Victor Villanueva
She says, “Yeah, the life of exile.”
And in that moment I had to rethink my whole ideological and economic being, the political economy of this body, this person. I had been constructed as and had accepted the construct of a person of color long ago. I had thought about and recognized the tie between color and colonialism some time ago. But it hadn’t occurred to me that part of my estrangement from the Island was the result of a sociocultural and economic banishment—exile
The Material Matters: Rhetoric and Political Economy
Washington State University
It was the damnedest thing. I was talking with someone from Puerto Rico, the kind of chit chat she and I tend to get into—a kind of heralding back to identity. In some sense, my identity has always been a question. Not a question unique to me, I understand, since someone sometime came up with Nuyorican to define an identity not Puerto Rican yet Puerto Rican, not Black yet Black, not White yet White. I was talking about how I had gotten to the Pacific Northwest originally—NY ghetto to LA ghetto to the Army, eventually to Ft. Lewis in Tacoma—and the decision to stay in the Northwest (which turned out to be stay, leave, and return).
