A pair of excellent articles by artist and writer Molly crabapple post-disaster Puerto Rico and the networks of solidarity and change that people are building there:
I arrived in San Juan on July 26, four days after Rosselló had
announced his resignation, and everyone seemed convinced that a new
Puerto Rico was being born. “I had nearly given up,” said José, a
restaurant manager whose design studio went bankrupt after Hurricane
Maria. “The citizens of a colony are now teaching the citizens of the
empire what people power can do,” wrote my friend Christine Nieves, an
organizer on the island’s eastern end. Sugeily Rodríguez Lebrón, a
performer with the radical artistic collective AgitArte, told me she had waited for this moment her entire life.The protesters had done more than boot Rosselló from office. They
wanted the head of every politician that had cheated and mocked the
island, whether or not they had taken part in the recently leaked texts
and chat messages between the governor and senior officials. “Clean the
house,” the slogan went, and by the day, protesters improvised new
chants savaging each potential Rosselló heir apparent. Protesters
repudiated Puerto Rico’s two-party system as a corrupt Punch-and-Judy
show in which each side took turns to build their patronage networks and
made empty promises of either statehood or greater autonomy; and they
rejected, too, the neocolonial Fiscal Control Board imposed by Congress
in Washington, D.C., that has been wrecking the island’s economy with
austerity measures in order to service unpayable, possibly illegal
debts.The protests had revealed, in the words of Puerto Rican writer Ana Teresa Toro, “the true social animal that we are: a beast that is joyous, wild, indocile and untamed, that has slept… until now.”
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/08/09/a-peoples-cry-of-indignation-a-dispatch-from-puerto-rico/