Before the war, Spain had grudgingly granted Puerto Rico limited home rule, an attempt to forestall an independence movement. It arguably began in 1898, when United States forces invaded Puerto Rico, then a colony of Spain, during the Spanish-American War. The disasters compounded a social and economic calamity that has been brewing for over a century. The hurricanes weren’t the beginning of the story, though. It was a clear, sunny day, a year and a half after the hurricanes, but the neighborhood was in yet another post-storm blackout. On the second day we visited, the school was closed. Another elementary school we saw, in the western city Mayagüez, had reopened a formerly vacant wing to take in students from nearby shuttered schools. ![]() I asked a teacher at one partially destroyed school in the central mountains if she felt abandoned by the government. The lag compounded the economic damage and contributed to the deaths of anywhere from 2,650 to 3,290 people. The Trump administration’s dismissive federal response to the storm - punctuated by the hiring of Whitefish Energy, a small and inexperienced Montana-based contractor with ties to the administration, to oversee reconstruction of the electrical grid - helped leave Puerto Rico in the dark for months. Most of the damage is the result of the catastrophic 2017 hurricane season, when Hurricanes Irma and Maria blasted through, wrecking homes and destroying the islands’ archaic electrical grid. Landslide-prone slopes loom, unrestrained, behind buildings filled with students. Even in schools that remain in use, mold creeps, roofs are torn and gymnasiums sag like wet shoe boxes. In others, neighbors had refashioned empty classrooms into stables for horses, rabbits and pigs. Some of the buildings had been left to addicts and thieves. Stray dogs made their beds beneath teachers’ desks. Books and blackboards rotted in the humidity. ![]() The photographer Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi and I spent weeks touring these monuments to neglect. As the summer wet season gives way to the wary hurricane watch of an ever-warmer fall, no evidence of this decline is more powerful than the islands’ hundreds of abandoned schools. Decades of abuse, austerity, corruption and now the ravages of climate change have triggered an exodus of people and money. Away from the echoing drums, down forgotten streets and across green mountains, the islands are emptying. The crowd’s ire was fueled in part by a sense of absence. They sang, danced and demanded the ouster of the commonwealth’s negligent governor, Ricardo Rosselló - and, with him, the federal control board that holds economic power over the United States’ oldest remaining colony in the Americas. Thousands of the islands’ residents marched shoulder to shoulder through cities. ![]() During the blazing summer of 2019, Puerto Rico was in tumult.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |