Today I am thinking about how recent attacks against queer Puerto Rican Bomba practicioners in New York City were abused by NYPD on night of June 8th, 2025, at an afterparty for Puerto Rican Day Parade activities.
When I first started writing about my experience with Bomba I was interested in how bomba serves as a spiritual and healing tool used to hold and provide space in the face of anti-black dehumanizing realities of enslavement and colonialism. For me that might be true. But what is also true is that the NYPD has no problem attacking people mid batey.
While it is said that Bomba was practiced on Sundays on the only day of the week our Enslaved Ancestors were able to be relatively free from the masters. Here they conspired against their dehumanization. I am immideatly taken back in time to consider how bomba this practice of freedom dreaming was policed then.
Similarly I am interested in the ways Bomba has been co-opted by the state to reproduce narratives that endanger practicioners in the present. Bomba serves as a tool of survival against anti-blackness but also reproduces narratives of Blackness that situates Afro-Puerto Ricans in particular space-time configurations. Put simply, the narratives that conveniently tie Black cultural production to the Nationalist myth of tri-racial harmony, serves to police the transformation of Bomba to meet the revolutionary needs of the present.
So, when a diasporic group of Queer radicals take up bomba to both uplift their current struggles against the constant threat of violence my ancestors don’t like it. It’s a reenactment of raids against Black space-making practices.
