The First Shore
I. Trade Winds and Fate
Before Columbus’s ships arrived with cannons and plague, the indigenous Taíno people called this lush land “Borikén.” Yet it was the Trade Winds, blowing ceaselessly across the Atlantic day and night, that sealed this island’s inescapable historical fate.
In the Age of Exploration, those powerful trade winds functioned like an invisible conveyor belt. Spanish ocean-going fleets set full sail and crossed the Atlantic with the wind at their backs, and when their bows first touched the shores of the Americas, it was Puerto Rico they struck. This enviable geographic position gave San Juan a brutal and unmistakable strategic role from its very founding — in the vast North American colonial map of the Spanish Empire, it was neither Havana, gathering merchant ships and gold, nor Mexico City, wielding the scepter of imperial command. It was born to be the Empire’s “military shield,” a bulwark built to absorb the blow.
II. The Empire’s Shield
The Spanish built the towering Morro fortress here, sealing off the entire bay with thick stone walls and dense gun emplacements. With the cannons came the cross. Missionaries landed on this soil and forced the Catholic faith into the hearts of its people; over centuries, religion not only shaped the island’s moral fabric but served as a form of spiritual sedation. People prayed for salvation in the next life inside their churches, only to step outside and face brutal exploitation in this one. That tension persists to this day: Puerto Rico retains a deep Catholic identity — grandmothers forever clutching their rosary beads — yet on streets where poverty and despair intersect, secular desire and violence become the operative logic of survival for those at the bottom.
The price of history was far more savage than any fortress wall. In an age of relentless cannon fire, when the British Royal Navy, French pirates, and Dutch raiders repeatedly formed battle lines at sea and bombarded this first Caribbean line of defense, those who actually bled on the ramparts were not the aristocrats lounging in faraway Madrid — they were the Criollos and enslaved people who subsisted on plantains and stewed beans. Pushed onto the gun platforms, they gave their bodies to defend a colonial power that offered them nothing but exploitation.
III. A Civilization Left to Fend for Itself
Yet Puerto Ricans were not born to simply endure. In the later years of the long colonial period, common people abandoned by their rulers used their own hands to carve a home out of dense tropical rainforest and desolate coastline, brick by brick. Over nearly a century, they built self-governing town after town. Those streets, plazas, and farmlands were not gifts from any outside power; they were a civilization forged from the sweat and will of local people alone.
IV. A Weary Prize of War
Yet the Spanish-American War of 1898 shattered this peace completely. The U.S. Navy sailed into the Caribbean and poured tons of shells onto the streets of San Juan. With Spain’s defeat, the Americans arrived like arrogant uninvited guests, crashing into a home that Puerto Ricans had spent an entire century building for themselves. The conquerors rewrote the laws, imposed punishing taxes, brutally stripped established local authorities of their power, and installed a compliant, pro-American leadership in their place. Puerto Rico, like a battered prize of war, was forcibly transferred from the hands of a fading old empire to those of a rising new one.
V. Beneath the Surface
For Washington, Puerto Rico’s strategic value has never changed: it remains an irreplaceable staging ground — an unsinkable aircraft carrier. To this day, in America’s strategic maneuvering against Venezuela and other South American nations, Puerto Rico remains the most forward position from which the U.S. military projects power, conducts surveillance, and asserts deterrence across the southern hemisphere.
The shadow of this military dominance is buried beneath the island in a form that is nearly invisible yet omnipresent. In the darkness far below, what kind of war machine is running? Dozens of floors beneath the earth, how many secrets has America pledged against the throat of South America? No one knows. The land beneath Puerto Ricans’ feet, below the surface, has long since ceased to belong to them.
VI. Exile and the Folded Place
Once the door of resistance had been welded shut, the island began a long and desperate exodus.
Countless Puerto Ricans left their homeland, heading for the cold streets of New York in search of a livelihood. The national poet Julía de Burgos is the most heartbreaking name in that diaspora. She had once cried out for independence through her poetry, but in the end withered and died in New York’s poverty and depression, collapsing in the street at just 39 years old, buried for a time under a stranger’s name. That sorrow of exile hardened into a cruel piece of New York street wisdom: when a New Yorker hits absolute rock bottom, with nothing left, people sneer, “He’ll have to move back to Puerto Rico.” In the eyes of the arrogant metropolis, this island that once gave birth to poets and heroes had been reduced to the final refuge of the defeated.
Those who stayed behind struggle to find equilibrium in an intensely fractured society. Puerto Rico is a place that has been “folded.”
VII. Another Arrival
The trade winds never stopped — and they brought me here too. I am, without question, an ordinary, small, and utterly superficial tourist. Just like En Mi Vida Fuiste Turista says:
Tú solo viste lo mejor de mí y no lo que yo sufría
Te fuiste sin saber el porqué, el porqué de mis heridas
Y no te tocaba a ti curarlas, viniste a pasarla bien
I came here for the beaches, the rainforest, and a piña colada. It was only through Bad Bunny’s lyrics that I began to catch a glimpse of the island’s scars. The cycle of colonial logic has completed its most elegant iteration yet: the Spanish colonized with fortresses and crosses, the American military with warships and law, and today’s colonizers do it with tax breaks and property deeds. The method changes; the structure does not — the land of Puerto Ricans has never truly belonged to Puerto Ricans. And it was only when I opened the lyrics of El Apagón and clicked on the translation that I could finally hear the voice beyond the trade winds.
Ya no me quiero ir de aquí
Que se vayan ellos
Lo que me pertenece a mí, se lo quedan ellos
Esta es mi playa, este es mi sol
Esta es mi tierra, esta soy yo