The Not-Quite States of America

by Doug Mack

  Everything was cordial, even if it was Bob against the room, with smirks all around, on every topic, from the closure of the Navy base on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques (“A big mistake!” said Bob) to whether students should be compelled to say the Pledge of Allegiance in school (“Who do you think is paying for the schools?” said Bob).

  The conversation floated between Spanish and English, with many clarifications and restatements to make sure we all understood each other, although even this sometimes became genially contentious because, Quique said, “Español es el idioma más fuerte”—Spanish is the stronger language. It’s the language of Puerto Rico’s native songs and poems and literature and everyday life, intrinsic to the culture. Being forced to switch to English, as part of any changed political status, was to Quique a deal-breaker, a likely death blow to the island’s heritage. After the Americans took over in 1898, César J. Ayala and Rafael Bernabe observe in Puerto Rico in the American Century, “Spanish acquired an added significance as it suddenly became available as the most evident marker of a distinct Puerto Rican identity, a role it could not play under Spanish colonial rule.” In a 1990 referendum, Puerto Ricans voted to make Spanish the official language, though this was overturned two years later, and today English and Spanish share the title.

  Every few minutes, someone came in and bought some candy or a beer from César, but most took one look at Bob and me and then went outside to socialize on the sidewalk. Quique later mentioned that he’d told a pro-statehood friend I was coming and the friend recoiled.

  “Yo quiero gringos pero no quiero gringo,” Quique said, summing up his friend’s view. I want the gringos—I want to become part of the United States—but I don’t want to talk to any gringos.

  Bob stayed for two Budweisers. As soon as he left, César asked me, “So what did you think about Bob?”

  I could feel everyone staring at me intently. My face turned red. César leaned on the counter. He wore a small peace-sign necklace that swayed slightly over his blue shirt. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said. “Bob is my friend. But he’s a fucking imperialist.”

  He walked around to the front of the counter as he continued, “Fighting against the American imperialism is harder than fighting against the Spanish imperialism. Because the Spanish fuck us hard”—he thrust his hips several times, laughing—“and the Americans fuck us hard, too”—more hip thrusts, with a delirious grin—“but they use Vaseline.”

  César stopped hip-thrusting and the smile disappeared. “En serio, the independence struggle is very difficult because the Yankees say they give us everything and without us you are nothing. They give us Pell grants and food stamps. The American imperialists are more smart.”

  “It’s political hegemony,” Jorge said. “People think it’s all fine because it does not look like the Haitian standard here.”

  In the states, the economy was improving: employment rates going up, optimism coming back after a long slump. The USA’s overall unemployment rate was at 5.6 percent. In Puerto Rico, it was 13.7 percent. In the Guayama statistical area, which includes Arroyo: 19.4 percent.

  César had a bachelor’s degree in history. He pointed to his stack of books and gave me one, a thick academic tome about the island’s coffee industry. He used to work for Jorge, and Quique was trying to find him a job. But for now, he was here, running this little store, with his loyal cat, on a quiet corner of Arroyo.

  “It’s okay, but . . . I want to get out of here,” César said. His tone was not despairing, just frustrated, tired, darkly amused. “It’s the same shit every day. The same conversations, the same jokes, the same fucking shit.”

  THE PUERTO RICO Independence Party is a minor player today, holding just one of the twenty-seven seats in the commonwealth senate, and none of the fifty-one seats in the house. Nonetheless, the independence movement is the strongest one you’ll find in any territory, and with the deepest history.

  The movement’s most influential figure was Pedro Albizu Campos, who first came to prominence in the 1930s, as the leader of the Partido Nacionalista. With a thick mustache and an ever-present bow tie, Albizu Campos looked the part of the Harvard-educated lawyer he was, a dapper firebrand who advocated armed rebellion against American “plutocracy.” In the midst of a series of incidents starting in 1935—Nationalists attacking police, police attacking Nationalists, each with deadly consequences—he was indicted on charges of “conspiring to overthrow the government of the United States” and sent to a federal penitentiary for ten years.

  By the time Albizu Campos was released, in 1947, major political change had begun in Puerto Rico, but not the kind he had in mind. Luis Muñoz Marín, a PPD member who had long been an outspoken supporter of independence, had recently changed his mind, deciding that a total split from the United States was not, in fact, a pragmatic path forward. The ELA was his proposed alternative. In 1948, Muñoz Marín was elected the territorial governor, the first voted into office rather than appointed by the U.S. president. The ELA passed in 1952, along with the Puerto Rico Constitution (both of which required the approval of Congress).

  To Nationalists, it was a step backward, and Muñoz Marín was a traitor who was undermining the cause of true sovereignty, not just through the ELA but also in his support, in 1948, of the Ley de La Mordaza, or Gag Law, which made it illegal to fly the Puerto Rican flag, sing patriotic songs, organize pro-independence events, or even write in support of nationalism. (The law was repealed in 1957.)

  Of course, outlawing a point of view doesn’t make it go away. In the autumn of 1950, while the ELA debate was in full fervor, Albizu Campos called for a revolt, and what followed was just that: the largest armed insurrection in modern American history and one that is curiously absent from the nation’s collective memory.

  On October 30, Nationalists in San Juan, Ponce, Peñuelas, Mayagüez, Naranjito, Arecibo, Utuado, and Jayuya held rallies and attacked police stations; in San Juan, they attempted to storm the governor’s residence and to take over the federal courthouse. The United States government declared martial law, sent in five thousand National Guard troops, and deployed P-47 Thunderbolt airplanes to bomb Nationalist-held buildings in Utaudo and Jayuya. The uprisings lasted just a few days and left twenty-eight people dead, including sixteen Nationalists. (The story is well documented in Nelson A. Denis’s 2015 book The War Against All Puerto Ricans.)

  In the states, two Nationalists living in the Bronx, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, traveled to Washington, D.C., where President Truman was staying at Blair House while the White House was being remodeled. On November 1, 1950, Collazo and Torresolo attempted to storm the residence. In the ensuing gun battle with police and Secret Service agents, Torresolo and a police officer were killed, while Truman—who was napping when the shooting started, and initially got up to look out the window—was unharmed.

  Four years later, another headline-grabbing act in Washington, D.C.: On March 1, 1954, four Nationalists, Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Miranda, Irving Flores Rodríguez, and Andrés Figueroa Cordero, entered the visitors’ balcony overlooking the floor of the House of Representatives, and opened fire with automatic pistols. Five congresspeople were hit, though none were killed. Lebrón was the group’s leader, and although she later claimed to have fired at the ceiling, it is she—“dressed stylishly with high heels and bright red lipstick”— who has entered the lore. “She emptied the chambers of a big Luger pistol, holding it in her two hands, and waving it wildly,” the New York Times reported. “Then she threw down the pistol and whipped out a Puerto Rican flag.”

  Remarkably, the four shooters were arrested, not killed in a shoot-out. Lebrón, Miranda, Flores Rodríguez, and would-be Truman assassin Oscar Collazo were granted clemency by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. When they returned to San Juan, “5,000 Puerto Ricans gathered to welcome [their] American Airlines jet,” Time magazine reported.

  What’s especially notable about Carter’s action is that it came at the same time that
a new group, called Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN)—Armed Forces of National Liberation—was carrying out attacks in New York and Chicago, calling the acts statements “against Yanki colonial domination.” Over the course of a decade, starting in October 1974, FALN bombed Department of Defense offices, military recruiting stations, banking headquarters, restaurants, and other military and civilian locations—in all, seventy-two bombings and forty incendiary attacks. The acts injured eighty-three people and killed five, including four in a 1975 bombing of the Fraunces Tavern in Manhattan.

  Before she died, in 2010, Lolita Lebrón came around to a more nonviolent point of view—independence, yes, but through civil disobedience and activism. At my hotel in El Yunque, the pro-statehood owner told me that he used to cross paths with Lolita Lebrón now and then, and “she was a real nice lady.”

  Quique emphasized that the days of violent action were over. “We have a political struggle, but no bombas.”

  I WOKE UP early to a horse clopping by on Ana and Quique’s subdivision street. Ana packed me a bag of fruit for the road and Quique pulled out a map and showed me how to get to Barranquitas, about an hour’s drive away, where I had a date with Luis Muñoz Marín’s father, Luis Muñoz Rivera, one of the early leaders of the Puerto Rican autonomy movement. The house in which he was born is now a museum, showcasing family history and his death mask.

  The route wound along mountain passes and through the town of Aibonito, whose name means, literally, “Oh! Beautiful”—before arriving in Barranquitas, which means, somewhat more unnervingly, “Little Mudslides.” I gulped the crisp high-altitude air and strolled around the central plaza before heading up the block to Casa Muñoz Rivera. It was a beige, one-story wood-frame house hard against the street, with closed-up shutters and a thoroughly locked front door.

  It was twelve-thirty p.m. I had nowhere else to be today; I’d already booked a room at a nearby guesthouse. On cue, a man walked by wearing houndstooth pants and a gray button-up shirt with pens tucked neatly inside a little pocket on the sleeve. A chef.

  “Perdóneme,” I began, and asked him in Spanish if the museum was just closed for lunch.

  He answered in English: “No, it’s closed today.” His name was embroidered on his shirt: CARLOS.

  “Where you from?” he asked.

  “Minneapolis,” I said. “In the middle.”

  His eyes lit up. “Prince!”

  “Yeah!” I said. “And Bob Dylan!”

  Carlos gave me a sideways look. He had closely trimmed short hair and a probing gaze softened by a quick if gruff smile.

  “What are you doing right now?” he asked. “You got time?”

  I nodded, laughing. Carlos led me down the block, to a door with a sign reading CAFÉ LUCIA. Inside were ten or twelve tables with red tablecloths covered in plastic, black-and-white photos on the wall, and no one else around but a sous chef chopping vegetables in the open kitchen. Carlos grabbed a guitar from below a kitchen counter and walked me over to the bar.

  “You want a shot?”

  My plans for the day were changing with remarkable velocity.

  Carlos grabbed a bottle of dark rum and motioned over the sous chef, a young man named Emanuel. We toasted and Emanuel gave a friendly nod, then went back to the kitchen. Carlos stared at me for a moment, as though trying to make me flinch, then grinned and started playing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” He paused every few measures to remember the words, then continued in a Dylan growl.

  Carlos had opened Café Lucia six months earlier, he said. His specialty was Puerto Rican–Asian fusion. He showed me a menu, everything written out in a red script: egg rolls with Puerto Rican beef, chicken with a mango-ginger chutney, tempura shrimp.

  “I trained at the Culinary Institute of America,” Carlos said. “Then I worked at the InterContinental in Panama, the Caribe Hilton in San Juan. I was Emeril’s sous chef in Orlando . . .”

  He could cook anywhere, he said, but he decided to come back home, settling down with his wife to raise their two young daughters in a familiar place. Carlos pulled out his iPhone to show me photos of his daughters, and regaled me with stories about Barranquitas. There were the gregarious blind brothers who walked around selling lottery tickets, asking people what number they wanted and somehow always knowing what number was on each ticket. The guy who made a living handing out flyers for businesses but spent most of his days in the library, studying Ph.D.-level textbooks. The amusement park with a vaguely Wild West theme, costumed cartoon mascots, a small shop selling cheese imported from Paris, and a main attraction of helicopter rides over the valley.

  “It’s like a comic book or a movie, man,” Carlos said. He paused and smirked. “You gotta be true to your home, you know?”

  Business was okay, but he’d put a lot of money into this place, and just since he’d opened, he said, “We got hit with eighty-seven new taxes.” He held up a plastic cup. “Four percent gas tax on everything, including this. How the fuck we gonna survive?”§

  Some nights, restaurant owners in Barranquitas would call each other. “Hey, man, you got anyone? No? We’re all coming over.”

  “I gotta help people,” Carlos said. “It drives my wife and my mother crazy: ‘Think about the money!’ I don’t need a dishwasher, but this guy, he needed a job and some help, so I hired him.”

  Carlos rapped his knuckles on the counter. “We touch wood so all the spirits hear us and give us a chance. It’s not about business—it’s about love, man.” He reached under the counter and pulled out a can of beer. “You want a Medalla Light?”

  I WENT OUT to the plaza and sat there enjoying the cool, sunny afternoon. After a few minutes, a pair of twenty-somethings came by taking pictures of the plaza, and we started talking. David, wearing a Spanish soccer jersey and red Toms shoes, was an architecture student working on his master’s degree at Cornell; Edda was a photographer, in a black shirt and tight jeans. After some introductory pleasantries, David said that they’d just heard about a historic house on the hill above town, where there was evidently some kind of garden party going on. They were going to try to talk their way in—would I like to join them?

  It was that kind of day. Up the hill we went, past gates reading EL CORTIJO and up a driveway winding around manicured grounds with a massive Spanish villa set in the middle. The party was winding down, the tents being dismantled, but David charmed the owners with a bashful student-of-architecture plea, and soon we were inside for our own private tour. In all my travels in the territories, I’d seen countless shacks and set foot in many middle-class houses and gaped from afar at the occasional oceanfront villa. But this was something else entirely. Here, in a little-known town in the mountains of a struggling island, was the most opulent house I’d ever entered.

  It was the sort of place where the guest room has a full coat of arms with swords and an honest-to-goodness suit of armor in the corner. The open stairway to the second floor had a custom-made Tiffany chandelier and, progressing up the stairs, around eighty handmade tiles telling the story of Don Quixote. The rest of the tile, on the floors and halfway up the walls in nearly every room, had Moorish patterns with intricate, delicate, repeating forms modeled, the home owners said, on the tile of Alhambra in Grenada. There were paintings by Spanish masters and tall lamps imported from Italy and carved wooden tables that you could probably trade for a decent car. David asked a torrent of questions, the home owners happily answered, and Edda and I merely gaped.

  By the time we left, it was after seven p.m., and we were hungry. We parked at the plaza, where teenagers were filming each other break-dancing, and speed-walked to Café Lucia. I’d told David and Edda the whole story: how I’d met Carlos on the sidewalk and he’d poured me a shot and sung me a song, how it turned out he was a seriously pedigreed chef and this meal was gonna be epic, and—

  The door was locked.

  I couldn’t believe it. I refused to believe it.

  We walked down the alley to the back d
oor and peered in. Carlos and Emanuel were talking at the bar. The kitchen lights were off. Carlos looked at me like I’d let him down.

  “The restaurant is closed.”

  My heart sank.

  His expression softened. “. . . But I will cook for you. No menus! Just what I want. We had no customers and so I said I just wanna go out. But now you’re here.”

  Carlos switched on the kitchen light and pulled out a cutting board, holding it up with obvious relish, as if to say, Watch this.

  Another couple of customers appeared, and then another, and a friend of Carlos’s named Leo wandered in and invited himself to join our table, telling us stories from their childhood and boasting, repeatedly, of the view from his house, overlooking a valley. Soon the conversation was spanning across the tables, an impromptu dinner party in an officially closed restaurant. And then the food came. I’d been a touch concerned that, after all this, it wouldn’t live up to my hype, but from my first bite of delicate tempura, it went above and beyond. David and Edda and I exchanged approving mumbles as we tucked into egg rolls with Puerto Rican beef and succulent, fall-apart ribs with a luscious tamarind sauce. As we licked our fingers, more plates arrived, with grilled chicken with a ginger-mango chutney that prickled my mouth in an oddly satisfying way, sweet and spicy. Everything was served with a modern flourish, on broad white plates with squiggles of sauce. Carlos was having fun, showing off.