The Not-Quite States of America

by Doug Mack

  In the center of Caguas, Plaza Palmer was a town square to make all other cities jealous, with a carousel and a floral clock and a snack kiosk. Jesus beamed as he told me the history. As we looked across the street at vacant storefronts, he noted that the historic downtown, like many around the USA, was struggling in the shadow of the big boxes on the highway.

  There was only the slightest hint of wistfulness in his voice. It was all part of the path of progress.

  At Casa del Trovador (House of the Troubadour), a group of perhaps twenty children were trying their hand, one by one, at singing ballads of the jibaros. Operation Bootstrap pretty well wiped out the real-life jibaros, but the archetype has remained essential to Puerto Rico’s identity, something like a Grapes of Wrath meets Will Rogers figure, with dirt on his hands and a song in his heart. There’s a monument to the jibaro up in the mountains, next to the tollway that connects the island’s north and south coasts and is itself a symbol of the modernization that relegated the jibaro to the realm of lore.

  But at the Casa del Trovador, he lives. To one side of the stage stood a man who looked like Benicio del Toro, the Puerto Rican actor, playing Huck Finn. He wore a straw hat and introduced himself to me as Don Chema, and spoke animatedly as he explained jibaro music’s defining elements: the mix of instruments, as I’d seen in Samuel Lind’s prints; the decima lyrical structure of ten lines with a specific rhyming pattern, which the best singers improvise on the spot; the cuatro, similar to a guitar but with five sets of paired strings.

  Don Chema mimicked playing a cuatro: “Ting, ting, ting, ting! Es la parte mas romantic.” Out on the stage, a man in his thirties was accompanying the kids on a cuatro, its twinned strings creating a twinkling, haunting backdrop to the ballads.

  This sort of music was “dying out,” Don Chema said, but then gestured to the students. A young man in a wheelchair and a fedora was singing, his voice crisp and passionate. “At the same time,” Don Chema added with evident pride, “coming back.”

  A boy who couldn’t have been more than six stepped onstage, in a blue American Eagle shirt and with a terrified expression. An accompanist played some opening notes, ting, ting, ting, ting! and the boy took a deep breath, clenched a tiny fist at his side, and began singing.

  AS OPERATION BOOTSTRAP left a broad swath of Puerto Ricans out of its vision for the future, the Gran Migración—Grand Migration—began. Almost 530,000 people, more than a quarter of the island’s population, left between 1950 and 1970, tacitly encouraged by the commonwealth government. The Gran Migración was also assisted by the fact that, in the mid-century, air travel was starting to open up to the masses—moving to the mainland was easier than ever. Today, there are more than five million people of Puerto Rican descent in the states, only about a third of whom were born in the commonwealth itself. (Incidentally, it’s important to note that people moving from Puerto Rico are not “immigrants” any more than someone moving from Minnesota to New York; it’s all the same country.)

  Now, as Puerto Rico’s economy struggled, a new Gran Migración was under way: in the last four years, more than 170,000 people, almost 5 percent of the island’s population, had moved out of Puerto Rico. The outflow was especially pronounced among professionals, including doctors—in early 2016, according to a National Public Radio report, doctors were leaving the island at a rate of one every day. The commonwealth’s largest pediatric hospital had to shut down two of its wings. More than 10 percent of the commonwealth’s schools closed.

  Many Puerto Ricans, particularly those who supported statehood, tied the exodus to the commonwealth’s political status. “Every month, thousands of island residents vote for statehood with their feet, in search of political rights and economic opportunity,” Puerto Rico Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi said in an official press release. He added: “There is no better evidence that the current territory status has failed, and that statehood is the right status for Puerto Rico, than these stunning numbers.”

  Before I’d departed for the USVI, a year earlier, I’d expected that the political status would be the most fiercely debated issue in every territory, but that hadn’t been the case at all. I usually had to drag opinions out of people. In Puerto Rico, I just had to wait a moment. The topic seeps into unrelated conversations, blares across the front pages of the newspapers, and forms the key platform planks for the island’s two main political parties, the pro-statehood Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP) and the pro-status-quo Partido Popular Democrático (PPD). (Neither has any specific alignment with the main national parties of the United States—you’ll find plenty of Democrats and plenty of Republicans within the ranks of both the PNP and the PPD.) The status debate “trumps the issues that really ought to be debated day to day,” Christina Ponsa, who is originally from Puerto Rico, told me. You might like one candidate’s overall platform—economic development, educational improvements, filling potholes—but if you don’t agree with his or her position on Puerto Rico’s political status, then never mind. The status issue is like the bomba dancers that Jesus and Samuel had told me about, sneakily dictating the rhythm of everyday life.

  While we were in Loíza to call on Samuel, Jesus took me to the town’s city hall. In the lobby was a photo of the mayor—a youngish man with braces that made him look even younger—and a Puerto Rican flag.

  “Look at the shade of the blue,” Jesus said, pointing. The left side of the Puerto Rican flag features a white star inside a blue triangle. To my eye, it was royal blue, Crayola blue, standard-issue blue.

  “It’s dark blue. That means this town is pro-statehood.” Many pro-status-quo towns, he said, fly flags with a lighter shade. In the San Juan suburb of Guaynabo, Jesus said, the mayor, as a signal of his support for Americanization and statehood, had mandated that in the square mile around city hall, all stop signs had to be in English: STOP rather than PARE.

  For Jesus, statehood represented the ultimate progress—though, of course, Samuel and many others would have disagreed.

  PUERTO RICO’S LOSS, in the Gran Migración, was the states’ gain. Puerto Ricans formed substantial communities in cities including Miami, Chicago, Philadelphia, and, most of all, New York City, where by 1970 more than eight hundred thousand Puerto Ricans lived.

  They quickly made their mark on the landscape, politics, and culture of the city, notably in the Nuyorican movement of writers, artists, and musicians. Though the names of certain Nuyorican luminaries, like the poets Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero (who also founded the Nuyorican Poets Café in the East Village), may be familiar in select quarters, it’s salsa—which has roots in Puerto Rican plena and bomba music—that has found the largest stage and has proven resilient and adaptable, working its way into the DNA of the modern American pop canon. And this, too, is progress of a sort. Just as Jesus welcomed elements of Americanization, the growing Puerto Rican population in the states is a boon to their new neighborhoods, adding new people and perspectives, in the same way that the outflow of residents from other territories also enriches the American cultural fabric.

  Salsa and its relatives—merengue, bomba, plena, and the newest cousin, hip-hop-inflected reggaeton—were inescapable. I heard the music in restaurants, from passing cars, on seemingly every radio station, floating in the air from unknown sources. Jesus took me to a salsa dance lesson (where I impressed everyone with my ability to inadvertently stomp my partner’s toes perfectly in time with the clave beat) and to the gentrifying Santurce neighborhood, where the evening scene around the public market was lively with people eating and drinking at everything from literal food counters to the internationally acclaimed restaurant José Enrique, to salsa karaoke bars. At one, a pair of yellow maracas sat next to the mic stand, just in case singers wanted to accompany themselves.

  Back in Old San Juan, the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián had started up and nearly every plaza hosted a band with horns blaring, drums clave-ing, and crowds throbbing, where seemingly everyone was dancing brilliantly, all twirls
and dips. One guy had brought his own güira and was playing along.

  Once the party started, it didn’t stop. Even away from the stages and the sea of vendors’ tents—ceramics with Taíno petroglyph motifs; driftwood furniture; T-shirts that read NO HABLO INGLES BUT I FUCK VERY WELL—the frenzy was unavoidable, pulling me from one wave of sound and mass of revelers to the next.

  At the edge of one crowd, fast-buck hopefuls sold selfie sticks and T-shirts. A group promoting AT&T paraded by carrying orange weather balloons, followed by an ecstatic trio in green top hats, guerrilla marketers handing out Tic Tacs. I’d heard rumbling that the festival was getting too corporate, and hand-wringing that the enthusiasm would be dampened by the island’s myriad woes: the mosquitoes, the economy, the crime, the new migración. But as the merrymakers downed their breath mints and their Heinekens and Gasolinas, the general mood was: We know we should be worrying. But for now, let’s party.

  I POKED AROUND the island’s eastern side for a couple of days, hiking in the El Yunque rain forest and eating inadvisable quantities of alpacurrias (fritters made with taro and green banana and filled with meat) and lechón (roasted pork) before heading south, to Guayama.

  “Why you going there?” Jesus had asked, incredulity in his gravelly voice. The town is not on the standard tourist itinerary, meriting barely a mention in my guidebooks, but I had an invitation to spend the night with some locals, and I felt duty-bound to accept.

  I guessed that Quique and Ana were in their early sixties, he slender, with glasses and a tendency to quote Marx with a friendly intensity, she with a short just-so hairdo and a quiet, maternal concern for my well-being; she had worriedly texted me several times while I was lost on my way to Guayama. I met up with them at a small art museum that they helped run. Their friend Jorge joined us to smooth over our otherwise highly imperfect grasp of each other’s languages. Jorge was an architect, historian, and poet, with a casual intellectualism, citing architectural theory and Puerto Rican novelists in the humble, unaffected way that few people can pull off.

  Guayama felt like a smaller version of Caguas: suburban big-boxes on the outskirts, a historic downtown that had seen better days. The art museum was only three rooms, but was recently opened, the building lovingly restored. After a brief tour, we drove to a seafood restaurant near the waterfront, austere but endearing, more like a church fellowship hall than my stereotype of the sort of place where you can order lobster. The catch was as fresh and tasty as at any seafood restaurant in the states, which wasn’t a shock, but the prices took me by surprise: twenty to thirty dollars for an entrée, not what I’d expected from the surroundings.

  As we were leaving the restaurant, Quique told me we needed to go see Bob the Gringo.

  “Bob . . . the Gringo?” I asked.

  Quique grinned.

  So off the two of us went to the next-door town of Arroyo, where we drove along the oceanfront main drag and turned left at an obelisk commemorating Samuel Morse, who came here to set up the first telegraph lines in Latin America. We parked and entered a small corner store—a colmado—where most of the floor space was given over to a handful of black patio chairs and a plastic table with dominoes awaiting players. There was a diagonal counter cutting off one corner, where the owner, César, greeted us and asked me a question I’ve never heard at a bodega back in the states: “What do you want to drink?”

  César had a few shelves full of goods behind the counter—steel wool, toothpaste, cans of Goya beans—but I quickly gathered that this wasn’t a store so much as an unofficial community center. Jorge was already there. I got a can of Medalla Light and took a chair at the table while Quique and César started chatting and César’s black cat came over to inspect us. As I told the men about Caguas and the jibaros, César cocked an eyebrow and smirked at something over my shoulder. I turned to find an elderly man with lean, wrinkly arms and a hunched posture—plus a strut in his slow step and a spirited, high-pitched Texas drawl.

  Bob the Gringo had arrived. The energy of the room shifted, all eyes on him. He spoke not in sentences but in smiling decrees.

  “I’ve been here for eighteen years,” he said, opening a can of Budweiser.

  “Why here, why Arroyo?” I asked. It wasn’t exactly your typical retirement community. Most of the buildings near the store were run-down, if not actually falling down.

  Bob pointed a long, bony finger. “I’ll tell you! It’s simple! I just found a town where the people are as crazy as I am!”

  “Ask him what he thinks about the political status,” someone said, to a chorus of muffled snickers.

  Bob pointed again. “When I came down here, I thought Puerto Rico should be a state, but now I’ve changed my mind completely! We can’t afford to be a state or independent! We should stay exactly the same!”

  “That’s the view from a gringo,” Quique countered.

  “It’s true!”

  Like every iteration of this debate I would hear in Puerto Rico, there was no animosity or surprise in anyone’s tone; the points were passionate but the edge was dulled by their predictability, their familiarity.

  “The president and Congress have been saying for years that Puerto Rico can’t make up its mind,” Bob said. “People can’t figure it out!”

  César chimed in. “Doug, independence is stronger than you think.” He had a buzz cut and round John Lennon glasses and a small stack of books sitting on one side of the counter: one about the philosopher Epicurus, another titled Puerto Rico: Una Historia Contemporanea. “We have a joke here,” César continued. “Do you know that it is against the law to sell or even to drink alcohol on Election Day here?”

  This was news to me.

  “Do you know why?” César stared at me deadpan, waiting. Bob the Gringo sipped his Bud.

  “No,” I said.

  “Because when we’re drunk, we’re all independents!”

  The store erupted in laughter, although for Bob it was more of an eye-rolling, I-saw-THAT-coming chuckle.

  What BOB was getting at was this: Puerto Rico has voted on its political status four times—1967, 1993, 1998, and 2012—and the results have been all over the board. The first two times, the voters favored commonwealth status. In 1998, the preferred choice was “none of the above,” because of disagreements over what, exactly, the other options actually meant. In 2012, there was a two-part ballot. First: Should Puerto Rico continue its current territorial status? Most voters, 54 percent, said no. Second: Which non-territorial option do you prefer? Statehood received 61 percent of the votes, free association (like the Marshall Islands) got 33 percent, and full independence got 5.5 percent. People who supported the status quo, however, pointed out that even if they voted “Yes” to continuing things as they were, they still had to vote on the second question. And when it comes to electing a governor and a resident commissioner, that unofficial baro-meter of public sentiment, voters go back and forth between the pro-statehood PNP and the pro-status-quo PPD. There’s no clear, definitive answer to what Puerto Ricans want, although debating the options is something of a local pastime. (They turn out to elections at higher rates than the mainland U.S.; it helps that Election Day is a territorial holiday, with businesses and schools closed.)

  Part of the issue is disagreement about what, exactly, commonwealth means and what improvements are possible within the constraints of this designation. “Nobody knows what a commonwealth is,” Christina Ponsa told me, “and that was pretty much on purpose.” For starters, the very label is misleading. As discussed, there are myriad definitions of “commonwealth,” but that’s not what they call it in Puerto Rico. Here, the political status is known as Estado Libre Asociado (or ELA), a term dreamed up to sell the idea of this non-statehood, non-independence compromise designation in the first place. Translate Estado Libre Asociado directly into English, though, and it’s free associated state, which implies that the island has entered a compact of free association, which it has not. Legally, “freely associated state” appl
ies only to the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Republic of Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia—not to Puerto Rico.

  The ELA/commonwealth status was proposed by Luis Muñoz Marín, the president of the Puerto Rico Senate, and set up in 1952. Even beyond the name, this new status was an optical illusion of a policy change, its meaning depending on your view. It offered an apparent increase in autonomy, promising a divorce from congressional oversight, and for the optimists among the local statehood and independence movements, this seemed to be a step toward their differing desired outcomes. But the new status actually changed very little in everyday terms, much to the delight of Puerto Ricans who favored the status quo.

  Today, most people who support the status quo—with the possible exception of Bob the Gringo—believe it should be “enhanced,” with more local rights but no change in the overall setup. Most people who support independence or statehood note that various “enhancements” have been proposed over the last fifty-plus years, but none have accomplished much, and there’s no reason to believe more minor tweaks will help. Real change, they say, will require the setup itself to be overhauled. As numerous legal scholars have pointed out, Congress still holds plenary power over the commonwealths, meaning it can unilaterally withdraw their right of self-government at any time. This requires a few more hurdles than in the territories, but, from a constitutional perspective, it remains an option; the commonwealths are still, like the territories, under congressional control.

  What César, Quique, and Jorge were getting at was this: Sure, the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) hasn’t done so well at the polls. But the Grito de Lares has echoed across the decades. In a tourist-town souvenir shop a few days later, I would even see it emblazoned on a T-shirt, along with the slogan VIVA PUERTO RICO LIBRE (and sharing shelf space with Che Guevara shirts). There’s a baseline of Puerto Rican pride, nudging toward Puerto Rican exceptionalism—even Jesus and Samuel Lind had agreed on this—and this, nationalists say, is a tacit support of independence. For instance, at the 2004 Summer Olympics, the Puerto Rican men’s basketball team beat the superstar-filled Team USA, and all of a sudden, César said, everyone was a nationalist. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm’s comments about soccer are pertinent here: “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven people.” (According to the Olympic charter, “the expression ‘country’ means an independent State recognized by the international community,” which is not to say that “countries” with Olympic teams must be autonomous or recognized by the UN.)‡