Christine Nieves

July 2018

Christine Nieves is the Co-founder and President of Emerge Puerto Rico - a non-profit focused on rooting cutting-edge Climate Change leadership and education in community wisdom. She has an interest in Indigenous and African wisdom and in how the invisible infrastructure of so-called marginalized communities can be activated when disasters happen. Christine’s attention is focused on human consciousness, cognition, evolution and adaptation to extreme environmental disruptions. She is also a Bridge Fellow at TNTP where she is learning how the education field can be a game-changer to systemically nurture human compassion, ingenuity and adaptability. While attending the University of Pennsylvania as an undergrad she hosted and produced a TV show for Telemundo Philadelphia and graduated proudly from Annenberg’s School of Communication. She then pursued her masters in Evidence-Based Social Intervention at Oxford. Christine worked at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation where she funded disruptive innovations in health and then turned her knowledge into an undergraduate class at Florida State University. At FSU she was the first Latina and youngest Entrepreneur in Residence to be part of the Council of Entrepreneurship. Born in England and raised in Ponce, Puerto Rico she now resides in the mountainous region of Mariana, at the border of Yabucoa and Humacao where Hurricane Maria first made landfall.

Transcript

CN (0:14): There’s something happening in the mountains. Historically, that’s where the Taínos hid from the Spaniards; That’s where the nationalist leaders hid from the FBI and the Puerto Rican government that was persecuting them and trying to kill them. There’s something happening in the mountains.

CN (0:39): My name is Christine Nieves and I’m the Co-Executive Director of ARECMA, and it’s an association that’s been around for 36 years in Mariana, a hilltop town in the southeast tip of the island in Puerto Rico.

CN (0:57): We started feeling the hurricane on the 19th of September, and our windows–glass windows–exploded, just like a bomb. We spent most of the hurricane underneath the staircase in a small, bathroom type closet. Three adults, a dog and a cat, and when we came out, the world had changed.

CN (1:20): Fifteen days later, we hadn’t even seen FEMA around. Life became survival, and the only people that could help you were the people in front of you, next to you. That was your family. For decades, there have been a series of decisions made in government — between taxes, between the cost of energy, water, and housing — That have made it very difficult for people to really have a life of dignity here.

CN (1:49): Violence was at the core of the relationship between America and Puerto Rico. It’s like any abusive relationship where the boyfriend has money and has convinced the girlfriend that — or boyfriend — that they’re less than, and they need to stay here, and if they leave: they’ll be in trouble.

CN (2:21): We’ve been in this constant complication and confusion around our identity. Because we think that — and I thought that, I—I’m ashamed to admit this but I have entries in my journals where I said “Puerto Ricans — We’re lazy” [begins to cry] “And it’s shit. Why would I want to move here?” When you believe that so deeply, how can you build a country based on people that believe that to be true? And that’s a lie. That’s the biggest lie that America has made us believe. And we have made it true by believing it. And-and then I saw this big lie. And I saw it for what it was. But we have to go deep into where that is because that is passed on from, at least 5 or 6 generations.

CN (3:30): Where we are right now shows a triumph of the Puerto Rican spirit over who we are, and what we want, and how we want to live, and what it means to be Puerto Rican, which is very different from being American. Living in Puerto Rico time is different, you’re surrounded by water. It affects who you are and how you live. It’s just—the thing that’s gonna people back is not only knowing that they’re going to have a community, but realizing there are people that are building a different Puerto Rico, and that we need everyone who wants to be part of building it.

CN (4:12): What is gonna change and continue to change, is that as we build power in communities, the government has to respond to us. Because that’s democracy. And that’s how it should work and it will work. So it might not be now, it might not be two years from now, but it’s coming.

[Guitar starts playing with singing.]

CN (4:36): Nothing happens in a vacuum. And so out of the horrible treatment, the oppression, the abuse, and the extraction from the land, we’ve transformed that into art, into culture, into song, into dance. And I think at the heart, we are an island of reconciliation. And I think that we stand not only for ours, but for the world. [String score begins to play]