When I was six years old, my father gave me my first machete. He instructed me how to swing diagonally and away from the body, emphasizing “be careful because you know Tio Jaime is missing two fingers”.My hands grew roots to that machete as I climbed the mountain in my grandfather’s land with my parents beside me.

I remember looking around one day and realizing they had allowed me to stray because I knew my way around the plot. I knew that if I went back down I would find my family, so I wasn’t afraid and they knew I could find my way. But, they were never very far off, for we were all trying to clear the brush and find a way up the mountain. I recall my unlucky encounters with “ortiga” and how it stung my skin with its bumpy green leaves. I remember watching my grandfather knock a 20-foot tree down once with just a machete. He cut it open and showed me that the insides could be eaten.

One day, we decided we would find our way up that mountain to “Guilarte” (the peak). We climbed and cut our way up against the brush. The mud and water that lay on the grass and made our boots slip. When "promise" to reach the peak was at our fingertips he stopped; it was a wall of rock, shooting straight up to the top. My father looked at me and said, we would have to just find another way. At the age of nine or maybe ten, I didn’t realize then, that this giant rock was a metaphor.

El chiste es (the joke is) that Puerto Ricans are born with machetes in hand. We have fought wars against imperialists with machetes, with one fluid swipe. The older I got, the more I saw that the machete is a metaphor for my people; we are metal, hard and sharp, attempting to break through the barriers that surround us. But we just can’t break through that rock. We can’t crack imperialism with one fluid motion. We face two options at this point; allow ourselves to dull, or sharpen against it. But, what more is there to do? How can we get passed this giant rock?

There has to be another way up the mountain, but where is it? We’ve been searching for over a century for that crack in the wall, that alternate route. Now it seems all we can do is hit it head on and allow it to slowly dull us down. This structure threatens our economy, our livelihood, our very cultural traditions. It tells us to simply leave, give up, back down, stop fighting it, because it will only grow taller. It threatens to crush us, it whispers that it only wants what’s best for us. There is no way around this rock. An alternative route to imperialism does not exist; our only option is to break it down and build stairs from the rubble. But, how do we continue to find the strength after over a century? The simple answer is that we do not dull so easily.