Sovereignty and Wellbeing in Rural Puerto Rico

At the Centro de Apoyo Mutuo Jíbaros de Lares (CAMJi-Lares) in Puerto Rico, organizers are carrying out their vision for food, medicinal and territorial sovereignty through their “del Bohio al Batey” support center — a healing and wellbeing project supported by Grassroots International through the Martín-Báro Initiative.

We have built this project from the essence of understanding that, in a colonial territory, the body also constitutes that territory, where we are the ones who have to liberate our body in order to be able to liberate the territory.

And from that space, we are working to ensure that it is the community that determines what to eat, and where they manage their health, you know?

As Pluma describes in the video, the body is also a territory deserving of sovereignty — no less important than the national sovereignty of Puerto Rico. CAMJi-Lares is reclaiming ancestral knowledge of native plants and ensuring that the community can shape what they eat and how they can manage their health.

The Centro de Apoyo Mutuo Jíbaros de Lares is part of a network of mutual aid/support centers created by grassroots community members. They are part of an emerging movement of community-based disaster response and ongoing radical self-management. The CAMs Jíbaros see jíbaras (i.e. peasant) communities as forming the nucleus of grassroots power capable of self-managing natural resources for their own sustainable development.

CAMs Jíbaros call for “community sovereignty” which is made up of four interconnected dimensions: food/medicinal sovereignty, educational/recreational sovereignty, economic sovereignty, and organizational sovereignty.

We all deserve access to health. We all deserve to be able to offer access to our families, to our children, to our grandchildren, to our neighbors.

So medicine sovereignty is, essentially, understanding this process. How we can emancipate our health. It is total emancipation of the issue of health, on which we previously had the power to make decisions.

So, this is what we are claiming, little by little, and that is our project. We hope it will help to create a bit of justice and equity in our communities.