Catatonia

The funeral of a military man. A young man escapes homophobia. We all recall memories associated with our contentious relationship with our political identity. What is your anecdote of the concept of Puerto Rico Statehood?

4,645 people died after Hurricane María ---- 4 6 4 5 ----- The number? A report by The New England Journal o Medicine. The conclusion? Lack of transparency. This episode explores the poetry behind the discourse given to a nation in a state of shock.

I went to Puerto Rico to bury my grandmother. There I found the national strike. This episode is about pausing, thinking and the silences we face during trauma. It also about images and surveillance, and how social and traditional media might evolve to become Puerto Rico's next "carpeteo" or surveillance program.

Bubu Negrón y Luis Agosto Leduc visited NY's NADA Art fair to raise funds for the Puerta de Tierra Brigade, an arts initiative to lift San Juan's Puerta de Tierra neighborhood into visibility. This is a bilingual episode.

Puerto Rico goes into overdrive. Privatized PREPA. Ed system is overhauled. And bitcoin zillionaires move to PR. But where are culture and arts mentioned in our recovery? Also, the second half of photog Joseph Rodríguez's interview.

Legedary photographer Joseph Rodríguez (Nat Geo, NY Times) talks life and death in Puerto Rico. Women take the streets of NY and my mom leaves for Puerto Rico.

My mom adopts a pigeon. The New York Times reports on the sole suicide center on the island. The First Lady thinks parks are pretty.

My mom relocated to New York after Hurricane María, a category 4 storm, eroded Puerto Rico's electric grid and killed close to one thousand U.S. citizens. In this podcast, I talk about moving her to New York, a metropolis unlike here small town in Caguas and the anxieties of living with an elderly adult in a hostile city. But what I really focus on is putting together the puzzle of what happened in Puerto Rico through her own anecdotes.