Coming back home to el campo
Planting trees and preserving fruitful traditions in Puerto Rico
Hey Friend,
For the past decade I’ve been slowly documenting my family’s self care and food traditions. On any given day you can find me photographing recipes, recording conversations with my elders, interviewing my family for my personal archives or traveling to my parent’s home islands of Puerto Rico and Honduras to document climate change effects on our daily lives. I’m curious about intentionally preserving our practices of sustaining and seizing life.
My paternal grandparents were campesinos who grew up in the farmlands of Puerto Rico. My people have always known about living in communion with the land and water, and I want to make sure my future generations can say the same.
Our stories shape reality and create new futures, so I write. I photograph. I record voice notes and interview my uncles over a couple of beers and a bowl of peanuts. I’ve recorded everything from daddy’s tips on when to plant a fruit tree to how to bake mommy’s coconut bread without all the ingredients. Part of me knows this information will be useful in the coming years of climate reality, but more importantly this is heart work - a way of coming home and honoring what’s worth saving now.
Instead of lamenting the core memories that have turned bittersweet — the fruit trees in abuela’s yard blown away by Hurricane Maria, the coastline of my childhood beach shrinking, the poolside hangouts now too hot to handle — I choose to activate my vision and preserve my memories through storytelling. I stay up late nights writing and rewriting memories into history and I show up here to meet you every month. So here we are. Weaving in and out of awe, steeping in presence, noticing.
What’s one way you honor your family’s traditions and histories in the face of climate change?
Share with us in the comments below. Or send a voice note via dm to @theawecast.co and I’ll feature it in my next podcast episode.
3 Awe ‘Tings
a short list of awe-inspiring content to help you through your week
🎧 La Brega podcast episode about the unofficial Puerto Rican anthem Preciosa
🥭This Fruit Love Letter to Mangoes because it’s mango season!
🎤This Boriqua Reporter telling the true story of PR in inspiring ways
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Nostalgic for the sun The final letter I wrote before heading to puerto rico. In it I share the full story of why climate has become my #1 creative focus.
Make room for your best self A letter sharing the exact details of how I entered into the most creatively aligned year of my life yet.
COMING HOME PT. 3
In my last few letters, I’ve been sharing bits of what coming home looks like as part of my Coming Home series. In February’s letter, I told you that I went to Puerto Rico during the pandemic, but I didn’t share the full details of why or what happened when I landed. Let’s get into it!
Welcome to Coming Home, an Awe Cast miniseries about my Caribbean family’s experiences with island life, sustainability, home and climate change told through the perspective of different generations in my family.
NAH, I CAN’T DO THIS
Winter cold was setting in swiftly, and I couldn’t bear the thought of turning thirty cooped up in my apartment under blankets. It was seven months into the pandemic and Brooklyn had callused me into a version of myself I didn’t like - hesitant, hopeless, weary. I bought furniture, painted my walls orange, danced alone in my living room, decorated my home with warm lights and still felt anxious about the world outside my apartment. To be outside was to constantly avoid the piercing male gaze and to shrink from the aggression of the city. I wondered if gunshots would sound off again in front of my apartment building. Brooklyn was feeling less and less safe and was limiting how I showed up in every area of my life. I needed home, a space to just be that didn’t demand the performance of confidence on the street. I was looking for my personal form of sustainability, a way to live that didn’t feel like survival.
So I decided to return to my father’s motherland, Puerto Rico. I booked my flight a month before my 30th birthday and planned to stay for about a month to reground, reconnect and create. This would be the first time I visited PR on my own for an extended period of time outside a major family event like a funeral, vacation, or Christmas. I land in Puerto Rico with a shaved head, an overpacked suitcase and the hope of regaining my soul bearings…
SPACE TO REGENERATE
Puerto Rico greets me with a familiar campesino symphony, a cacophony of sounds that whisper to my cells the world is alive and you are too, all is well. The sound of roosters crowing, wind chimes knocking and dogs barking is drowned out by the neighborhood bodega van with the loudspeaker selling pastelillos de guava!, pan de maiz!, helado! This is the soundtrack of my childhood.
I arrive at my grandparent’s old house at the break of dawn and yell bendición Tia. My favorite aunt emerges from the front of house saying Que dios te bendiga. She cracks a smirk that says girl, welcome back and feeds me cheese and crackers before I settle into my dad’s childhood room.
After a quick shower, I cross the road to my other aunt’s house (yes, my fam mostly lives on one street). My cousin emerges from her garden smiling. In no less than five minutes we’re in her kitchen and I’m scarfing down a plate of rice and stewed chicken and listening to her share what’s been up since we saw last saw each other years ago. We sip carrot juice and catch up on pandemic madness through laughs and deep sighs.
She takes me ‘round back and shows me her tamarindo tree and the classroom she’s built for her home school business - all new since the last time I’ve been here. Both the tree and the room are monuments of time invested, patience, abiding, persisting.
It is high noon now and I am in the front yard with my favorite aunt again picking and sorting gandules (pigeon peas) beans from her tree. She’s one of my dad’s many sisters, the one I’ve grown closest to who has passed down her knowledge of how to grow and pick my own fruits and vegetables. There are so many gandules going to waste, not enough hands to help gather. I gladly oblige to the task, I needed this reminder and grounding.
The sun is shining hard and it’s not yet mango season but there’s an abundance of shade from the old mango tree waiting to be savored in abuela’s backyard. It will always be her backyard in my mind even though it’s been six years since she passed. Her garden is still a thriving homecoming, a reminder that my people tend to growth. Puerto Rico is far from perfect but it’s certain. I can count on home being there.
In my next letter, I’ll share more about how Puerto Rico changed my life forever.
Until then, I want to hear from you (seriously). I want the details on the everyday stories and subtle ways climate is changing you, how you’re adapting. Tell me the tiny things that make life brilliant and honors what you love about living.
Thank you for being here. Let’s continue to celebrate the tiny wonders, the brilliant awe’s that sustain us, yea?