Re: mona bola

As I approach the next event and reflect on those prior, I have a few words regarding the approach, intention and direction of this platform.

mona bola is rooted in my Puerto Rican heritage – a chance to both share and explore the cuisine and contexts surrounding it.

With regards to this event and in other areas of my life, I speak of Indigenous and Latinx food ways as they are areas that relate to me. But I’m still learning.

Conceptually, I understand the pain and the trauma associated with culinary migration, theft, persecution, but at a distance. I have not lived it.

I present as white; I live with privilege. I’m disconnected to my heritage at the hand of both colonisation and families who chose to forget.

I’m still figuring out how to navigate this space - to share without acting as an authority, and to create room to learn from others.

And my experience only accounts for part of the story.

Contemporary Puerto Rican food has Spanish and Taíno origins but would be nothing without influence from Africa.

My ancestors were enslaved – men forced into labour and largely wiped away; women commoditised and traded and bred against their will – but I do not know the experience of enslaved African people and their ancestors.

However, I recognise my responsibility to educate myself if I’m going to be talking about and engaging with this cuisine. 

As we were reminded after backlash to In the Heights, Afrolatinx people are often erased from the Latin and Caribbean dialogue – and even encouraged to disown their own racial identity – despite being critical to the cultures’ development.

Often, Spaniards are also erased – not in an attempt to exclude but to overlook the bitter history of colonisation.

I am as Spanish as I am Taína. I am the colonised and the coloniser; the enslaved and the slaveholder. They can be one and the same - and both inform how I approach this event.

It’s easy and appealing to embrace one side while rejecting the other, rejecting responsibility, rejecting the ugliness of the past. It’s what my instinct tells me to do, what I have done in the past, but I’m creating accountability in an attempt to shift that reality.

In Naarm, there’s little to no discussion about Puerto Rico, nor about the West Indies. But there is discussion about the bla(c)k experience, the Indigenous experience, the experience of people impacted by Spanish colonisation. 

I welcome those who share these experiences to challenge me where needed, and I challenge myself to keep learning and evolving my approach to GRUEL accordingly.