On September 20, 2017, Maria hit Puerto Rico as a Category 5 hurricane with winds up to 165 mph; just five days after Irma, another Category 5 hurricane with winds up to 185 mph passed over the island. The devastation that Maria left on the island is greater than anyone could have imagined, but the love and resilience that rose within the island will be known as the greatest testament to the strength and perseverance of the Puerto Rican people.
Luis Miranda, Jr. was the moderator for the evening discussion at the 10th Anniversary Practitioners Gathering in Puerto Rico, joined by what he referred to as fellow “disruptors,” May Boeve, Executive Director, 350.org; Gabe Gonzalez, Writer and Comedian; and Christine Nieves, Co-founder and President, Emerge Puerto Rico. The conversation led by Miranda was inspiring, troubling, and enlightening, relevant not only to Puerto Rico, but vulnerable peoples around the world.
Luis asked each panelist where their journies began after he took time to share his personal and political experiences as a Native of Puerto Rico. His sentiments matched those of Gabe and Christine, notions that are intertwined for so many Puerto Ricans about how the island might fall to the wayside without the aid of the United States.
Gabe grew up in Florida after his grandmother left the island with five kids and her young husband who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Christine grew up on the island in a gated community, an elite class and somewhat separate and segregated from the everyday people that struggled in a sad economy and mismanaged system. She too felt the island had nothing to offer and as she built a career in the states through access to education, she became a professor at Florida State University, but inherently felt a longing, a sadness, a pain in her life that drew her back to the island, seven months before Hurricane Maria. May remembers vividly a moment in her childhood where her mother brought her a dictionary one evening. She opened it and pointed at the word 'activist.' She said, “I think this is what you are.” That moment in time defined the future for this someday young global leader, beginning with how she viewed herself and her purpose.
Luis defined the panelists as disruptors, but impressed that “disruptors have the power to destroy, but also to build.” In the aftermath of Maria, he and others on the island found a common spirit. They saw disruptors transform in identity to rebuild Puerto Rico. In the aftermath of a devastating natural disaster that would reverberate for two long years, Gabe stated, “Why can’t we create something new and something better?”
As Christine and her husband began to work to rebuild their local community after Maria, they realized that the entire infrastructure of Puerto Rico was dismantled. “We refused to accept that the original conditions were going to be rebuilt in the same way.” She and her husband became aware that everything had to change. She explained that they went from “having no breakfast” immediately after the storm, to owning twelve chickens, so they would always have a source of eggs. Power was needed, but community-owned solar panels would be the new infrastructure that would withstand another natural disaster.
“We are close to two and a half years post Hurricane Irma and Maria, yet many parts of the island are still feeling the pain of an abandoned lover after a catastrophic disaster,” shared Luis. Aid did not get to the island for weeks, power was out on the island for months, and the death toll from the hurricane and post-conditions was well over 4,000. It’s believed over a hundred thousand people fled the island to the U.S. because they could not survive the dire circumstances. But that’s not the story carried by these disrupters.
“The realization that the U.S. is the savior has long passed and the understanding of the U.S. as colonizer has been accepted” intimated Luis. Nowadays the inherent spirit of the island is about solidarity. Gabe stands by the sentiment that “it’s important for us to reimagine our relationship with U.S., but also important that we reimagine our relationship with ourselves.”
The group’s call of action was to do more. If you’ve already divested funds from climate change causing fossil fuels, good, divest deeper down the supply chain. Spend more endowment money, take the time to fight, question, and change policy. Understand that a movement is not just an idea or a march or a hashtag, a movement is a coalition of something greater than everyone. Boave concluded with a quote from Rev. Yearwood, President of the Hip Hop Caucus, “Organized people beat organized money every time, but when you add organized people with money to one equation, suddenly the momentum shifts dramatically. This is a decisive decade, not just for Puerto Rico, but for the Confluence community.”
