Why do you travel -- Artis

Tell me about Puerto Rico.

I took a plane to Puerto Rico because I had been brainwashed. Four years of living in Puerto Rico’s biggest colony, a.k.a. New York City did it to me. The fluttering of a million banditas bonitas during the annual Puerto Rico Day Parade, flags hanging from car rear view mirrors and tattooed to the skin of countless Boriqua papi chulos drove me to the island. (That and a cheap airline ticket.) In other words, I wanted to go to San Juan to see what all the commotion was about.

Puerto Rico is Latin America, West Africa, and North America packed into one small island. Once I got there I felt right at home and out of my element all at once. The faces, the music, and the syncopated body language were all familiar, but the tongue was strange. (My four years of high school Castilian Spanish couldn’t keep up with 500 years of Antillean Spanish.) In many ways San Juan is like a bizarro New York City: the professional class uses Spanish while most restaurant and hotel workers spend their work-day speaking English; instead of undocumented Mexicans/Central Americans supplying the underground economy with cheap labor you have undocumented Dominicans doing most of the heavy lifting and “dirty work”. Unfortunately, many things in San Juan were all too familiar. I noticed that the folks living in La Perla (Viejo San Juan’s only low-income neighborhood) and the Loisa Caserio (a sprawling public housing project) near the mega-hotels of Isla Verde, looked like the folks living in the South Bronx and Harlem. While the playeros (beach bums) of Ocean Park, lounging on the sandy beaches during the middle of the workday, were mostly blanco, indistinguishable from the folks in Breezy Point, Queens… And there I was, a moreno, with my third bottle of Presidente, in the middle of it all.

Why should people travel? Why can't we just stay where we are?

I travel to get away from the familiar and the mundane. Movies, video games, and chat-rooms are no substitute for traveling. I travel to see my home, my culture, and my nationality from new perspectives. I travel to be seen as an individual, and not as a demographic.

Where else have you been?

I’ve walked the streets of Johannesburg, Paris, Kuala Lumpur, London, Singapore, Durban, Bangkok, Madrid, Montreal, Pretoria, Berlin, Cape Town, and during one 24hr lay-over in Japan I walked through the districts of Tokyo non-stop from sunset to sunrise.

Talk about a place that you've visited that turned you the fuck-out. Tell me why.

During the spring of 2001, I toured a Zulu village in the KwaZulu-Natal Province in eastern South Africa. My guide was a young Zulu brotha who dreamed of going to college in the U.S. That night, after drinking several cans of homemade beer at a local shebeen he asked me about the East Coast vs. West Coast hip-hop rivalry and the whole Tupac vs Biggie thing. I was like, whaaaaaaaat?

Why are you soooo sexy?

I’m sexy ‘cause I don’t have game, but I’ve got “madd skillz.”

Wednesday, September 03, 2003 @ 02:01 PM