José /  by Tamara Cedre

A culture bearer for his community, Jose has hope in our people and faith in our struggle for self-determination. Always gracious with his time, he teaches anyone who is open to listen. He’s been such a mentor to me and an inspiration for finding my own ways of engaging frontline communities here in Southern California. The first time I met José, he was protesting the Junta in Hato Rey and shared the history of Vieques with me. He was one of many activists that were arrested for protesting the U.S. Navy's occupation there. He told me of the families that were ravaged by disease from arms testing, and how the dumping of heavy metals and toxic chemicals seeped into the soil and water.

Our water is our life...everything flows from it. Jose knows about water and the ecosystems surrounding them. He’s a respected elder and community partner along Caño Martín Peña, he spends his days educating people on the challenges neighborhoods like his face systemically and ecologically. 

The Martín Peña Channel was once a waterway that ran through the middle of San Juan. In the thirties, thousands of families migrated from the mountains to the city to find work, transforming Puerto Rico's economy from rural agriculture to manufacturing as the sugar cane monoculture collapsed. This influx of residents and lack of city planning created squalid living conditions near the city and surrounding waterways. By the midcentury, those settlements along the channel, nicknamed "El Fanguito", were pushed out as the government tried to build a water system for transporting goods. Jose's father was one of many farmers that moved, lived in those slums and later purchased a home along the north of the waterway after government initiatives left families displaced. This is the home Jose lives in now.

Along the channel, eight neighborhoods that started as informal settlements now make up Jose's community. The current threat to area residents is that the water is not flowing in the channel and the stagnation is contaminating everything around it.

In 2002, the government proposed a new project to dredge and clean the channel. While this was a much needed proposal, locals were concerned that the improvements would drive up property values and gentrify the area, like so many other places in proximity to the city. Before they could fight to clean up the channel, they had to ensure their survival to avoid displacement. For over three years, organizers knocked on doors and got the buy in of residents to develop a community land trust, where the rights of the locals could be exercised over outside investors so everyone could have rights to the land.  

While the success of this model inspired international acclaim, the G-8, or eight communities of Caño Martín Peña, are still fighting to clean their water system. After the hurricanes, the situation has become even more dire, as a third of the communities lack a sewer system, and the storm water system has collapsed. Recent federal allocations for flood control and recovery, managed by the Army Corps of Engineers, were withheld from funding the channel dredging project. They categorized the campaign as an ecological project with flood benefits instead of flood mitigation. 

The struggle for environmental justice continues as Jose and his neighbors fight for their survival against higher prioritized rebuilding efforts.

Updated 9-2023
Everytime I go back, there are small developments. The last few images I took are of new housing being built in the community. Some of the residents of the land trust were given a choice to live in newly built homes (projects) along the channel that is being dredged and cleaned or they were offered an opportunity for a grant assisted home loan to move out of the area. Through much sadness, Jose, honoring his wife and children’s wishes, left the community he had lived in since he was a child for a less stressful living situation out of the city. He still returns weekly to the area and showed me the strides that younger organizers have made, but he said it was the hardest decision of his life.

Mayra /  by Tamara Cedre

Mayra lives in the barrio of Puerto Nuevo with her mother and brother, who are ill and bedridden. Mayra is the sole caregiver in the home. Once a month, she pays a registered nurse $200 to watch her family for the day while she runs into town to take care of errands like grocery shopping and getting medical supplies. This is when she leaves the four walls of her home and is able to have time to herself. During the week, she sells sodas from her house to those who knock on her door passing through.

This life was difficult before Maria, but now has become nearly impossible. The hurricane's damage to the top floor of her home was so bad that she had to move everything to the bottom floor. Her rotting roof has not been seen yet by insurance companies as she waits under a pile of claims. Her electricity goes in and out from the precarious rooftop wiring that has also not been fixed.  Every time she loses power, her mother's medical bed made of air deflates, causing a danger of bedsores and great discomfort. 

Though she said she doesn't want people to think of Puerto Rico and only think of the recent hurricanes, she told me this moment is a critical part of our history, too.  People in the coastal communities have lost everything, but communities right in the metro areas of San Juan are also suffering. "We used to help each other in my neighborhood, but the feeling of community went away when people were forced to find ways to survive. Times are changing. I feel alone here now."  She informed us of several other families living on the same street who are also struggling. 

Updated 3-2021
Myra lost her brother. He died in his sleep suddenly. She has so many mixed feelings about it and is contemplating moving to the states after her mother passes.

Updated 9-2023
Myra lost her mother just a short time after. I got to take one last pic of them together, before she passed. Mayra took a loss on the sale of her house and left the island to stay with family in Florida. We stay connected through WhatsApp. I think it’s been a hard change for her, but a moment in her life where she can finally take care of herself.

The sigh of history rises over ruins /  by Tamara Cedre

“The sigh of history rises over ruins…Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.”
― Derek Walcott, Fragments of Epic Memory

My memory of Puerto Rico oscillates between the locus of a place I’ve only visited and an imaginary drawn from my family's memory. In Walcott’s speech, he sees poetry in a similar way to how I see photography, “as an act of remaking, an act that can conjugate both the past and present ” to reconcile these disparate visions. It’s the photograph’s ability to continue; to transcend its temporality, into present conversations, that I am most drawn to.

Before and after Hurricane Maria, I photographed this landscape. There is this tendency within landscape photography to think that somehow the landscape is neutral and timeless; as if it isn’t shaped by human forces. It’s clear to see scars from the military’s presence here. Its easy to observe how climate change and colonial neglect has leveled neighborhoods and shorelines.

But, this land isn’t empty. It’s inhabited by a people who will persevere into the future. It still echos with stories, footprints, traces of my parents, grandparents and now myself during my summers here.

Rubén, Mayra y Amanda /  by Tamara Cedre

Rubén and I are related distantly on my Dad's side. Our family hails from Arecibo. Many moved to the US during the great waves of migration but, some of us remained in Puerto Rico. Rubén remembers leaving on a plane for Florida when he was very young and arriving in a swampy area of Miami that received an influx of immigrants from neighboring islands. It's hard not to smile as he shares his story through the mind of a six year old: My mother dressed me in my best suit. No one showered on that plane. It smelled to high heaven. One of the first meals I ate in the U.S. was a 'hot dog'. I thought, do these people in the states eat dogs? 

He lived for many years in El Barrio, in the same areas around Lexington where my father grew up. But, hardships and homesickness led him to return back to Puerto Rico as a young adult. He has lived in Bayamón ever since, where he married and raised his family. 

I went to visit Rubén on Father's Day. He took me through the neighborhood, several months after the storm. Insurance companies hadn't addressed many houses that were damaged and electrical lines were still down in the streets where people walk. Flat tires are a monthly occurrence as roads remain unfixed and are filled temporarily. He informs me of the politics on the island and the crumbling infrastructure that began decades before Maria in the form of rigged local elections and empty promises from political parties that never delivered. 

His daughters have a grace and sense of humor about all of it— qualities that they've refined after living through this disappointment their whole lives. Mayra works in a restaurant and Amanda just began working with FEMA. Single mothers, they are a close pair that have raised their own children, put them through private school and prepared them for university. Mayra gives me a tour of her backyard garden where she shares some recao seeds with me. Both of them have the "jibara thumb" and try to grow their own veggies and herbs as the weather and their schedules allow. Over dinner, we talked about job opportunities they looked into in the states in between bitefulls of crispy chicharrón.

A few hours into dinner, the electricity goes out. This is a regular occurrence they greet with cheers—as if they just heard their favorite song at a club. Ready with emergency lamps and candles from their pantry, they light some around the table and the rest of our visit feels like we are on a family camping trip; jokes and stories as shadows dance across the walls. 

Update 2018, 2019, 2020
Mayra (Ruben’s youngest daughter) and I stayed close with each other. She is the most hilarious, brilliant and stunningly beautiful person. She used to fear for her sons, living in Bayamón…worried that they didn’t have many options. She ended up moving to Las Vegas (just a few hours from me!) and her oldest son went off to college and is now engaged! She is salt of the earth and I’m so happy for them.

2022
Ruben was diagnosed with cancer, but is surrounded by his family who are taking great care of him. Mayra goes back and forth to visit. I’m going to see her this summer again.

Leslie /  by Tamara Cedre

Leslie and I met at a rally a few years back as Puerto Rico's bankruptcy loomed and local leaders were beginning to organize. As someone who only visited the island in the summers, I asked him what some of the needs were in his area and what I could do to help. Dressed in a super hero shirt, he tells me, empathy leads to radical transformation.

Educated in psychology and business, Leslie left his corporate job to start an initiative called Resuelve Comunitario to give resources to the most needy in his community. Without a single dollar exchanging hands, he meets the needs of his neighbors——many elderly, some who are bedridden, immobile or just lacking in resources to survive day to day. With the closure of hospitals and the lack of public services, many feel invisible. Leslie distributes donated medical/ hygiene supplies and connects them with long term support. This could take the form of making calls for them or finding them legal aid, but often times, it's just a friendly face to check in on them.

The relationships he develops are consistent and close. He visits the same people within a 10 mile radius by bicycle. Most of his job, he says, is listening and letting people know that someones cares about them and that they are "seen." Since we have become friends, he often checks in on me with the same care through a long distance text or a note. 

He told me if I wanted to create change...to "see" the people with need in my own life...in my own 10 mile radius. 

Update 2017, 2018, 2020
Leslie and Jose are usually who I stay with when I visit the island. Leslie takes me on “neighborhood runs” to distribute aid. I’ve been fortunate enough to have my intern Cindy come with us on several of these occasions. In 2020, on our last trip where we were all together just after New Year’s, we went into the mountains to help families during a series of earthquakes that had hit the island.
What was not shown on TV or in newspapers were the way communities in Guanica, Peñuelas and Ponce came together to feed and shelter each other. There was an unspoken solidarity between those that were displaced to stick together. They spoke with us, shared what was happening and then insisted we ate and had something to drink before we made our trek back.

Josué y Iris /  by Tamara Cedre

Josué & Iris run their family owned bike shop in San Juan. They care for Iris’ sick parents and her younger sister while trying to keep the business alive. They have two children. Their youngest daughter was born right before the hurricanes. 

With no other choice, they rode out the storms last year in shelters just days after Iris gave birth. Due to poor city planning, they were moved from shelter to shelter. During this time, Iris’s father suffered a stroke, her mother’s diabetes was out of control and Iris lost her ability to breast feed because of a lack of water and stress to her body. Medical personnel were spread too thin to attend to evacuees, and there was no medical care or medicine available to them for much of their stay. It was Iris’s strength and Josué’s calm thinking, and previous training as a nurse, that kept their family alive.

After months in the shelter, they returned to a destroyed apartment, so they had to live in a motel off of a FEMA voucher until power was restored in January. While the bike shop had no electricity, they ran the business in a tent outside. Insurance companies continue to take their money, but have not made good on their policies to help. 

They say they feel lucky to be together, because they didn’t suffer a death or the loss of a family property like so many they know. But, everything they have is invested into their store in an economy that has seen wages plummet and job security vanish for Boricuas as private investors profit off the disaster.

Leyda /  by Tamara Cedre

283 schools are shutting their doors in Puerto Rico. 
I met Leyda, a security guard at the site of the abandoned Escuela de la Comunidad Dr. Isaac Gonzalez Martinez. She took this job after the school closed, because her granddaughter used to attend there and her family still feels very connected to this place. She showed me pictures on her phone of children playing and happy memories of students learning from teachers who lived in the same community of Caparra Terrace. I toured the facility that is now being repurposed into land to be sold to private developers. 

Leyda shared that the neighborhood started going downhill shortly after the closure of the school. Since law enforcement precincts could not afford to operate, private security contractors have replaced community police, and are given special permission to guard their investment properties. Hurricane damage was merely salt to a wound of neglect that festered in these inner city areas over the last 50 years.

The school used to be an institution of learning but, also a safe meeting place for families.  Leyda said, “Cuando cierras una escuela, toda la comunidad sufre.” When you close a school, the whole community suffers.

Sarai y Esteban /  by Tamara Cedre

Sarai and her brother Esteban were part of the mass exodus that migrated from the island after Hurricane Maria. The siblings have left their family in Trujillo Alto to try to build a life in the states to send money back home to their family. With help from the organization Latino Leadership, based in Central Florida, they were able to receive assistance starting over in Orlando.

For most of his life, Esteban was a a water treatment technician working for the government. When the public utilities in Puerto Rico went bankrupt, his salary was reduced to a figure that made it difficult to survive with no chance of retirement. After his home was destroyed from the hurricanes, his health began to deteriorate. He was out of options.

Sarai made the move to look after her older brother. She told me she had worked as a massage therapist in San Juan. After Maria, business in the area took a nose dive. She showed us pictures on her phone of her own destroyed home and neighborhood still under construction. 

A giant American flag greeted them upon their arrival to the Orlando International Airport, but a small Puerto Rican flag is hung in their little kitchen, where they offer us some of the dinner they've prepared for themselves. Next to the inflatable mattress Sarai sleeps on in the living room, Esteban explains what it is like to leave home and lose everything. He blames the government corruption on the island.

I asked Sarai if she would ever return to Puerto Rico, and holding back emotion, she told me " I don't know. Day by day."