A crowd of around 100 people gathered Thursday in what’s known as “Little Puerto Rico,” the Villa Victoria apartments in Boston’s South End, rounding out a full week of protests in the city of Boston and around the world.
Protesters have demanded that Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo “Ricky” Rosselló step down, followinga leak of thousands of misogynistic and homophobic texts between the governor and his main advisers.
Activists at the protest said the leaked texts, which included messages from Rosselló mocking victims of Hurricane Maria, confirmed widespread suspicions that the governor was not concerned about repairing conditions after the storm.
Hayley Calderón, a Villa Victoria resident and Puerto Rican native, said the texts were a “tipping point” that set the political action in motion.
“He sees that we're suffering and he's not trying to do anything about it,” Calderón said. “So we want him to just resign, and that's all we ask for, because he let us down completely as a governor.”
Activist Pedro Lugo, of Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, said the leaked texts were “gasoline on that fire.” Lugo joined hundreds of thousands of protesters who took to the streets in San Juan on Wednesday night, and then took an overnight flight to Boston to visit his sister Sujei, a children’s librarian who lives in Jamaica Plain.
"We have a saying that you're Puerto Rican even if you're on the moon — 'Boricua en la luna,'" Lugo said. “You have your island inside of you and everywhere you go, you have to be able to represent it. So that's why I'm here.”
“And when I get back to the island,” he continued, “I hope [Rosselló] resigns soon, but if he doesn't, I'm going to go back to the protests.”
Sujei Lugo said she hopes her family members back home feel supported by actions taking place in cities across the United States, including Boston.
“They have the support of the Puerto Ricans that are here,” she said. “Many were displaced from the different issues that we are right now in the streets protesting.”
The protest was organized on social media by Puerto Rico Me Llama, one of several local activist groups representing Puerto Rico in Boston. Otoniel Figueroa-Duran is an activist with Vamos4PR, another group that formed after Hurricane Maria and has held protests in the city. He says the action is about demanding the resignation of Rosselló, but it’s also about a larger issue with holding banks on Wall Street accountable for their role in Puerto Rico’s $74 billion national debt.
“If the governor of Puerto Rico resigns, that is not enough,” Figueroa said in a phone interview. “We need to hold accountable the fiscal oversight and management board. We need to audit the debt. But we also need the bankruptcy proceedings to slow down. ... That process should be slowed down until we understand or until Puerto Rico stabilized politically.”
President Donald Trump weighed in on the crisis via Twitter on Thursday, describing the island as “corrupt” and lamenting what he falsely said was the congressional allocation of $92 billion for hurricane relief. According to federal data, Congress has only allocated $42.5 billion, and the island has received less than $14 billion since May.
“A lot of bad things are happening in Puerto Rico,” the president tweeted. “The Governor is under siege, the Mayor of San Juan is a despicable and incompetent person who I wouldn’t trust under any circumstance, and the United States Congress foolishly gave 92 Billion Dollars for hurricane relief, much of which was squandered away or wasted...much of their leadership is corrupt, & robbing the U.S. Government blind!”
Jose Del Rio Pantoja, an activist, a second-year graduate student at Harvard University and a member of the school’s Puerto Rican student organization, said he fears that Trump’s response to the scandal might endanger future allocation of funds to Puerto Rico.
“It's already happening, coming from the president of the United States, and I wouldn't be surprised if it gets even worse if our current governor stays in power,” Del Rio said in a phone interview. “Which I honestly don't think will happen, because Puerto Ricans are really, really mad.”
High profile Bostonian Puerto Ricans are weighing in as well, including Red Sox Manager Alex Cora, who posted on his personal Instagram in Spanish earlier this week, expressing his frustration at being far from home during the crisis.
"If it was hard to watch Maria hit from afar, knowing the only one in control was God, it’s even worse for me today as I see, read, and watch everything going on back home,” he said, according to an ESPN translation, “knowing that throughout all of this, those that had or have control were elected by our people.”
Pedro Lugo said that Rosselló will feel the “misery” he helped to inflict on his constituents after Hurricane Maria.
“Right now we are his hurricane, and what we felt during that time, he's going to feel that right now,” Lugo said. “The hurricane was natural, but the disaster was human. So we are here to clean up the disaster that he created.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the protest held at Villa Victoria on July 18 was organized by Vamos4PR. It was organized by activist group Puerto Rico Me Llama.
