The Not-Quite States of America

by Doug Mack

  In part, my reason for ending my trip in Vieques was purely selfish. I’d enjoyed my travels around Puerto Rico, but I was also exhausted, and here was a chance to relax. Esperanza, where I was staying, is a barefoot-living sort of place, and I was looking forward to lazily strolling along its two-hundred-yard-long waterfront malecón, before settling in for a rum punch at one of the intriguingly named bars across the street, like Belly Buttons, Lazy Jack’s, Bananas, or Duffy’s. (The last dates to the 1960s, when Dennis Duffy, a close friend of the Mamas & the Papas, started the hippie-tourist trend here.)

  But I had more on my mind than cocktails and beaches. Vieques was undergoing its own reboot, and offered a case study in a territory transforming itself from a military zone to a tourist playground. Here was a chance to see many of the issues I’d observed elsewhere, playing out in real-time and at a small scale. More than perhaps anywhere else I’d been, change was in the air.

  The U.S. Navy first set up shop on Vieques in 1941, holding it as a secure port for the British Navy; should their homeland fall to the Nazis, this would be their refuge. When the war ended, well, the Cold War was just beginning. In the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. Navy took over a chunk of the island’s western side and all of the eastern half, giving some residents a day, a week, or no advance notice at all. “They gave us a paper that said we had to leave within twenty-four hours,” recalled one resident quoted in a locally produced history titled, simply, Vieques. “Everyone was in a state of panic, taking down their houses before the bulldozers came and left us with nothing.”

  One of the Navy’s primary plans for this land was the creation of a bombing range. Once the residents were gone, the bombs rained down—tens of thousands every year, during runs conducted 180 days a year. The residents of Esperanza and Isabel Segunda were caught in the middle, access to much of their own island cut off, their water and soil contaminated with nitrates. In 1978, Viequense fisherman, angered by naval vessels destroying their fish-trap buoys, set up a blockade to prevent the Marines from conducting exercises. The so-called “Fishermen’s War” catalyzed more protests against the Navy, which continued the bomb tests throughout the 1980s and 1990s, without gaining much broader notice. But in 1999, an errant five-hundred-pound bomb killed a civilian guard named David Sanes, sparking international attention and drawing bold-name outsiders, including Reverend Al Sharpton and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (While Kennedy was in jail for his action, he missed the birth of his son Aidan Caohman Vieques Kennedy.) The United States finally relented, and the base was shut down in 2003.

  It didn’t take long for magazines and newspapers to take note of this largely undeveloped Caribbean island, and soon they were touting Vieques as the next hot spot, an undiscovered gem, off the beaten path.

  “It’s like the rest of the Caribbean used to be before the resorts and cruise ships arrived,” said a woman who’d moved from the states twelve years earlier and now ran a gift shop. This was a common theme among locals I talked to, one that echoed Tisa in American Samoa and Lino in the CNMI: We’re wary of what will happen if more people come here. We like it quieter—not “simpler,” necessarily, but calmer. A local conservationist named Mark Martin told me that thirty television shows had come to Vieques in the last decade to document this island in transition. A W Retreat & Spa had opened in 2010, and now, the W’s parent company wanted to build a 150-acre resort with a golf course and maybe a casino. “The consequences of such rapid growth could be really great,” he said (meaning significant). “The question is, who’s benefiting?”

  These questions weren’t abstractions: Environmental impact studies were already well under way, the development plans beyond mere concepts, even while the onetime naval bombing range was still being cleaned up—the military-to-tourism timelines of the other territories was highly compressed in Vieques.

  On Calle Flamboyan, Esperanza’s restaurant-filled oceanfront main drag, there was a new boutique hotel, El Blok, with a restaurant headed by Jose Enrique, whose eponymous restaurant in San Juan’s Santurce neighborhood had garnered him a James Beard Award. At four stories, El Blok was the tallest building on the street, and the most strikingly modern, with white walls and long rows of shutters formed of concrete punched out with a pebble-like lattice. By the time I got there, less than a year after it opened, it had been written up in the New York Times, Travel + Leisure, and Architectural Digest, all of which cropped out the scrubby vacant lot across the street, where a wild horse sniffed an empty potato chip bag as I entered El Blok for dinner one evening.

  I was the lone charge of the bartender at my end of the football-shaped bar, and we got to talking while he mixed me a cocktail called Sahumerio, with rum, coconut ice, cinnamon, and rosemary. Jose wore tight jeans and curving spikes in his earlobes. He was soft-spoken and patient as I asked him about the island’s history while half eavesdropping on the conversation among the cashmere-and-loafers group at the other end of the bar. (“I had four flower girls at my wedding,” said one woman.)

  Jose spoke with a shy enthusiasm, and seemed to know a bit about everything on Vieques. When the subject turned to the protests against the Navy, his eyes gleamed. “I was part of that.” Jose’s friend, he said, once shot a flare off a boat and hit a military helicopter; he got two years in prison for it. Jose didn’t do anything that wild but did trespass on military property, as part of a mass protest effort, and was jailed for two days.

  Maybe it was the Sahumerio getting to me, but I started to view Jose as my personal guru, and began to feel hopeful that here, finally, I would find concrete answers that would tidily sum up my year of research, ideally packaged in a Teddy Roosevelt-esque bon mot, wise yet direct, somehow quintessentially American.

  I asked him: “So, what’s next for Vieques?”

  I leaned in, awaiting my answer.

  Jose offered a tight chuckle. “Well . . . here we are,” he said, and turned to make a cocktail.

  WHAT REMAINS to be seen is whether and when Puerto Rico’s next referendum will happen. If Puerto Ricans vote conclusively in favor of statehood, the matter would still have to go to Congress, thanks to the Insular Cases. What that august body would do is hard to say. It would hinge on a political calculation that Foster Rhea Dulles would have predicted nearly a hundred years ago: How do you weigh principle against expediency, altruism against aggressive nationalism? It would also come down to a simple matter of whether or not Congress is actually paying attention to Puerto Ricans, in all their complexity.

  At the present population, Puerto Rico would get five representatives in the U.S. House, along with two senators and thus seven electoral votes. This is not insignificant political clout. Some 83 percent of Puerto Ricans on the mainland United States voted for Barack Obama in 2012, according to exit polls, a fact of which Republicans will surely be aware. This alone may be enough for some afraid of a Democratic shift to get on their soapboxes and scrounge up some seemingly noble excuse to oppose this fifty-first state, never mind what Puerto Ricans want. In his keynote address at the “Reconsidering the Insular Cases” conference at Harvard Law School in 2014, Juan R. Torreulla, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, recalled that, years earlier, then-Senator John Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, had told him:

  I come from one of the original thirteen colonies. We have two Senators and one Congressman. If Puerto Rico becomes a state, you’ll have two Senators also, and seven or eight Congressmen, and they’ll probably all be Democrats! I don’t know if I can go for that.

  Beyond the appallingly antidemocratic idea of shutting people out of the political process because you don’t like their views, this is a simplistic calculation, one you’ll also see in assorted think-pieces mainland commentators have written over the years. It’s based much less on hard evidence of a Democrat-embracing electorate than on a gut feeling that of course people in Puerto Rico and any other territory will vote Democratic because they’re not as economically well-off as the rest of the United St
ates and because, well, they’re not white.

  It’s an Insular Cases sort of perspective, troubling in its archaic assumptions about homogenous, predictable populations. In Puerto Rico and the other territories, the Christian faith that forms a cultural bedrock also creates a strong strain of cultural conservatism. Guam’s presidential straw poll has accurately reflected the national results for decades. The territories all present an interesting mix of views that don’t neatly fit with the Republican or Democratic platforms.

  But Congress’s understanding of the territories has always been spotty. The representative from American Samoa was once introduced, before speaking on the floor of the House, as hailing from “American Somalia.” Congress even had a hard time approving the quarters that had piqued my interest in the territories on that cold November day: the first four efforts to approve quarters for the territories and the District of Columbia didn’t even make it out of the Senate committee, after an anonymous, unexplained “hold.” It wasn’t until the fifth try that the bill passed, in December 2007, after Representative José Serrano, a Democrat from New York who was born in Puerto Rico, tucked it into the federal budget bill at the close of the session.

  All of this speaks to an important, troubling fact: even our nation’s leaders in Washington, D.C.—in theory, some of the foremost experts on How America Works and What It Means to be American and, more important, the people with ultimate say over every facet of life in the USVI, American Samoa, Guam, the CNMI, and Puerto Rico—don’t have much of a clue about or a concern for the United States territories.

  MY LAST ACTIVITY on my last day in the territories was pure pleasure: a kayak tour around Vieques’ Puerto Mosquito at night. The bay’s off-putting name belies the joy it holds: bioluminescence. Every sudden movement in the water—a dragging hand, a gliding paddle, a swimming fish—makes it light up, briefly, in a brilliant, otherworldly green.

  There are only a handful of bioluminescent bays around the world and the Guinness Book of World Records certifies this as the brightest, offering ideal conditions (small size, the right nutrients) for microscopic organisms known as dinoflagellates, specifically a genus called Pyrodinium, which comes from the Greek words for fire and whirling.

  Stir them, splash them, or scoop them and you activate a biochemical process that makes them spark like teeny-tiny fireflies. Multiply that by a bajillion, and you’ve got something that looks like the force field in a science fiction flick. Contrails traced the lines of my paddle strokes, and every drip of water onto the kayak was like glowing glitter. Once I got up a good pace, even the wake of my boat pulsed, and it looked for all the world like I’d installed neon lights in the hull.

  Above me, another brilliant show: the night sky, a million pinpoint twinkles, not quite as stunning as at Tisa’s, but pretty damn close. My guide, Julia, pointed out Orion and apologized for not knowing much else. Except, ah, there was Polaris.

  A wave of homesickness washed over me. After all these miles, it was almost time to follow the North Star back to my own home, this time to stick around for a good while with Maren and our soon-to-arrive baby girl, our own marvel. There was a pulse of light across the sky and I made a wish, the first time I’d done that since I was a little kid myself. I wished the world for my daughter, health and happiness for her, for Maren, for us. My heart was overflowing and, suddenly, I was a quietly bawling mess. I figured I might as well keep wishing, since I had a decades-long backlog. I wished for more customers for Carlos the chef, a permanent-resident visa and a trip to the states for Chun, more whales (but not tourist influxes) for Tisa, sweet new Harleys for Carl and Tony, a full generation or two of stability for the Bikinians, all the best for everyone I’d met in the territories.

  “Ooh, we’ve got a hot spot over here!” Julia called, snapping me out of my thoughts. The bay’s bioluminescence isn’t entirely consistent, she’d explained—better in some places some days, worse in others. The lights went out entirely for a while in 2014, for unknown reasons—a shifting wind might have altered the conditions or maybe it was pollution. But now the glow was back. Things were in order. There were many factors, so many things that could go wrong. And what the future held was anyone’s guess. Everyone was holding their breath. For now, all you could do was try to appreciate the beauty and wonder in this moment.

  I pulled my paddle in a long stroke, scattering a school of fish into liquid fireworks. A grand finale.

  * Mallorcas are so intrinsic to Puerto Rican life that they even have them at McDonald’s.

  † Incidentally, it is also from their language that we get common words including hurricane, canoe, tobacco, hammock, and barbecue.

  ‡ The USVI, Guam, and American Samoa also field Olympic teams. Puerto Rico has won nine medals—picking up its first gold in 2016—and the USVI won a silver medal for sailing at the 1988 Summer Olympics. Interestingly, all four of these territories have even fielded Winter Olympic teams, including an American Samoan bobsleigh team, in 1994.

  § While I couldn’t verify all eighty-seven, I did confirm that the Puerto Rican government had, indeed, recently instituted more than a few new taxes, including raising the sales tax to 11 percent, higher than any state’s rate, and increasing the tax on gasoline and petroleum-based products, among them certain types of plastic goods.

  ¶ Technically, Guam is also exempt from the Jones Act, but because it’s on a natural shipping route with much-larger Hawaii, the law is in place, for all practical purposes.

  Epilogue

  THE

  FUTURE

  OF

  EMPIRE

  ON A CLEAR JANUARY EVENING, I BOARDED A PLANE in Puerto Rico and flew across the sea and halfway across a continent, home to Minneapolis. In the coming weeks and months, the territories followed me. When I saw them, they were no longer confusions but delights, a welcome part of the fabric of everyday life in Middle America.

  I noticed, for the first time, a small section of West Indies food at my local grocery store (no mauby, alas), and thought of it not as exotic but as American regional cuisine. I heard salsa’s clave beats drifting in the air, and saw Head Start buses puttering around the city, and remembered that, as Jesus had told me, this national program of early childhood education was modeled on a program initiated by former Puerto Rico Mayor Felisa Rincón de Gautier. At a Super Bowl party, someone brought up the topic of Samoans in the NFL, and we all spent some time studying the teams’ rosters, surprised and disappointed to find no players from the territory. In the headlines, Puerto Rico’s financial crisis was soon inescapable (the New York Times, the Economist, Minnesota’s St. Cloud Times, even the television show Last Week Tonight), as was the Zika virus making its way across the tropics. The New York Times ran a long feature about the virus in Puerto Rico, failing to mention that it was in the USVI, too, as well as American Samoa.

  I kept in touch with many people I’d met. Emanuel, the sous chef at Café Lucia, had friended me on Facebook the day after my dinner in Barranquitas, and thereafter my news feed was filled with a steady stream of photos: salmon fillet with Thai sweet chili, garlic chicken breast with mushroom risotto. John Wasko sent photos of a new house he and his family were building, and gave updates on his efforts to raise money to start a new university in American Samoa; last I heard, he was excited about a new potential investor in Chicago. Over the summer, Walt and Cinta sent emails about new U.S. military plans to turn all of Pagan—Cinta’s beloved home, in the remote northern islands of the CNMI—and two-thirds of Tinian into a large-scale war-training ground, with live-fire exercises and thousands of troops coming in to scurry around the beaches and trample the undergrowth, as part of the Asia-Pacific shift. And as the 2016 presidential primary season dragged on and became ever more combative, the territories crept into the national consciousness as candidates battled for each and every delegate, even in these islands most people had forgotten even had delegates. Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton all campaigned in Puerto Rico, and a gr
oup of mainland Republican activists moved to the USVI just in time to become the territory’s official slate of delegates.

  I kept pondering the territories—how they fit into the American Story, what their future might be. There were more rabbit holes, endless hours in the library. I daydreamed about finagling my way to one of the Minor Outlying Islands. About a week after my flight from Honolulu to Guam, another plane on the same route had mechanical problems along the way and had to make an emergency stop at Midway Atoll, a key World War II battleground and present-day national wildlife refuge. I cursed my misfortune for missing out on this experience (while understanding that for all the other passengers, this side trip would have been harrowing, not a delight). But maybe I could get there, or to Howland Island, or to incorporated Palymra Atoll, or to Johnston Atoll, although the last quickly went to the bottom of my list when I learned that for decades it was a storage site for leaky Agent Orange containers. I spent a day trying to figure out if it was feasible to get to Wake Island, and several more days exchanging emails with a man who, in the 1990s, joined with a friend to claim that the island was a sovereign nation, the Kingdom of EnenKio. The two men drafted a constitution and tried to sell $1 billion in war bonds, using Wake Island’s puzzling political status to run interference for their scam. But the Kingdom of EnenKio’s leader had recently died, his associate told me, as had the sovereignty claim.