Return to the Future: Puerto Rican Vernacular Architecture in New York City

Abstract

And so I thought of many things. I thought of my new born son and what was to become of his life here, I thought of Puerto Rico and the elders and all that we left behind simply out of necessity. I thought of many things that by now I have forgotten, because, you know, the mind is like a blackboard and time an eraser that passes across it each time we fill it up. But the thing I will always remember is what I told doña Lula, which is what I am going to tell you now to finish what it is you wanted to know. And that is, in my poor way of understanding things, that was the night we became people again.

I think that communities of resistance should be places where people can return to themselves more easily, where the conditions are such that they can heal themselves and recover their wholeness.

(Thich Nhat Hahn, The Raft is Not the Shore quoted in bell hooks’ Yearning)

Entonces yo pensé muchas cosas. Pensé en mi hijo que acababa de nacer y en lo que iba a ser su vida aqui, pensé en Puerto Rico y en los viejos y en todo lo que dejamos allá nada más que por necesidad, pensé tan tas cosas que algunas ya se me han olvidado, porque tú sabes que la mente es como una pizarra y et tiempo como un borrador que la pasa por encima cada vez que se nos llena. Pero de lo que si me voy a acordar siempre es de lo que le dije yo entonces a doña Lula, que es lo que te voy a decir ahora para acabar de con tarte lo que tú querías saber. Y es que, según mi pobre manera de en tender las cosas, aquélla fue la noche que volvimos a ser gente.

(José Luis González, ‘La noche que volvimos a ser gente’)