The Battle For Paradise

Like so many others, Flores said it felt impossible to take on these systemic issues when you have lost your home, when you are living out of your car, when you are going to friends’ houses to shower. “You’re trying not to fall apart … and people are immobilized because they’re scared, because they’re lost, because they’re just trying to survive

But it’s also true that many governments have deployed a starve-then-sell strategy when it comes to public services: cut health care/transit/education to the bone until people are so disillusioned and desperate that they are willing to try anything, including selling off those services altogether

The exodus also conveniently helps create the “blank canvas” that the governor has bragged about to would-be investors

“Puerto Ricans had already undergone a huge amount of trauma due to the colonial relationship to the United States,” most recently during the debt crisis.

long-awaited “fiscal plan,” which included closing more than 300 schools and shutting down more than two-thirds of the island government’s executive-branch entities, going from a total of 115 to just 35

A way to “start really thinking about how you prepare for the fact that climate change is here.”

A way to “start really thinking about how you prepare for the fact that climate change is here.”

The problem, he went on, is that “people in Puerto Rico are very fearful of thinking about the Big Thing. We are not supposed to be dreaming; we are not supposed to be thinking about even governing ourselves. We don’t have that tradition of looking at the big picture.” This, he said, is colonialism’s most bitter legacy.

Colonialism itself is a social experiment, a multilayered system of explicit and implicit controls designed to strip colonized peoples of their culture, confidence, and power. With tools ranging from the brute military and police aggression used to put down strikes and rebellions, to a law that once banned the Puerto Rican flag, to the dictates handed down today by the unelected fiscal control board, residents of these islands have been living under that web of controls for centuries.

Juan E. Rosario, a longtime community organizer and environmentalist who told me that his own mother was a Thalidomide test subject, put it like this: “It’s an island, isolated, with a lot of nonvaluable people. Expendable people. For many years, we have been used as guinea pigs for U.S. experiments