Embracing Rootedness and Radical Genealogy

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Raícism—from raíces or roots—is the practice of rooting ourselves in the real, concrete histories of our people: our families, our local communities, our ethnic communities. It is radical genealogy, history made personal. It is a keeping of accounts. Its intent is to pierce the immense, mind-deadening denial that permeates daily life, that drowns our deepest grief and horror about the founding and ongoing atrocities of racism, class, and patriarchy in endless chatter about trivialities. Oppression buries the actual lives of real and contradictory people in the crude generalizations of bigotry and punishes us for not matching the caricature, refusing all evidence of who we actually are in defiance of its tidy categories. It is a blunt instrument, used for bashing not only our dangerous complexities, but also the ancient and permanent fact of our involvement with each other.

Raícism, or rootedness, is the choice to bear witness to our specific, contradictory historical identities in relationship to one another. It is an accounting of the debts and assets we have inherited, and acknowledging the precise nature of that inheritance is an act of spiritual and political integrity.

I grew up on stories of my mother's barrio childhood in Spanish Harlem and the Bronx, of near starvation in the early years of the Depression, of my grandmother's single dress. It was not until I went to the small Puerto Rican town of Toa Alta and examined the parish registers that I discovered five generations of slave-holding ancestors among the petty landed gentry of northeast Puerto Rico. A handful of families held political and economic power, married their children to each other, and consolidated their wealth with the purchase of enslaved human beings. I remember the feelings, as this reality dawned on me, of shame, but also of excitement. Over the years I had found peasants, small farmers, revolutionaries in my family tree. This was the thing I had not wanted to find. If I could figure out how to face it and consciously carry it, how to transform shame and denial into wholeness, perhaps I could find a way out of the numbness of privilege, not only for myself, but also for the people I worked with in classes and workshops who came asking to learn.

So that day I wrote down the name of each and every slave held by my ancestors. I have used my own family history to break silence: to acknowledge publicly and repeatedly my family debt to their coerced labor, to expose and reject family mythology about our "kind" treatment of slaves as a step in challenging the generalized myth of kind slavery in Puerto Rico, and to decide that although none of these people had chosen me as a descendant, I owed them the respect one gives to ancestors because their labor had made it possible for my forebears to grow up and thrive. I have also made it my responsibility to make African people visible in every discussion of Puerto Rican history in which I participate.

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