Happy spring! I'm back.
Hello. I just got home from a two-week reporting trip to Puerto Rico, and I am exhilarated, and I am tired. I've spent more time in Puerto Rico than anywhere else outside Chicago in the past five years, and the more time I spend there, the more I feel utterly unqualified to write about it. Puerto Rico is beautiful and confounding and joyous and heartbreaking and just writing that brief description feels diminishing, colonialist, othering.
I've been going to PR in recent months with two other reporters, on short, weeklong trips, none of which felt long enough. So this time we went for two whole weeks. Well, guess what? Still not long enough. For one, turned out that there was a conference happening *the day were leaving* on the very subject of our research (property rights and displacement). Plus, Marxist anthropologist David Harvey was coming this weekend, and speaking at the very site we were writing about. Plus, we hadn't even gotten to interview half a dozen people on our list. Plus, I had five new story ideas to follow up on. But, also plus, we were out of money.
What to do? I guess just what we can.
This has been the overarching theme of this project, which is so all-encompassing in its scope that, really, a year of reporting wouldn't be enough. So you do what you can. Try to find not *the story* but "a story* -- or a few, whose vaguely contained arcs and characters stand in as inadequate representations of the whole the magnitude of which, like galaxy of stars we saw on the night boat to Vieques, is incomprehensible.
We interviewed people living along the coast in the neighborhood of Parceles Suarez, in Loiza, to the east of San Juan. The beach there is eroding fast, and climate change is bringing ever more frequent floods. Like everywhere else, it was walloped by Maria. "I'm not afraid to die," said one old woman, "but I don't want to die by drowning."
There we met Tito, who was sitting on his porch drinking with his ... sister? Unclear. In any case: he wasn't afraid of anything. He just wanted to hang out and enjoy the view. And we met Doug, a retired white auto worker from Dayton, who had bought his house after Maria. While he was chill about it (he was a little stoned, he told us) he probably wouldn't have bought the house if anyone had told him about the flooding. Which they didn't because, why? Unclear.
And we met up again with Guillermo, a community leader we'd met in January, whose house one block from the beach was utterly ruined in the storm. The roof was wrecked, the floor tiles were flooded, everything was covered in mold. He'd been denied FEMA aid (Why? Unclear.) but had been working with the Ricky Martin Foundation to identify other folks in the neighborhood who could use private support to rebuild. And then, in March, 18 months after Maria, the RMF turned to him and said, you know what? You could use some help as well. He took us over to his now sparkling, mold-free home and we tried really hard not to cry as we oohed over the new ceiling.
That's the story of one quarter-mile of beach in a little town. There are 3 million more stories like that, that will never get told -- because of time, exhaustion, lack of money, the shitty American news cycle, the language barrier (*very important and I will circle back to this at a later date*), and plain old racism.
I spent no small amount of time on this trip grappling with, yep, white privilege, both internally and in conversation with my reporting partner, who's Puerto Rican and called me out a few times. It was uncomfortable, and frustrating and embarrassing. But my embarrassment is not the end of the world, and I'm glad we went there. I may still be sleep deprived, but I'm humbled by the whole thing and just hope I can do a few stories enough justice to get to go back and do more.
Meanwhile! Oh god back in Chicago. So much has happened.
Let's see. Hey, I did a show! It was so fun! You can watch it here if you are really bored and a sucker for a five-minute Hunger Games-themed aerial act performed by vaguely proficient amateurs.
This was so much fun in fact that 5/8ths of my class have decided to choreograph another routine, to audition for a show in July. This one is based on the board game Clue; I am Col. Mustard. Stay tuned.
Soup & Bread ended for the season on April 3. We collected a cool $10,000 for Chicago-area hunger relief organizations, and have distributed about half of it so far, but I'm going to put a pin in this story and come back to it at a later date because there's a lot more to say! But, in related themes, my friend Millicent -- who came out from New York to cook for the final Soup & Bread -- recently wrote a wonderful essay for Bon Appetit on her transition from fine-dining cooking to cooking for a Brooklyn soup kitchen. Highly recommended.
A piece I wrote in collaboration with several Medill students and the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo -- on the multifaceted experiences of Puerto Ricans in Chicago, both before and after Maria -- was published in March, and has been republished several times since. I hear it has been picked up by Univision and will be available soon though their platform as well.
And, last but not least, my book is *almost* at the printer! The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook comes out September 10. There will be more about it soon, but this too gets filed under "pick a few stories to tell because the story of Chicago is unmanageable in its magnitude." You can read more about it, and pre-order a copy, at the link above.
I'm sure I'm forgetting something. It's been a while. So much has happened! But I'm still catching up on my sleep so this will have to do for now. Happy spring everyone. I'm back.