Las playas son del pueblo: sensing multifaceted solidarities

Processing colonial histories often entails a sensorial response akin to grief. As an antidote to this grief, I propose multifaceted solidarities. Contextualizing displacement caused by colonial-capital enterprise and its attendant environmental degradation, in this forum contribution I focus on stories from Puerto Rico's northwestern coastal town of Aguadilla, to amplify how groups of people have come together to protect public access to their coasts. The search for a decolonial imaginary of Latine people, particularly for those of us in diaspora, is facilitated by a consideration of multifaceted solidarity in relation to the common refrain “las playas son [del] pueblo.” Sensing multifaceted solidarity in revisiting these histories—by swimming, protesting, researching, and writing—I emphasize the significance of fractured and experiential memory within US territories like Puerto Rico.