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Reclaiming Borikén: Decolonizing Puerto Rico Through the Lens of Afro-Taíno Heritage

  • Writer: yannick-robin eike mirko
    yannick-robin eike mirko
  • May 2, 2025
  • 3 min read

As an Afro-Taíno person, I carry within me the weight of dual survival: the memory of my Taíno ancestors who first called Borikén home, and the African blood that arrived in chains, reshaping our collective destiny through unimaginable strength. I also carry rejection: most of my biological family has disowned me for being Biawaisa (most commonly understood by English speakers to be similar to Two-Spirit), a gender identity recognized by our Indigenous ancestors but suppressed under colonial Christianity (see The Gender History of Puerto Rico, Before Colonization). My life is lived between erasure and awakening, from what Boriken once was to what it could be.


Our history did not begin in 1493. We were not waiting for Columbus. The Taíno people, with their rich social systems, matrilineal governance, and spirituality rooted in nature and reciprocity, lived decadently in harmony with the land and sea. The decadent, in this sense, refers not to moral decay, but to the luxuriant beauty of balance, celebration, and community. The arrival of Spain, and later the United States, introduced systems designed to erase that beauty. Our language, our genders, our food systems, our sovereignty…were all labeled as primitive or sinful. And…it worked. 


Now, 500 years and some change later, Borikén is a colony twice over. A United States “territory,” where “Puerto Ricans” are born into second-class citizenship. And yet, the deeper colonization…is mental. Columbus was not a hero. He was a trigger point. Today, lateral violence among our own people is as devastating as any hurricane. The humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico isn’t just about FEMA trailers and bankrupt infrastructure. It’s about a people brainwashed into hating their roots, policing their queer relatives, worshiping their colonizers and the “god” they were told to love, and confusing survival for freedom. This is why decolonization must be cultural before it can be political. We need more than statehood or independence (though to be very clear, I personally refuse statehood as an option). We need soul retrieval. My work centers on that: building a world where people awaken to our true history, where Afro-Taíno identities and stories are uplifted, not buried. 


Policy efforts like the Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act (H.R. 2070/S. 865) reflect this yearning for agency. Introduced by Representatives Nydia Velazquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the bill proposes a status convention led by Boricuas themselves (Puerto Rican Cultural Center, 2021). It would finally allow us to author our own future. Yet political autonomy is not enough. Groups like Boricuas Unidos en la Diáspora (BUDPR) push a more radical vision: decolonization rooted in justice, equity, and full cultural reawakening. Their framework emphasizes inclusion, historical awareness, and dismantling U.S. imperial norms (BUDPR, 2022). 


On the ground, community-based initiatives are already modeling what decolonized life can look like. El Departamento de la Comida, led by Tara Rodriguez Besosa, advances food sovereignty by rejecting U.S. import dependency and reclaiming local, sustainable agriculture (Them, 2022). Likewise, the Adjuntas solar microgrid initiative I look up to and light a candle for daily demonstrates that energy autonomy is possible without U.S. utility monopolies (Time, 2023). These efforts parallel the goals of Project South’s Free Puerto Rico Campaign, which calls for international solidarity, educational sovereignty, and demilitarization (Project South, 2021). They recognize, as I do, that decolonization is not a one-time vote, but a lifelong unraveling and reweaving. 


If Borikén is meant to heal, the wounds need to be fully recognized. We must name lateral violence, colorism, homophobia, Christian supremacy, and internalized colonialism for what they are: symptoms of a larger disease. I’m not going to sit here and say that the policies and efforts we have now are radical or substantial enough to even begin to scratch the surface in the slightest. The world will always spin too slowly for me. But I digress. We need to choose each other again. We need to protect our trans and two-spirit youth like our ancestors once did. We need to remember. 


De-colonizing Puerto Rico isn’t just about what we remove, it’s about what we recover. 






Boricuas Unidos en la Diáspora. (2022). A Framework for Just and Inclusive Puerto Rico Status Legislation. https://www.budpr.org/framework_status_legislation


Puerto Rican Cultural Center. (2021). Puerto Rico Self-Determination Bill Profiled: A Major First Step Towards the Decolonization of Puerto Rico. https://prcc-chgo.org/2021/05/19/puerto-rico-self-determination-bill-profiled-a-major-first-step-towards-the-decolonization-of-puerto-rico


Project South. (2021). Free Puerto Rico, Free Ourselves: Remembering Colonial Legacies in the 21st Century. https://projectsouth.org/free-puerto-rico-free-ourselves-remembering-colonial-legacies-in-the-21st-century


Them. (2022). El Departamento de la Comida: Puerto Rico's Decolonial Food Movement. https://www.them.us/story/el-departamento-de-la-comida-tara-rodriguez-besosa-puerto-rico-food-farming


Time. (2023). How a Solar Microgrid Is Rebuilding Puerto Rico. https://time.com/6264631/puerto-rico-adjuntas-solar-microgrid

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yannick-robin eike mirko [who communicates in Spanish, English, + ASL] is a Manhattan-based Biawaisa/Yamoká-hu/Maorocoti multidisciplinary artist, choreographer, writer, doula and disability justice activist with a rare disease. His work sits at the intersection of movement, access, queer and indigenous survival, death care, and institutional accountability, using the body as archive, protest, and living evidence.

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Her relationship with dance and movement has never been linear or purely technical. From Off-Broadway to online, their work has been shaped by access, interruption, advocacy, and forced stillness. Movement and progress, for yannick-robin, is not simply choreography or activism; it is testimony, how a marginalized body speaks when institutions fail to listen. 
 

In 2021, yannick-robin participated in Drawing Breath, a visual and embodied project by Risa Puno that centered marginalized voices during COVID, with yannick-robin representing disabled people. The work focused on breath, endurance, and visibility at a time when disabled lives were being openly treated as expendable. This project cemented their understanding of movement as political: presence itself became resistance.
 

In 2022, disability justice became inseparable from his professional life. He was the first physically disabled actor/musician [acoustic and electric guitar, accordion, glockenspiel, xylophone, tambourine] to play a physically disabled role written through an ableist lens and publicly fought the theatre and writers for accountability. This work was documented in his blog and a documentary, a social media movement, and ultimately led to his inclusion in the University of Minnesota’s Tretter Transgender Oral History Project, archiving his contributions to disability, gender, and labor justice in theatre (the most recent edition/collection of years awaiting entering the public access archive due to funding and completion of editing. Help fund the preservation of non-cis history here).
 

That same year, he worked on Mr. Holland’s Opus at Ogunquit Playhouse as an actor/musician [bugle, trumpet, drum kit], a fully captioned production where his lived experience as a non-cis deaf and physically disabled artist directly informed their performance rhythm, physical storytelling, and musicality. Also in 2022, she performed in the inaugural Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival on Theatre Row under the direction of L Morgan Lee, delivering work as an actor involving monologuing about wheelchair use, access failure, and systemic injustice, using their body not as metaphor, but as evidence. 
 

In 2024 after a year and some change prioritizing deathcare work, they returned to theatre at New York Stage and Film (NYSAF), contributing to the work of disabled choreographer Jerron Herman as an actor/dancer. They also released their multi-genre EP passing that year, which catalogs their multi-instrumental writing and use of music for processing as they fall deeper into grief, hearing loss and deafness, and a world of being misunderstood for not being cis.

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In 2025, yannick-robin worked on the developmental process for Jay Alan Zimmerman’s upcoming show Songs for Hands on a Thursday, following Jerron Herman’s recommendation. The project included a residency at New York Theatre Barn’s Choreography Lab and a music workshop premiere, where yannick-robin served as both choreographer and dancer. The piece centered a Deaf father’s death and a CODA grappling with silence; yannick-robin’s role was to integrate sign language into choreography and bridge gaps between sound, access, and movement for d/Deaf performers.
 

Alongside his performance work, yannick-robin has been active in nonprofit and advocacy spaces since 2020. She worked for Imara Jones of TransLash Media, one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2023, where they were nominated for a Webby Award as an associate and digital producer for The TransLash Podcast, contributed to The Anti-Trans Hate Machine series, and wrote obituaries for TGNC siblings lost to violence. He has written for TalkDeath on racial disparities and discrimination in death care and other deathcare and injustice related topics and now offers obituary writing, death doulaship, and bereavement counseling for TGNC decedents and their families, people with rare diseases, and disabled communities.


for commissions, death care, speaking engagements and more, press the contact button.
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yannick-robin eike mirko is represented by Arise Artists Agency

© 2026 yannick-robin eike mirko

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