Agueybaná, Bayaguex, Guanina, Salcedo
Truth/Untruth
“There is no such thing as alternative facts.” - Raoul Peck, Exterminate All the Brutes
I’m being called to be more accountable to other ancestors.
My mother and I watched this video. We are learning together, trying to reconnect with past knowledge before it is too late. Mama’s mind already drifts to part unknown. At ninety four years old, she deserves to drift wherever she pleases. But I am selfish enough to want to call her back to meet her great-grandchildren, to tell me more stories about her siblings and her mother, Aurelia Cortez, to marvel at the times of today. I know my mother wishes for even more.
Uncle One thinks Madear, my great-grandmother on the other side, died in the wake of her daughter’s death. It really wasn’t more than a few months later. She lived to be one hundred and one. Granma passed and, as Uncle One likes to say, “that was her best girl.” Mama, my mother says, never quite recovered from the death of her sister, Titi Auria. That was when her mind began to fly over the trees and across the stars.
That was when I decided to write this book. It was already too late, but we only know what we know when we know it.
Like this:
I’m watching Exterminate All the Brutes by Raoul Peck. What an indictment of everything. Watching while I’m quietly obsessing over the minutiae of a moment: the moment Juan Ponce de Léon lands on Borinken. Who does he meet? Where does he go? What does he see? Or, more important, what do the women who encounter this encounter see, hear, smell? The witnesses. And I watched this scene after revisiting the death of Diego Salcedo, one of Ponce de Léon’s soldiers, who is drowned under the order of the cacique Urayóan. Urayóan wanted to confirm the Spanish were not gods or so the story goes. Guess what? They aren’t. And revolt followed.
Which brings me back to the pages in Remedios where Aurora Levins Morales embodies Guanina’s sister. This is where I first learned of Salcedo’s drowning, Agueybaná’s meeting with Ponce de Léon, his son Guayabana’s resistance when Agueybaná died. According to history that has become legend (but remained historic enough that the U.S. Special Commissioner Henry King Carroll related in his 1899 “Report on the Island of Porto Rico,” written in the wake of the U.S. takeover), Agueybana was the primary cacique of Borinken when Juan Ponce de Léon landed. Agueybana initiated various diplomatic rituals, including gift exchanges, offering to trade names (which Ponce de Léon agreed to) and presenting his sister, Bayaguex, to be the newcomers’ wife (a high honor).
We already know the end of this story—exterminate all the brutes. Ponce de Léon, who would become the patron saint of conquistador-settler mentalité, was not interested in diplomacy or kinship or gifts. He and his men wanted gold, sex, and leisure, possibly in that order. They came for conquest not collaboration. And things went the way things go when guests enter your house and start fucking it up—you either let them burn it down, you ask them to leave, or you fight.
Guanina was the niece of Agueybaná. At some point, Cristobal Sotomayor, a lieutenant made Guanina his. His what? Concubine. Victim. Wife. Business partner. All of the above. Not sure. She appears in Puerto Rican legend as either hopelessly in love with Sotomayor (re: Cayetano Coll y Toste)—or as another Malinche, a traitorous femme fatal who condemned her people to slavery and genocide because she aided Spanish interlopers (re: Cacike Don Pedro Guanikeyu of the Jatibonicu Taino). But those of us who write the history of Black and Indigenous women know that stories of conquest and stories of counter-conquest are too often written by men, and Black and Indigenous men who want to correct the narrative don’t always mind the conquering part so long as they can get the gold, sex, and leisure for themselves. The land of women knows that when women are painted as villains because of sex there is usually more to the story.
This is how Morales writes Guanina—as more to the story. As a girl, old enough to imagine sex and partnership could build a bridge between two cultures, young enough to imagine it would matter to Sotomayor, following in the footsteps of her aunt who was given to Ponce de Léon as a part of diplomatic policy, and foolish only because we hold the power of hindsight. And, ultimately, killed in the revolt her brother staged against the Spanish. Young, brazen, naive, and dead.
This story is in the section called Huracán (hurricane). "Guabancex stirs the great blue pot of the Atlantic until the bitter saltwater breaks on all its shores," Morales writes.
Learning these things so late in life, late in the genealogy of the land of women, is strange. Odile Ferly, when discussing Julia Alvarez’s book How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents writes:
“They came every summer and were out of here by September…it seemed right in keeping that they should make their exit just as hurricane season was about to start.” Lucinda's bitter remarks are not devoid of lucidity: her cousins, especially Yolanda, get the best of both worlds: it is easy for them to claim their Dominicanness without having to live up to the consequences. But if Alvarez reveals the falsity of their construct, she does not condemn her protagonists: being between two homes, two cultures and two languages, they have no choice but to invent their own identity.
We have no choice. We have to build on and with what we have.
But the story is also familiar. More a memory than a haunting. More a fact than a fantasy of diasporic longing, although it is all of the above as well.
xo,
jmj