Platanos and Polychronic Time

How Puerto Rico Transformed My Clock

Growing up in New York, the boiling and frying and smashing and refrying of platanos was a tradition that tied me to my family and to Puerto Rico, an island I had seldom visited, but I knew was home.

In Puerto Rico, the plantain has similar cultural significance, taking many forms. Maduros. Amarillos. Mofongo.  Each with their own distinct flavor, preparation and time.

Time is its own ingredient in Puerto Rico.

Photo by Michael Gaylard, Wikimedia Commons.

In the United States, time is an obstacle. Time is a complication, a concept that trips up the cogs of production and industry central to U.S.  culture. Every process has been streamlined to take less time, turning hours into seconds and years into days. A cardinal sin of U.S. culture is wasting time, of not using time, of not extracting something from time.

The English language solidifies this understanding of time in its very grammar. Phrases like “lose time” or “waste time” are examples of this phenomenon, defining the United States, especially, as a monochronic culture. That is, in the United States, time is reified, tangible, and thus also able to be squandered.

In New York and in Cambridge, everyone is in a rush. Always. Everyone is a hurry to get somewhere else, in a hurry to prove themselves in their field, rushing to reach whatever they have defined as success in their heads.

In Puerto Rico, this hyper-focus on production and efficiency vanished for me.

During the Puerto Rico Winter Institute, we stayed at Hotel Nest, a locally-owned hotel in Rio Piedras, a city near San Juan, where my mother’s father had grown up. Most of our seminars were held at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) Law School or the offices of a local non-profit, Espacios Abiertos.

Each morning, I woke up, got ready and gathered with the group, made up of both Harvard and UPR students, to have breakfast. We ate fruit, waffles, cereal, and brown sugar-sweetened coffee. We lingered and chatted and then set out to seminar.

Walking out of our hotel each morning, we were welcomed by sun and time. Our 15-minute walks elongated into 20 minutes, our legs settling more deeply into each step. Our joints loosened and muscles relaxed as our conversations replaced the destination. Each stroll transformed into a cradle for connection and learning, for revisiting the old and discovering something new, only made possible by time.

This understanding of time is defined as polychronic. Time is a liquid, filling up vessels, like conversations and strolls. Time is something to be enjoyed rather than wasted.

Growing up in New York, I have an instinct to avoid people whom I do not know, a suspicion of any person who greets me. My grandfather had come to New York City from Puerto Rico at only 9 years old and my grandmother, though Puerto Rican, was born in New York City. Despite the culture of community and greeting instrinsic to la isla de encanto, they both became more used to the individualistic nature of New York City and the continental United States. Both my mother and father were raised in Brooklyn, New York.  Also my family history is rooted in patience and warmth, my environment created cultural worldview filled with fear and hesitation and efficiency.

As I walked around Rio Piedras, I was met with a greeting from every person I passed. I was met with “buenos días,” “buenas tardes,” “buenas noches,” from people whom I would never see again. Smiles and well-wishes replaced wariness and anxiety. Each day walking to and from seminar held the time to reflect, to prepare, to observe, rather than a rush. Each greeting to a passerby held the spirit of hospitality, of community. This kind of communication is endangered where I am from.

In New York, people speak to one another for a predetermined purpose, always. Whether it be order food, to complain about someone’s sidewalk speed or to greet a friend, where I am from, every action always has a tangible goal.

Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. Photo by Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo For The Washington Post.

What does it mean for time and for interaction to have a goal? In the United States, each person isolates themselves in silent siloes where time were something to get through, rather than experience. With a cultural transition towards efficiency comes the surprise I felt at a simple greeting. It is this deprioritization of time that decimates the present.

Puerto Rican culture requires presence, in all its definitions.

At first, it made me uncomfortable to spend my time in this way, without worry about what had just happened or what would happen after. I avoided the actions that, to me, felt like they had no concrete or final product. It took much effort for me to begin to unlearn my perspective on words and time as only means to an end.

Slowly, throughout my two weeks, I became more comfortable with this experience of time. My steps widened and I greeted every person I walked past.

Time holds so much more in Puerto Rico. Seminars lingered. Conversations defied goodbye. The lyrics and rhythms of the music we listened to and sang along to only had their melody or their flow because the songs and their makers respected the power of time. They recognized that so much happens in the liminal time and speech, in the time spent waiting, walking, going, in the words said in passing.

This attitude towards time in Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands has been made into a pejorative, a topic we explored during one of our seminars at the University of Puerto Rico’s Law School. Terms like puertoriqueño aplatanado depend on the representation of Puerto Ricans as lazy, as unambitious, as complacent. It comes from the idea of platanos as a simple food, as an undistinguished food.

The thing is platanos are not simple nor undistinguished. They take effort and they take time. Much knowledge is required to properly prepare the myriad of platano dishes in Puerto Rico.

At lunch after seminar days, I had tostones, a double-fried and smashed platano variety, from a restaurant around the corner from where we stayed. On beach days, we customized alcapurrias, filled platano fritters, with our hot sauces of choice. On the penultimate night of the Puerto Rico Winter Institute, the cohort came together to prepare and eat pasteles, a dish I grew up with, that either features platanos or guineos, green bananas. On the final night, my friends and I enjoyed mofongo during goodbye dinner at an aptly named restaurant El Platanal.

Each of these dishes, and many others, rely upon a different time of platanos, young and old, green and ripened. They depend on time. I too depended on time in Puerto Rico. Each beautiful moment or revolutionary moment was made possible by my new attitude towards time, one that respected it and savored it.

We watched our candles slowly melt into wax after offering them to the Three Wise Men at a chapel in Carolina before Three Kings Day, hoping that our wishes would be granted. We allowed our eyes to navigate around and absorb historical and aesthetically rich architecture, fully appreciating each angle and cut on our architectural tour of Old San Juan. We filled time with intentional silence, finding our centers with the musical group Agua, Sol, and Sereno. We first greeted the drummers who brought life to the batey during our bomba lesson, paying close attention to the beat and time of their instruments. We enjoyed a home-cooked lunch made from produce nurtured with time and attention at Josco Bravo, an agroecological farm in the Toa Alta mountains. On drives that spanned the diameter of Puerto Rico, music and conversation decorated our time. I enjoyed hours of music and conversation at El Boricua and El Refugio, a few local gathering places where people came together to experience musical traditions of Puerto Rico like bomba and plena.

At the end of our final excursion to Cabo Rojo, we watched the sunset. This sunset was unlike any I had seen. A classmate from the University of Puerto Rico explained that because we were at the southwestern point of Puerto Rico, here, the sun set directly onto the water, into the horizon in a vivid spectacle.

We all watched, with salt water slowly evaporating from our hair and skin, as the sun and sky began to shimmer, changing color and form with each moment. We sat captivated and time, for us, slowed.

My flight to leave Puerto Rico was at 7:17a.m. I watched the sunrise from the Luis Muñoz Marin International Airport. I returned home with a craving to make tostones and a new understanding of time.