WRITING
Enid Marie's writing spans research essays, articles, zines, plays, and more—each exploring questions of identity, politics, memory, and liberation. Her work weaves together personal narrative and collective history, often grounded in decolonial and community-rooted frameworks.
Burning bipartisanship: PERFORMANCE AND RESISTANCE AT THE FESTIVAL DE LA ESPERANZA
Under a political storm and the lingering shadows of colonial legacies, Puerto Ricans have always known how to gather—around a velita, around music, and around hope. The island, a perpetual tinderbox of resistance, has sparked fires of defiance that now blaze into a transformative political moment. The Festival de la Esperanza, the campaign closing event for Alianza de País, marks a pivotal moment in Puerto Rico's ongoing political transformation. Held on November 3, 2024, this gathering of over 50,000 people in San Juan is the largest rally in the island's history for a Pro-Independence candidate, symbolizing the culmination of a growing storm of resistance and upheaval. Since fires of rage burned outside of the governor's mansion in 2019, acts of resistance have evolved into a powerful movement reshaping the political landscape. The Festival de la Esperanza exemplifies how this fire has now transcended into electoral politics, catalyzing historical shifts that challenge the entrenched bipartisan structure of the island's governance. This paper examines the festival as both a cultural and performative site of resistance, analyzing key performances—including bomba, liberation anthems by Roy Brown and Fiel a la Vega, and reggaeton—through the theoretical frameworks of CLR James' The Gathering Forces and Sven Lindqvist's Exterminate All the Brutes. These performances are understood as acts of "gathering forces," mobilizing participants not only for electoral change but also for fostering collective memory and anti-colonial imagination. Framed as a contemporary campfire, the festival draws on ancestral traditions of storytelling, music, and ritual to unite attendees in a shared act of resistance and reimagination. The cyclical rhythms of bomba, the intergenerational resonance of liberation anthems, and the disruptive energy of reggaeton challenge colonial narratives and ignite visions of liberation. The Festival de la Esperanza is a testament to the enduring fire of Puerto Rican resistance—a fire sparked by exhaustion with colonial oppression and sustained by the collective agency of a people refusing to be extinguished. It exemplifies how art and performance create spaces of disruption and possibility even within a political campaign, illuminating paths toward decolonial futures while burning away the structures of systemic adversity.
hABLANDO SPANGLISH: Language, politics, and identity in puerto rican island-based performance
How is Spanglish represented in Puerto Rican island-based theatre, and do these representations need to experience change? Throughout its journey as a colony, Puerto Rico has been home to various language policies and processes of transculturation and mixing. Currently, as the island continues to be a United States territory, the effects of language mixing have resulted in the arrival of Spanglish. Herein, Spanglish is defined as an expansive combination of English and Spanish, resulting in Puerto Ricans' individual speech patterns. Within this reality, two Puerto Rican performances, La Guagua Aerea and “Las Housewives de Miramar,” provide Spanglish-speaking characters that reflect the continuous relationship and fears arising from the intersection of Spanglish, politics, and identity. These characters are represented as the only evident Spanglish speakers surrounding stories of disidentification. Moreover, the lack of representation of Spanglish speaking in an empowering format demonstrates a monolingualism campaign by Puerto Rican performance. Analyzing the politics and identity of each character through their language use enables an understanding of the inherent politics present in Spanglish representations. Moreover, they demonstrate a constant separation of these characters from the Puerto Rican identity in performance. Consequently, parting away from these stereotypes would allow for a varied and fruitful representation of Spanglish-speaking characters and their potential to be liberatory.