For Puerto Rico, the after-effects have been much more lasting, and also much harder to pin down. One clear result seems to have been the growth of a larger block of Puerto Ricans supporting statehood. For a long time, there have been three blocks on the political future of the island: full independence from the mainland, full statehood, and a continuation of the current status of protectorate. Pre-2017, supporters of the status quo often argued that Puerto Rico had a pretty good deal that allowed them to have a mix of reasonable autonomy, low taxes, and protection from the United States. However, autonomy had already been undermined in the 2000s when Puerto Rico had been unable to pay its debts and been forced to accept an outside, unelected board to run its economic affairs.
When the hurricanes hit and the federal government proved unable or unwilling to provide prompt aid, the "protection" leg of the old status quo platform suffered a serious blow. Since 2017, public sentiment in Puerto Rico for continuing the commonwealth has dropped significantly, while support for both full statehood or full independence have gone up. Right now, support for full statehood is the strongest sentiment by a healthy margin, with people feeling that if Puerto Rico were a state, it would have been given support that other states suffering from natural disasters have received.
Identity and politics
"Maritza and Carmen" takes place after the two hurricanes, and it features a woman whose life has been completely erased by the storms. She can't remember her past, other than in flashes. When her new lover Juancho finds an article about her daughter who is looking for her, Maritza, who now realizes that her former name was Carmen, isn't especially interested in meeting her daughter Taína.
In a sense, by making the story all about Maritza/Carmen's desire to figure out her own identity and to reject whatever of her past that doesn't fit her new vibe, the story is taking a huge step back from the political. But as feminist theorists have been telling us for more than half a century now, the personal is political, because the rubber of power structures meets the road of personal decisions in the tiny decisions of our private lives. So Maritza's identity crisis is political; it's simply a political drama played out on a small scale.
Maritza prefers her new life to her former life as Carmen. In her new life, she is sexier (both her daughter and Juancho use this word), thinner, and less uptight. It's tempting to think that Maritza, with her sudden power to remake herself, is a microcosm of Puerto Ricans post-2017. Maritza--whose very name is a diminutive of Mary/Maria, the storm that took her memory from her, although she claims to have taken her new name from the Nuyorican woman who saved her--is redefining her identity at a time when many of her fellow Puerto Ricans are doing the same thing. However, Martiza, unlike many others, does not seem interested in a more "authentic" version of Puerto Rican identity. She is dismissive of the patron of Juancho's cafe looking at reprints of a island artist, "as if she were in a gallery." When she learns that her daughter's name is Taína--closely related to the Taino, the aboriginal dwellers on the island--she reproaches herself for not picking a better, more original name. Her daughter bemoans the loss of a Taino relic, but Maritza has other worries.
Although Juancho chooses the foods he makes based partly on "family comfort and criollo identity," Maritza seems not particularly interested in either. But it isn't just Boricua enthusiasm Maritza is short of. She's also not interested in her former ideologies that she embraced prior to the hurricane, the ones associated with life on the mainland or her former career as a police officer. When she learns that she was once married to a white man in New York, she has no interest in learning anything about him. When she finds out she used to be a police officer, she wonders why, when she dislikes the police. She mocks the "mainland American dream" of West Side Story by taking the name of the girl Maria from the musical and replacing it with the hurricane of the same name, then distorting a line from one of the musical's most recognizable songs: "Maria, Maria, Maria, Maria, all the horrible sounds of the world in a single word."
Maritza is now in a state where she rejects both her pre-hurricane identity and any attempt to force her post-hurricane reality into too strictly defined a reality. She isn't a microcosm of the people, striving for a more authentic sense of identity. She isn't Puerto Rico, she's just Maritza, and she isn't looking to the outside world for meaning at all. In this sense, she's representative of another Puerto Rican reaction to the hurricanes: autogestión. It means something like "self-management," and, in spite of how non-politically Maritza attempts to hold to the view, it's a very political, social movement. Since Puerto Rico realized that the mainland isn't going to jump to any hoops to improve life on the island, the island has since begun to look to itself. Maritza is a more extreme version of this; for her, autogestión has to do with managing her own life.
It's kind of a humble choice. It may not sound as grand as a proudly patriotic, full-throated "Boricua" vision, one in which a person's every choice is circumscribed by the need to be authentically Puerto Rican. Maritza is more concerned with how the flowers she puts out on the tables look. It's a classic "tend your own garden" kind of ending, literally. It may not sound grand or inspiring, but in the reality of a post-Maria world--both the hurricane and the musical and all it represents--it's all Maritza can scrape together.
One reality of the post-Maria world for Puerto Ricans--and for Maritza as well--is the loss of a sense of place. Although even long before 2017, Puerto Rican movement between the mainland and home was often described as "El vaivén," referring to the tendency of people to move back and forth, the hurricanes turned that up a notch. Many people soon after had no choice but to depart for the mainland. Maritza had returned to Vega Baja before the storms. If there was a born-again Boricua moment for her, it was then, before Maria, not after. Vega Baja was where her family was from, including one progenitor who had helped create the island's constitution.
It's an interesting inversion of expectations. One would think that after the hurricanes, when the island became aware of the extent to which the mainland didn't really care, would be the moment of a turn toward Puerto Rican nationalism, but it isn't, at least for Maritza. This came before the hurricanes, and that turn is rejected as much as anything else by Maritza. After waking up with her memory gone, Maritza is in Arecibo, then she is sent to San Juan (passing by Vega Baja on the way). At the end, Martiza seems content to stay in San Juan, along with Juancho, whose name, like Maritza's, is a diminutive, in this case a diminutive of "Juan," the saint for whom the city in which they live is named. Both Maritza and Juancho are content to live diminutive lives shaped by the great events around them, and escaping only by their willingness to be too small to notice.
It's an interesting inversion of expectations. One would think that after the hurricanes, when the island became aware of the extent to which the mainland didn't really care, would be the moment of a turn toward Puerto Rican nationalism, but it isn't, at least for Maritza. This came before the hurricanes, and that turn is rejected as much as anything else by Maritza. After waking up with her memory gone, Maritza is in Arecibo, then she is sent to San Juan (passing by Vega Baja on the way). At the end, Martiza seems content to stay in San Juan, along with Juancho, whose name, like Maritza's, is a diminutive, in this case a diminutive of "Juan," the saint for whom the city in which they live is named. Both Maritza and Juancho are content to live diminutive lives shaped by the great events around them, and escaping only by their willingness to be too small to notice.
This really deepens the story - thank you!
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