Sugar Pathways Examines STX-PR Ties

In her brilliant documentary, Sugar Pathways, award-winning filmmaker, Johanna Bermudez-Ruiz, has turned her camera’s focus on the migration of Puerto Ricans to St. Croix in the years following the U.S. Navy’s controversial occupation of the east side of the island of Vieques, a sister island of Puerto Rico. On the surface, Sugar Pathways appears to be an extremely well-documented account of the injustices hoisted on the citizens of Vieques as they struggled to put up with the increasing military presence of U.S. forces on their tiny island, and the ultimate heart-wrenching decision by many of them to abandon their homeland and move to St. Croix and the U.S. Virgin Islands. But underlying this astute examination, Ms. Bermudez-Ruiz digs deeply into the intimate and lasting connections that have been forged over the years between the Crucian and Puerto Rican populations that now co-exist on the Big Island.

In her previous short documentary, Vieques: An Island Forging Futures, which won numerous prestigious awards, Ms. Bermuda-Ruiz fought off the harshest of criticisms and governmental barriers to produce a truthful and gut-wrenching account of the inhumane and barbaric conditions that were imposed on the Viequense citizens by the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps. These two branches of the U.S. Department of Defense established and maintained a Vieques Naval Training Range of nearly 15,000 acres, where they practiced ground warfare and amphibious training for Marines, naval gunfire support training, and air-to-ground training, including a Surface Impact Area (fired or launched ammunition and explosives) and Live Impact Area. 

Sugar Pathways travels further down the road than her first film, past these gross injustices and horrors hoisted on the people of Vieques, and reports on the difficult but necessary path of migration taken by people who chose to live a new life on a new land, far from the madness of their homeland.

Sugar Pathways becomes much more than a documentation of the coupling between two islands, it is a deep dive into what now, particularly in this day and age, makes up an unusual melding of the races. It cracks open the soul of St. Croix, an island that long ago had the courage to snap off the bonds of slavery, lift itself up out of the morass of  U.S. colonialism, and hand-in-hand, brother-to-brother, sister-to-sister, repeatedly struggle up from the basement of defeat and despair, solely on the shoulders of its fellow man, and declare itself a “free people” amazingly unencumbered by the racial strife that plagues so many other places in today’s world.

Ms. Bermudez-Ruiz’s film cries out to tell the true and complete story of why St. Croix and the U.S. Virgin Islands have become a major player on the world stage of race relations. The film looks beyond the obvious footprints of its choppy industrial past and its current potential as a world gateway, beyond its pace-leading birth in the Caribbean tourism sector, to the individual stories of the people who have come to love their adopted land and the people who have so graciously accepted them into their lives. 

Sugar Pathways documents the links that bind. It displays vital episodes and individual tales of those Viequense who ran from the tyranny of their homeland to an island that allowed them free access to not only its land, but its hopes and dreams; an island that allowed them to once again see a brighter tomorrow. Although it was by no means a smooth path for many, it was a path that was essential, a path that had to be cleared, fought for, and maintained in spite of the initial racial obstacles that were thrown in its way.

“It was 1998 to 1999, my friends were starting to protest about Vieques,” Ms. Bermudez-Ruiz relates her thoughts on making the film to the St. Croix Times. “At that time I was clueless about what was going on in Vieques. I was really considering making a film about my interest in gender equality in Kenya. But my friends pulled me over and said Vieques is a place where the U.S. Navy is practicing bombing runs. We are all protesting this horror. One of us has already been killed by their bombs.”

The “Navy-Vieques Protests” was a name adopted by the English-speaking media to a series of protests that started in 1969 on the Puerto Rican island municipality of Vieques. The protestors were obviously steadfast against the use of their island by the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps for bombing target practice. 

“I was 24 years old and I had no idea the impact when I started the first film. The Navy was calling up people I interviewed and calling them thugs,” Ms. Bermudez-Ruiz recalled. “And the protestors were calling the navy thugs…That’s when it hit me the struggles, the desperation and depression everyone was going through,” she related. “It does rattle all sense of decency. The tone was understandably all anti-army, anti-military, anti-government. The people on the island were being forced to live in a place that was exposed to depleted uranium, agent orange, live bombings, you name it, it was all being practiced on Vieques. And the U.S. government didn’t think a thing about it.”

Sugar Pathways is not only a film about the end results of those horrific episodes, although it was the gross injustices that obviously pushed the envelope of tolerance and spurred the enormous migration to St. Croix. Yet, it is a film that examines the eventual outcomes of such a movement, not so much as a people who decided to bury the horrors of the past, but about the future itself that was forged by those who decided to leave and make the fifty mile journey to the U.S. Virgin Islands. It speaks more of the beauty in the hearts that these people brought with them, the beauty they decided to plant in their new world, and the beauty of the people who opened their hearts to engage them. 

It is the American immigrant experience. The ability to gaze out across the vast waters of the sea, over the horizon and see the same promise and opportunity that three tiny ships full of voyagers must have seen travelling off the shores of Spain and winding up at a place now called Columbus Landing over five hundred years ago. 

Sugar Pathways was produced by the  Johanna Bermudez-Ruiz production company Cane Bay Films LLC.

You can view Sugar Pathways at: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/sugarpathways 

or Contact: www.canebayfilms.com