“The Gifts of the Hurricane:” Reimagining Post-María Puerto Rico through Comics

Although the media framed Hurricanes Irma and María and their aftermath as a tragedy, and indeed it was, a small literary canon has emerged that explores the storms as an opportunity to rethink Puerto Rico’s future. The aftermath of the hurricanes impacted cultural production two-fold; by forcing writers to engage with climate change, while also rethinking the colonial relationship that Puerto Rico has with the United States. Looking specifically at selections from English- and Spanish-language comic anthologies Ricanstruction (2018), Puerto Rico Strong (2018) and Nublado: Escombros de María (2018) as well as single-author graphic novels like María and Temporada (2019), I explore how authors used Hurricane María as a catalyst to reimagine and recreate a more autonomous future for the island through decolonial imaginaries, a notion laid out by Emma Pérez. Despite their different approaches to Puerto Rico’s future, the comics’ commonality lies in counter-narratives that espouse community values, indigeneity, innovation, and reclamation of nature as a means to confront hardship. Together they produce alternative modalities for transcending the vulnerabilities of debilitating disasters brought on by climate change. They offer a return to pre-colonial values combined with new technologies to empower the island to break from the United States and withstand future storms.

Pérez, Emma

The work of writer, historian, and theorist Emma Pérez encompasses a broad intersectional approach to the study of Chicanas. Her life’s work crosses disciplinary boundaries by working with history and literary fiction. Noted for her dedicated study of gender and sexuality, Pérez also demonstrates a commitment to feminist studies, Chicana studies, and especially Latinx LGBTQ communities. Her complex interlaced approach brings together a powerful critique of the problems within the historical discipline and redirects her concerns for the erasures of Chicana lesbians from the historical record and cultural archive by writing novels that revise the past. Furthermore, in her theoretical work, particularly her groundbreaking book, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Back into History (1999), Pérez revises the representation of Chicanas by revisiting the history of colonialism and devising a theoretical approach that aims to recast Chicana subjectivity. In her theory of the “decolonial imaginary,” she identifies a set of conditions that presumptively casts Chicanas in a subservient or sexualized role that cannot be easily undone without changing the representations of these conditions, specifically the representations of conquest and colonialism. Likewise, Pérez’s effort to rework the colonial past is performed by her inclusion of Chicanas and Chicana lesbians in her literary works. Her first book of fiction, the novel Gulf Dreams (1996), is unique for its portrayal of sexual violence, racial ambivalences, and romantic love. In her second book, the historical novel Forgetting the Alamo, or Blood Memory (2009), she explores deep same-sex love, complex political histories revolving around differential regard for the lives of women and people of color, and gritty depictions of hardship, loss, historical memory, and the complexities of forgiveness. In the larger scope of Chicana/o literature, Pérez bears no claim to idealizing Chicana/o culture; rather she harmonizes the good with the bad and lets the reader decide what is real. Trained as a historian, Emma Pérez understands that changing the historical past requires reassessing reality, and her work accomplishes this goal.

“A Detour in Longing”: Gender, Sexuality and Lesbian Desire in Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings and Emma Pérez’s Gulf Dreams

Questions of gender and sexuality have oftentimes been portrayed as taboo in traditionalist conservative societies. Gloria Anzaldúa claims in Borderlands/La Frontera (1999) that “she [the lesbian of color] goes against two moral prohibitions: sexuality and homosexuality. The Chicana lesbian, as a matter of survival and motivated by sexual impulses, struggles to surpass the passive role repression assigns to her and refuses to accept the heteronormative rule. In the present paper, I investigate how the narrative strategies and cultural references bring to surface the emotions and experiences that form subjectivity and sexual desire in Emma Pérez’s Gulf Dreams (1996) and Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings (2003). Such transgressive narrators are of different ages and thus undergoing different maturity processes, but they begin both novels as young Chicana women attempting to explore their sexuality and uncover their own prohibited desires while becoming aware of the patriarchal and machista system in which they are inscribed. Here female sexuality and lesbian desire intertwine. The chosen novels enable a debate on women’s sexual development and exploration and society’s influence, judgement and punishment on female sexuality. Writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, Carla Trujillo, Emma Pérez and other feminist Chicana critics aid this analysis.