La vida continúa in Puerto Rico
A year and a half after Hurricane Maria, the island is filled with omnipresent smiles and a large sense of optimism
If this is a Monday night, it’s hard to imagine what Friday looks like. About 300 people are spilling out of a club onto AAAvenida Eduardo Conde in the Santurce district of San Juan. The space I’m in has limited seating, but the stools are empty anyway because everyone is standing. One window sells fluffy, fist-sized empanadillas and stacks of lightly salted tostones while another one hands over cans of Medalla beer at a furious pace. EEEveryone is here for bomba and plena, two t distinct but closely linked Puerto RRRican musical traditions that can trace tttheir roots to the African slaves brought to the island starting in the 17th century.
The first set is all plena: A dozen men fill the stage, their fingers ricocheting off circular pandereta drums, providing a bedrock for the call-and-response vocal lines. The lyrics are largely improvised aaand often lewd and full of thinly veiled social and political commentary. There are repeated mentions of the venue wwwe’re in, La Terraza de Bonanza, and calls to dance. Judging by the expressions on the faces of the people around me, the lyrics hold several inside jokes that fly right over my head.
After about an hour, there’s a 10-minute uuminute break and the set changes to bomba, an a even older musical tradition (and a kkkind of cultural parent to plena) an- ccchored by barrel-like drums. Women take centre stage. A trio of vocalists face the drummers and a revolving cast of dancers leap, twirl, grin, shout and have me so transfixed that it’s a full15 minutes before I realize I forgot to hit the record button on my camera.
I came to Puerto Rico, my first stop as this year’s 52 Places Traveller, hoping to see an island well on its way to recovery, ayear and a half after Hurricane Maria. I knew I would see progress, especially wwwhen compared to the fresh devastation ttthat my predecessor Jada Yuan saw just five f months after the hurricane when she visited the island. What I didn’t expect to see were the omnipresent smiles, the sense of optimism shared by so many people I met, from pig roasters to yyt young iculously entrepreneurs, manicured and cobblestoned from the me- streets of Old San Juan to the rollercoaster hills in the centre of the island.
Throughout my six days on the island, a single sentence spoken to me by a 13- year-old in the ocean-hugging neighbourhood of La Perla, just below Old San JJJuan, was on repeat in my mind: “La vida v continúa,” or “Life goes on.”
The ensemble I saw at La Terraza, where it plays every Monday night, is more than a bar band. It’s a movement called Compartir de Plena, or Sharing Plena. After Hurricane Maria hit, the gggroup waited just two weeks before put- ting on a show in its hometown as a way to lift the spirits.
One week after that, Compartir de Plena were back at La Terraza de Bonanza, wwwhere a generator kept the beers cold a and the microphones on for months.
PUERTO RICO continued on T2
These days, the group sometimes streams the Terraza performances live on Instagram and Facebook, Emerson told me when I connected with him days after the performance.
“It’s to bring happiness to people to see and hear our native music not just here in Puerto Rico, but also in other countries around the world,” he said.
La Terraza de Bonanza was the first stop in my mission to explore the island of Puerto Rico beyond the regular tourism routes. I put the little time I had on the island largely into the hands of some young, energetic Puerto Ricans I met — one introducing me to another.
Loreana González Lazzarini, 34, is from Isabela, a town on the island’s northwestern coast.
One day, she mapped out a trail of chinchorros (rural roadside restaurants) for me, stretching from the outskirts of San Juan to Orocovis, in the island’s centre.
The night before my road trip, speaking of the need for tourists to see the island beyond San Juan, González Laz- zarini told me, “I want tourists to experience the people of Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans’ main concern is always, ‘Are you having a good time?'”
I spent the day alone, weaving through the winding, narrow roads that snake up and down jungle-covered hills into the interior.
There were clear signs of the hurricane’s devastation. I saw the infamous blue tarps, still covering the tops of houses whose roofs had been blown off a year and a half ago.
That same day, I saw the immense generosity that has carried the island through the hurricane and other crises over the past several years.
When I finally found a place for a late lunch — Roka Dura, an open-air restaurant at the top of a hill overlooking Orocovis — I ate a plate of country specialties: chicken chicharrón, fried till the skin cracked off the meat like an extra greasy potato chip; alcapurrias, fritters stuffed with mashed green plantains and ground meat; and longaniza, a Puerto Rican take on chorizo.
It took me a few days to realize it, but González Lazzarini’s own story is one that I heard, in some form or another, again and again during my time in Puerto Rico.
“I can’t think of my life without thinking of Hurricane Maria — it changed me,” she said. “Instead of B.C. and A.D., here it’s Before Maria and After Maria. B.M. and A.M.”
In González Lazzarini’s case, B.M. meant working at a major consulting firm in New York and then as a private consultant in Puerto Rico. A.M., her clients could not pay for consulting fees. González Lazzarini instead worked with a local nonprofit to distribute generators to businesses on Calle Loiza, a rapidly up-and-coming strip of bars and restaurants in Santurce. Then, she took a position with the recently established COR3, a local government agency working on reconstruction, recovery and resilience following the hurricane.
“The hurricane took so much away from us, but it gave us something, too,” González Lazzarini said. “It showed us how we can come together and organize as a people on our own.”
For Xavier Pacheco, 40, a globally recognized chef, A.M. was about finally making the leap to what he considers his life’s work: a farm-to-table operation he’s starting with two chefpartners that will be, in his words, “our farm, with our animals, and a menu that comes from what we harvest.” He feels a magnetic tug away from the more established centres of tourism, on which he has relied. (He estimates that in his previous venture, the wildly successful Jaquita Baya, 70 per cent of his customers were tourists).
“I’m refocusing on taking my product out of San Juan,” he told me, as I rode shotgun in his pickup truck past the Carraízo Dam, about 15 miles from Old San Juan. “The San Juan metro area is so saturated. There are a lot of places outside that area that are really cool — tourists should understand how much there is to see.” Put another way? “You have these people going to Señor Frogs and it’s like, ‘What’s the point?’ As a tourist, you could close your eyes in there and know your way to the bathroom.”
On my first day with Pacheco, I had one of two lunches at one of the “really cool” places he mentioned. I was hungry for lechón, the whole slow-roasted pig that is famous in the island’s interior, so we stopped at Lechonera Angelito’s Place. It is part of a strip that Pacheco calls “a mini Guavate,” referring to the section of the town of Cayey that’s become famous for the density of its lechoneras. This place is better, Pacheco promised. I can’t say how it compares with every other pig roast on the island, but it is hard to imagine anything more decadent than those chunks of meat, slick with melted fat, and layers of thick pig skin roasted to the consistency of hard candy.
Even González Lazzarini and Pacheco admitted I needed to spend at least half a day in Old San Juan, home to sprawling colonial-era fortresses like San Felipe del Morro and San Cristóbal. Beyond its Instagramfriendly beauty, the area, packed with cruise ship tours the day I went, is itself a symbol of post-hurricane, mid-debt crisis resilience.
Look at Old San Juan today and, apart from the political graffiti that speckles its outskirts, you would never imagine a hurricane that claimed the lives of almost 3,000 people had made landfall just a year and a half earlier.
Tourist numbers are slowly creeping back to their pre-hurricane levels in Puerto Rico. But there’s at least one place that’s received a flood of newcomers: El Centro de Bellas Artes Luis A. Ferré. That’s because for three weeks in January, the fine arts complex was playing host to Hamilton, with Lin-Manuel Miranda reprising his role as the title character..
When Miranda stepped into the spotlight to the words “Alexander Hamilton,” the ensemble had to pause for a full two minutes to allow the standing ovation to pass. Every major number ended with raucous cheering. But a different energy settled on the theatre in the opening moments of “Hurricane,” in which Miranda sings, “In the eye of a hurricane, there is quiet.” And there was. Even the applause at the end of the song seemed more subdued, more sombre.
By the end of the next number though, the crowd was smiling, whooping and loudly cheering once again.