Porque Estamos Aqu?: Puerto Rican Feminisms Against Empire (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781558613607)

A future classic collection of Puerto Rican feminist writing that spans time, terrain, and phases, invokes voices across generations and fields, and bridges island and diaspora

In her years of scholarship and activism with fellow Puerto Rican feminists, editor and professor Jessica Nydia Pab?n-Col?n reached for a feminism to ground her work and validate the women who paved her way--but in her search for a defined tradition of Puerto Rican feminism, what she found were gaps, disappearances, and unanswered questions. Despite the omnipresence of Puerto Ricans in American pop culture and the long history of Boricuan resistance to American subjugation on both archipelago and mainland, no feminist lens existed to link the myriad identities and geographies of Ricanness, or to focus critique on Puerto Rico's status as an American neo-colony. The consequence of this lack became clear in 2017 when Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico; though American feminists gathered in droves to protest Trump's presidency, most drew no attention to the disaster right off Florida's coast.

Counteracting such erasure, Porque Estamos Aqu? maps Boricua feminisms of the past, the present, and the future, defining what it means to be a "bad subject" of US empire. Engaging in radical collectivity, Pab?n-Col?n joins forces with Puerto Rican scholars, memoirists, artists, activists, and chefs--feminist legends like Aurora Levins Morales, political trailblazers like Rosa Clemente--to ground this anthology in a tradition of resistance to empire at home. Through essays, roundtables, historiographies, poems, and even recipes, Porque Estamos Aqu? asserts that Puerto Rican feminists are undeniably, irreducibly here and will guide generations of our shared movement for years to come.