Beacon

Abstract

During my tenure at The University of Maryland, my writing has been primarily occupied with storytelling as a survival mechanism, and the story as a site of pedagogical potential. Beacon is a selection of short stories from a larger collection in progress that envisions itself as a hybrid between an instructional and fictional text. Combining elements of magical realism, mythology, and metafiction with a reflection of the Diasporic Puerto Rican experience and the island’s history with the mainland U.S., Beacon attempts to satiate the universal diasporic urge to connect with home. As a first-generation Puerto Rican born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised mostly in New Jersey, I hope Beacon can serve as an arrow that points diasporic Caribbeans towards familiar avenues of learning and connecting. “The Storm”, a meditation on the toxic relationship between the mainland and Puerto Rico, is intended as a primer on how to read the collection. Taking place both in a not-too-distant future and within the footnotes, this novella opens through the hegemonic lens of an ICE agent. Relying heavily on metafictional tools, “The Storm” endeavors to shift narrative authority between the center and the margins of the page in order to focus the reader’s expectations for the collection that follows.As I’m drawn to the many unnoticed ways Puerto Rican culture has directly shaped the American landscape, the second story, “Cousins” is a monologue that serves as comic relief, an invocation of the Big Puerto Rican Family™ and the joys that make my people so compelling, and to further reinforce the lens through which the reader should approach the ensuing stories. The rest of the collection aims to explore themes of colonization, dares to reimagine Puerto Rican mythologies in both pre-colonial and contemporary contexts, and reflects nostalgic folkloric characters across time through the recurrent character, Kasiwa. Her development is intentionally scaffolded out of chronological order, and through perspectives external to herself, suggesting a modern incarnation (descendant) of the Puerto Rican Jibaro character, infused with Taíno spiritual beliefs and practices. As much of my personal work revolves around rebuilding the fabric of Taíno culture which Paper Genocide has left tattered, frayed, and with gaping holes, Beacon is my oblation to my community; my attempt to mend those tears using the very tool used to bring the Taínos to the brink of eradication: the written word. When considered as an instructional text, along with Puerto Rican/ mainland history there are over 60 Hiwatahia Taíno words scaffolded through this selection, and deployed through a variety of pedological methods, including contextualization, footnotes, and a glossary that also serves as a Table of Contents, which intends to subvert the expectations of instructional texts as necessarily non-fiction.My creative muses and mirrors include Elizabeth Acevedo, Chinua Achebe, Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, Percival Everett, Gabrielle Lucille Fuents, Jamaica Kincaid, Gabrel Garcia Marquez, Jordy Rosenberg, Rion Amilcar Scott, Leslie Marmon Silko, Elizabet Valasquez, and my family bochinche.