The Sanrio Machete

In collaboration with our friends at Objet: We’ve asked five writers to write about a single object that is significant to them and will be publishing these essays in the coming months.

Objet embeds memories into clothing via regular soirées—parties with a French touch—where they invite local tailors to customize your favorite garments. Imagine that piece now, carrying your best moments into the next century. 

Today’s OBJET dispatch is Michelle Santiago Cortés on trying to live up to her blue china.

I was meeting my Puerto Rico friends for the first time after moving back from New York City. We were in a circle at the edge of the pool cackling, screaming, and catching up. We complained about Luma and how the cost of living in PR is on par with Miami and New York City while your earning potential is slashed in half. We talked about Botox and Chappell Roan and how some of us were taking care of the crumbling houses we grew up in and Oh, by the way, I asked, Do any of you have avocado trees? Nobody did, but between those of us in the pool we had: orange, lemon, breadfruit, mangos, star fruit, and passion fruit trees in addition to some very productive culantro, lavender and oregano plants. None of us knew anything about gardening; those trees managed to thrive all on their own.

The conversation turned towards banter about our collectively nerdish constitutions and skill sets—what do writers, violinists, filmmakers, and doctors who met in private schools and have lived in cities and suburbs their whole lives know about taking care of fruit trees? Little to nothing, as it turns out. We don’t even have basic gardening tools in my house. So I joked that I would probably have to go buy a machete and it would only make sense for me to have one if it was covered in Sanrio stickers.

My mom is a doctor, and about fifteen years ago, one patient gave her a sprouted avocado seed as a thank-you gift. I don’t remember how, but when she brought the small plant home—a thin stem and topped with a handful of leaves—we somehow came to know it would take at least 10 years to reach fruiting maturity. Once it grew tall enough, we asked a gardener to plant it into our yard and forgot about it.

I was reading on the patio earlier this summer when out of habit, I inspected the tree from across the yard. I was shocked to find that a few branches were suddenly droopy with fruit. Every day after, I stood under the tree like a proud dad, taking pictures and counting avocados. By the time I got to a dozen, my mom and I were speeding over to Home Depot for the basics: a shovel, a fork, a fruit catcher and, most importantly, a machete.

In Puerto Rico, the machete is a more essential gardening tool than sun hats or gardening gloves, for the simple reason that vegetation here is aggressively abundant and it requires a lot of hacking. It’s also a symbol for rural autonomy and nationalist identity. Our cultural mythology relies on the image of the jíbaro, a mountain-dwelling farmer who can be identified by his straw hat (pava), his bare feet, and his machete. The jíbaro is the caricature of the Puerto Rican every-man, and savvy politicians like Eliezer Molina know it helps to pose for photos holding a machete.

Roadside vendors near Walmart and Costco parking lots use machetes to bust open water-filled coconuts pulled from a backseat cooler, but the machete is as much a weapon as it is a tool. There’s a local paramilitary group called Ejército Popular Boricua (Boricua People’s Army) that some consider terrorists and others think of as freedom fighters—but everyone calls them Los Macheteros (“The Machete Wielders”). Our local version of that international stereotype—the bearded leftist bro and self-identifying feminist who has never done laundry or cleaned his dishes—is a Machetero fanboy with tragic machete-wielding skills.

When I got my Home Depot machete, all these layers of symbolism got papered over by the Sanrio character stickers I ordered from Amazon. When I held the machete for the first time, I had Cinnamoroll in my palm, the Little Twin Stars under my pointer and My Melody along the length of my thumb. It looked ridiculous and I felt ridiculous when I used it, but only as ridiculous as I would if I was using a regular machete. And yet, when I tried to hack away at some low-hanging branches, my swings left stab wounds and mangled branch stubs all along the trunk of my precious tree.

At some point my mom asked me: “Do you feel badass with your machete?” No, I thought, I feel like Simone Weil handling a firearm.

The truth is I’m not a farmer: I don’t live in the countryside and I have no upper body strength. Ever the shameless bookworm, I can only think of Oscar Wilde’s words: “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.” We bring objects into our lives and find ourselves trying to live up to them instead of using them.

Because I live in a suburb and faint after too much time under the sun and am dangerously gangly and clumsy, I paradoxically insist on becoming the kind of person who can casually wield a machete. Someone who can swing at things with confidence and leave clean vicious cuts along my path. It soon became clear to me, though, that the jokes and the stickers were protecting a part of me that felt threatened by a garden tool.

On the road to my house, a cement fence snakes along a bright tree-lined sidewalk. On the opposite side of the road, a towering wall of igneous rock is thick with swirling vines, big glossy leaves and the occasional fruit tree. Cows from a nearby farm sometimes climb down these hills to run along the chain-link fence. If my house were a few stories taller, I would have a clear view of the river the infamous poet and Puerto Rican nationalist, Julia de Burgos wrote about in her best-known poem. Once upon a time I’m sure it made sense for the people living here to be skilled machete wielders. But in just a short century these emerald hills gave way to farms and quarries that were eventually taken over by gated communities like mine.

As a teenager I decided I would avoid taking walks after dark, when bats would fly across the road and between the trees lining the moonlit sidewalk, whooshing dangerously close to the top of my head. While reading Andreas Malm’s book, Corona, Climate and Chronic Emergency, I learned about zoonotic spillover, how a “pathogen spills over the species boundary...” The passages on bats, in particular, read like the Anthropocene’s answer to Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “When roads are cut through tropical forests humans come into contact with all the teeming life forms hitherto left on their own.”

Bats are perfect “reservoir hosts,” carrying pathogens that can easily devastate a feeble human specimen—as in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic—without being affected by them. The stress of deforestation (to the bats, not us) can trigger “pulses of viral excretion, episodes when viruses are shed en masse onto accidental hosts.”

The part I often struggle to translate to people who have never lived here, in Puerto Rico, is how our heightened contact with other animals and their habitats isn’t a sign of our coziness in nature; it’s a condition of our encroachment.

While I confidently call this house my home, I question its place on this particular patch of land. In turn, I feel myself dangling over an edge, like some irreconcilable surplus that literally does not fit in. This sticker-clad machete looks as ridiculous as this whole situation tends to feel. Like Wilde, I find it harder and harder everyday to live up to my machete. As these doubts spill over, I worry about the future of this house and my future in its country. I worry about self-deprecating humor and how it cracks open to reveal festering questions and unresolved doubts. But for now, I’ll worry only about the bats and taking care of this overgrown tree. 🥑

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