The seven part short film, Yo Soy Lloréns, came to my attention via Facebook and I was really struck. The short clips all focus on life in the largest housing project in the Antilles, Lloréns Torres, in Santurce, Puerto Rico.

The reason why this series affected me is that when I was child, spending many of my holidays in Puerto Rico in the house of my Stepmother’s family in Santurce, Lloréns Torres was right across the street. I and the other children were warned to never to speak to anyone on the stress because they might be from there and we were taught to be wary of stray bullets, especially on New Year’s Eve. There was so much fear put in us over a caserio, a project, even though the only thing that separated “us” from “them” was a bit of concrete and iron gates. When I became politicized, I revisited Lloréns Torres through poetry and as an adult, traveled to Santurce and through Lloréns Torres with my then small daughter.

The series is only in Spanish and if I had the time/budget to translate it for all I would because it is such an important part of Puerto Rican culture. Named for a Puerto Rican poet, caserios like this one in Puerto Rico were looked at, studied, and written about by gringo anthropologist as proof of Rican inferiority. Add in colonial ideals about race and misogyny, and books like La Vida by Oscar Lewis were taken as accurate representations of poor Ricans, even by other Ricans. My own great tia (QEPD) handed me a well worn copy of the book as an adolescent to show me what kind of Rican I wasn’t.

It is specifically because of this attempted brainwashing and because of disturbing comments posted on YouTube where the film is housed, that I chose this specific part of the film. It breaks my heart that instead of looking at the institutional ways that race and class work, fellow Ricans adopt an individualistic lens, blaming the families themselves for having multiple generations inside caserio instead of focusing on first how the caserios came to be and how communities are built there.

Take time to watch all 7 parts.