Notes on Puerto Rico: Sin Pie Forzao'

It’s the first time I write about Puerto Rico. The place I was born. Our beautiful island. The oldest colony in the modern world.

I acknowledge that I’m writing this from privilege. Parental leave with my newborn beside me. I heard Roy Brown’s “Boricua en la Luna” and something inside me clicked. I needed to write about Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico, for me, is the only toxic relationship you are permitted to have as a Boricua.

My parents live here. My ex-wife lives here. My 5-year-old daughter lives here. My partner’s family lives here. My sister lives here. Many dear friends still live in Puerto Rico. So when I talk about Puerto Rico, this isn’t academic because I’m watching Puerto Rico’s government and infrastructure grind the people I love in near real time. Through media, which is what I can consume nowadays from the USA mainland, most I see is criminality and corruption at all levels of the island, religious commentary about politics, the celebrities, and gore left, right, and center (on the TV, yes! they don’t even censor stuff in the island, but the taboo topics are plenty!). If you’re reading this from the island, you probably know worse situations and cases than I do.

I graduated from Colegio San Antonio in Río Piedras. I went to the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras, but eventually gave up—disillusionment after disillusionment—and left to chase the money bags. The American Dream. I got it actually, I made and got my own American dream, then lost it, then got it again, then lost it again. Most of us aren’t that lucky. We boricua, we work hard and struggle hard.

Anyways, the point of this essay is to point out things. So, if something here tightens your stomach or pisses you off a little, good. That reaction is data. Trust it. I’m not asking you to agree with me. I’m asking you to just notice.

The Baseline

Puerto Rico’s median household income is $25,096 while the U.S.A. mainland’s median household income sits at $78,538. This means that about ~43% of Puerto Rico residents live in poverty, the highest rate of any U.S. jurisdiction. Mississippi, the poorest state, is under 20%. This means that if you are in public around 10 people, there’s a chance that 4 of you are below the poverty line, poor. This baseline is important to setup as context, and it’s a stark contrast of how Boricuas present themselves. El fronte, el piquete.

Electricity costs 34 cents per kWh. Mainland average is about 14 cents. That’s nearly 2.5× the price for a grid that has collapsed repeatedly under private management (Hey Luma!).

Tolls increased again January 1st, 2026, with hikes across PR-22, PR-52, PR-5, PR-20, PR-53, PR-66 and the Puente Teodoro Moscoso (Metro Puerto Rico, 2026). Traveling round-trip on the José de Diego highway from San Juan to Hatillo now costs $13.60, up from $12.40 (Primera Hora, 2025).

The percent of debt to personal income is almost 90%—a ratio where anything above 50% indicates financial distress (Consolidated Credit, 2025). Six out of ten people who seek financial advisory services express feeling overwhelmed by debt. “People are no longer able to make ends meet, and they’re using credit cards as part of their income to maintain certain levels of consumption” (Washington Journal Puerto Rico, 2025).

And healthcare isn’t just becoming unaffordable—the doctors are leaving. Puerto Rico loses nearly 400 physicians annually to the mainland, where family doctors earn an average of $237,000 compared to $194,307 on the island (JAMA Health Forum, 2024). Between 2010 and 2012, more than 4,000 health professionals—approximately 9% of the healthcare workforce—migrated to the U.S. mainland (Urban Institute, 2021). The ones who stay face longer wait times, reduced services, and the same exhaustion that keeps everyone else from engaging politically.

Our Education systems are following the same pattern. The Universidad de Puerto Rico, the island’s only public university system and the source of 80% of all higher education R&D in Puerto Rico (Grupo CNE, 2021), has had its budget slashed by 47% since the Junta de Control Fiscal arrived (Rumbo Alterno, 2024). The Ley 2 de 1966 guaranteed UPR 9.6% of the general fund. That formula was frozen in 2015 under the PPD and gutted from 2017 under the PNP and the JCF (Momento Crítico, 2022). In a single cuatrienio, UPR lost $127 million in Department of Education contracts that shifted to private institutions (Diálogo UPR, 2016). Meanwhile, administrators of the Sistema Ana G. Méndez have publicly expressed interest in buying UPR campuses like Utuado, Aguadilla, and Ponce (Bandera, 2009). Former governor Pedro Rosselló worked for Ana G. Méndez while his son pushed online education privatization proposals that would funnel public students into private hands (Bandera, 2021). The system is a family dynasty—founded by Ana G. Méndez, passed to her son, now run by her grandson José F. Méndez Méndez, whose 2024 total compensation exceeded $1.35 million at a nonprofit institution running a $10.7 million deficit (ProPublica, 2024). You defund the public university, starve its contracts, then position the private one to absorb what’s left. This is not neglect, it is literally the business plan, and apparently it’s not even overt, this is public knowledge nowadays. “There is an attempt to have a Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans,” as Dr. Marisol LeBrón put it (Borgen Magazine, 2025). In Ricardo Rosselló’s leaked Telegram chat, his publicist Edwin Miranda wrote it even more plainly: “I saw the future. It’s so wonderful, there are no Puerto Ricans” (¡Presente! Media, 2024).

Those fancy cars you see when you visit? Welp! They’re mostly financed, naturally. Puerto Ricans carry $1,300 more in auto debt than mainland Americans on average, while earning 55% of mainland hourly wages. The Tacoma isn’t wealth. It’s a seven-year loan at 84 months. The BMW isn’t prosperity. It’s the visible half of a debt-to-income ratio approaching 90%.

Are we the biggest spenders in the USA? No. But we might be the most leveraged ones. Private consumption accounts for 80% of Puerto Rico’s GDP, compared to ~68% on the mainland. We have the largest shopping mall in the Caribbean, 2.1 million square feet of retail, in a territory where 43% live in poverty and the median household income is $25,096.

Congressional testimony called it what it is: “high levels of private consumption and indebtedness enabled by having access to a stronger currency than its economic fundamentals would warrant.” We consume at American standards on Puerto Rican wages, financed by American credit cards at 30% interest.

So yeah—jump on the Tacoma, post the beach pic, and let’s talk archetypes (stereotypes?).

The Salaried Professionals

If you’re a salaried professional in Puerto Rico, you are almost certainly underpaid to the point that political engagement becomes inherited instead of examined. How your parents vote is probably how you vote. If you are always exhausted the old voto íntegro system made it easy to stay superficial in politics. In 2012, the PNP pulled 47% of its votes straight-ticket. The PPD got 46%. That’s 93% of voters marking one X under their family’s color. Straight-ticket voting was the default for over 96% of voters.

Here’s a concrete example from one of the hardest working women I’ve ever met: A Director of Sales at the largest cornmeal manufacturer on the island—a billion-dollar company, by the way—making under $70k. I have stories like this, professionals of all sorts, in all verticals, and it’s mostly the same story.

Here’s another: A public school teacher on the island made $1,750 a month as their base salary for 13 years straight. No adjustments for inflation. No cost-of-living increases. The same $21,000 annual floor while electricity doubled and groceries climbed. It took 70% of teachers walking out in 2022 to force a temporary $1,000 monthly increase. Meanwhile, the U.S. mainland average teacher salary sits at $72,030. Even Mississippi, the lowest-paying state, averages $47,000.

Executive responsibility with entry-level mainland pay is basically the vibe, the norm. If you live here, you know this isn’t rare. You know exactly who and what I’m talking about.

Y’all work 50+ hour weeks and commute through toll roads that cost $35–40 a month minimum. Then, again, pay double the mainland electricity rate.

By the time election season comes around, salaried professionals are cooked because exhaustion isn’t a side effect. It’s the mechanism that ensures they mark one X. Go home. Keep the machine moving because they don’t have the energy to fight the machine. Rajamos la papeleta! Yay!

About 22% of these households pay credit card late fees. These aren’t irresponsible people. These are professionals drowning inside a cost structure designed to bleed them slowly.

I was one of these, but the colonized in me was too strong, so I left to chase money in the mainland.

The Welfare Class

This group, the “welfare class”, is exploited for votes and federal assistance dollars, often without full visibility into how the extraction works. The finesse in these matters, this is where our politicians spend all their energy, not on actual meaningful work, in PR (public relations) and the welfare class eats that shit up like sandwichitos de mezcla. Oh and the other “classes” talk so much shit about these, “los cuponeros son el problema”, it’s so misguided!

1.4 million people in Puerto Rico live below the federal poverty line. Almost one-in-five reports foregoing medical treatment because of cost (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 2023).

They live genuinely hard lives. IMHO, our people live in HARD-MODE difficulty.

Consumer culture becomes the only accessible form of agency when you are surviving like this. Jordans. Cash for verse cabrón. A moment of dignity. I get it. The cruelty isn’t how they spend. The cruelty is that consumption is the only dignity the system offers while stripping healthcare, education, and mobility.

And no, our people aren’t all housed either. In 2024, average home prices on the island increased by 15%, with the typical home now costing $221,824. Puerto Rican families earn only 61% of the income needed to qualify for a mortgage (Reason Foundation, 2025). Among extremely low-income renters, 86% experience severe cost burdens, meaning they spend more than half their income just keeping a roof (National Low Income Housing Coalition, 2025). The official point-in-time count found 2,096 homeless individuals in 2024 (San Juan Daily Star, 2024), but those numbers don’t capture the families doubled up with relatives, the people sleeping in cars, or the post-María displaced who never came back. The real number is worse. It always is.

And let’s talk about the caseríos públicos—Puerto Rico’s 328 public housing projects where roughly 100,000 people live (Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, 2022). These aren’t just housing. They’re open-air laboratories for what happens when you concentrate poverty, underfund maintenance for decades, then blame the residents for the decay.

After María, entire projects flooded from rivers that hadn’t been managed properly for years. Buildings got condemned from earthquake damage that revealed structural problems nobody bothered fixing. 1,169 housing units are currently on the demolition list, with 492 families still living in them (Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, 2022). People are literally living in buildings scheduled for demolition. Not being relocated. Not being given options. Just living there while the government decides what’s profitable.

The plan? Tear down the caseríos and build “mixed-income” developments. Sounds progressive until you see the numbers. When they demolished Las Gladiolas and built Renaissance Square in Hato Rey, they promised housing for 125 families. Only 12 of the original families made it into the new complex (Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, 2022). The rest? Scattered. Displaced. Erased from neighborhoods they’d lived in for generations.

This is gentrification with a wrecking ball. The caseríos get stigmatized as dangerous, left to rot through deliberate neglect, then cleared for developments that price out everyone who used to live there. And the people in the caseríos? They know exactly what’s happening. They’re not stupid. They’re just powerless against a system that sees them as inventory to be relocated rather than people with roots.

When the power goes out, these are the people who die first.

By the way, seven years after María, Puerto Rico still doesn’t have an integrated system to identify people who depend on electricity to survive.

I’m not qualified to speak for this group. My father grew up in poverty as an orphan in Santurce but I didn’t. What I know is secondhand. What I do know is that they are the most exploited and the most disposable when infrastructure fails. Their story deserves a first-person voice.

The Affluent (Los Apellidos)

Inherited wealth, recognizable surnames, political dynasties. The families whose names appear on buildings, law firms, and campaign finance reports in the same breath. Many run for office. Many steal. Corruption in Puerto Rico isn’t episodic—it’s ambient. A steady parade of indictments across administrations confirms what everyone already knows (Refworld, 2012).

This group doesn’t just benefit from corruption. They architect it. They write the laws, fund the campaigns, and sit on the boards that award the contracts. Then when things collapse, they retreat behind generators, private water systems, and gated communities while the rest of the island sits in the dark.

And then there are the new apellidos. The ones nobody can pronounce because they just got here. Since 2012, over 6,000 wealthy investors from the mainland have relocated to Puerto Rico under Act 60 (formerly Acts 20 and 22), lured by 0% capital gains tax while keeping their U.S. citizenship (Borgen Magazine, 2025). They spent an estimated $1.3 billion on real estate between 2015 and 2019 (Catalyst Planet, 2025). Housing prices in San Juan jumped 22% between 2018 and 2021. The median listing in San Juan hit $905,000 in January 2024 (YIP Institute, 2024). In a territory where the median household income is $25,096.

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz called it directly: “I don’t think attracting tax avoiders is a good thing. Rather than bringing in revenue, they are raising the cost of living” (Latino Rebels, 2022). The Centro de Periodismo Investigativo found that the majority of Act 22 grantees “barely create jobs and represent minimal impact on the local economy” (Latino Rebels, 2022).

So the old money steals through politics and the new money steals through tax code. The result is the same: Puerto Ricans get displaced from their own island. Entire blocks in Condado and Old San Juan converted to Airbnbs. El Charco del Hippie, a swimming hole families used for generations near El Yunque, sold for $2.2 million to investors marketing it for short-term rentals. Vieques residents described it as a “tsunami of gentrification” at a United Nations decolonization hearing (Time, 2021).

They want a Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans. The old apellidos vacation in Spain, send their kids to U.S. colleges, and invest in mainland real estate. The new ones arrive, buy beachfront, dodge taxes, and petition the local government to protect their investment while suing to block the modest donation requirements of their own tax decrees.

The record is public. The indictments are public. The displacement data is public. What isn’t public is any coherent plan to reverse it. The colonization is not something that just happened, it’s still happening!

The Religious Bloc

The congregation that votes as instructed.

Proyecto Dignidad got 73,613 votes in the 2024 governor’s race. That’s 6.63%. Down from 87,379 in 2020 which means that by every electoral metric, they’re shrinking but they also passed more religiously motivated legislation in 2025 than the previous four decades combined. This 7% number will be important later.

PD has two legislators. Two. Senator Joanne Rodríguez Veve and Representative Lisie Burgos Muñiz. But Rodríguez Veve, a canon lawyer trained in Catholic Church law, authored or co-authored virtually every major piece of socially conservative legislation in the current session. The PNP supermajority carried these initiatives across the finish line by the way.

Five laws from two “christian fundamentalist?” legislators in one session. This is the type of stuff we are seeing now from the religious bloc in Puerto Rico. I wonder if we import these ideas from the mainland.

The current Secretary of Justice has issued the legal opinion that after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, abortion in Puerto Rico is governed by the Penal Code, meaning it is only legal when performed to protect the life or health of the woman (Center for Reproductive Rights, 2025). Feminist coalitions called a “pañuelazo” on December 22, 2025, drawing from the Latin American Marea Verde movement (Left Voice, 2026). Doctors warned they could be considered murder suspects under the new statutes.

So yeah, how does a party with 7% of the vote do this? How does the religious bloc have so much power in Puerto Rico?

It’s the damned Churches and Church networks! Puerto Rico’s Protestant population is approximately 33-38%, majority Pentecostal (Wikipedia, “Protestantism in Puerto Rico”). The island has churches on nearly every corner, multiple Christian radio and television stations, institutes, and seminaries. PD’s founder, Dr. César Vázquez Muñiz, is a cardiologist and former pastor whose X bio still reads: “médico cardiólogo, defensor del matrimonio, la familia y la vida; pastor” (WIPR, 2019). The party built organizations in all 78 municipalities and nominated 401 candidates in 2024, including 43 mayoral candidates, in just five years (El Vocero, 2025; McConnell Valdés, 2024). That kind of ground coverage in five years doesn’t come from conventional political organizing. It comes from having a building and a congregation in every town already. Why aren’t these political activism communities, excuse me, churches, not being taxed? This is material for another essay.

PD doesn’t need to win elections to shape governance by the way. It just needs the PNP supermajority to carry its bills, and in 2024, PD aligned with the PNP and PPD in a coalition openly backed by more than 140 corporations and business associations under the name “Democracy is Prosperity” (Revolutionary Communists of America, 2025). Conservative churchgoers who vote PNP still push their PNP legislators to adopt PD positions. The church frames the issues, the congregation applies the pressure, and the PNP delivers the votes.

People tithe money they don’t have to churches that tell them how to vote for politicians who gut healthcare and criminalize their daughters’ medical decisions.

Then they pray.

Los Más Cool

Young, educated, and online.

Hyper-aware of Venezuela and Cuba or Sudan as performance and extremely opinionated about Israel and Palestine and deeply invested in U.S. politics, or at minimum deeply invested in having opinions about it. Many of them consume their politics the same way they consume Netflix: endlessly, passively, as background noise that produces the illusion of engagement. You know at least one person like this.

But a lot of these people have never voted in a Puerto Rican election.

“They all suck.” “It doesn’t matter.” “Ninguno sirve.” “They’re all corrupt.” “What’s the point?”

Here’s the thing: they might be more right than wrong, and that’s the part nobody wants to sit with.

In 2016, the U.S. Congress passed PROMESA and installed “La Junta” in Puerto Rico, a Financial Oversight and Management Board with broad powers over Puerto Rico’s budget where all seven members are appointed by the President of the United States. Neither the Governor nor the Legislature may exercise any control, supervision, or oversight over the Board or its activities (Wikipedia: PROMESA; Oversight Board FAQ). La Junta slashed pensions, delayed infrastructure, and imposed austerity measures that gutted public services (Medium: The Last Two Standing, 2025). 70% of Puerto Rico voters view the Board unfavorably (Data for Progress, 2021).

So when a 28-year-old says “it doesn’t matter who wins,” they’re not being lazy. They’re observing that the most consequential fiscal decisions on the island are made by seven people they didn’t elect and can’t remove, which makes local elections, structurally, a fight over who gets to administer someone else’s austerity plan.

A Penn State University study found the pattern: Puerto Rican youth show simultaneously low formal voting and high activist orientation (PSU Dissertation, 2022). That combination signals a population that sees the electoral system as irrelevant to their actual concerns, not a population that feels powerless. Their parents didn’t just watch votes change nothing. Their parents participated intensely in a system that delivered patronage to insiders and stagnation to everyone else, which is pretty much most of the island. The lesson absorbed isn’t “nothing works.” It’s “the game is rigged, and participation means legitimizing the rigging.” That belief is more specific and harder to undo than generic apathy.

And then there’s the exit valve: leaving the island, like I did. More than 700,000 working-age Puerto Ricans have migrated to the mainland over the past 15 years (NBC News, 2024). The stateside population now surpasses the island population, with Florida recently overtaking New York as the state with the largest Puerto Rican diaspora (Scholars Strategy Network, 2024). The system never has to reform because its harshest critics leave. Frustration gets released through departure instead of building internal pressure for change. The people best positioned to demand accountability are the same people with the strongest economic incentive to go, and once they do, they fall out of the island’s political calculus entirely.

Out of 150,000 young boricuas who reached voting age before the 2024 election, only 40,000, about 25%, had registered (The Latino Newsletter, 2024). Puerto Rico’s youth unemployment rate is 12.5% (World Bank, 2024). The labor force participation rate drops to roughly 22% for ages 15–24 (MacroTrends, 2023).

These are the people who will inherit the debt, the blackouts, the toll hikes, and the hospital closures. They already live it. And most are too busy surviving to trace the architecture of why.

Because all along the option was always there.

The Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño has been on the ballot since 1948. Seventy-seven years. A party that centers Puerto Rican sovereignty, Puerto Rican governance, Puerto Rican self-determination. It has never held the governorship. Not once. And I’m not claiming the island wouldn’t have its own problems under different governance. We would still be a territory of the USA, and we’d have to own whatever mess we made. But at minimum, we’d be making our own decisions about our own future, and that distinction matters.

Why hasn’t it happened? Generations of Puerto Ricans have been so thoroughly colonized that voting PIP registers as secession from the empire. This essay is a testament to my own deprogramming. The colonization runs deep in most of us and we don’t realize it. Imagine thinking that marking a ballot means the Navy shows up Tuesday and the Social Security checks stop Wednesday. The Cold War did a number on us and we are still living with the residue. Decades of statehood-party fearmongering, genuine economic dependency on federal transfers, and the cultural muscle memory of equating “independence” with “Cuba” turned a vote for Puerto Rican self-governance into something that felt existentially dangerous. That’s not stupidity. That’s colonization working exactly as designed.

So when the 2024 data broke the narrative open with la Alianza, it wasn’t because young voters suddenly discovered decolonization. It was because the Alianza coalition (PIP + MVC) gave them a vehicle that didn’t trigger the generational panic.

Juan Dalmau and the Alianza earned 77% of the youth vote according to university student polls across Puerto Rico (LA Progressive, 2025). The status referendum resulted in a 51% to 49% rejection of statehood, with 43% supporting sovereignty options. Turnout jumped from 55% in 2020 to nearly 65% in 2024 (IFES Election Guide, 2024). Young voters responded most favorably to candidates making explicit commitments to self-determination, with a net positive of +44 points among young voters compared to +7 among voters over 60 (Right to Democracy, 2024).

Dalmau didn’t run as the independence candidate. He ran as the anti-corruption, anti-colonial, pro-Puerto Rico candidate. The Alianza repackaged what the PIP had been saying for seven decades into a coalition brand that didn’t sit on the ballot like a grenade. And the young voters showed up.

Which means the disengagement was never really about apathy. It was about colonial conditioning so deep that self-governance looked like self-destruction. The option to take Puerto Rico seriously was on every ballot they ever skipped. Their own internalized colonialism kept them from seeing it.

The Alianza made it easier to see. Whether that coalition sustains beyond one cycle is an open question. But the PIP has been on the ballot since before their grandparents were born.

The question is what took so long for young voters to take themselves seriously.

The Business Owners (Los Conectados)

Small businesses make up 99.7% of all business establishments in Puerto Rico. In 2017, 54% of firms reported revenue decreases while operating expenses increased (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2018). After María, 77% of small businesses reported direct losses from the hurricanes. By 2020, the island’s labor department was estimating that 20-30% of small businesses would close permanently (Puerto Rico 51st, 2021).

Businesses in Puerto Rico open and close like a revolving door. Not because entrepreneurs lack hustle—boricuas work their asses off—but because the game is rigged from the permit office to the procurement process.

The business permit procedure is consistently identified as one of the main obstacles. It got so bad that in June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that existing permit regulations were null and void (GEM Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, 2023). The governor had to enact emergency regulations. Think about that. The system was so broken it was declared unconstitutional.

But permits are just the visible dysfunction. The real story is who gets to survive.

If you’re connected—if you have the right apellido, if you know the right politician, if you went to school with someone’s cousin who sits on the municipal board—your business has a shot. Maybe you get the waste management contract. Maybe you get the asphalt deal. Maybe your invoices get paid on time while everyone else waits months.

If you’re not connected? Good fucking luck.

In the last six months of 2021-2022, the FBI arrested 6 of Puerto Rico’s 78 mayors for public corruption—all for the same thing: taking bribes in exchange for government contracts. Same two companies kept coming up: trash and asphalt. One photo showed the mayor of Guaynabo, one of the island’s most important cities, accepting an envelope of cash from a contractor (NPR, 2022).

The former education secretary and the former head of the Health Insurance Administration were arrested for steering $15.5 million in contracts to politically connected friends (NPR, 2019). Government contracting isn’t just big business in Puerto Rico—it’s $4.4 billion or 20% of the annual budget (University of Illinois, 2024).

Under the guise of fighting corruption, the Puerto Rican government has spent more than $787 million on “anti-corruption and fraud prevention” since 2018 (University of Illinois, 2024). They outsourced anti-corruption work to private companies. Let that sink in. They created an entire industry around preventing corruption—and that industry is itself corrupt, awarding contracts to connected firms who profit from the appearance of oversight.

This isn’t business. This is extraction with a business license.

For every boricua entrepreneur grinding 60-hour weeks at their colmado, their auto shop, their restaurant, there’s a connected contractor getting paid 90 days early while everyone else waits 6 months for municipal invoices. For every small business that closes because they couldn’t navigate the permit maze, there’s a cousin of a senator whose LLC just got another no-bid contract.

Benjamin Torres Gotay, columnist for El Nuevo Día, described it perfectly: Puerto Ricans increasingly feel that “the government is no more than a piñata that corrupt interests can come and pillage” (NPR, 2022).

And the thing that breaks my heart? The entrepreneurs keep trying. One in five adults in Puerto Rico is currently starting or running a new business—fourth highest in their economic bracket, tenth highest globally (GEM, 2023). One in four adults expects to start a business in the next three years.

That’s not naivety. That’s survival. When formal employment pays $25,096 median household income and the lights go out every few months, entrepreneurship isn’t a choice—it’s the only move left.

But without connections, most of these businesses won’t make it past year five. Not because the idea was bad. Not because they didn’t work hard enough. Because the system only sustains the connected while everyone else gets bled dry by permits, bribes, and a procurement process designed to extract from the island rather than build it.

The Conscious Ones (Los Pelús)

The people who understand imperial law, historical patterns, colonial economics. Marginalized precisely because their analysis threatens the bipartisan machinery. They build their own infrastructure out of necessity. These are the professors, philosophers, community leaders, los Tito Kayak, las Lola Rodríguez de Tió. These are our real leaders, the community.

They see everything clearly and can change almost nothing except their own environment, around them. Y cuidao’, porque la policía no protege a la comunidad, protege el capital.

They’re called communists, told to go to Venezuela, dismissed as idealists. They watch the same disasters repeat while their neighbors vote for the same two parties. They organize, they educate, they build solar microgrids and community health clinics, and they watch the elections get stolen anyway.

But if this essay is honest about every other group’s blind spot, the pelús deserve the same honesty. The conscious class has a fragmentation problem of its own. They talk primarily to each other. The language of decolonization, while accurate, often lands as academic jargon to the salaried professional who just wants the lights to stay on. There’s a tendency toward ideological purity that rejects imperfect coalition partners, and a fatigue that sometimes curdles into moral superiority: I already know, I already did the work, you people refuse to see. That posture may be earned, but it doesn’t build the coalitions that actually win elections. Knowing the system is broken and making that knowledge accessible to 3 million people are two completely different skills. The pelús have mastered the first. The second is still in progress.

Still, there’s movement. There’s hope.

The straight-ticket vote dropped from 47%/46% in 2012 to 29%/25% by 2020 (Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, 2024a). The Alianza (PIP/MVC) explicitly rejects voto íntegro. In the 2024 general election, the Alianza secured second place with approximately 33% of the vote—a historic result (McConnell Valdés, 2024). Voter turnout jumped from 55% in 2020 to nearly 65% in 2024 (IFES Election Guide, 2024).

The “corazón del rollo” is bleeding out. The question is whether the erosion translates to actual power transfer before the next 3,000 people die from infrastructure failure.

The Body Count

Hurricane María killed roughly 3,000 people, not because of wind speed, but because the healthcare system collapsed and electricity stayed out for months. Six days after landfall, only 18 of 69 hospitals were functioning in any capacity. Every resident lost power. In rural municipalities, the blackout lasted more than half a year.

This did not end with María.

On New Year’s Eve 2024, nearly 1.3 million homes and businesses were left without electricity. In April 2025, another island-wide blackout shut down the grid again. The timeline keeps repeating. The only variable is who has generators, who has money, and who dies quietly at home.

The affluent have private infrastructure. The religious have prayers. The professionals have exhaustion. The cool people have opinions about other countries. The welfare class has nothing resembling a buffer.

But the outages do not care which clique you belong to. Electricity does not respond to ideology. Dialysis machines do not care how you voted, or if you voted at all. Puerto Rico does not have a representation problem. It has a fragmentation problem. The system survives because each group explains the collapse in a way that preserves its own self-image. No one has to change if the failure can always be blamed somewhere else.

Change is still possible. The data already shows erosion in straight-ticket voting. New coalitions are forming. The old machine is weaker than it pretends to be. But none of that matters if people continue to confuse identity with action.

If the cliques remain intact, the infrastructure will keep failing, and people will keep dying in predictable, preventable ways. That is not a metaphor. It is a policy outcome.

And here’s the thing: this is only what I know about. This is only what made it into the news, what the investigative journalists uncovered, what my family and friends on the island tell me when we talk. This is the visible layer.

I had a beautiful childhood. Fond memories, good friends, a culture I carry everywhere. Puerto Rico is the Island of Enchantment and I mean that without irony. I miss our people. I miss our food.

But something always felt off. I couldn’t name it until college, until I started working and the mechanics of the place became visible. The warmth is real but so is the machinery of extraction underneath it. We have been exploited—this is what we’ve learned—but we do not have to perpetuate the cycle. Corruption belongs on the curb.

I did leave Puerto Rico to live in Miami, Florida (hah, ironic now that I think about it). Chased the American Dream, got it, lost it, got it again. Most of us aren’t that lucky. Coming back has been a long dream of mine. But the political reality, the governance against collective interest, the slow extraction I’ve documented in this essay, it makes that dream feel less possible every year. That’s the melancholy. Loving a place whose leadership doesn’t love you back.

In December 2025, Governor González Colón signed Act 156, a law restricting public access to government documents. The new legislation doubles the time agencies have to respond to information requests, allows the government to classify information as confidential without judicial review, and eliminates privacy protections for people who request records (Associated Press, 2025; Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, 2025c). The same government that failed to track who depends on electricity to survive now gets to decide what you’re allowed to know about how it operates.

For all the talk of winning and chest-thumping from the PNP, their media machinery is loud enough that you’d think Puerto Rico was thriving. The last time they even claimed fiscal health was under Pedro Rosselló in the late ’90s, when the government presented budgets that appeared balanced but were built on accounting gimmicks that helped create the $72 billion debt crisis (Grupo CNE, 2021). Remember “el superávit”? Also PNP. Also corrupt. So fundamentally, what changed? And you might notice that the PPD is notoriously missing from this essay, this is not a coincidence, since the PPD just kneels more quietly, the PPD mindset is so colonized I don’t even want to give words to them so I’ll do just that.

Boricuas argue with other boricuas about why people leave. Everyone has their moral explanation. But the numbers point to one vector: they want us gone. In my case, it worked. I do dream of coming back to a healthier island someday but I don’t know if the current path makes that possible.

I told you at the top: if something here tightened your stomach, that reaction is data. Now what are you going to do with it?

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