by J. L. Torres
During the week that followed the Brown concert, nevertheless, solidarity began to wear thin. It was hot, even for Baná, which sits at a higher altitude than the coastal cities, and tempers began to flare over the living conditions. For the less committed, the fun was wearing out, the fad quality fading, and they left. Except for the diehards, their outrage was not so easily dampened. They planned to stay as long as needed to make those responsible pay, one way or another. They did not believe in the judicial system, much less the government. They demanded those in charge be held accountable, that they pay for their horrific actions. Ahora.
The government also began to lose patience. The campers officially became squatters; they were informed to “desist and break camp or be in violation of the law.” The university became concerned about the ability to offer classes during the approaching Fall semester, to which the protestors responded with a demand to close the college because it presented a hazardous risk to students, faculty and workers.
Micco called me and asked if I could do something to ensure the start of the semester in two weeks. “Think of all those students graduating this year, Rennie.”
To which I answered, “This is bigger than me, Micco. I’m just one of many.”
He grunted and hung up.
Marisol called daily to tell me she worried for my safety, to question if this was all worth it.
A flurry of accusations flew across the airwaves. I was interviewed, introduced as “the son of the activist lawyer Julia Matos Canales, whose firm is pursuing a class-action suit against the U.S. government.” In my accented Spanish, I reiterated our committee’s position on the protest, entering its third week. Sitting next to me in the radio studio, Samuel, our official spokesperson, delineated with calm and eloquence. He informed the media that we, under no circumstance, advocated violence and did not want anyone hurt. “But,” he said, “we strongly support the right of citizens to assemble and protest peacefully, even if it means civil disobedience.” Above all, he claimed, this is “a dignified, united front of indignation” over the continued contamination of the college and the island in general.
Miki Tavárez had other ideas. “Protestin’ don’t mean you can’t have fun, am I right?” That was his mantra for the first few days in the camp. And most of us had to admit he brought humor and needed levity to the situation. Just running around in his wig, clown pants, clown shoes and make-up made us laugh. He had a horn he kept blowing at people’s behinds—that always got a laugh. His fellow clowns, twelve in number, patrolled the environs, cheering people up, telling jokes in between the musical acts. He put up a tent for face painting and balloon sculpting for the children and set up a few games in there; soon it was always crowded with children. Why parents brought their kids to a protest-squatters camp was beyond me; they were just kids, and not interested in politics. Restless, they ran around the camp without anything to do, taxing the fragile nerves of everyone, creating tension among parents and tent neighbors. So, we thanked Miki for taking the initiative on that one. Encouraged by our response, he organized kite flying. At first for the kids, but after a few days the adults got into it and scores of kites brightened the cerulean sky, every one of them scribbled with a political slogan.
Maybe we emboldened him too much, who knows. It’s strange the way these things happen. Another night had fallen on the camp. Fires burned everywhere; the university had turned off all the electricity. The music continued, as townspeople donated generators that could power mikes and speakers. The music pacified everyone at night; it was the glue which held everything together.
That night I was pleased to see Rita Gómez’s niece show up on stage. I had invited her and wasn’t sure if she would show up. She came on with a young man who played guitar beautifully. First, she introduced herself, talked about her aunt who worked for the college and had died recently from cancer. To loud cheers she simply asked, “Why can’t the university investigate and make sure my aunt and others have not died from this contamination? From those responsible: We want the truth.” And the crowd began the chant, “The truth, the truth, we want the truth!” She raised her hands and told us she wanted to sing for us.
Her melodious soprano voice then went through the haunting lyrics of the danza, “Verde Luz,” to a silenced, mesmerized audience. I had heard of the song, never heard it sung, and was moved by the beauty of the words and how she cradled every metaphor with love and sincerity. The perfect song for the moment, and everyone there that night knew it.
The last note brought a roar that made me tremble. She left the stage, wiping tears from her eyes. They wanted her to sing another, but this wasn’t a concert performance for her. She had come to sing this song and no more, for her aunt and the cause. The audience kept clapping, even after she had left. From the darkness like a mischievous demon, Miki jumped onto the stage. He brought an empty milk carton on which he stood to reach the mike. That brought a laugh from the crowd. In his clown outfit, he started telling rowdy, raunchy jokes about gringos, and then got serious, talking about the serious problem with the environment in Puerto Rico. He pumped everyone up with the previous chant, “we want the truth, we want the truth, now.”
Then he silenced the crowd, putting his small hands up in the air. “Gente, I want to inform you that the Puerto Rican colonial government has mobilized the National Guard.”
There was a groan, then a wave of murmuring across the multitude.
I turned to Felipe, who looked at Samuel. We scrambled for our cell phones. A few calls confirmed what Miki had said. The Guard was already positioned by the athletic track across from us, not even a quarter of a mile away. The police, in turn, had been ordered to stop any flow of traffic coming into the vicinity of the college. We soon received phone calls and text messages informing us that we had twenty-four hours to evacuate the college or the Guard would dislodge us and arrest any violators.
Foley texted me: “Warned u. Get ur asses out of there now!!!”
Our faces turned grim and anxious, and we stared at each other trying to figure out what to do next. We decided that Samuel should first calmly update the campers on the situation and then try to convince everyone to follow the instructions to avoid harm to anyone. But Miki Tavárez was on a roll.
“We will not be intimidated,” the clown Miki shouted.
Samuel struggled through the agitated crowds, now pumping fists, shouting slogans.
“We won’t take this anymore.” Miki unleashed a harangue of the angriest, most intensely hateful anti-American venom. “Those yanqui sons of bitches are killing our people,” he yelled. “They’re destroying our island, filling it up with their shit and flushing us down with it!”
He was literally foaming at the mouth, spit flying in all directions. His head’s wild movements started to make his wig slide, so he took it off, bringing a strange cheer from those gathered. He had them captivated. And then he started screaming that we should chain ourselves to the bulldozers at the clean-up site, pointing in its direction with his orange wig.
“We won’t let them dislodge us, compañeros. ¡Venceremos!” Miki pumped his little fist in the air, his real hair, long and straight, falling all over his face.
“To the bulldozers,” he shouted.
By the time Samuel got up to the mike, the other clowns had taken up the people’s solidarity chant, “El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido,” as they followed Miki to the clean-up area, located about two hundred yards from the center of the camp.
“Amigos, compañeros,” Samuel shouted, but his words were lost amid the yelling, chanting and shuffling of feet. The crowd moved like the angry, disgruntled mob it had become, toward the equipment at the clean-up area.
The Guard had received orders that any move toward the equipment justified action. As the mob moved toward it, Miki and his clowns leading the way, the Guard was given the order to move forward.
Faced with the Guard coming toward them, they hesitated. Sane individuals would have stopped as soon a
s the Guard had circled the equipment area. But Miki gave the command to charge. It was more like a loud screech of frustration.
Felipe tried to calm people down, shouting instructions through a megaphone to stop, and some of the protestors backed off. But dozens charged, following Miki and the clowns, some now running with anchor chains and locks to tie themselves to the equipment. They attempted to break the barricade of soldiers, and as these pushed back, some protesters dropped to the ground but got up again in defiance and anger. They had no weapons, but with their fists they pummeled the soldiers, who continued to force back the horde. Then I saw Miki wrapped around a soldier’s leg, biting him. The soldier yelled, and in a flash, he was butting poor Miki with his rifle. The other clowns jumped the soldier, Jaime Cruz, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student from Salinas. Chains started to swing, punches thrown, scuffling, pushing, a litany of obscenities and shouts.
A warning shot was heard and then a high pitch wave of screams. Like a flash flood, there was a massive retreat. I was trying to hold back demonstrators from moving toward the brawl and was knocked down by the retreating mob. I huddled myself into a fetal position on the ground, covering my head. People wailed obscenities, the Guardsmen yelled to move back. I smelled the scent of dirt and grass, and in the distance, heard the steady beat of a lonely drum.
I would have been injured worse if Felipe, who had the body of an offensive lineman, had not blocked people from trampling me, at times pushing others to the ground, while Marco and Mercedes, two student leaders, helped me up. Felipe leading the way, we ran toward the safety of the water fountain in front of the Administration Building.
Luckily, no one was killed. I received cuts and scratches, had to put my left arm in a sling, but nothing was more bruised than my spirit. The weeks that followed the “riot of clowns” were even more painful, though. The media ran with it as a big joke, deviating from the seriousness of our claims and demands. We had to work night and day to bring the issue back to the gravity it deserved. My mother was incensed.
“So much work, René, down the toilet,” she said. “How did you let it get to this?” I had no answers. No one could have seen this coming. Felipe and Samuel shook their heads, even laughed, saying you had to take it all in stride and move on.
Marisol visited me in the hospital, hysterical. When she saw my minor injuries, she proceeded to slap my good arm a few times and to tell me she had warned me this political stuff was risky. Then, she sat by me and kissed me on the forehead and face.
“Why do you put me through this, Rennie? What would I do if something happened to you?”
I couldn’t respond. It was the best thing to do, not to continue discussion on the topic, and she dropped it.
Marisol was relatively calmer because Mom had recommended her to the Dean at the Bayamón campus, and he had authorized the transfer. She was happy to have her job secured, despite the driving it would involve, and was spending the remaining summer preparing for the move to the new college.
“At least you weren’t hurt as bad as that poor little clown,” she said, to change the subject.
Miki had sustained serious injuries and had to remain in the hospital for a week. A lawsuit was expected, and he had even approached my mother, who declined the case. But on release from the hospital, Miki became a celebrity. He hit the local talk shows and was invited everywhere to give a speech or talk about his experience in the riot. People celebrated him as a folk hero, or as one of the talk show hosts introduced him, “a man small in stature who stands like a giant in comparison to our politicians.” The buzz on the street was that he was a “little guy with big balls.” We had to contend with and deflect his status as the face of the movement to end the dangerous pollution of our college.
“Learn from this, René,” my mother advised. “Just remember: in Puerto Rican politics, nothing is what it appears to be, and all that it appears to be is nothing.”
Twenty-Nine
* * *
I was kicking the footbag in our bedroom, when Julia called. After the protest camp debacle, I went to a corner to heal my spiritual and physical wounds. Most likely in that corner I’d be kicking the footbag ragged. There was a difference, though. Once enjoyable and challenging, hacky sack had now become an activity to keep me from the doldrums, a way to forget the events of the past few weeks.
My mother, astute as always, knew my state of mind. “Pack your weekend carry-on,” she said in her usual curt way, which I had grown to interpret as “We’re off on an adventure somewhere.”
I looked forward to these impromptu trips now. Even in an island 100 by 35 miles, there is enough to make you want to jump in the car and explore, and my mother was a great tour guide/historian/road companion.
But it wasn’t just that each one of these “cultural field trips” had been educational, as Julia had promised. How dumb for me not to see it at first. Or, maybe, so numbed by my hurt, so simply lost, Julia showed me that when hard times hit, you need to regain a sense of direction. Movement toward something. Rage against the inertia. At first, I thought she was just being pedantic and overbearing, pushing an agenda, when it was her way of just being there for me.
“Where we going now?” I asked, excited.
“The Fiestas in Loíza,” she said. “Pick you up in an hour.” And she hung up.
We drove up to the house in Guaynabo, and from there we headed toward the condo in Fajardo. We didn’t go straight to the condo. Loíza coming first on Route 3, Julia decided to go directly to the festival since it was getting dark and we were hungry. It was Friday, the first day of the three-day festival celebrating Santiago Apóstol, or Saint James’ victory over the Moors. Each day of this festival began with a procession in which a group of men carried the saint’s statue from the center of town to a barrio approximately three miles away called Las Carreras. The first procession, which we had missed, is dedicated to the men, the second to women and the last one to children. It was essentially the same ritual every time.
“No big whoop,” she said. “But the people get dressed in wonderful costumes and it’s so much fun, you’ll see.”
As night fell on the town, the residents of Loíza, and others from all over the island, roamed the streets dressed as the traditional four carnivalesque characters—caballeros, vejigantes, locas and viejos or locos. The caballeros, or knights, wore wide-brim hats, with dangling ornaments or streamers, and they waved wooden swords. Sometimes they rode on horseback, resembling the Spaniards who had conquered the Moors in the medieval Iberian peninsula.
“How bizarre,” I observed to my mother. “A town with such an African legacy and the Spaniards are the good guys.”
“And what’s most African, the vejigantes,” she responded, “are demons, the bad guys.”
Trickster figures, the vejigantes bounced and pranced in their lavish, vibrant colored jumpsuits that opened wide like wings as they extended their arms and legs. Their ornate, painted masks were spiked with three to eight long, curving horns. They circled the festival grounds in packs, a flock of children following them, chanting, demanding food, drink or money on their behalf. If you refused, they’d strike you with a simulated goat bladder, or vejiga. These days, the “goat bladders” were long plastic sticks with an inflated bag at the end.
I don’t know how many times my mother and I were struck with those silly plastic vejigas. Even as we ate our alcapurrias and tacos de chapín, they would walk by us and slap our butts with them. After a while, you just ignored them and their little smacks like gnats floating in the night air.
We passed the various kiosks, surrounded by caballeros and vejigantes. At one point a band of vejigantes rumbled by, and Julia screamed and grabbed my arm. I protected her from the playful vejiga blows, and we both laughed. Closer to the band stand, a group of viejos and locas danced for spectators. The locas had blackened faces, wore wild wigs and exaggerated, padded breasts and butts and hit large tin cans rhythmically to the music. The viejos grinded against th
e locas, who kept slapping them with brooms and at times emptied their pockets. They harassed dancers and spectators who congregated by the band shell. The locas flirted with the men; the viejos ogled the women.
The crowds were getting rowdier, in the air was a constant stream of animated voices and laughter. The salsa was percolating, and droves of people dancing, but Julia wanted to head back to Fajardo.
“We need to get up early tomorrow to see the procession,” she said.
The next day we set out early to have breakfast at a little dive off Route 3 and then we drove to Loíza for the second procession. It was a much more somber event than I had anticipated, quite religious, with praying and chanting. Several men shouldered the platform, carrying the saint’s statue. The saint, mounted on a white horse, brandished a sword. He seemed odd displaying that warlike stance festooned with wild flowers and flamboyant streamers.
My mother wanted to walk in the procession. “For your benefit,” she said.
I didn’t understand what she meant. Not big on religious rituals, I walked to humor her. I never discussed religion with her. To think about it, Mami and Papi didn’t push their religious ideology on me. I was baptized, did my First Communion, Confirmation, like every other Catholic kid. My parents continued to practice their faith to their last days. You could say they died because of their faith. As I withdrew, they showed concerned for “my spiritual side,” but being intellectuals and scholars, they understood that thinking individuals go through various spiritual periods in their lives.