‘dejaqueveas trepar un bosque y tocar el cielo:’ Envisioning cuerpo-territorio in Roque Raquel Salas Rivera’s poetry

Abstract

This thesis offers a reading of Puerto Rican author Roque Raquel Salas Rivera’s poetry collections x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación / poems for the nation (2021) and antes que isla es volcán / before island is volcano (2022) through the grounded framework of cuerpo-territorio [body-territory], a practical concept envisioned by Latin American and Caribbean decolonial feminist groups. By providing a close reading of Salas Rivera’s poetry and focusing on notions of embodied geographies and contested notions of home(land), this thesis argues that cuerpo-territorio is central to Salas Rivera’s critique of colonialism and his vision for Puerto Rico’s future. I contend that Salas Rivera confronts environmental, queer/cuir, and social vulnerabilities that characterize Puerto Rico’s crisis-ridden present and exposes their entanglements with ongoing colonial and environmental ruptures. I specifically discuss how his poetry examines how they materialize in the archipelago’s colonial juridico-political status, the violence exerted against trans and cuir people, ecocide, migration, unhousing, and the sustained production of debility, amongst others. Moreover, I claim that Salas Rivera draws on cuerpo-territorio to make an imaginative leap into the future and advances other subjective, ontological, relational, and political modes of being and being-with that center interdependence and relationality.