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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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"War Against All Puerto Ricans"

Puerto Rico is back in the news.

Sorta.

That Other America breaches the US media consciousness every couple of years. The Bad President put it in the news by his horrific, racist failure to respond to Hurricane Maria:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/it-totally-belittled-the-moment-many-look-back-in-anger-at-trumps-tossing-of-paper-towels-in-puerto-rico/2018/09/13/8a3647d2-b77e-11e8-a2c5-3187f427e253_story.html

And the Good President put Puerto Rico in the news by sidelining its elected government because they had the temerity to stiff his buddies on Wall Street, just like GW Bush did to Flint when they crossed the same line:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/obama-signs-law-to-rescue-puerto-ricos-economy/2016/06/30/882fbc7e-3ed7-11e6-84e8-1580c7db5275_story.html

The finance bros that Obama put in charge of the island turned it into an offshore Flint, starving its utilities in order to extract more debt payments to the finance sector. The ensuing neglect meant that when Maria hit, the power infrastructure collapsed, leaving the US citizens of Puerto Rico without electricity for three months.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/us/puerto-rico-power-outage.html

Donald Trump couldn’t have murdered thousands of Puerto Ricans and immiserated millions more without Barack Obama’s help. But that’s unfair to both Trump and Obama: they were merely carrying on a centuries-long tradition stretching back to Teddy Roosevelt, a bedrock American heritage of racism, neglect, enslavement, torture, and extraction (so. much. extraction.).

Puerto Rico is back in the news. The island territory — where US citizens do not get to vote for the president nor send a voting representative to Congress — is planning a binding referendum on whether to become a US state, or whether to secede from the USA altogether.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/20/puerto-rico-statehood-independent-free-association-debate

As it happens, I just became a US citizen. As a Californian, I am (nominally) protected by the US Constitution, and in a couple months I will get to vote for my Congressional rep — unlike millions of Puerto Ricans, who have been citizens for generations, but who are not entitled to equal protection under the law — as the Supreme Court just affirmed:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-303_6khn.pdf

Days after I took my citizenship oath, I joined my family for a two-week holiday on Puerto Rico. I arrived with jumbled impressions of the island’s history, gleaned from the odd article, radio documentary and news article. By the time we left, I had a much more coherent understand of the centuries of systematic, ghastly fuckery that these United States of America had visited upon its “commonwealth” and what the stakes are for the referendum.

We started in Old San Juan, where we got oriented via Andy Rivera’s architectural tour, which introduced us to the 500 year history of the city and its colonial masters:

https://www.airbnb.com/experiences/174126

On the tour, I noticed the Librería Laberinto, a bookstore, and made a point of visiting it later that day:

https://librerialaberintopr.com/

That’s where I found Nelson A Denis’s incredible history of the island, War Against All Puerto Ricans, a brilliant, funny, enraging and masterful history of the failed Puerto Rican revolution of 1950, and its leader, the remarkable Pedro Albizu Campos:

https://waragainstallpuertoricans.com/the-book/

Denis is a Cuban/Puerto-Rican-American raised in New York City, whose Cuban-born father was kidnapped and deported to Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the FBI indiscriminately shattered families on orders from Bobby Kennedy:

https://nelsondenis.wordpress.com/home/

Denis went on to go to Harvard, where, in 1977, he published a landmark work of historical scholarship in the Harvard Political Review, “The Curious Constitution of Puerto Rico.” From Harvard, Denis continued on to Yale, where he took a law degree — and continued his voracious study of the Puerto Rican revolution and its aftermath.

He conducted years of research — hundreds of FOIA requests, thousands of hours of interviews with the architects, partisans and eyewitnesses — he published his masterpiece, which weaves together the disparate narratives of all the actors in this tragicomedy to present a truth that is far, far stranger than fiction.

For generations, Puerto Rico was a classic imperial periphery, the place where eminent families sent their failsons for a second chance. The most rapacious corporations in American — along with the US military — established operations in PR and staffed them with a clown cavalcade of idiots and sadists, who, by dint of birth, were put in a position of power over the people of Puerto Rico.

Each of these men came to Puerto Rico to seek their fortune, and, by and large, they found it — extracted it, rather, from the sweat and blood of Puerto Ricans. They committed gaffes, scams and atrocities and then went back to the mainland, where they were celebrated.

Take Dr Cornelius Rhoads, an eminent physician whose tenure as an island hospital administrator was cut short when his maid discovered a letter he’d written to a mainland colleague in which he railed against Puerto Ricans in a vicious, racist tirade, then gloated about having murdered several of his Puerto Rican patients as part of a genocidal campaign to rid the island of its islanders:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_P._Rhoads

Despite having admitted to a string of racially motivated murders, Rhoads was celebrated on his return. He became an army doctor, developed chemical weapons, and went on to appear on the cover of Time magazine as a great hero.

In some ways, it’s not surprising that Rhoads would be lionized for murdering Puerto Ricans. After all, a legion of white doctors participated in the forced sterilization of Puerto Rican women from the 1930s to the 1970s, ultimately sterlizing a third of the island’s women:

https://www.panoramas.pitt.edu/health-and-society/dark-history-forced-sterilization-latina-women

I’d heard of Rhoads, but not of the many other failsons whose lives Denis chronicles — the governor who arrived on the island with a plan to remake it as an animal training center where nightingales would learn to sing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” for sale to patriotic Texans at $50 a pop. I also didn’t know about the army — literal and figurative — of FBI agents who employed a vast network of informants to produce detailed, paranoid dossiers on the people of the island.

More importantly, I didn’t know about the Puerto Ricans who are the true heroes of this tale, like Albizu, orphaned as a small boy following his mother’s suicide, who raised himself, became a prodigy, attended Harvard, and excelled at everything he did. Albizu — brilliant, driven, committed — refused offers to clerk for the Supreme Court or work for large American corporations, and instead returned to Puerto Rico to work as a poor peoples’ lawyer. He went on to lead the revolutionary independence movement, and was tortured to death by America in return.

Albizu is just one of the many larger-than-life, tragic heroes of Denis’s tale: there’s Juan Emilio Viguié, a self-taught virtuoso filmmaker who left the island to work as the embedded documentarian for Pancho Villa’s army, returned home, and became the Zapruder of the Ponce massacre, a grisly atrocity whose architects — more failsons from the mainland — were never held to account for.

There’s also Vidal Santiago Díaz — a barber turned gunrunner, who supplied the independence movement with arms and a secret meeting place, all under the nose of the FBI, who eventually helped the island police kidnap him and subject him to barbaric torture. On his release, Díaz returned to his barbershop, recovered his cached weapons, and held off thirty armed men singlehandedly from within the shop, for hours, as the nation listened in to live, play-by-play radio reporting. Eventually, they gassed Díaz, entered his shop, and shot him in the head. They dragged him into the street for the news-crews to photograph, but he surprised them by reviving and denouncing the police. He was taken to a cell to die, but not before he recounted his side of the storied, fabled battle.

These are the protagonists of Denis’s narrative, with the failsons serving as foils, villains, and color — like Waller Booth, a spy with the OSS (forerunner to the CIA) who came to the island to spy on nationalists. He set up an after-hours club themed after his favorite movie, Casablanca, which he screened on repeat in a private room in the club. Nationalists would sit and watch the movie every night, in the manner of Rocky Horror, and shout witty lines at the screen: “We’ll always have the FBI!” and “Round up the usual Nationalists!”

Denis builds up his story one character or event at a time, retelling the tale from different angles, weaving together the perspectives of his people over and over, using them to illuminate different aspects of the degradation and pillaging of Puerto Rico and the indomitable spirit of its people. It is in this fashion, for example, that Denis dissects — and demolishes — the 1917 law that Congress passed in the name of Puerto Rican self-determination, but which really only served to make Puerto Ricans subject to the draft.

So it goes, in Denis’s history: an American conglomerate or politician comes up with a new and depraved way to profit from the islanders, and they resist — against all odds, in the face of violent repression. The revolution itself — which included an attempt on Truman’s life — plays out with the drama of a war movie.

Apart from their Puerto Ricanness, the protagonists of this story would make great American folkloric heroes, Horatio Algers who came from humble beginnings, succeeded through thrift, tireless striving and indomitable will, devoted themselves to justice, and stood up to bullies — and paid with their lives for a righteous cause.

But because the bullies they stood up to were operating as agents of America, they are forgotten. Not even reviled — erased. On the American mainland, the Puerto Rican revolution isn’t even a footnote. Indeed, Puerto Rico itself is often forgotten by America, despite the many sons and daughters of the island who have fought for its military. Remember Maria, when Trump and his supporters spoke of Puerto Ricans as foreigners whose “country” was insufficiently grateful for “American charity?”

But this history is not forgotten in Puerto Rico. How could it be? After all, the disappearances and torture — which included mad science experiments in which political prisoners were irradiated until they perished — did not take place in some distant past. As Denis’s end-notes demonstrate, many of the people who witnessed these extraordinary events are still alive, and Denis’s work is based on corroborated eyewitness testimony, backed by FOIAed documents.

Denis’s book was indispensable as we traveled around this beautiful, marvelous island, because it is also a small island, and every place we visited had a cameo in the book: the movie theater we took the kids to see Thor at was in a town that once housed a nightmare gulag where Nationalists were electrocuted, starved and shot.

By superimposing the crimes of empire over the landscape, we were able to get some context for the flags, the graffiti, and the news about the looming referendum.

One day in a taxi, the driver talked to us about the referendum: I mentioned that I had just become a US citizen and for my sake, I would like Puerto Rico to become a state and gain two senators, but for their sake, it seemed that independence would be a better deal.

She agreed vigorously, and spoke of the crypto-bros and pharma companies that descended on the island with the idea of turning it into a kind of hyper-Delaware, an onshore-offshore regulation and tax haven, just as the sugar-barons and other failsons of the mainland had done for more than a century.

Visiting Puerto Rico was the perfect commemoration of my US citizenship — a chance to eat some of America’s best food, listen to some of its greatest music, see its most beautiful national forest, meet some of its friendliest people, see some of its most beautiful art — and learn of some of its most vicious crimes. Puerto Rico is the only place where the US military bombed US citizens, but, of course, the US military has bombed many, many places.

The contradictory currents that pull at America are all in sharp relief on the island. It has served as a lab for so many of America’s worst ideas, and also as a proving ground for the resistance to those ideas.

So much has happened since 2015 when this book was published — and so much of what has happened is an echo of what went before. Denis’s ability to describe the bravery and spirit of those who fight for independence, self-determination and dignity rivals greats like Howard Zinn. Combine that skill with Denis’s personal connection to the material — and the access it gave him to the buried histories of America’s sins — and you get a high-speed masterclass on the choice facing Puerto Ricans today.

[Image ID: The cover of the 2015 Bold Type Books edition of Nelson A Denis's 'War Against All Puerto Ricans.']

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courage-in-immensity · 7 years ago

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My first video in such a long time, had to do something for this amazing show! xx

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nbcnightshift · 7 years ago

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What's wrong with a little competition?

#The Night Shift #Night Shift #NBC #television #Jill Flint #Jordan Alexander #Mark Consuelos #Cain #Tanaya Beatty #Shannon Rivera #Season 4

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acheronidae-origins · 2 years ago

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Calvin: So, what's for dinner?

Flint, staring at the food he just burnt: Regret.

Calvin: Flint was banned from the Chicken Shack, so we had to go out of town to get some.

Flint: Well, they shouldn't say "all you can eat" if they don't mean it.

Calvin: Flint, you ate a chair.

Calvin, tending to Flint's wounds: How would you rate your pain?

Flint: Zero stars, would NOT reccomend.

Flint: Oh, just so you know, it's very muggy outside.

Calvin: ...

Calvin: Flint, I swear, if I go outside and all of our mugs are on the front lawn...

Flint: *sips coffee from a bowl*

Flint: English is a difficult language. It can be understood through tough thourough thought, though.

Calvin, struggling in Bilingual: You need to stop.

(P.S. I don't know the sources for these I just used that one quotes generator website)

#gay married couple vibes #even if gay marriage was not legal in America at the time the story takes place #(but let's not worry about that)#code xiii #calvin cortés #flint rivera #incorrect oc quotes #(and yes I changed calvin's last name. what of it?)#((his other language is filipino btw))

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marvelsagentsofshieldtv · 4 years ago

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Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Cast and Crew thank you for the Past SEVEN years

Agent Phil Coulson - Clark Gregg

Agent Melinda May - Ming-Na

Skye/Daisy Johnson - Chloe Bennet

Agent Leo Fitz - Iain De Caestecker

Agent Jemma Simmons - Elizabeth Henstridge

Agent Alphonso "Mack" Mackenzie - Henry Simmons

Agent Elena Rodriguez - Natalie Cordova-Buckley

Holden Radcliffe - John Hannah

Agent Grant Ward - Brett Dalton

Agent Lance Hunter - Nick Blood

Agent Bobbi Morse - Adrianne Palicki

Lincoln Campbell - Luke Mitchell

Agent Piper - Briana Venskus

GHOSTRIDER / Robbie Reyes - Gabriel Luna

Patriot / The Director / Jeffrey Mace - Jason O'Mara

Calvin Johnson / The Doctor - Kyle MacLachlan

The Superior / Anton Ivanov - Zach McGowan

Hope MacKenzie - Jordan Rivera

Gabe Reyes - James Henrie

Vin-Tak - Eddie McClintock

Agent Davis - Max Osinski

Agent Anderson - Alexander Wraith

Burrows - Patrick Cavanaugh

Ellen Nadeer - Parminder Nagra

Mr Giyera - Mark Dacascos

Rosalind Price - Constance Zimmer

Luther Banks - Andrew Howard

Lash - Matthew Willig

Jiaying Johnson - Dichen Lachman

Gordon - Jamie Harris

Robert Gonzales - Edward James Olmos

Kara - Maya Stojan

Agent Weaver - Christine Adams

Agent Oliver - Mark Allan Stewart

Agent Antoine Triplett- BJ Britt

Danial Whitehall - Reed Diamond

Graviton/Colonel Glenn Talbot - Adrian Pasdar

Deathlok / Mike Peterson - J. August Richards

Ian Quinn - David Conrad

Raina - Ruth Negga

Ruby Hale - Dove Cameron

Werner von Strucker - Spencer Treat Clark

Polly Hinton - Lola Glaudini

Agent Tomas Calderon - Kirk Acevedo

Toad - T.J. Alvarado

Qovas - Peter Mensah

Agent Jasper Sitwell - Maximiliano Hernandez

Agent Flix Blake - Titus Welliver

Agent Victoria Hand - Saffron Burrows

Doctor J. Streiten - Ron Glass

Lash/Doctor Andrew Garner- Blair Underwood

General Rick Stoner - Patrick Warburton

Gabe - James Henrie

Isabelle Hartley - Lucy Lawless

Agent Shaw - Charles Halford

Zav - Kaleti Williams

Agent Phelps - Anthony D. Washington

Zack Bynum - Bryan Keith

Diego - Carlos Rivera Marchand

Agent Kim - Chen Tang

Sunil Bakshi - Simon Kassianides

Carl Creel - Brian Patrick Wade

Kara Palamas / Agent 33 - Maya Stojan

Alisha Whitley - Alicia Vela-Bailey

Joey Gutierrez - Juan Pablo Raba

R. Giyera - Mark Dacascos

Hellfire / J.T. James - Axle Whitehead

Nathaniel Malick - Joel Dabney Courtney

Madame Hydra / Aida "Ophelia" - Mallory Jansen

Lucy Bauer - Lilli Birdsell

Elias "Eli" Morrow - José Zúñiga

Enoch Coltrane - Joel Stoffer

Tess - Eve Harlow

Kasius - Dominic Rains

Grill - Pruitt Taylor Vince

Flint - Coy Stewart

Hale - Catherine Dent

Ruby Hale - Dove Cameron

Marcus Benson - Barry Shabaka Henley

Keller - Lucas Bryant

Jaco - Winston James Francis

Snowflake - Brooke Williams

Pax - Matt O'Leary

Malachi - Christopher James Baker

Izel - Karolina Wydra

Wilfred "Freddy" Malick - Darren Barnet

Luke - Luke Baines

Sibyl - Tamara Taylor

Kora - Dianne Doan

Sequoia - Maurissa Tancharoen Whedon

Special Guest Stars

Eric / Sam / Billy Koenig - Patton Oswalt

Gideon Malick - Powers Boothe

The Clairvoyant / Agent John Garrett - Bill Paxton

Agent Peggy Carter - Hayley Atwell

Dum Dum Dugan - Neal McDonough

Agent Maira Hill - Cobie Smulders

Nick Fury - Samuel L. Jackson

Sif - Jaimie Alexander

STAN LEE

Director / Writer Joss Whedon

Director / Writer Jed Whedon

Producer / Writer Maurissa Tancharoen Whedon

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wheelsgoroundincircles · 4 years ago

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Bombshell Buick - 1952 Super Rivera Once you’ve seen this on the dry lakes or the salt flats, it is hard to forget. Maybe it’s the conspicuous styling, or perhaps it’s because a battleship-size ’50s sedan wasn’t meant to go 165 mph. And who in their right mind would select a Buick Straight-8 as their race engine of choice? Jeff Brock, that’s who! He’s a sculptor from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and he knew nothing about Bonneville when he decided to build a land-speed racer. Growing up in the automotive town of Flint, Michigan, Jeff Brock cut his teeth in his dad’s one-man machine shop behind their house. Of the five Brock children, Jeff was the one who tagged along with his father, Doug, as he raced flathead Fords and GMC six-cylinders at the Auto City Speedway circle track. He vividly recalls as a kid riding in the truck to motorcycle scrambles, where his dad raced for Flint Indian Sales. Looking at the Buick, it’s easy to see the influence of flat-track motorcycle racing, where less is always more. The XO class at Bonneville and El Mirage is perfect for the ’52 Buick, as it is open to pre-’59 inline-six and eight-cylinder engines and non-Ford flathead V8s. The body class for the Buick is GCC, for Gas Competition Coupe. This class allows chopping the roof, adding a bellypan, and cowl-forward streamlining. The two designations come together in XO/GCC, which is then applied to the rear quarter-panel. The makeshift ‘F’ over the ‘G’ in these photos confirms that racers are always considering different class changes (from Gas to Fuel, in this case). Obviously, Jeff Brock has done his homework, establishing five impressive Bonneville records in the XO/GCC class with a best of 165.380 mph at the recent World Finals. Feats like this can only be attained with support from an understanding wife, family, friends, and friends’ friends. One of the major players in helping bump the SCTA record an impressive 35 mph is crew chief Sergio Juarez from Hernandez, New Mexico. More than just the crew chief, Sergio is often the entire crew.

#1952 Super Rivera #Super Rivera #Rivera #buick #buick riviera #bonneville

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kaikamahine · 5 years ago

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👀

YOU.

You are such a kind, supportive person and the absolute BEST cheerleader your mutuals could ask for *__* I hope good things happen to you all 2020!!

This is from the AU where Imelda and Héctor rise to meteoric fame right alongside Ernesto, because, like, imagine Imelda as a film star during the Golden Age. Like? /fans self

Once, a long time ago, he saw a photograph of Emiliano Zapata’s wife immediately after his assassination, while they were still parading his corpse around Cuaulta.

She’d been sent away, the señora had, when the war started turning. But they found her anyway, and here she was, stepping out under the mantle of her home, her hand turning the head of her four-year-old daughter into her skirts. She looked straight into the camera, right through you; an expression so hard, so cold you could see it flint.

It’s the first thing Zacarías thinks of, when Huerta shows Imelda Rivera through the door.

God. What a hard-eyed woman.

He rises. They shake hands. They sit down. She crosses her ankles, tucks her skirts under the chair. She does not smile.

Zacarías looks sidelong. His brother, casually unstudied in his chair with the buttons straining over the rise of a growing paunch, merely lifts his eyebrows back.

“Señorita —“ he starts.

“Señora,” she corrects immediately. “My husband waits outside.”

“Ah, yes. They always start with one,” his brother murmurs to his folded hands, and Zacarías cuts him a warning look. The woman, somehow, grows even more reptilian; expression stilling, cold-blooded.

“Señora,” he says willingly.

The script sits on his desk in front of him. Usually, the process of picking a cast follows the same formula: where are you from? How long have you been in the city? What’s your background in acting? All questions he feels like he should be asking, as an employer interviewing a potential job candidate. He and his brother had only opened this studio two years ago — it’s still a process.

But Zacarías has what his brother calls an instinct, and he takes one more look at that unscalable armor and finds those questions falling away, as unimportant as dead leaves.

He leans forward.

“What makes you think you could be my leading lady, señora?” he asks, low, and her eyes spark.

Without missing a beat, she replies, “Why did you come back to Mexico?”

The legs of his brother’s chair hit the floor with a thunk. Zacarías nearly smiles.

“Have you heard of Juventino Rosas?”

Her attention sharpens.

“A fiddler,” she says, watching him tap the end of his pen against his notepad. Then, with a note of irony that Zacarías doesn’t miss, she corrects herself, “A composer. Tejano, Mexican polka. He died young, didn’t he?”

“Twenty-four,” he answers. “Did you know they play his music overseas?”

She does something impressive with only one eyebrow.

“They played his waltz once,” Zacarías continues, “at a party at the consulate I attended shortly after I married. I remember being thrilled. ‘This is Mexican,’ I said to my peers. ‘A Mexican made this music!’ And they said, ‘that’s impossible. This is too good to be Mexican.’”

The other eyebrow joins the first.

“So,” he spreads his hands. “I came home. I opened this studio. I intend to make movies. I don’t want to just copy what we get from the European theaters, like other studios do, just as —“ a singer, Huerta had said. “— just as I’m sure you don’t want to work for a knock-off Cuban dance hall,” and can tell by the minute stiffening in her face that he’s hit true. “I want to show everyone that Mexicans can make anything, and make it better. Mostly, I want Mexicans to know they can make anything, and make it better.”

“So will you make a film about him, then?” she presses. “Juventino Rosas?”

“The script is ready already,” Zacarías says instantly. “But first, they need to find out how to record sound with picture, so we can have movies that talk — and, more importantly, sing. His name should not be forgotten. It should not be erased. Don’t you think?”

He’s leaning forward still, hands outspread, watching her watch him, and realizes all at once that she’s reversed their positions. As if she is the one interviewing him. As if she’s drawing up her own cast, giving him his role.

And though he doesn’t know it yet, this will be the running theme of Zacarías’s life.

This chair. The young person sitting across from him, all their handcrafted armor locked in place to protect them and their own hope.

He will see María Felix in this chair, and Pedro Infante, and Cantiflas, and he will see in them what Mexico needs to see.

“I think,” says Imelda Rivera, slowly. “That would be a marvelous thing to leave on his ofrenda.”

And then she does something stunning.

She smiles.

#quensty #FACT: miguel zacarías is a real person; born in mexico and fled to lebanon during the revolution; he came back as an adult and directed #some of the golden age's most memorable movies #juventino rosas is also a real person; he composed one of our most famous carnival tunes (sobre las olas) and died v. young #anyway the fic was basically just imelda‚ héctor‚ and ernesto in cdmx in the 30s and 40s bc why not #i remember it ended with them being the ones to drop the bell on ernesto but i forget the details that led up to it #SHRUG #THANK U AGAIN ❣️❣️#coco 2017 #elizabeth needs a tag for answering that one meme

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