Murmurations: Puerto Rico’s Resilient History Mirrors the Mangrove

There is a popular saying among organizers across movements: “They wanted to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.” From the seed, I arrive at the mangrove. According to the Science Museum of Puerto Rico (Museo de Ciencias de Puerto Rico), mangroves are tropical or subtropical forests between water and land that “are formed by trees and shrubs adapted to environmental conditions such as floods due to tides, soils where there is little air circulation, little sand, and high salinity.” 

The mangrove seed is born suspended in the air and attached to its mother plant. When it matures, it separates and falls into the water where it rides the tide until it finds a place in the ocean depths where it can take root—until it is ready to reach toward the air again.

Mangroves remind me of social justice movements in Puerto Rico, serving as a symbol of our histories and our interconnection. The history of Puerto Rico—and the Caribbean overall—is marked by the violence of colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, and more recently, the climate crisis. An archipelago that floods will always have to be evacuated. A people that loses its history does not survive. 

Creating new memories in this region is a complex process full of opacity and without guarantees. However, much like the mangrove, some of us in Puerto Rico weave the stories that situate us in time, shed light, and sustain us. This is how many of our stories are born. 

Strengthening Our Roots in the Face of Disasters 

Half of the world’s mangroves are in danger of disappearing. Ensuring their survival is crucial for the survival of Caribbean resistance movements because mangroves are our first line of defense against hurricanes and coastal erosion. Fighting for the future of mangroves teaches us how to regenerate ourselves.

Mangroves cover only 0.1% of the Earth’s surface. Curiously, the Puerto Rican population also represents 0.1% of the world’s population. Most mangroves are found in tropical and subtropical areas. The Puerto Rican archipelago has many of these forests. Mangroves help absorb CO2, and their resilient ecosystem reduces the effects of coastal erosion, hurricanes, and tsunamis. Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities have always understood the importance of these ecosystems. 

For centuries, mangroves have protected the Caribbean from storms while also providing food, wood, habitat, and water filtration. Our coastal towns, particularly Loíza and Salinas, have been our greatest teachers, continuing with initiatives that remind us of their importance in the face of their imminent destruction. The Caribbean, one of the regions that emits the least greenhouse gases, receives the strongest attacks from the climate crisis. Recent studies show that nearly 40% of Puerto Rican coasts are affected by coastal erosion.

The supremacist capitalist crisis also threatens us with extractivist and harmful constructions on our ecosystems for the super-luxury projects of foreign investors that diminish our quality of life and displace us. It’s tempting to want to skip this moment. But it’s also powerful to remember that we are privileged to have collective memory in moments of fear. 

The Land Continues to Be Named

Puerto Rico was a colony of Spain for more than four centuries and is now a U.S. colony. In the mid-19th century—the last decade of Spanish rule—a group of young working-class intellectuals formed Sociedad Recolectora de Documentos Históricos (the Society for the Collection of Historical Documents of the Island of San Juan Bautista, Puerto Rico) to recover a sense of national identity. 

Alejandro Tapia y Rivera and other young prominent figures with a profound love for art and culture led these efforts. La Sociedad sought to preserve Puerto Rico’s robust and autonomous culture in the face of the lack of civic responsibility of the Spanish authority. Spain perceived Puerto Rico as a colony of inferior subjects to be extracted from rather than a community of dignified people whose culture and history deserved to be preserved. 

La Sociedad archived the histories of an emerging people and an archipelago-wide cultural identity that was not being centrally preserved. This project had elite colonial nuances, since it wanted to gain acceptance from Spanish rule, and lacked our aboriginal and Afro-descendant stories. 

While the project was imperfect, it still inspired major political figures, including Segundo Ruiz Belvis, an advocate for the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico. Most importantly, La Sociedad inspired national independence hero Ramón Emeterio Betances, who in 1868 led El Grito de Lares, the most successful insurrection during his time. 

Puerto Rico had a brief period of autonomy and self-government until the U.S. military arrived in 1898 and illegally acquired our lands from the Spanish. The usurping U.S. government further repressed Puerto Rican identity and liberation and began instilling obedience to Americanization. Despite this, there was resistance against coloniality. The first national archive was founded in 1919. By institutionalizing our histories and traditions from our ancestors, a national sentiment of Puerto Rico can begin to be researched, understood, and remembered.  

For decades now, our local communities have been rescuing the stories of our recent freedom fighters to preserve their memory and their dignity: Eugenio María de Hostos, Pedro Albizu Campos, Arturo Schomburg, Celestina Cordero Molina, Ana Roqué Geigel de Duprey, Lolita Lebrón, Blanca Canales, Adolfina Villanueva, Luisa Capetillo, Rafael Cancel Miranda, and Rafael Cepeda among others. 

Many grassroots archiving projects such as Archivo Negro, Corredor Afro, and Memoria Decolonial are continuing to germinate the seeds of that mangrove in ways that expand the lands of our archipelago. But the people of Puerto Rico and their diaspora are tired of being resilient. Survival is not the only thing that defines us. And yet, our history shows that we prevail under circumstances that seek to erase our trajectory. 

We have experienced the whitening of our identity, the usurpation of our lands by foreigners, and our forced displacement—and we are still growing, still fighting, and are even more alert and enraged. 

Mangroves Rooted

The efforts of telling our stories and sharing our knowledge helps others to be inspired by it. We gain access to further freedom and power. To some outsiders, Puerto Ricans can seem submissive, obedient, and grateful for Americanization. Global coverage of recent events, including the Milla de Oro protest on May 1, 2017, the mutual aid and community response to Hurricane María, and the “Ricky Renuncia” movement in 2019 have helped shed light on a more complex sentiment for Boricuas, one that reflects a shift in national consciousness. 

Right now, we are facing two parallel political hurricanes: Puerto Rico’s recently elected Governor Jennifer González-Colón and U.S. President Donald Trump. Both ran fear campaigns that have resulted in deep human rights violations. Despite this, the Puerto Rican community has strengthened its memory of resistance. 

During the 2024 election, there was mass popularity toward a government candidate in favor of Puerto Rican independence for the first time since the U.S. began occupying the archipelago. The candidate, Juan Dalmau, obtained 33% of the votes compared to the statehood candidate, Jennifer González-Colón, who reached 39%. With each event lived—earthquakes, Hurricane María, Trump, pandemic, genocides, wars, González-Colón—we continue to forge common narratives, a history that interweaves our roots. Our resistance is rooted and reaching for air. The recovered ground continues to regenerate.

The mangrove has thus become a metaphor. Like roots, memories ground our collective experience and strengthen our ties to our land. The strength of our collective power lies in recovering our lost, forgotten, invisibilized, or untold stories as a way of resisting. In the face of disasters, we use our creativity to face the coming changes. 

We are Caribbean beings, surrounded by water and at the mercy of its tempest. With strong roots, mangroves protect our coasts, preventing the tempest of wind and sea to drag us away. No hurricane will sweep us out. We are rooted and dispersing our seeds. Colonialism will be swept away by coastal erosion while we recover our land in dignity and community. Our stories will be told, treasured, and celebrated.

The mangrove interweaves its roots between water and land to protect the soil from storms; we play with the elements to strengthen our communities. Let us not forget that before these hurricanes, we were already mangroves.