The Cordillera of My Country is the Earth's Spine

Vamonos caminando
Vamonos caminando
Vamonos dibujando el camino


(Let us walk
 Let us walk
 Let us draw the path)

TV

2010:

Summer. I am browsing the night away on Facebook. 

            My friend Luis posts this short, one-paragraph note. It says something like, “I wish I could have been there, so I could spit on their faces.” It refers to some event.

            I go down the stairs because I feel that this is something that, whatever it is, I could learn about with a quick look at the television screen.

            It turns out that my father’s watching the video—playing over and over and over. It runs about five minutes. It’s a compilation of violence. Angry commentators verbally spit on it as it plays.

            That afternoon, a group of students and some professors of the beloved University of Puerto Rico (affectionately called “la Yupi” as in U. P. or “Yupee”) had been performing a sit-in at the Capitol. Short-term protesting reason: the government’s raising the tuition of the public university. Long term protesting reason: the university is slowly being privatized, a development that would make public education at the university level disappear completely from the land of Puerto Rico.

            A group of policemen with tazers and guns and shields busts in on the sit-in and starts punching away. Blood spurts. Nineteen year-olds and twenty year-olds bleed on the sidewalks, some fall on their head so hard that they lay on the street unconscious for minutes. Look at the cop’s faces and see them enjoy it. The crowd evanesces but not without an anguished scream. A frustrated, angry thing goes on between everybody, and the violence just keeps clubbing itself into people’s eyes.

            And all for sitting down.

            I stay up the rest of the night, glued to the TV as it plays the same video over and over again, like an MtV no. 1 hit.

From the Superintendent (2:09-11): "The thing is that, here, an intervention [like that of the protesters] creates a confrontation. What we did here was disperse and avoid physical confrontation. This is what the police is for."
From a police officer (2:30): "We are here preserving the order, as you can see, um."