Porque Estamos Aqu?: Puerto Rican Feminisms Against Empire

A future classic collection of Puerto Rican feminist writing that spans time, terrain, and phases, invokes voices across generations and fields, and bridges island and diaspora.

In her years of scholarship and activism with fellow Puerto Rican feminists, editor Jessica N. Pabón-Colón reached for a feminism to ground her work and validate the women who paved her way—but in her search for a specific tradition of Puerto Rican feminism, what she found were gaps, disappearances, and unanswered questions. Despite the presence of Puerto Ricans in US pop culture and the long history of Boricua resistance to US subjugation, both on the archipelago and in the diaspora, she did not find a feminist lens to link the myriad identities and geographies of Ricanness or to focus critique on Puerto Rico’s status as an American neo-colony.

Counteracting such erasure, Porque Estamos Aquí maps Boricua feminisms of the past, the present, and the future, defining what it means to be a “bad subject” of US empire. Engaging in radical collectivity, Pabón-Colón joins forces with Puerto Rican scholars, memoirists, artists, and activists—including feminist legends like Aurora Levins Morales and political trailblazers like Rosa Clemente—to ground this anthology in a tradition of resistance to empire at home. Through essays, roundtables, historiographies, poems, and other cross-genre writing, Porque Estamos Aquí asserts that Puerto Rican feminists are undeniably, irreducibly here and will guide generations of our shared movement for years to come.

Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón is a diasporic Puerto Rican feminist scholar of identity, community, and resistance. Her essays appear in journals including Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. Her book Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora (New York University Press, 2018) is the first academic study on women’s participation within hip-hop graffiti art subculture. She spends her summers as a butterfly doula helping monarchs on their migration journey and can otherwise be found baking breads, crafting, playing with her human and nonhuman children, or in a forest admiring the moss.