This documentary traces what happened between the two events that have shaped our generation: Hurricane Maria in 2017 and the resignation of governor Ricardo Roselló in 2019 after massive protests. The sentiment that “only the people can save the people” is not uttered verbatim in the film, but oozes from its most powerful images.
This is a story beyond a counterposition of the people’s struggle and the people’s victory. Examples of community-led reconstruction are mapped throughout Aldarondo’s film, interlaced with evidence of foreign disaster intervention. As jarring as it is to see a crypto colonizer when he mocks a Boricua woman mid-debate, what remains in my mind is a short, seemingly innocuous scene: an older man speaks about the ceiba tree. “It is one of the native species that best withstood the hurricane,” he says.
The important themes are there: the debt, the talent fuge, testimonies of loss. Sure, Act 20/22 was present before the hurricane, but millennial disaster capitalism brought on a new caricature: the bitcoin businessman, a white man harmlessly dressed in the likes of hemp clothing and dreadlocks. “We had vultures coming to Puerto Rico already, the hurricane just brought the showstoppers,” said producer Namerrow via Zoom interview. While crypto-technology is arguably revolutionary, these characters are donning the double-edged sword of “freedom” (I know, triggering) to justify their mission. Director Aldarondo called the bitcoin descent on Puerto Rico “a Trojan horse.”
In another scene, Yaron Brooke (Chairman of the Board of the Ayn Rand Foundation) speaks at a conference somewhere in the metro area. Very unabashedly, he is motivating entrepreneurs to privatize Puerto Rico and earn a living while doing it. “We don’t quite have Stanford here, but…” he says. Yeah, no kidding Yaron.
In a parallel universe, a viewer of the documentary told the director, “you need to show this film in all the history classes at the university.” Aldarondo answered: “If we don’t have a university, where will we show it?!”
While I had a knot in my throat at one point, I finished watching this film in tears. The final scene is a farewell to the Puerto Rico we used to know and a welcome ceremony to the country we can build. When I closed my laptop I thought of one of the most important stencils I have seen in the streets of San Juan:
“Neither people without houses nor houses without people,” and I just blurted it out.