REMEDIOS: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriqueñas
This is the book it took me ten years to research and write. It formed the main part of my doctoral dissertation in Women's Studies and History from Union Institute. Writing this book required me to trust my own thinking, to dig in all kinds of unexpected places for information that official histories have considered unimportant, and to ask again and again what the purpose of history is, how it can serve the urgent needs of the present and help to construct a better future. My goal in writing Remedios was to make medicinal history, history to cure the wounds of a deeply colonized sense of ourselves and instead to chart the course of our resistance, throughout millenia, to everything that tried to rob us of our humanity.
The book begins with our prehistory, with the myths of our origins. Our First Mother, bearing children in Sub-Saharan Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, and the early human societies in the three regions of the world from which Puerto Ricans spring: America, Africa and Europe.
The book begins with our prehistory, with the myths of our origins. Our First Mother, bearing children in Sub-Saharan Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, and the early human societies in the three regions of the world from which Puerto Ricans spring: America, Africa and Europe.
First Mother: Sub-Saharan Africa, -200,000
We began in her shade, running at her callused heel, strapped to her strong back, the first mother, the one woman we all hold in common out of that band of a thousand ancestors from whom humanity came, rising like a dust storm out of the heart of Africa. First Mother was never the golden-haired Eve in Renaissance paintings whose flowing locks fall across perky breasts, munching apples with the snake. She was walnut skinned with hair like a thundercloud, and her breasts hung long and slack and leathery from nursing many babies. She lived at the rim of the wide and green Sahara, a land of many rivers and flowering meadows, and she did not eat apples. She ate dates from the palms, and sweet berries from shrubs. She ate nuts and seeds, wild grubs and honey. She had antelope when she could get it. Fish when she could catch it. She did not live in a garden, alone with a man. She lived with a band of kin, and they walked wherever they pleased, on the green and yellow and brown earth, gathering, and dropping seeds, hunting, and scattering bones, drinking, and going dry, growing older and bearing young. Her children spread outward like a fan of fingers, filling up continents. Some lived at the edge of the sky, in high cloudy valleys among snowy peaks, and their chests grew broader and deeper in the thin air, their blood richer. Some lived in the dense dimly lit forests, where warm rain dripped from a canopy full of the swinging shadows of monkeys, and these became quick and light on their feet, small and compact, with smooth and hairless skin, the better to stay cool. Some lived in places of long winter and few plants, of mammoth Arctic nights and blazing days, and they padded themselves with fat against the bone-cracking cold, and learned to eat the oily flesh of whales. Some lived inland, houses pitched against the winds of winter sweeping the plains and steppes for endless months of darkness, far from the fish oils that could strengthen their bones, and these grew pale, translucent skin, made to suck up the meager daylight. Some stayed in the latitudes of the sun, and gathered up even more of the darkness of earth to keep them from burning. They were tall and thin, arms long enough to pick fruit of savanna trees, legs swift enough to follow the distant herds, with a blue-black sheen that gave their bodies shade. But everyone in the menagerie came from the same litter, suckled at the same brown breast; and in every one of her daughters, unchanged through the generations, a tiny fragment of her flesh persists, a grain of earth she gave us, with our humanness, in the wide Saharan garden, at the beginning of human time.  "Soul Food" by Ricardo Levins Morales
1515: Plátano Would you believe there was a time when we had no tostones? Plátano didn't start out being Puerto Rican any more than spaghetti was originally Italian! Marco Polo brought spaghetti home from China and plátano went from Malaysia to East Africa with the Indonesians and to West Africa with the Portuguese and when they found out how many slaves you could feed just enough to keep them going on guineo verde and plátano...¡mija! Se lo trajeron enseguida. Fíjate. One of those traveling priests brought the first plátano to the banks of the Toa in 1515. You know they still grow plenty of it in the hills around Toa Alta, Orocovis, Naranjito. So who invented the first toston? Slaves, por supuesto. The patrón throws down a sack of guineos y plátanos and says, "This is your food for the week." So the first day it's boiled. The second day it's boiled and mashed. The third day...boiled. One of the women says, basta ya! Gets a little grease from somewhere throws in a bit of garlic and fries it up--but the inside stays too raw, so she slams it with the palm of her hand, throws it back in the pot, y en un dos por tres everyone's eating tostones. On Saturday, the patrón brings them some salt pork for Sunday and someone invents mofongo. Soon they have a whole cuisine going. It doesn't win any prizes for good nutrition, because that's not a slaveholder thing, but making sabrosura out of empty calories is an act of resistance, and soul food is damn good medicine. |
Remedios Sections
 Ancient inscription at Essouk, Mali
Bisabuelas, (Great-Grandmothers) is divided into three sections: Women of Yams (West Africa), Women of Bread (The Mediterranean) and Women of Yuca (The Americas). They take us from our prehistory to the early years of the Euro-Christian Calendar (ECC.)
Abuelas begins around 600 ECC to the eve of the European invasion of the Americas, in the same three regions. 
Premonitions explores the events: the Spanish conquest of the Canary Islands, the beginnings of the European slave trade in Africa, the witch persecutions in Europe, the widespread trafficking of women, and the prophetic nightmares of America's shamans, looking east across the Atlantic.
After 1492, the sections each cover roughly a century: Huracán (1492-1600,) Jenjibre (1600-1700,) Parteras (1700-1798,) Lazos, (1798-1898,) until the 20th century with two sections, Aguacero, (1899-1929) and Derrumbe, (1930-1954) All these later sections focus more specifically on Puerto Rico, but richly woven into the fabric of world history, something the colonial chroniclers of our past have denied us. Plants in Remedios
 Anamú
Throughout Remedios, the voices of plants speak to the human condition. Plants have accompanied our entire journey, from the first humans, gathering berries and seeds, through millenia of foraging and farming, as we learn to make food and medicine, clothing and shelter from plants. In Remedios, I am using plant foods and medicines as a metaphor for the "remedies" we must craft for the deadly conditions oppression imposes on humanity, and compare the kind of history I write to herbal medicine, gathered from our own back yards, from what we already know, to heal our most common ailments, as opposed to the expensive, patented and often toxic medicines made by pharmaceutical companies, the kind of history that reinforces the status quo, that teaches resignation and shame to the oppressed, and glorifies wars and empires.
The plants voices speak are a commentary on the human thread of the story, speaking all around us. 
Potatoes
Small, round teachers of possibility, how you shine in all your endless variety in the cold highlands where you first came into our lives. In each small plot of Andean soil, the ancestors bring forth from your infinite adaptability new varieties perfected for just that combination of sun and soil and water. You come in white and yellow, purple and red, orange and brown. You can be sweet or earthy, floury or slick, delicate and fragrant or too bitter for anyone but the llamas. You ripen fast or slow, moist or dry, for quick consumption or long storage. Tuber of the three thousand forms, you remind us that there are always more choices, more unexplored paths, is always more potential than we can imagine from the present moment. Papita de los Andes, you roll into our hands shouting "Diversify! Be colorful! Have fun!" You offer us the unknown, the multiple pathways, the different seasoning, the doorway to discovery, the unexpected bonus, the unqualified disaster, the privilege of making many fruitful mistakes. Only when this lesson is refused, when those who cultivate you reject the rainbow and repeat themselves endlessly, planting the same seed in the same ground, acre upon acre, season after season, does famine follow on your heels. Choosing safety, you say with a wink, is not always safe. |