Puerto Rican Women Fight Curse of Maria

Five years ago today, Hurricane Maria attacked Puerto Rico with devastating force. For the next 16 hours, the Category 4 storm clawed its way across an island which was still reeling from Hurricane Irma’s unwanted visit two weeks earlier. For the second time in one month, Puerto Rico was devoured by the swirling green-and-red bands on meteorologists' storm maps.

“Puerto Rico disappeared completely from the radar,” Mayor Cruz remembers. “It was 16 hours of silence.”

When Cruz emerged from shelter the following evening to survey the damage, she had to tie a rope around her waist and anchor herself to a car to brace against the final lashes of the tailing winds. “I've never seen a war zone, but those pictures you see of wars — the desolation, the stillness — it was eerie,” Cruz tells OZY.

When Maria finally left and Cruz was able to venture outside without a tether, she began to grasp the extent of the devastation to her island. “I would like people to understand the scene,” she says; “there's no electricity; there's no communications; there's no water because people cannot get their water pumped up in their buildings. There are no elevators, so buildings are becoming human cages, especially for people who have mobility issues.”

In the weeks following the natural disaster, a preventable tragedy began to unfold. The response by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was woefully ham-fisted and “lacked a coherent strategy,” according to a report by the House Oversight Committee. Adding insult to injury, then-President Donald Trump visited the island two weeks later and threw paper towel rolls at storm victims, like a cheerleader tossing T-shirts into a crowd at a basketball game.

But from the rubble of tragedy emerged a group of female community leaders who stepped forward to take charge. The women organized, fed and comforted desperate families, and helped pull Puerto Rico back to its feet. Leading that effort were the women of Torres de Francia, a densely populated 15-story public housing project in San Juan.

When Maria knocked out the power grid, a group of women living in Torres de Francia sprang into action. They went door to door to check on everyone and gather provisions from refrigerators to organize a community kitchen — with cooking over an open fire on wood dried from storm damage — before the food spoiled. Once they had gone through that reserve, the women approached Mayor Cruz to ask for help from the relief donations that were arriving at the makeshift donation center in Roberto Clemente Stadium.

“I remember something about the way Luz looked at me,” Cruz says of her first encounter with Torres de Francia community leader Luz Griselda Vasquez. “Most people that we saw had given up — you could tell in their eyes; they had that glazed stare that was looking at nothing. But Luz had this look that was sharp and pointed. I could tell she wasn’t going to give up; that she wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I saw some of myself in her. I saw some of my grandmother in her.”

Vasquez says she was only doing what came naturally. “Resilience,” Vasquez says, thinking back to that day. “Maria won’t be the last hurricane that passes over Puerto Rico. We’re vulnerable to other hurricanes, earthquakes and pandemics. So resilience is the key. If we weren’t resilient, we wouldn’t have gotten up again. We never would have gotten up again.”

Resilience wasn’t an act of heroism, she insists. It was just a practical matter of doing what had to be done. Fellow community leader Sujey Ocasio agrees. She says it was just women doing what women do naturally: leading. “On that day, we realized that men follow our lead,” Ocasio says with a laugh. “And that’s the truth. They follow us because we’re the ones who make decisions about what needs to be done, and then they do it.” But it’s not about being a hero or a boss, she says. It’s just about getting things done. “At a time when everyone is in need, you don’t think about who gets credit for doing what,” says Ocasio, a mother of three. “You don’t think of yourself as a hero, you just think about how to help others.”

Help is what they did, feeding some 600 families three meals a day for the next four months. The Torres de Francia community kitchen was so successful, it became a model that was replicated in 26 other neighborhoods around San Juan, providing nourishment and hope to tens of thousands of families.

“This isn’t just a story of women cooking to feed people; this is a story of women using food as a platform to redirect desperation into hope, to redirect inertia into passion,” Cruz says. “They used food to engage and they engaged because they loved. They did what FEMA couldn’t do.”