Rosie Pérez's latest documentary and the silence of history

I just bought the IFC documentary "¡Yo Soy Boricua, Pa' Que Tú Lo Sepas!", which is directed by Rosie Pérez and attempts to explain what being "Puerto Rican", or to be more specific, what being an American of Puerto Rican descent means. She tries to explain why are Americans of Puerto Rican ancestry and Puerto Ricans in general so proud of their "Puerto Ricanness"- proud almost to the point of exaggeration.

Rosie attempts to find answers in our ethnic background and political history, which I believe are good places to start. However, I couldn't help notice how easily Rosie basically omitted the presence and history of Africans and their descendants in Puerto Rico- omission that reminds me, a black Puerto Rican, of the racism our community is subject to by our fellow Latin Americans.

We, Puerto Ricans, can take pride of our ethnic diversity. Generally speaking, Puerto Ricans are the result of hundreds of years of coexistence and, in many cases, intermixing of people of Spanish, Corsicans, English, Irish, German, French, West African and Indigenous descent. It is very probable that most Puerto Ricans today are of mixed ancestry to some degree. However, there is a fact that shouldn't be denied but often is: Of those groups, the ones that have had the greatest impact on the formation of the Puerto Rican being are the Spanish, Corsicans (both European groups) and the descendants of West African slaves.

It is no secret for any educated Puerto Rican (or, to be more precise, any Puerto Rican with some basic knowledge about our history), that the Taíno people (the Indigenous people of the island) were almost completely exterminated in the 16th century and that by the late 18th century, the number of Taínos in Puerto Rico was around 200. However, by the late 18th century, around 50,000 Puerto Ricans were of African descent, and around 35,000 were of European descent.

The 19th century would see the number of both groups go up, with 50% of the population being either mulatto or black, and the other 50% being of European descent around 1847. With the mass immigration from Europe and other Latin American nations, the number of Europeans went up considerably while the number of people of African descent remained stable.

However, it has been common practice throughout the history of our people to diminish the importance of the African component of our identity while giving much more importance to the European and the minimal Taíno component. Not to say that the indigenous people of our island didn't contribute to our formation- they left us very valuable linguistic and gastronomic contributions. However, it has been a constant throughout our history to use the Taíno heritage as an excuse to hide or minimize the impact of West African peoples in our identity.

Rosie Pérez is no exception. Her documentary starts with a brief review of pre-colonial and colonial Puerto Rican history. Rosie spends several minutes talking about the Taíno people and how similar Puerto Ricans of today are to the Taíno people, implying that Taíno culture survived the genocide committed against them through the Spaniards, who did nothing but to adopt that culture after they killed the Tainos. Rosie then implies that Puerto Ricans are mixture of different racial groups, including "black" (the famous "We got some black in us" line Americans of Puerto Rican descent like to use), but she forgot to include the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and its long lasting impact on Puerto Rican culture and history.

That didn't stop Rosie Pérez, a Puerto Rican of predominantly African descent herself (her father, mother and grandma, as the movie shows, are Puerto Rican "mulattoes"), from expressing her pride Puerto Rican musical traditions like "bomba" and "plena" and on our very particular instruments (including the "bomba drums" and "panderos", which are handheld drums). The only problem is that Rosie forgot to mention where that music and those instruments come from: West Africa.

Then Rosie spent quite a few minutes talking about Puerto Rican pro-independence icon Pedro Albizu Campos and about how he was the "Puerto Rican MLK". Of course, Rosie never mentioned him as an example of a great Puerto Rican of African descent who contributed to the history of his people.

Rosie's cousin, who has stronger African features than her, does mention the topic of blackness in Puerto Rico, although very casually. He avoids to talk about racism among Puerto Ricans of different skin colors, even though he winds up narrating how he was discriminated in New York by the parents of one of his girlfriends once because he happened to be "dark-skinned" (notice that he avoids calling himself black while talking about this incident, but in other moments, when making jokes and fun about himself, he calls himself black).

So, as I am watching this documentary, thinking about if I should show it to my Spanish students next week, I feel pain because I know this documentary will be seen by many people across America and the world, and all of them will not have the chance of learning that in Puerto Rico there have been and are are millions of descendants of Africans slaves throughout our history, who have fought slavery, racism, poverty and rejection and have given glory, culture and pride to the land they were born in. I felt the sadness of knowing that for many Puerto Ricans, I am not one of them, or maybe I am, but just an unimportant part of them. A part that doesn't deserve any attention or mention. A part that can't be exterminated like the Tainos were, but that can be ignored and eventually wiped out of the map of our existence by the silence of history.

As I watched this documentary, I wondered how I was going to explain to my students why Rosie Pérez left me, herself, and so many others out...