The blow that cracked Hawaiian sovereignty was the imposition of land ownership. At gunpoint, Hawaiians were forced to divide sacred and common land, to comodify it, price it, allot it. In Europe itself, it was the enclosure of the commons, the grazing lands and great forests from which people subsisted, that created a massive class of landless laborers to fill the factories and transport the goods of industrial capitalism. Earth-centered cultures everywhere held our kinship with land and animals and plants as core knowledge, central to living. The land had to be soaked with blood and that knowledge, those cultures shattered, before private ownership could be erected. It wasn't just theft.
9
And yet owning has seemed like such a good defense. With the commons gone, strive to own. With the land commodified and confiscated, struggle to enforce treaties. If you are driven away, fight to return. For Jews, barred for centuries from landholding, how legitimating, how healing, what a chance to strike back at history it is to acquire land. Why should we alone be excluded? When Baron von Hirsch sought to help the Jews of Eastern Europe escape the pogroms, he bought them land: in Argentina, in New Jersey, in other places, and settled them there to farm. Landlessness had been a central feature of Jewish oppression. Having land became a symbol of resistance. Our own connections with land have been severed time after time. We would come to know and trust a particular landscape, to understand Babylonian weather, to know the growing seasons of Andalucía, to recognize the edible wild foods of the woods around Rouen, the wildflowers on the Dneiper or the Rhine or the Thames, and it would be time for another hurried departure. To have land, to farm became one of the most emotionally powerfully images of Jewish freedom, even when getting land meant severing someone else's ties to it. Even when it meant tearing the olive trees and the fragrant dust and the taste of desert spring water out of the lives of Palestinians whose love for the land was hundreds of generations deep.
In the 1930's my father's family sang this song, translated from the Yiddish of Russian Jews:
On the road to Sebastopol,
not so far from Simfaropol
Just you go a little further on.
There you'll see a collective farm,
run by sturdy Jewish arms
and its called Zhankoye, Zhan.
Aunt Natasha drives the tractor,
Grandma runs the cream extractor
as we work we all can sing this song:
Who says Jews cannot be farmers?
Spit in his eye who would so harm us.
Tell him of Zhankoye, Zhan.
And yet owning has seemed like such a good defense. With the commons gone, strive to own. With the land commodified and confiscated, struggle to enforce treaties. If you are driven away, fight to return. For Jews, barred for centuries from landholding, how legitimating, how healing, what a chance to strike back at history it is to acquire land. Why should we alone be excluded? When Baron von Hirsch sought to help the Jews of Eastern Europe escape the pogroms, he bought them land: in Argentina, in New Jersey, in other places, and settled them there to farm. Landlessness had been a central feature of Jewish oppression. Having land became a symbol of resistance. Our own connections with land have been severed time after time. We would come to know and trust a particular landscape, to understand Babylonian weather, to know the growing seasons of Andalucía, to recognize the edible wild foods of the woods around Rouen, the wildflowers on the Dneiper or the Rhine or the Thames, and it would be time for another hurried departure. To have land, to farm became one of the most emotionally powerfully images of Jewish freedom, even when getting land meant severing someone else's ties to it. Even when it meant tearing the olive trees and the fragrant dust and the taste of desert spring water out of the lives of Palestinians whose love for the land was hundreds of generations deep.
In the 1930's my father's family sang this song, translated from the Yiddish of Russian Jews:
On the road to Sebastopol,
not so far from Simfaropol
Just you go a little further on.
There you'll see a collective farm,
run by sturdy Jewish arms
and its called Zhankoye, Zhan.
Aunt Natasha drives the tractor,
Grandma runs the cream extractor
as we work we all can sing this song:
Who says Jews cannot be farmers?
Spit in his eye who would so harm us.
Tell him of Zhankoye, Zhan.
10
Land ownership was only a hundred years old in Indiera when I was growing up. Its hold on people's imaginations was still tenuous. It was not until the 1860's that the Massaris and Nigaglionis, Agostinis and Pachecos began filing title claims to large stretches of mountain lands. That there were already people living on and from that land was irrelevant, because none of them had surveyed it, fenced it, paid a lawyer to draw up deeds to it. Since at least the 1570's, the mountains had been worked by wandering subsistence farmers who would clear and burn off a bit of forest, cultivate it for a few years and move on while the land renewed itself. Descendants of Arawak and other indigenous people enslaved by the Spanish, runaway slaves and poor Europeans, the people of the mountains didn't own the land. They moved across it and lived from it.
The new settlers owned and profited. Our own farm was carved out by a Corsican named Massari who, like the others, planted the new boom crop, arabiga coffee, for faraway markets. Then it was owned by Pla who was Mallorcan. Then by my parents. But the neighbors who held small plots and worked other people's land for cash never seemed to take boundaries seriously the way my neighbors in New England did. Everyone harvested bananas, root vegetables, oranges and wood from the farms of the Canabals, the Nigaglionis, or Delfín Rodriguez who only kept Hacienda Indiera as a tax write off to protect his sugar profits. Our neighbor to the north, Chago Soto, was always moving the fence between our properties. On one visit we found that Cheito Agostini had built pens for his pigs on our side of the road. Another time, exploring the deep overgrown valley on the back side of our land, my sister-in-law and I stumbled across a cement holding tank built over one of the springs and plastic pipes leading the water out to a house and garden. It was only when we introduced ourselves to the man loading a truck in front of the house and saw his chagrin, that we realized that the water was on our side of the property line.
So what do communist landholders do with privilege? My father says you have to get rid of it or use it for the common good. So we tell Cheito he can keep the pigs there, but no more dumping piles of Pampers, and no permanent structures. We let the farmer to the north know that we understand the water came from our land, and for now it's OK. But what are we doing with this land at all, now that we don't live there?
Land ownership was only a hundred years old in Indiera when I was growing up. Its hold on people's imaginations was still tenuous. It was not until the 1860's that the Massaris and Nigaglionis, Agostinis and Pachecos began filing title claims to large stretches of mountain lands. That there were already people living on and from that land was irrelevant, because none of them had surveyed it, fenced it, paid a lawyer to draw up deeds to it. Since at least the 1570's, the mountains had been worked by wandering subsistence farmers who would clear and burn off a bit of forest, cultivate it for a few years and move on while the land renewed itself. Descendants of Arawak and other indigenous people enslaved by the Spanish, runaway slaves and poor Europeans, the people of the mountains didn't own the land. They moved across it and lived from it.
The new settlers owned and profited. Our own farm was carved out by a Corsican named Massari who, like the others, planted the new boom crop, arabiga coffee, for faraway markets. Then it was owned by Pla who was Mallorcan. Then by my parents. But the neighbors who held small plots and worked other people's land for cash never seemed to take boundaries seriously the way my neighbors in New England did. Everyone harvested bananas, root vegetables, oranges and wood from the farms of the Canabals, the Nigaglionis, or Delfín Rodriguez who only kept Hacienda Indiera as a tax write off to protect his sugar profits. Our neighbor to the north, Chago Soto, was always moving the fence between our properties. On one visit we found that Cheito Agostini had built pens for his pigs on our side of the road. Another time, exploring the deep overgrown valley on the back side of our land, my sister-in-law and I stumbled across a cement holding tank built over one of the springs and plastic pipes leading the water out to a house and garden. It was only when we introduced ourselves to the man loading a truck in front of the house and saw his chagrin, that we realized that the water was on our side of the property line.
So what do communist landholders do with privilege? My father says you have to get rid of it or use it for the common good. So we tell Cheito he can keep the pigs there, but no more dumping piles of Pampers, and no permanent structures. We let the farmer to the north know that we understand the water came from our land, and for now it's OK. But what are we doing with this land at all, now that we don't live there?
11
Class privilege allows us this option, to see ourselves as stewards of this land. Because we don't need to live from these thirty-four acres we can resist the pressure to sell. Our neighbors keep asking: can't you sell us a piece of the farm to expand my coffee, my bananas, to build a house? After all, you're not using it. Poverty does not allow them the luxury of thinking twenty or thirty years ahead, but we know that the land they want now for farming cash crops will pass through their hands and into other uses and that in thirty years this place would be lots for cement houses. My mother says the rich ruin the poor and the poor ruin the land.
From up here in the cordillera you can see where the rich ruin land directly . We grew up with the smudge of poisoned air over Guayanilla, where the oil refineries used to make such a stench we would always buy sweet maví to drink before we got there so we could hold the cups over our noses as we went by. There are puffs of dust where the limestone hills are being bulldozed and ground into cement for more housing developments, shopping malls, factories. So much of the land has been paved, in fact, that the drenching rains of autumn have nowhere to soak in. The water runs off into the sea now, and to the water table has dropped so much that last year some neighborhoods in San Juan went without water for weeks at a time. But up here it hasn't yet been worth the developers' while . Here it's the desperation they've created in the lives of the poor that does the work for them .
Between the land hunger of the poor to turn acreage into a little money and the commodification of the earth into real estate, only privilege seems able to preserve the land. The Rockerfellers, buying up islands, keep pockets of wildness alive in the Caribbean while deforestation and massive shopping malls destroy the freshwater supplies of Puerto Rico, leaving everyone thirsty.
This is what we want our privilege to buy, my brothers and I. Because of how we lived there, because of the ways our parents cherished and nurtured our intimacy with the land, we know we're kin to it. We don't want it to die. But we also want to give the land a chance to tell its story and the story of the people who have worked it. On that overgrown abandoned coffee farm in the middle of increasingly cleared and pesticide soaked lands, we want to build a cultural center and museum of the history and ecology of Indiera, where the community can participate in retelling its past. We hope that in this process of storytelling, the people of Indiera will rediscover pride in their heritage of work and a new sense of their connection to this land. By drawing tourist dollars from the nearby Panoramic Highway, we also want to model another way of living from the land, in which livelihood comes not from extracting the land's wealth but from telling in as much detail as we can, the complex story of our relations with it.
I imagine this museum filled with family photographs, letters from the migrant children who moved away, and recorded voices of elders testifying. I imagine showing the people who grow coffee the faces of the people who drink it and vice versa. I imagine a narrow pathway winding down into the rain valley through the forest of tree ferns, South American shade trees, wild guavas and African Tulip trees. I remember how my father used to take his microscope down to the schoolhouse and how the children would crowd around waiting for a turn to be amazed at what the world looks like close up. I imagine the children of the barrio walking among the photographs and voices and trees that way, renaming their place on this land and in the world.
Class privilege allows us this option, to see ourselves as stewards of this land. Because we don't need to live from these thirty-four acres we can resist the pressure to sell. Our neighbors keep asking: can't you sell us a piece of the farm to expand my coffee, my bananas, to build a house? After all, you're not using it. Poverty does not allow them the luxury of thinking twenty or thirty years ahead, but we know that the land they want now for farming cash crops will pass through their hands and into other uses and that in thirty years this place would be lots for cement houses. My mother says the rich ruin the poor and the poor ruin the land.
From up here in the cordillera you can see where the rich ruin land directly . We grew up with the smudge of poisoned air over Guayanilla, where the oil refineries used to make such a stench we would always buy sweet maví to drink before we got there so we could hold the cups over our noses as we went by. There are puffs of dust where the limestone hills are being bulldozed and ground into cement for more housing developments, shopping malls, factories. So much of the land has been paved, in fact, that the drenching rains of autumn have nowhere to soak in. The water runs off into the sea now, and to the water table has dropped so much that last year some neighborhoods in San Juan went without water for weeks at a time. But up here it hasn't yet been worth the developers' while . Here it's the desperation they've created in the lives of the poor that does the work for them .
Between the land hunger of the poor to turn acreage into a little money and the commodification of the earth into real estate, only privilege seems able to preserve the land. The Rockerfellers, buying up islands, keep pockets of wildness alive in the Caribbean while deforestation and massive shopping malls destroy the freshwater supplies of Puerto Rico, leaving everyone thirsty.
This is what we want our privilege to buy, my brothers and I. Because of how we lived there, because of the ways our parents cherished and nurtured our intimacy with the land, we know we're kin to it. We don't want it to die. But we also want to give the land a chance to tell its story and the story of the people who have worked it. On that overgrown abandoned coffee farm in the middle of increasingly cleared and pesticide soaked lands, we want to build a cultural center and museum of the history and ecology of Indiera, where the community can participate in retelling its past. We hope that in this process of storytelling, the people of Indiera will rediscover pride in their heritage of work and a new sense of their connection to this land. By drawing tourist dollars from the nearby Panoramic Highway, we also want to model another way of living from the land, in which livelihood comes not from extracting the land's wealth but from telling in as much detail as we can, the complex story of our relations with it.
I imagine this museum filled with family photographs, letters from the migrant children who moved away, and recorded voices of elders testifying. I imagine showing the people who grow coffee the faces of the people who drink it and vice versa. I imagine a narrow pathway winding down into the rain valley through the forest of tree ferns, South American shade trees, wild guavas and African Tulip trees. I remember how my father used to take his microscope down to the schoolhouse and how the children would crowd around waiting for a turn to be amazed at what the world looks like close up. I imagine the children of the barrio walking among the photographs and voices and trees that way, renaming their place on this land and in the world.
12
Because the land is alive, our relationship with it is real. We are kin to the land, love it, know it, become intimate with its ways, sometimes over many generations. Surely such kinship and love must be honored. Nationalism does not honor it. Nationalism is about gaining control, not about loving land. But it wears the cloak of that love, strips it from its sensual and practical roots and raises it into a banner for armies. The land invoked as a battle cry is not the same land that smells of sage, or turns blue in the dusk, or clings thickly to our boots after rain. That land is is less than nothing to the speech makers.
The land invoked to the beating of nationalist drums is what lies at the linguistic roots of the term "real estate," meaning royal property. It is the land my hacendado forebears kept in the bank, ransacked, used to pay the bills. The land bristling with "No Trespassing" signs, the land the lords of Europe enclosed against the peasants in the infancy of capitalism, the land as symbol of power over. It is the land we can be mobilized to recapture because, with its fences and mortgages and deeds, it has been the symbol of our dispossession.
13
Ownership shatters ecology. For the land to survive, for us to survive, it must cease to be property . It cannot continue to sustain us from much longer under the weight of such a merciless use . We know this . We know the insatiable hunger for profit that drives that use and the disempowerment that accommodates it . We don't yet know how to make it stop .
But where ecology meet sculpture there is another question . How do we hold in common not only the land , but all the fragile , tenacious rootedness of human beings to the ground of our histories, the cultural residues of our daily work, the individual and tribal longings for place? How do we abolish ownership of land and respect people's ties to it? How do we shift the weight of our times from the single-minded nationalist drive for a piece of territory and the increasingly barricaded self-interest of even the marginally privileged toward a rich and multilayered sense of collective heritage ? I don't have the answer. But I know that only when we can hold each people's particular memories and connections with the land as a common treasure can the knowledge of our place on it be restored.
Because the land is alive, our relationship with it is real. We are kin to the land, love it, know it, become intimate with its ways, sometimes over many generations. Surely such kinship and love must be honored. Nationalism does not honor it. Nationalism is about gaining control, not about loving land. But it wears the cloak of that love, strips it from its sensual and practical roots and raises it into a banner for armies. The land invoked as a battle cry is not the same land that smells of sage, or turns blue in the dusk, or clings thickly to our boots after rain. That land is is less than nothing to the speech makers.
The land invoked to the beating of nationalist drums is what lies at the linguistic roots of the term "real estate," meaning royal property. It is the land my hacendado forebears kept in the bank, ransacked, used to pay the bills. The land bristling with "No Trespassing" signs, the land the lords of Europe enclosed against the peasants in the infancy of capitalism, the land as symbol of power over. It is the land we can be mobilized to recapture because, with its fences and mortgages and deeds, it has been the symbol of our dispossession.
13
Ownership shatters ecology. For the land to survive, for us to survive, it must cease to be property . It cannot continue to sustain us from much longer under the weight of such a merciless use . We know this . We know the insatiable hunger for profit that drives that use and the disempowerment that accommodates it . We don't yet know how to make it stop .
But where ecology meet sculpture there is another question . How do we hold in common not only the land , but all the fragile , tenacious rootedness of human beings to the ground of our histories, the cultural residues of our daily work, the individual and tribal longings for place? How do we abolish ownership of land and respect people's ties to it? How do we shift the weight of our times from the single-minded nationalist drive for a piece of territory and the increasingly barricaded self-interest of even the marginally privileged toward a rich and multilayered sense of collective heritage ? I don't have the answer. But I know that only when we can hold each people's particular memories and connections with the land as a common treasure can the knowledge of our place on it be restored.