Community Liberation in a hangar, Puerto Rico
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Blue Heart co-founder Lindley Mease caught up with Lale Namerrow, a film editor, producer and DJ of the subversive queer scene in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Frania Climaco, puertoriqueña currently live in Washington D.C. Lale and Frania are members of the collective at El Hangar en Santurce, dedicated to social transformation amidst the ongoing crisis in Puerto Rico.
Lindley: Can you all start by sharing what Hangar is doing? What are you all about?
Frania: We are a parcela as we say in Puerto Rico. A “parcela” is like a piece of land. Our space is located in San Juan, Puerto Rico, specifically in Santurce, in la Calle Hoare. It is a plot of land with “un hangar” — a hangar. Usually it’s to hold planes. Our story is that the hangar used to be a church — or a church in the making. It was abandoned — like many properties in Puerto Rico. Our director, Carla Torres, had found the spot and moved in with this idea of creating a cultural political movement from that space. That was five years ago. Two years into the cleaning of the space, in 2017 September 20, happened Hurricane Maria. So, at that time she invited a few of her family members to weather-out the storm in that space. What happened afterwards, we could never have imagined. I get very emotional. What we thought was just going to be something just to get through, ended up being months and months and months of healing, reparation, political work, of internal work. What started out as Carla and her family ended up being tons and tons of people coming to the space seeking refuge, seeking community, seeking love, seeking food, seeking water, seeking a place to feel safe when we didn’t have power for months.
It’s especially important to highlight that Santurce is a working class area — if not impoverished. Black people, Indigenous people, immigrants from la republica dominicana, the Domincian Republic, people that the government absolutely abandoned. We became a refuge, a center of mutual aid. What Carla envisioned happened in the blink of an eye.
In the midst of Hurricane Maria, we were cleaning up, we were living in El Hangar. We literally put our mattresses under the mango trees and kind of weathered out the months there without power [electricity]. We knew after Hurricane Maria that we had to continue with our mission to be a safe space for our community, specifically for working class, immigrants, trans workers, sex workers, people queer and our LGBT community, people who our laws and government brush under a rug. So that’s how we started.
Lindley: You did a beautiful job in describing the richness of the community! When you talk about your political aims, what’s your vision?
Lale: Even though we have a vision, it’s always evolving and always changing, because we are always responding to the urgencies that we have in Puerto Rico. Our main goal is to be a safe space for marginalized communities around us. One of the biggest things that we lack as a social justice movement is space. Usually we don’t have where to have our meetings, where to paint our banners. We don’t have spaces just to gather and to be. So El Hangar has become this multidisciplinary space where not only us as an organization, but multiple social justice organizations use it as a space to gather.
Also we have a mercado cuir — queer market — which is empowering our community’s economy. We can not rely on our economy. There is no place for small businesses and crafts people to share their products and sell them and not be charged for having a table.
Lindley: When you say mercado cuir — that’s a space within El Hangar?
Lale: We open up El Hangar and different queer folks from our area sell food, clothes, earrings that they make. It is an underground economy that we foment. We help them to gather. We also have el Bombazo Retumba el Gandul a gathering of bomba, which is one of the most important music styles from Puerto Rico, that comes from the African culture. This is one of our main events — very rich, very cultural. It’s about healing, reparation, space for BIPOC community. It’s a wonderful magic space.
Frania: In Puerto Rico we say “Hay una mente colonizada.” The minds of a large portion of our population are colonized. That’s because of years and years and years of colonization. Literally if you’re not free, how can your minds and bodies be free? But as Lale was saying, times and people are changing, things are evolving. Our space is adapting to that need. If society makes it hard for our people to be free, to feel free, to respect us, to let us be us, then that is what our space is for. So, for example, the cuir mercado. We came up with this idea because we all hustle. In Puerto Rico the average person makes $7.25 an hour. A gallon of orange juice costs $4 dollars. A pack of strawberries costs almost $7 dollars. I have to work one hour to get a pack of eggs. Because everything is imported from the U.S. No one can survive with their $7.25 per hour job. So everyone has side jobs. Our communities especially. They are trans communities, and there is discrimination in the workplace against trans people. There is discrimination against Black people, against the color of our skin.
So we came up with el Mercado cuir so that people can be free, be themselves, and sell the things that they love, and that they make, and people can support them. The same thing with bomba. We created el Bombazo Retumba el Gandul because there has been historically a lot of misogyny when it comes to bomba. In our space men are dancing with skirts and the bomba scene has been contemplated. So when you go there, you don’t have to be a man to dance like a man, or a woman to dance like a woman. There are no gender norms in our space because you are who you are and that’s it.
Lindley: That sounds like a dream! That’s beautiful!
Frania: That’s the world that we see, that we envision. That’s the world we are creating.
Lindley: What is that making possible? What do you see as possible now as a result of the spaces that you have created?
Frania: El Hangar started as a refuge during Hurricane Maria with Carla, her family, and her closest friends. By the end of it we had tons and tons of people coming to the space. So as activities started happening, as people came to us saying “These are our needs,” we listened to them. People needed someone to listen and we listened to them and we helped them and we asked them “How can we be of support to you?” People talked about how they needed money, and so that’s how el Mercado came about. People said, “ I need a space to feel free!” and “We need a place to heal!” And so we created popular education, educacion popular. And we created healing circles and menstrual circles to address stigmas about menstruation. And not only women menstruate, trans people menstruate.
El Hangar really collaborates with people. Our first party was with an organization called ESpicy Nipples. This was still in the first year after Maria and they talked about the power of healing, especially for our community. And I want to say that a few hundred came out to that activity.
El Hangar really believes in the empowerment of our bodies. We are the owners of our bodies. Neither the church or the state is going to tell me how to identify and what I am going to do with my body. We had monthly parties [before the Covid Pandemic] to liberate ourselves. Easily at one party we can have 500 people come out. That’s a huge testament to how people are like, Wow! We needed this space and it’s here!
Lale: I think that El Hangar is where we can put in practice the idea that our bodies are our first political home. It’s where you can feel the essence of that. As an activist for a few years…I come from academia…”intersection” is the word right now, but how do you see the action in “intersection?” How can you actually understand it, see it, watch it? El Hangar helps us grow so much politically because we could actually see how intersection works and how our work as social justice activists and anti-racists groups actually was working because we have the trans/non-binary folks, also immigrants. Our population of Santurce is mostly Black population fighting resistance to gentrification — not just for the past few years but basically more than 100 years.
The fact that we have parties, the market, healing spaces, and menstrual circles with people outside of academia is special. You suddenly have a beautiful space in the heart of the metro area where it is very difficult to find a space with trees and fruits and a roof that can hold 400 people! The possibilities are endless! We can have drag shows, a play, stand-up comedy, and we invite different DJs. It is very important to us to open up spaces for Black, queer, trans, non-binary folks. We usually never get the chance to DJ in different parties and El Hangar opens up a space where you can DJ for 100, 200, 400 people. The energy is like if you were in a club. You can disconnect from Puerto Rico and it’s like you are in Ibiza or Miami or actually San Juan. People just feel like this is utopia, but you know it’s the work that we do. It’s very hard to have a safe space. But it’s beautiful work and we see the cambio, the change.
Lindley: Will you talk about the colonization mindset? What does decolonization look like for you all and in the context of Puerto Rico specifically?
Frania: So decolonization for me means creating a world that is trans feminist. We want a world that’s inclusive, Black, Indigenous people of color inclusive. We want a world that understands that Puerto Rico is a place where the people are poor. We are poor. We are working class. How do our laws, our policy, and our country operate for the people that actually live in Puerto Rico?
Decolonization also means to me, how do we create a country where people aren’t leaving? Things like food sovereignty — we are a tropical island — why are we importing things from the U.S? We have the land, the weather, the knowledge. Our agricultores are super knowledgeable. There are beautiful projects that work the land.
A lot of our members are a little bit academic, but our experience comes from the streets. There is no better way to educate ourselves than the streets. That’s exactly why, for example, Ricky Renuncia!1 was such a success. People from the streets were in the streets. We had that chance to decolonize ourselves just a tad bit, taking that power back, taking someone out of Congress who had publicly laughed about the death of 5,000 Puerto Ricans.
Decolonization is something like what Lale was saying, a utopia of being able as a people, Puerto Rican people, to be able to live in our country without having to leave or to change, without the fear of being killed. Right now in Puerto Rico we have a state of emergency not only for women — I think the statistics are that every seven days a woman is killed in Puerto Rico — but also for transwomen. This year we have had a handful of trans people be killed and in all of these cases there hasn’t been justice for these people. I want to be able to walk on the street and be free. I want to be able to live with dignity, justfully, and not have to say good-bye to anybody.
Lale: I echo those words. Decolonization is very easy to talk about but it’s a process and it hurts. Es un duelo. We come from a land that’s been colonized from forever. Decolonization is tenderness, compassion, reflection, being able to grow and call each other up. The system wants us to live individually and we need to work collectively. That’s where our power resides. That’s where my idea of decolonization is right now.
Lindley: You have brought up reparations multiple times and Blue Heart is in the work of redistribution. The hope is reparations. It is an aspiration. I want to hear your thoughts about funding. Perhaps what it has been like to raise money and how you fit that within your work. Where is that in your strategy?
Lale: I’m going to jump in and say that for us right after Maria, our whole economy changed. We were used to doing this kind of job voluntarily, but we have been learning along the way what it is to be funded, what it is to have compensation for the work that we do.
Frania: It’s crazy to think that the start of El Hangar was in 2017. It feels like time has flown! That shows that this is my heart, my passion! For me what’s political is personal and what is personal is political. This is that space for me but I can’t help but think that it is exhausting. It is exhausting because we all have some type of hustle. We all make money somewhere else because we truly believe in the mission, in the vision, in the change, and in the work. The thing that has happened has come from blood, sweat, and tears. It is not only physical but also writing propuestas [grants] and that’s not easy. They ask that you be 501c and all these documents and paperwork. Regardless we keep going, because we do it for this change that we see.
It would be a relief to get money. We have so many great ideas and things that we want to keep doing. El Hangar is like a magic carpet. You go to la parcela and it takes you to your wildest dream! But we’ve been hit very hard during Covid because we can’t meet physically together. That’s had an impact on us not only financially but it’s had an impact on our mental health as well. Not only for us as an organization but for people that looked at us for support and back-up.
Puerto Rico in general and Santurce in particular is being gentrified. People from the mainland are going there with money that people from the neighborhood don’t have. They are buying up land from people, taking it over. Our dream is to buy the land, but we may not afford it because fulano comes from New York with a whole piggy bank and its way more than we have.
Funding is very important to us to continue doing the work. For example, I’m one of the people who had to leave Puerto Rico because financially I couldn’t do it anymore. I want to be in Puerto Rico. I want to be able to live and I want El Hangar to live. For people in la diaspora, for people in the U.S. I think that it’s important to understand that our organization is really doing the work. If people can help continue that work — that’s what mutual aid is! The only way that we survived after Hurricane Maria was funding from people in the U.S. We really appreciate the people who believe in us and our work. People who come to our space can vouch for the importance of this space to exist.
Lale: It is so important to have support and open up networks. You have members who are giving 25 dollars to understand what reparations can start looking like and that is very important. This is decolonization. For us, especially in this pandemic, it has been a really hard process because we were a gathering spot and we’re not gathering anymore. We are now in this process of transforming so that we can be that space of gathering but in this new panorama. What is the new protocol? How are we going to be safe? We’ve been putting our heads together about this fundraiser to buy the land where El Hangar is. The whole area is being gentrified. We used to be on a street where there were ten different buildings. Nine of them were completely abandoned. Now eight of them are being remodeled and converted into AirBnBs. So, gentrification is knocking on our doors. It is also important not to become ourselves the gentrifiers. It is important that the cuir/queer community gets involved with the present community that is living in Santurce.
- Thousands In Puerto Rico Seek To Oust Rosselló In Massive ‘Ricky Renuncia’ March NPR. July 22, 2019.
