A small Place-Chapter 2

A colonized territory has no word on what they want and what they don’t want for themselves. This is the story of many of the islands of the caribbean. Pretty much every single island on the caribbean was colonized by one of the major Countries like Spain, England, France or Portugal. The majority of them are by this day free but still have colonies. Puerto Rico was first colonized by the spaniards in the 16 century and then by the United States in 1898. The Spanish bring a huge change to the island, they bring with them slaves, new agricultural products and introduce new methods of transportation like the horse. These changes might seem like progression for some people but what they really were doing was killing the native Taino culture.

The mix of new cultures set a new future through the years and a new culture arose. From a native Taino culture we went to a African oriented culture. Many of today’s typical dressing, food and music came from the African. The industrialization of the island on sugar cane and human labor resource made people in the United States set eyes on our island. These changes brought by Spain made us attractive to an even bigger colonizer. In 1898 Puerto Rico fought a war on the United States to keep them from invading us but at the end they win and made us their colony. During the beginning of this time  changes were radical, schools had english as a first language, a language that the majority of people didn’t know. We didn’t had the right to vote for our own governor. We were living a dictatorship by the country that fight for democracy and freedom. Today more than a hundred years after our island still is under the same oppression as a hundred years ago, yes we have the right to elect our own governance, and legislation but honestly we have been so brain-washed that it is worthless because politics are just hungry for power and money and they do anything to shadow the great nation.

Democracy made us slaves, we have a flag but no space in the world’s affairs, we have a flag but no nationality, we have a flag and we don’t belong here o there. This democracy have kept us slave giving away money to keep our mouths shut but at the end we still have no vote in their politics, the politics that at the end have the higher power on us. Progression might have come with the colonization but at the same time we lost our identity when we sold our souls to the devil, our vocabulary became a non-sense mixture of spanish and english with words that are not present either on the spanish or the english dictionary, the modernization of the island came with big food chains that make us fat and unhealthy just like them, all the good they think they gave us is just some more of their poison in the world.

A Small Place-Chapter 1

As a local we see things in a different way. The beauty of our own place might seem kind of irrelevant to us. I think that the only way to really appreciate things is to need them. For example a person from the mid United States might think of the beach as a wonder of the world, but for a local it might only be another normal day in what others think is paradise.Puerto Rico is not that far away from from Antigua, we have almost the same geography, we have a big tourist market as well and people sometime feel the same way about tourist and sometimes worst.

Like Antigua the first thing you see when you come to the island is the Airport but slightly different for people from the United States. Unlike Antigua, Puerto Rico, for being a territory of the United States has an easier way to come in. US citizens have no need to go through customs or anything like that, they just unload the airplane and keep walking to the outside without doing any lines at all. Once you come out of the Airport facility is pretty much the same deal as Antigua, you have crazy hungry taxi drivers waiting for some “gringo” as we call them to jump inside and try to charge them an excessive amount for a short ride. When you jump into that taxi you will probably ride for about five to ten miles to the hotel strip and you don’t get to see that much of the real face of the island. Tourist just go through the nice and clean streets with beautiful gardens on the side of the road and where the government have removed any sing of economic struggle like for example beggars, they used to be all around the area but in recent years the government of the capital decided to “relocate” them.

It is really frustrating to see people being cheated from the reality of the place they are visiting, many times it seems like it is all perfect but that is only because they don't have to read the news paper everyday or watch the late night news. By the same time Tourists enjoy themselves we have people in the streets killing each other, we have some others begging for some food or money. Way inside where that tourist will never get into we have families living in a single bedroom house that can nearly fit the four of them. Families that have to rationed food so that they have something on their table every day. That is the real face of my island, that is the real face of any other place in the world where you are a tourist. As a tourist you will only see what the government had money to embellish for you to see but the reality is that what you see is about a ten percent of the country the other ninety percent remains abandoned and unseen.