Everybody Wants to Be Boricua Until It’s Time to Carry the Water

Editor’s Note: This opinion piece was originally published at the Preserving the Record Substack. The author has granted The Latino Newsletter permission to republish after we accepted an Instagram collaboration with the original piece.

My people, let me tell you what is happening on the island of Borikén while the rest of the world plays dress up with our culture.

Right now, in San Juan, the capital, people are waking up and turning the faucet, and nothing comes out. Not a drop. Some of them have been living like this for days. Some for weeks. One man in the capital told NPR he had gone nearly two months without running water in his home. In the United States territory of Puerto Rico, in the year 2026, abuelas are hauling five-gallon buckets up three flights of stairs to flush a toilet and wash a plate. Mothers are heating bottled water on a stove to bathe their kids. The governor activated the National Guard. Milk trucks got sanitized and repurposed to deliver water because there were not enough water trucks to go around.

And here is the thing I need you to sit with. This is the same summer everybody decided they were Puerto Rican.

This is the summer of Benito. Off the back of Bad Bunny’s stardom, that historic residency, and a Super Bowl halftime show watched by more than 100 million people, everybody and their mother booked a flight to San Juan. Everybody is wearing the flag. Everybody is posting the playlist, throwing the parties, calling themselves boricua for a weekend. La isla del encanto became the destination, the aesthetic, the vibe. Everybody wants to be Puerto Rican.

Until it is time to actually be Puerto Rican. Until it is time to carry the water.

People will scream every word of “Una Velita” at a party and miss that the man is begging them to wake up. At that Super Bowl, in front of the whole world, he climbed an electrical pole to point straight at the island’s power crisis, and the crowd cheered the spectacle and let the meaning slide right off them. That song is not a vibe. It is a eulogy and a warning. Benito wrote it about the hurricanes that keep hitting the island, about a government that hides when the storm comes, about a people left asking who is going to save them. And he answers his own question. He says it falls on the pueblo. He says the help is not coming from the government, that the powerful will only bury the truth, and that the only ones who are going to save the pueblo are the pueblo.

He puts it plain in the song. Falta que el boricua quiera despertar. The Puerto Rican has yet to want to wake up.

That line is the whole thing, mi gente. Because the appetite for our music and our beaches and our slang has never once translated into showing up for the actual people of the island when the actual people of the island have no water to drink. You will fly down to party in Condado and step over the crisis on your way to the resort. The signal is right there. La señal ya se dio. People just do not want to see it.

Let me kill the easy excuse before it leaves anybody’s mouth. As of the start of this year, the federal drought monitor said there was no drought in Puerto Rico. A leader from the Partido Independentista said it directly in June: the water problem is not about rain, it is about administrative incompetence and decades of governments, Popular and Nuevo Progresista alike, letting the bones of the island rot.

More than half of Puerto Rico’s drinking water has been lost over the last two decades to leaks, breaks, and busted pipes. Imagine running any business and losing half your inventory every year to rot and calling it normal. That is the water authority. The AAA serves about 97 percent of the island and cannot reliably deliver to a capital city. In the first weekend of June alone, nearly 40,000 customers got hit with outages. Last summer, when a 54-inch main ruptured, more than 183,000 customers lost water at the peak. San Juan’s own emergency office logged over 3,000 water emergency cases in less than two weeks this June and still had thousands sitting unanswered.

And who carries this hardest? The poor. The people who cannot drop a few hundred dollars a week on cases of bottled water just to drink, cook, and stay clean. The small business owners, the cafeteros, the colmaderos, and the salon owners, who, unlike the foreign corporations and the chains, have to close their doors when the water stops. Every closed day is revenue they never get back. That is rent unpaid, that is a worker not scheduled, that is an economic wound that scars a whole community and gets passed down to the next generation. Meanwhile the big players with foreign money keep the lights on.

None of this fell from the sky. Back in the 1990s, instead of repairing the water infrastructure the island already had, the government poured $372 million into building a Superaqueduct, a 50-mile pipe running across the island. It was controversial from day one. And it ended exactly how these things end here. Federal prosecutors convicted officials of running an extortion scheme on the construction contracts, shaking down contractors for millions. They built a monument and skipped the maintenance. They chose the photo op and the kickback over the pipe under your street. The island is drinking the consequences right now. Or rather, it is not drinking anything at all.

Do not let anybody tell you boricuas on the island are sitting still. They are not. Local leaders are out front demanding the resignation of Governor Jenniffer González Colón and the resignation of the AAA executive president, Luis González Delgado, the man directly presiding over these service interruptions. There have already been multi day protests in front of La Fortaleza. A finca owner named Pedro “Pellito” Santiago, speaking to local news, put it better than any politician: poor people cannot carry their voice with money, pero la llevamos con el pueblo. We carry it with the people. That is the whole of democracy right there, in one sentence.

And then there are the people the cameras forget. In el sector Palma Sola, in barrio Carité in Guayama, a woman named Marisol Vega cares for her father, don Luis, in a small wooden and zinc house at the end of a road so deteriorated you have to get out and walk part of the way. They have lived for years with no potable water and no electricity. Don Luis has early dementia, osteoarthritis, hypertension, and respiratory problems. The only money coming into that home is nutritional assistance. Years. Not days. Years without water, while the rest of us argued about concert tickets.

Here is what I keep coming back to. Puerto Rico is a colony. I will say the word the politicians will not say. Three point two million American citizens, taxed and bound by laws written in Washington, with a single representative in Congress who is not even allowed to vote on the floor. That is taxation without representation. That is the founding grievance this country went to war over, and it is the daily condition of the island right now.

And the federal government has shown Puerto Rico, again and again, exactly how much the island is worth to them. During Trump’s first term, his administration withheld roughly $20 billion in congressionally approved hurricane recovery funds from Puerto Rico after Maria. Lawmakers had to question whether it broke the same impoundment law at the center of the Ukraine scandal. FEMA lost track of hundreds of millions of dollars of food and water meant for a dying island. Two years after the storm, barely a fraction of the money Congress promised had landed. And today, as San Juan goes dry, where is the federal cavalry? Nowhere substantive. Because a colony only matters when there is something to extract from it.

So I am going to say the thing this crisis keeps screaming. An island that cannot be trusted with its own water by a government that withholds, neglects, and disappears should not have to beg that government for permission to live. This is one more argument, written in empty faucets, for why Puerto Rico must be free to govern itself. Autonomy. Independence. The dignity of a people deciding their own infrastructure, their own priorities, their own future, without a control board and a non voting commissioner standing between them and a glass of water.

And I have to name the obscenity at the center of it. While poor families watched their neighborhood water tankers sit bone-empty for days, the government’s own Tourism Company trucked in 12,800-gallon loads to keep the hotels and the short-term rentals supplied. Let that land. They made sure the tourists could shower. They made sure the visitors playing boricua for the weekend never felt a thing. And the elderly, the disabled, the children in the barrios were left to haul buckets and wait. That is not a glitch. That is a choice about who counts.

This should be a national story. This should be wall-to-wall coverage and a country mobilizing aid the way this country does when it decides a people are worth saving. It is not. And the silence is the answer.

So this one is for us, the ones up here in the Bronx and Orlando and Holyoke and Chicago who carry the flag in our chests. Loving Puerto Rico cannot be a costume we put on when a parade in our city comes around. If you have the privilege of a faucet that works tonight, you have a debt.

Send money to your familia and to the mutual aid networks doing the real distribution. Call your representatives about the withheld funds and the privatization of our public resources, because they are circling our water the way they circled our land. Amplify the voices the mainland media will not, the Pellitos and the Marisols and the don Luises. And when somebody wants to wear our culture, make them carry our struggle too.

My mother was born and raised in Isla Verde. My great-grandparents lived their whole lives in Santurce and in Manatí. I am a Bronx kid, but the island is in my blood and in my name. So I am not writing this as a tourist or a fan. I am writing it as one of los nuestros.

Falta que el boricua quiera despertar.

So let this be the morning. Not the flag we wave one day a year, not the song we scream and forget by Monday, but hands. Real hands.

Because the flag was never meant to be a costume. It was meant to be a responsibility. Benito already gave us the ending, and it is not a rescue. No government is riding in to save Borikén. The only ones who ever will are her own, the ones still there hauling buckets up dark stairwells and the ones up here who never stopped calling her home.

So if you are going to wear the flag, carry the water too.

Luis Jonathan Hernández is a strategist working across racial justice, public safety, youth leadership, and systems change. His work is shaped by the lived realities of communities navigating violence, disinvestment, and structural harm. He is the founder of youthoverguns.org and a Forbes 30U30.

We are 40% of the way toward our 2-year birthday target of $25,000. Help us with our birthday campaign by giving here.

Cuba’s Economic Measures: From the Associated Press, an explainer about Cuba’s emergency economic package.

Julio Ricardo Varela edited and published this edition of The Latino Newsletter.

The Latino Newsletter welcomes opinion pieces in English and/or Spanish from community voices. Submission guidelines are here. The views expressed by outside opinion contributors do not necessarily reflect the editorial views of this outlet or its employees.