Peace is about Becoming an Activator of Social Change for Justice

Since I was 12 years old in 1960, having been raised as the oldest girl in a large family clan in colonized Puerto Rico, I knew what my

mission in life was to become: political work towards social change, challenging all oppressions and injustices.

Embodying being a girl, oldest in a family of six siblings, a second class citizen living in a USA colony in childhood, being of mixed mostly Spaniard, but also African and indigenous origins, being left handed, dyslexic and a rebel, my life has been one single continuum regarding my mission.

In order to stay in the continuum, one has to be able to change and reinvent one’s self many times and in many ways. Continuum happens only in the midst of change.

As a “baby boomer” (in colonial terms), I was born in 1948 in the very beginning of a “new” world order based on the internationally agreed human rights framework and international legislation that emerged after two world wars and a long standing and extended colonizing and neo-colonializing Western dynamics.

With such mission, in such context, life becomes a permanent discovery and re discovery of the structures, dynamics, culture and paradigms that have created, perpetuated and deepened social injustices and oppressions, in the midst of personal and collective alternatives in the process.

I have been many beings in the continuum, reinventing myself many times and in many ways. For some strange purpose of life, I was born and raised upside down from mainstream.One simple example emerges from my playing the Mother Peace Tarot cards and to no surprise, the Hanged One opens in front of my eyes today.

The Hanged One calls for turning one’s self upside down in order to be able to see things differently: not straight or right side up, not “girly girly”, not money oriented, but the gifts of nature as a main way , clan and community, and caring for nature ’ s creatures.

The card’s message I understand: revelation through analysis; spiritual awareness through solitude and self discovery in collective social social practice. It also represents. the suspension of time and also the suspension of moving forward at all times with the idea of being forced to stop and listen to our inner voice; to our ancestors; to our sisters; and, most of all, to listen to ourselves and other people and living beings.

Only when we learn everything we are meant to learn, will we be free from shackles and able to plant our feet firmly back on Mother Earth.

That is a long trip. In order to do that authentically, one needs to name the captivities that trap humans in who we are not. As feminist anthropologist Marcela Lagarde has very well said, I patriarchy women live many cautiverios (captivities). I have lived most of them, experiencing st least six M’s in Spanish: mujer (woman), matrimonio (marriage), madre (mother), militante (militant), monja (nun) and maniatada (incarcerated). Others, outside the personal realm of my continuum so far, are putas (whores) and locas (crazy).

I have become and am still becoming, a feminist activist, journalist,

writer, radio producer, school teacher, university professor, writer, activist in human rights, women’s rights and the environment, with a PhD in Pedagogical Mediation (Applied Holistic Education based on Quantum Physics).

Also, having been born out of my mothers oceanic womb and raised and grown in childhood in a marine clan family in the shores of Puerto Rico, my first love was the ocean: the planet’s wide, deep and fluid waters constitute my first sensual experience as an integral part of the living world.

A very happy and joyful marine, clannish, family life together with all coastal living beings and a fisherfolk community, I have had another constant in my life: being an artisanal fisherwomen and diver, which as an adult I have been able to find in Costs Rica´s Southern Caribbean. Living - on and off - in its Talamanca coasts for over 50 years is proudly the place I call home alongside Vega Baja in Puerto Rico.

I have become a professional PADI Master Diver, a graduate of the full underwater archaeology program of the Nautical Archaeology Society (NAS) and a graduated boat captain. In between both costal homes – in childhood and upon aging into adulthood, I have been a Dominican nun in New York, an anti wa hippie against the USA war in Vietnam, an independentista boricua.

During the Central American period if military dictatorship, I became an adult literacy teacher in the mountains of Costa Rica, part of the designing team of the National Literacy Campaign in the original Sandinista revolution and later in war in El Salvador literacy teacher in the zones of control of the guerrilla. I was incarcerated and disappeared in Honduras during the civil war in El Salvador. Afterwards I became Sub-coordinator in charge of education of the Central American Human Rights Commission (CODEHUCA).

When I moved to Costa Rica at 26 years old, I became an early childhood professor at the University of Costa Rica and in international communication as adjunct professor at the University of Denver.

I was married a few times, have had a miscarriage and an abortion, and thus, no children of my own, but have contributed to the caring of many children throughout life in the clan and the communities where I have lived. and much more.

I was co creator and co coordinator of Feminist International Radio Endeavour (FIRE), the first shortwave radio feminist program that eventually became the first women´s internet radio station worldwide.Its motto in the early 1900 s: “Connecting voices, technologies and actions, giving women a voice worldwide about their perspectives on all issues.”

FIRE covered women’s voices globally in every issue that formed part of all United Nations Conferences in the last decade of last century were the global feminist movement coalesced to influence global agenda with its perspectives.

Earth Summit 1992: Our bodies are our just environment. Human Rights Conference 1993: Women rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights. Population and Development Conference 1994: Sexual and reproductive rights are part and parcel of justice for women. World Conference on Women 1995: Look at the world through women’s eyes. Conference against Racism and Discrimination 2021: There is an intesectionality between all forms of discrimination that challenges identity politics. Conference on Sustainable Development: Developing alternatives with women for a new era became a path (and is the name of an initiative) where Southern feminist views challenged capitalist macro economic policies intersecting with patriarchy, supremacism and extractivism.

Recently I co-founded Centro Comunitario de Buceo Embajadores

y Embajadoras del Mar (CCBEM) in Costa Rica’s Southern Caribbean in 2014. It is a non governmental intergenerational initiative that trains Afro descendants and indigenous youth as scuba divers and cultural advocates in community underwater archaeology, developing a citizenry science stewardship project since 2016. It has contributed to expand the history and narrative of the origins of slavery in Costa Rica by having scientifically identified to slave ship wrecks of 1710, an unknown story tha changes the story as to how African descendants arrived in Costa Rica’s Caribbean during the transnational Slave Trade.

In 2023 I also co-founded in Cahuita, the Institute of Marine Community Science (INMAR Caribe), dedicated to the creation of Artistic, Cultural and Research Residencies in its Casa Marina forthe development of oceanic citizenry science that honors ancestral knowledge together with other sciences.

I hold strong ties of presence with my clan back home in Puerto Rico, with the feminist and social movements that I have been a part of and with community organizations in Costa Rica’s Caribbean where I have retired since 2012, including membership in the Talamanca Association for Conservation and Ecology (ATEC), of the Costa Rican Association of Women Writers (ACE), member of the board of Centro Comunitario de Buceo Embajadores y Embajadoras del Mar and of the Association of Women and Mythology (ASWM), the Maternal Gift Economy Network (MGEN) and INMAR Caribe.

I have left my life’s legacy in the lives I have touched and been touched by, and in many books I have written and published. Seven of them have been about the my love life with the ocean, about its environmental, cultural, social and economic sagas and struggles to resist gentrification and commercialization of its coasts and contamination of its waters and land.

Among such books are the following

• Se Vende Lindo País (2001) with Cristina Zeledón, published by the ADELA community movement to stop oil explorations in Cosa Rica´s Caribbean.

• La Tranca (2002) with Cristina Zeledón published by the Instituto Tecnológico Costarricense (TEC)

• Un Tiburón, del Pez León y un Biólogo Marino (2015) Editorial Publicaciones Puertorriqueñas

• Una Estrellita que Bajó del Cielo (2016) Editorial Publicaciones Puertorriqueñas.

• Tona Ina: La Misteriosa Cueva de un Pez León en Cahuita (2017) Universidad de Costa Rica

• Tona Ina, La Misteriosa luz en el mar en el Caribe (2021) Centro de Investigaciones sobre Diversidad Cultural y Estudios Regionales (CIDICER), UCR

• Tierra Oceánica, (2024), Editorial Publicaciones Puertorriqueña.

I can die tomorrow, the next day or two decades from now, and I can say that at 77 years old I have lived and done only my best to stay focused on my mission, contributing, learning and living in my quest throughout life.

Cornel West has said that justice is the publish expression of love. I have loved humanity. No regrets, as a free, life living, loving and truth telling human being, ready to continue learning and struggling until my las breath for humanity to revitalize its balanced peaceful place as part of the planetary and universe’s family.

End