A Bordering Net

Without intending to, I became a historical statistic: one of the 160,000 Puerto Ricans who emigrated to the United States a year after Hurricane Maria hit the Island. My exile, which had been planned before the 2017 catastrophe, did not respond to economic reasons, as for most of my compatriots, but to the idea of exploring a creative life beyond the island border. It didn't take me long to realize that, due to my temperament and cultural background, joining the artistic scene of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the city was not for me. But it was not until the advent of the pandemic that I became fully aware of my misplaced condition: I had exchanged the island border for the uncertain border of exile. 

Whether out of desperation or out of a hardened vocation, disassociation gave rise to an experiential and creative question: how to turn an uncomfortable border where I felt misplaced into a creative vantage point fueled by uncertainty? It has been rightly said that imagination has no limits, that material reality does, and that our lives coexist in both spheres. After three years of maladjustment, my imagination was beginning to crawl towards the creation of a new book, but my material and emotional reality remained detrimental. It was during this time that I received the news that I had been selected in 2021 as one of the twenty recipients of the Letras Boricuas Fellowship. 

My first reaction was of relief and gratitude. The fellowship provided me with an unexpected income to aid me financially, while betting on the continuation of a literary work that was just beginning to break the harsh silence of exile. 

My second reaction was to take on the fellowship as a creative call. Despite the joy of receiving it, I couldn't help but think of so many other Puerto Rican writers who could have applied and received it like me. Given the care taken and good luck in my selection, I took on the fellowship as a challenge to create a new book. This exceeded Letras Boricuas’ requirements, but I felt that only by finishing a new book, I would be worthy of the recognition. Today I can say that, in November 2023, two years after receiving the fellowship, I earned it. Hopefully, my book, based on the complexity of lives led in multiple borderlands, will be published soon. 

But beyond the effect on me, I viewed the fellowship as laying an imaginary literary net. The very name of the fellowship—Letras Boricuas—and the number of fellows, implied a collective We that, without diminishing the merits of each recipient, entwined us in a Boricua creative net without borders, where island and diaspora writers were equally recognized. 

The net was further manifested with the Letras Boricuas’ convening that joined together the 2021 and 2022 cohorts in April 2023 in Puerto Rico. The We that resulted from the event, represented by thirty-seven writers from here and there (interchangeable adverbs depending on the side of the Boricua border from which one speaks), left me with a testimony of the creative richness of our literary hybridity. As an esteemed bicultural poet once said: “culture is largely involuntary osmosis”, and each Boricua writes whatever s/he can, with whatever s/he has at hand: here, there, and everywhere. This is what my exile lenses see for now: an imaginary, motley and changing literary net, with increasingly free symbolic incursions.  

I am looking forward to the next fellows who will expand this bordering net. 

Francisco Font Acevedo was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Puerto Rican parents, on September 15, 1970. He grew up in Rincón, Puerto Rico, the country where he lived until July 2018. Since then, he has lived in exile in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he assumes the border identity of being a Puerto Rican islander who neither assimilates nor wishes to assimilate to the equivocal category of Latino. On that side of the Atlantic, he works as an interpreter and writes fiction. His most recent publications are Santurce, un libro mural (in collaboration with the artist Rafael Trelles, Fundación Puertorriqueña de las Humanidades, Puerto Rico, 2020) and La troupe Samsonite (Folium, Puerto Rico, 2016).