Susanne Ramirez de Arellano

“As I watched TV coverage of the wildfires incinerating Maui… a single thought raged in my head: Colonialism is a brutal, never-ending story… The footage triggered memories of Hurricane María, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017 and transformed the archipelago into a rich man’s paradise—and a no man’s land for many Puerto Ricans.”

With a generational shift against the status quo, a growing reluctance among Puerto Ricans to see their islands become part of an increasingly authoritarian nation, and now a battle between its two leading figures —Gov. Pedro Pierluisi and Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González-Colón, a Trump supporter— the ruling pro-statehood New Progressive Party’s days seem numbered.

This is the story of two Puerto Ricos—a phantasmagorical island cooked up by Pierluisi and the one Boricuas endure daily.

During a recent “sermon,” the head pastor of an evangelical church in Puerto Rico denounced people of color as racist, slammed the LGBT community, and complained that the Black actress starring in Disney’s remake of ‘The Little Mermaid’ was ugly.

González and Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, both of the ruling PNP, seemed united at a recent rally in San Juan, even as she schemes to replace him in 2024. If González is willing to stab her party’s president in the back to take his job, how far would she go to keep it?

Bad Bunny is a Puerto Rican reggaetonero, the biggest music superstar on the planet, and the voice of a generation. But all of this is what is lost in translation, or not translated at all, when CBS captioned his performance and speech with “singing in non-English, speaking in non-English” during the Grammys on Sunday.

Women’s rights begin with access to reproductive health care, and because abortion clinics provide such access, they are on the frontline of the struggle for women’s rights in Puerto Rico.

A look at the battle over abortion rights in Puerto Rico following the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of ‘Roe v. Wade’ in 2022, which undid nearly 50 years of reproductive rights protections in the United States

“Poet. Maestro. Cuba’s defiant son. Pablo Milanés was all these things and more. He was also the soundtrack of my youth,” writes Puerto Rican journalist Susanne Ramires de Arellano.

The recent image of a car stuck in a massive pothole in Humacao, Puerto Rico makes a fine metaphor for the state of Puerto Rico today and the role played by the pro-statehood Gov. Pedro Pierluisi and his New Progressive Party in the deterioration of the island.

In ‘Vida y Hacienda,’ Andre Lee Muñiz details the different stages of Don Pedro’s life, but in the end, the heart of the book is the fact that Pedro Albizu Campos lived for one thing: the emergence of the Puerto Rican nation among the other free countries of the world.

The controversy surrounding a tiny park in a well-heeled San Juan neighborhood has become a symbol of the struggle against the Puerto Rican government and its ruling New Progressive Party, shedding light on the double-dealing and deception that is now business as usual in the archipelago.

Manuel “Manny” Suárez del Rio was one of those rare journalists who never let the bastards get away with it, hounding stories until he broke them wide open, as with the Cerro Maravilla murders in 1978.

La cortina de humo que lanzaron los agarra perlas —que es un irrespetuoso mal hablado y un soldado de la izquierda (algunos lo comparan con un joven Fidel Castro)— no puede tapar la verdad: Bad Bunny le pertenece a su generación y dice las cosas en su propio idioma.

In the end, the congressional visit was Boricua political theater at its best, with a showy guest list.

If ‘Roe v. Wade’ is overturned, the fear is that the religious right in Puerto Rico and the two main parties will be emboldened to further limit women’s rights. The hope is that young women, part of the increasingly powerful Boricua female voting bloc, will go to the polls in large numbers.

Puerto Rico is undergoing a fundamental shift in its social and political architecture, and for the first time since I can remember, strong winds are blowing in favor of self-determination and possibly, eventually, independence.

Women now account for more than half of Puerto Rico’s population and are spearheading —especially the young women— an unstoppable revolution, one that will change the island’s future.

The Diaspora has become a political battlefield between those who want a permanent union with the United States and those who want freedom. The narrative divides Puerto Ricans at a time when the island and its people should be more unified than ever.

Boricuas are in an all-out struggle to save what is theirs from the crypto-barons and Wall Street vultures —their beaches, their homes, their neighborhoods and towns, and the beautiful architecture of their island— of which the Normandie is one of the brightest jewels in the crown.

The triumph of Gabriel Boric over the extreme right in Chile sent out “a generational howl” that is reverberating throughout the region and is echoed in Puerto Rico by young Boricuas who want to change the political and social architecture of their homeland.