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  • The Paris Review

    Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Houses Still Standing

    by Molly Crabapple Dec 20, 2017 2 minutes

    In November, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple spent a week in Puerto Rico documenting grassroots efforts by communities to rebuild after Hurricane Maria. Here are excerpts from her sketchbook.

    © Molly Crabapple

    “We are older than you,” Pepe says, when I meet him on the lemon-yellow striped bridge. The bridge is in Paloma Abajo, a neighborhood in older than I am, with a neat gray beard and a bandana printed with marijuana leaves wrapped around his hair, but he is speaking not of himself but of our respective countries of birth. Puerto Rico was colonized before the United States, and by the time U.S. gunboats boomed into its harbor in 1898, it had enjoyed its hard-won autonomy from Spain for several months—not that this helped the island in the eyes of its new overlords. In the opinion of many U.S. politicians, Puerto Rico was populated by members of the deficient “Spanish” race, too lazy and primitive to be granted either independence or statehood. How little some attitudes change.

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