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From Silence To Sovereignty AMORir

"From Silence to Sovereignty: End-of-Life Doula Work as Cultural Transformation in Puerto Rico" - Alexander Aldarondo Jiménez (Puerto Rico) Fourth Annual End-of-Life Doula International Research Symposium, "Research is a verb: Sharing knowledge as collaboration." September 2024 Hosted by the End of Life Doula International Research Group (EOLD-IRG), the symposium brings together new and emerging research with speakers from Australia, Canada, South America, the UK, the USA, and beyond. This year’s programme includes research sessions on the evaluation and mapping the experiences of providing and receiving care, the ethical and relational dimensions of care, the influence of cultural and legal contexts, and how to better support doula practice through evidence-informed approaches. Abstract: In Puerto Rico - a U.S. colonized archipelago marked by a collective experience of death shrouded in silence, overmedicalization, misinformation, and legal ambiguity - AMORir has emerged as the first organized end-of-life doula organization on the island. Rooted in decolonial practice, community-based care, and the cultural rehumanization of death, AMORir’s work bridges accompaniment, education, advocacy, and ritual. More than a service provider, AMORir is a movement: a collective gesture of loving resistance, public education, and cultural evolution in response to a death culture shaped by centuries of imposed beliefs, institutional fragmentation, and emotional Illiteracy. This presentation introduces the foundational context in which AMORir was born, outlines our community-based philosophy, and shares insights from five years of situated, embodied, and relational practice across the archipelago. Framed through decolonial, narrative, and action research lenses, we explore how doulas in Puerto Rico serve as both companions and cultural workers - tending not only to individual deaths, but to a broader collective awakening around how we live and die. We share learnings from our ongoing work and collaborative inquiries – including Mapping the Territory of Death in Puerto Rico, a participatory research process in which doula trainees and community members named the cultural, legal, social, medical, and spiritual terrains in which death unfolds. This harvest offers concrete findings and visionary pathways forward, including a call to reclaim dying as a community-rooted, autonomous, and sacred act. In alignment with the symposium’s theme, this session positions research as a living verb: embodied, remembered, and reimagined through presence, practice, and deep listening. We offer this work as both a window into the Puerto Rican context and an invitation to co-create more dignified ways of dying across cultures and borders.