Saludos!
I’m Chris Rodriguez - educator, bombero, musician, and writer. For over ten years, I’ve been on a journey to heal the effects of colonization within myself and my communities. As a child of Boricua and Cuban immigrants who moved from the Caribbean to the Bronx to suburban New Jersey, I was witness to how intergenerational trauma can manifest as assimilation and disconnection from our roots, our bodies, nature, and each other. Through my diverse professional and creative roles, I work to heal this trauma through art, ritual, education, storytelling, and community-making.
A not-so-obvious reason for me leaving Instagram has to do with time. The waste of time, of course, but moreso my perception of time. Have you noticed that social media and the proliferation of short videos have distorted our sense of time? Everything seems to move at lightening speed these days: news, events, pictures, information. Even my memory is shot; unless I write down, day-by-day what I do, I can’t remember things clearly, and when I have social media, many of my days seem to blur into a single, amorphous haze. What I do remember is that before I got a smartphone with social media (i.e., when I was about 20), time literally felt different.