What does el coqui have to do with me?
Laying in a Spanish colonial style bed and staring at the mahogany beams on the ceiling a few years ago in the converted convent-now-luxury hotel “El Convento” in Viejo San Juan… I started to close my eyes to immerse myself in the aquatic song of el coquí. For those who don’t know, el coquí is the national symbol of Puerto Rico, known for the “co-quí” this frog makes.
Cy booked the trip there to spare me, he said, of the shame of being Boriqua and never having set foot on la isla de encanto. True, true, but Boriqua to me meant skyscrapers, not palm trees, but I suppose he could have made the same argument about Greek diners, and he was right so off we went.
What does one think when laying in a Spanish colonial canopy bed in El Convento listening to el coquí? Whether a special place is reserved for you in hell because you are engaging in pre-marital fornication in a room where a nun once pledged her virginity to Christ? Not unless you want to ruin your vacation. How about: where are all those froggies living that I hear them outside my door? Does the hotel import them into the courtyard for the benefit of tourists? Or are they really indigenous to the island and living any place they can in an encroaching concrete world?
The answer seems a little bit of both, if PBS or the nature channel is right.Sunday’s post talked about birds talking over our cities. This one’s a little bit of the same, but also reverse depending on where you are, and about frogs. Beloved coquí is endangered! Their habitat is threatened in PR. But el coquí seems to be smart and decided that if life wasn’t working out for it in PR, it’d do what the rest of us did, hop on a boat (or be stolen) and immigrate.
El coquí is not stupid. It didn’t choose cold NYC or wacky Florida (which the New Yorker just recently wrote up as having a jungle animal escapee problem, the most troubling with monitor lizards). El coquí said, I’m going to the next best place, and for el coquí it seems to be Hawaii.
He must have taken his wife with him, or el coquí was a la who was knocked up, then siblings engaged in incest, because el coquí multiplied across the island.
So here is the point of this blog… It’s sort of a sad story with a happy ending, depending on whom you ask. PR doesn’t want to loose el coquí. Hawaii doesn’t want an invasive non-native species. I will take the stance of lawyer for the coquí. The treatment it’s getting in Hawaii, I argue, borders some type of symbolic transpecies racism. Like when the English becried the invasion of the Spanish blue bell. Here is some of the language used in that situation, according to “Human Flower Project” quoting a commentator, “The Spanish variety has blue bell-shaped flowers, but that’s where the similarity ends. Our native bluebells have a delicate scent, while the Spanish variety has hardly any. Our native bluebells have rich blue coloured blooms on just one side of a blue stem, while the Spanish bluebell is larger and straighter with pale coloured flowers on all sides…The Spanish variety will grow almost anywhere, and many of them have got into the British countryside where they are breeding with our own native species and producing a hybrid.”
In the same manner, retirees who settled in Hawaii from cold, landlocked mainland states are lamenting the arriving of el coquí, with a maddening rage! See how flushed their pale cheeks get at the sound of el coquí’s song (which I am in no way saying is always a lullaby)! It’s the intensity that I alarms me, which I saw in a couple’s eyes when watching this PBS or nature channel special, like Ahab for his Moby Dick. It’s the immense pleasure that was displayed by this couple who described their house as surrounded by these immigrants while stalking them and squeezing el coquí’s gelatinous body with their bare hands, or splattering el coquí with hammers. How can I not think of people in the Heights complaining of reggaetón, salsa, or merengue playing in the streets, starting petitions and overwhelming Town Hall meetings, infiltrating community board ranks with their voices to “reclaim” a neighborhood that was never anybody’s to begin with (or anybody still living)? M f*cker, do you think the kānaka maoli of Hawaii feel the same way about you?
So coquí, sing your song, if that’s what it takes for survival. I’m sorry that it’s getting hard for you to do it back home, where at least your music was beloved.
