Year One

Abstract

Year One Jaquira Díaz (bio) It begins like this: an assembly outside the university, students and professors and factory workers and taxi drivers, everyone, all holding up their protest signs, el presidente more than an hour late, the Alliance Police strapped head-to-toe in body armor guarding the stage where the country's Alliance-backed president will make his first public speech since stealing the election. Aurora, whose fourteen-year-old brother was last seen with Alliance cops outside the governor's palace, is among the protestors. She is nineteen, a first-year student, political science. Edgar, her only brother, was just a kid, a prankster, caught spray painting graffiti on the palace's south wall—stop negotiating with colonial overlords—probably something he'd heard their father say. He was taken away to answer for his crime. This story she got from his friends, Monchi and Chapo, who ran before the cops caught them. The bill for repainting the south wall was hand-delivered to her parents' house in Carraízo, but news about Edgar's whereabouts never came. Aurora's phone calls to la policía had been useless—they'd never heard of her brother or the graffiti incident, and if he was caught by the Alliance, well, he was shit out of luck, no offense, seńorita. The Alliance didn't even have an office she could call, and the receptionist at the palace just laughed when she asked to speak with el presidente, or el gobernador, ese maldito vendepatria. She visited el palacio at least four times, demanding to see a captain, a sergeant, somebody, anybody, but was turned away again and again. Her mother wrote letters, got other women in el barrio to write letters, which was useless according to her father. These men don't care about letters, her father had said. They only care about one damn thing. He had withdrawn all of their savings from el Banco Popular, had borrowed from everyone he knew. A ransom, that's what it was. The Alliance was holding Edgar hostage and he would get him back. Her father had returned penniless and beaten and without her brother. He had returned, and for that Aurora was grateful, but she had known then that her brother was dead, that he would not come home, not ever, that he was killed by a foreign government in his own country, for words he had written on a wall. When el presidente takes the stage, Aurora begins to make her way up front, sliding in between students and factory workers, ducking elbows to the head and pushing people out of her way. Her brother is dead. She once thought that knowing this would break her. But now she understands—can feel it in her bones—that being a colonial subject is even worse than being killed. Freedom is all that matters anymore. Viva Puerto Rico libre. She holds the gun against her body, in the front pocket of her Universidad de Puerto Rico hoodie, her sleeves scrunched up to the elbows. Her brother is dead and the cops notice her moving through the crowd, notice her making her way toward the podium, notice her meeting their eyes and not looking away because she is not afraid. Her brother is dead, and they are recognizing her from her many visits to the palace. Her brother is dead and el presidente is speaking—el gobernador watching from the side [End Page 70] of the stage after selling out his own people—addressing the assembly of farmers who have lost their crops, their lands, mothers and fathers who have lost their children, sisters who have lost their brothers. She feels the weight of the gun in her hand, and just like she'd imagined, protestors all around her with their makeshift signs, the heat rising rising rising like a breaking wave inside her, her brother, her brother's face, her brother's ghost-voice a whisper in her ear, Take the shot. And Aurora takes the shot. Immediately, she's surrounded by cops. A blow to the face from the buttstock of a rifle, more shots, the crowd pushing, running...