Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Elders of the Island
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.
All images © Molly Crabapple.
Puerto Rico is an elderly island. A quarter of its population is over sixty-five.
Poverty, gifted to the island by Spain and then exacerbated by American colonization, sent able bodiesThese workers kept the island close. Many returned, after decades of labor, to buy their ,a bit of land on which to resurrect a half-fictitious childhood on the green and generous earth, but this time with American modernity and the conveniences that was meant to imply.They looked with shame at the outhouse, the well, the mosquito net.In the early twenty-first century, the pattern continued. The island’s bankruptcy, unemployment, and the savage budget cuts imposed by the U.S. financial-control board——again forced working-age adults to leave the island, and their elderly parents, behind.
