Reflections on Layers of Belief, Material and Spiritual Survivals, and Colonialisms in Puerto Rico

Abstract

Reflections on Layers of Belief, Material and Spiritual Survivals, and Colonialisms in Puerto Rico Sherina Feliciano-Santos I was nine when I moved “back” to Puerto Rico from Chicago. While my parents had made many such moves back to the island, this was my first time living there, a relocation that coincided with the arrival of Hurricane Hugo. The preparations that went along with the threat of a storm that size welcomed us to Puerto Rico. I remember the prayers that were part of that preparation at my brother’s and my small new Catholic school. The rumors of dreams and predictions of devastation, overheard from parents and teachers, circulated clumsily among my fourth-grade classmates. While I had already attended Catholic school in Chicago, my experience of Catholicism in Puerto Rico already felt more mystical, the outcomes of events more directly connected to my prayers. The saints, angels, and Mary were clearly expected to be present among us. When Hugo came, it mostly missed my town but devastated my grandmother’s town of Vieques, an island-municipality on the east coast. My mother left for a few weeks to help my grandmother recover and returned with stories of my great uncle, who is now legendary in my family. He decided that his mission was to fight the “demon.” He wrapped a strong rope around his shack and sat inside physically holding the structure together throughout all the hours of Hugo’s rage. The demon was no match. My uncle, a weathered [End Page 85] root of a man, held his house together with his own two hands and triumphed over the storm. Although I was still becoming fluent in Spanish, I met a classmate at school who quickly became one of my best friends. I loved being invited to her family’s home. I remember doing homework in her dining room and catching a glimpse of one of the corners of what seemed to be a guest room. In that corner, a white tablecloth dressed a table, and on it were bowls and cups of water, statues, flowers, candles, and beaded cords. I often wondered about that table, which, as my friend’s mother implicitly told me by closing the dining room door every time she arrived from work, I was not supposed to ask too much about. My friend’s family took pride in having a Roman Catholic priest in the family, and, even then, I knew that the table wasn’t a part of the religion that we were supposed to speak about. That only made me wonder more. Decades later, I saw a similar table at a session with a spiritual consultant in a town just north of mine. The same white tablecloth draped it, cups and bowls full of water sat upon it, similar candles, and the scent of the freshly picked flowers took me back to my friend’s house all those years ago. Caught by the memory, I stared at the table long enough for the spiritual consultant to notice. She briefly explained how the altar helped her communicate with and open the channels to ancestors and spirit guides. I wondered if that was also the role of the table I had seen in my youth. Although most people in my town professed being Roman Catholic (though the number of people converting to protestant Christian churches was growing even then), I was also surrounded by practices and beliefs that existed alongside, within, and around the expressed and institutionally sanctioned Catholic ones. The Catholicism I grew up with was filled with ways of knowing that did not fit within the bounds of official dogma. It was packed with practices outside of the sanctioned rituals, and all of it seemed, at least to me, ubiquitous and known locally. I recall overheard conversations over the years of visions, ghosts, and spirits, mango trees whose fruits couldn’t be picked without angering the spirit of a deceased grandmother, street corners that shouldn’t be stopped at too late in the night, sites of apparitions, of ancestors who needed to be remembered, of promesas made to God for the safe return or healing of a loved one, of...