Love, for me, isn’t just about fluttery feelings and poetic text messages (though, let’s be real, I do appreciate a well-timed compliment). It’s something older than me, older than any single culture, older than even the colonization that tried to redefine it. My love—how I love, why I love, and what it means for me to want someone—is a living artifact of my Afro-Taino ancestry. To understand how I love, you have to understand the roots: the love of the Taíno, the love of my African ancestors, and how these histories merged to create something uniquely mine.
Taíno Love: A Soft Power
The Taíno people of Borikén (now Puerto Rico) had a different understanding of love than the rigid romantic ideals people carry today. Love wasn’t just about romantic partnerships; it was about kinship, responsibility, and spiritual connection. Relationships were often polygamous, not in a transactional way but in a way that reflected the fluidity of bonds. Marriage was flexible, and women had autonomy in choosing and leaving partners (Alegría 1997). The idea of "ownership" in relationships? A foreign concept. Love was expansive, a force that wove communities together.
Sex and intimacy weren’t laced with guilt or restriction; they were natural, celebrated, and connected to the cycles of the earth. A partner wasn’t just a person to possess but a spirit to cherish, to nurture, to honor. Love could be playful, communal, deeply emotional, or purely physical—sometimes all at once.
If I had been alive then, you’d find me sitting in a batey, watching the stars with someone I adored, running my fingers through their hair, painting them in annatto just because I liked the way the red looked against their skin. Love would have been about presence, about sharing breath under the ceiba tree, about whispering things that didn’t need permanence to matter.
African Love: An Unbreakable Bond
When my family was stolen from Africa and brought to the Caribbean, they carried their own definitions of love—resilient, unbreakable, fiercely protected. I am made up of regions with beautifully intricate understandings of love. The Wolof of Senegal, for example, placed deep importance on "sutura"—discretion and quiet dignity in love (Sarr 2001). Love wasn’t loud; it was steady, a whispered promise that carried weight.
In many West and Central African traditions, love was also communal. Marriage wasn’t just about two people but about families, alliances, and continuity. Romantic and sexual relationships were woven into the spiritual fabric of life, linked to ancestor veneration and the divine (Diouf 2003). In the Yoruba tradition, partners were believed to have soul ties that extended beyond this life into the next.
If I had been alive then, maybe I’d be the type to slip a charm into my beloved’s hand before they went to the marketplace, something small but heavy with meaning. I’d write love into music, into dance, into the steady way I showed up, always, even when I wasn’t seen.
Colonization and Catholicism: The War Against Our Love
Colonization didn’t just steal land and lives; it rewrote the rules of love. The Spanish imposed Catholicism, branding Taíno and African relationship structures as "savage" and "sinful." The Taíno resisted Catholicism at first, rejecting its patriarchal constraints and fighting to preserve their autonomy (Sued Badillo 1995). Yet over centuries, forced conversions and systemic oppression led to widespread acceptance of Catholic doctrine.
Today, many in Puerto Rico embrace Catholicism, often at the cost of honoring the love of our ancestors. The stigmatization of Indigenous and African expressions of love isn’t just personal bias—it’s colonial programming. Where the Taíno once celebrated love in its many forms, and African ancestors cherished bonds beyond European marriage constructs, modern Puerto Rican culture has largely internalized the Catholic obsession with rigid gender roles and monogamy as the only "pure" form of love (Guerra 1998). The stigma against natural expressions of intimacy is a colonial ghost that still lingers....only some of us can see it. I'm trying to get everyone a chance to, even if it's just a glimpse. But it's hard. I'm concerned some may never be able to see it before they're gone, a ghost among it.
If I had been alive in that era, I’d be one of the ones whispering the old ways in secret, finding ways to keep them alive despite the Spanish trying to beat them out of us. I’d be loving the way my ancestors taught me, even when the world said it was wrong.
Afro-Taíno Love: Post-Colonial Resistance
When these two worlds collided under colonial rule, Afro-Taino love became something even deeper: a form of rebellion. Love became a means of survival. My ancestors weren’t allowed to marry, weren’t allowed autonomy over their own bodies, weren’t allowed the kind of soft love they had known before—but they loved anyway. They built secret families, created new languages of affection, turned music into coded messages. Love became an act of resistance, a refusal to let colonialism strip them of their right to feel, to connect, to be whole.
Even after slavery was abolished, Afro-Taino love remained different from Western ideals. Marriage rates among Afro-Caribbean communities were lower—not because love didn’t exist, but because love wasn’t defined by a legal contract (Mintz & Price 1992). Relationships were about bonds, about partnership, about raising each other up in a world that tried to keep them down.
If I had been alive then, you’d find me in the mountains of Puerto Rico, slipping between Spanish and Yoruba in my declarations of love. Maybe I wouldn’t be allowed to marry the person I wanted, but that wouldn’t matter. My love wouldn’t need permission. It would exist, fierce and undeniable, like the rhythm of a bomba drum.
Modern Afro-Taíno Love: What it Means for Us
And now? Now my love is all of this history and more. It is Taíno softness, African resilience, post-colonial defiance. It is something that doesn’t always fit neatly into modern expectations. It is fluid, deep, and free. It is knowing that love is not possession but presence. It is knowing that sex is sacred but also joyful, that it can be both a whisper and a roar. It is knowing that I do not love in halves—I love with the weight of my ancestors behind me, with their wisdom in my hands, with their laughter in my touch.
So when I tell you I want you, I do not mean it lightly. I mean that I want to know the way your voice sounds at dawn and the way your skin tastes after the rain. I mean that I want to build something with you that echoes. I mean that I want my love for you to be another act of resistance, another proof that we survived, that we are still here, still loving, still choosing each other against all odds.
And maybe—just maybe—that is worth something more than just a fleeting feeling.
Alegría, Ricardo E. "Ball Courts and Ceremonial Plazas in the West Indies." Yale University Publications in Anthropology, no. 79, 1997.
Diouf, Sylviane A. Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. NYU Press, 2003.
Guerra, Lillian. Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico. University Press of Florida, 1998.
Mintz, Sidney W., and Richard Price. The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Beacon Press, 1992.
Sarr, Assane. "The Role of Sutura in Senegalese Social Relations." Journal of African Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, 2001, pp. 125-140.
Sued Badillo, Jalil. Los Tainos y el Encuentro. Ediciones Doce Calles, 1995.
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