Despite colonial policies pushing Puerto Ricans out, this article chronicles how organizers are fighting back by fusing mutual aid, political campaigns, and cultural joy into a powerful, people-led narrative: that privatization has failed and the archipelago’s future belongs to its people.
It’s 2025 and Puerto Rico is still a colony of the United States. Y ni siquiera disimulan. A federally appointed fiscal control board slashes public services like health, pensions, and education in the name of austerity to pay back U.S. bondholders. Act 22 (now part of Act 60) continues to bring millionaires to the island with full tax exemptions, while we are pushed out.
This is not by accident. Colonialism has always been a project of erasure, of controlling not only our economy but also our culture and our stories. Since the U.S. invaded in 1898, it has imposed itself through cultural dominance. Schools were converted to English overnight. Foreign traditions, such as Santa Claus, were introduced to replace our own. Protestant missionaries arrived to “civilize” us, bringing their religion into our classrooms and neighborhoods.
In 1948 the Ley de la Mordaza criminalized nationalism outright: people were jailed and even killed for raising the Puerto Rican flag or showing affiliation to the pro-independence movement. That’s what Bad Bunny is referencing when he sings “Aquí mataron gente por sacar la bandera. Por eso es que ahora yo la llevo donde quiera” (Here, they killed people for raising our flag, so now I carry it everywhere). When we see our flag waved on the Olympic stage, at Miss Universe, or on a music awards night, it cuts through divisions and pulls us together. Cultural practices, even under repression, have always been at the frontline of resistance.
What We Mean by Culture
Culture is the way people understand, embody, and express their worldviews, identities, and values. In a power-building context, culture is not an afterthought. Dance, music, ritual, and collective joy generate meaning beyond words and remind people of what we can share.
When people create culture together they build social bonds, shared identity, a sense of agency, and attachment. For communities that have been marginalized, this can be particularly transformative. Culture reflects who we are while actively creating the conditions to experience collective power and take action on the issues that matter to us.
Building people-powered movements is the best way to combat authoritarianism. Cultural strategy, when integrated into organizing, activates agency and solidarity. It creates living examples of the future we are fighting for, and it links representation to material power: not only visibility in cultural domains, but the ability to shape systems and structures in line with our own shared values.
Colonialism Today
What the United States empire attempted in the 20th century through law, language, and religion, it continues to do in the 21st through austerity policies, economic control, and gentrification. The fiscal control board and Act 22/60 is sold to us as “economic development,” but it’s forced displacement to us and our families. While rent prices skyrocket and essential services such as electricity are now profit-makers for private companies. Streets in Old San Juan, Santurce, Dorado, and Rincón cater to tourists and wealthy foreigners, while Puerto Ricans are pushed out.
Colonialism, once enforced through schools and jails, now operates through privatization and incentives. Cultural preservation and cultural strategy are central to resisting erasure and to building the power needed for radical systemic change.
Puerto Rico’s Cultural Power as a Case for Narrative Change
Narrative change is a vital shift in how people make sense of the world. Colonial narratives have long told us we are dependent and incapable of self-governance. In this context, our people’s resistance to colonial cultural impositions makes cultural strategy a central component in creating and amplifying narrative change.
4,645 people died in 2017, during the aftermath of Hurricane María, because of government neglect and lack of infrastructure to face a category 5 hurricane. It was an eye opening moment for a lot of people, who realized that it was mutual aid, not government aid, that really saved us. El pueblo salva al pueblo (The people save the people) became one of the most famous slogans during the recovery.
In 2019, a chat was leaked which exposed politicians mocking the deaths caused by Hurricane María. By the Verano 2019, there had been a mass narrative shift from a complacent “we accept the government as corrupt as it is,” to a combative “we put them in power, we can take them out.” Old San Juan’s streets were flooded with cacerolazos, art, music, dance, and a mass presence that delegitimized a government in a few nights.
In 2024, the energy crisis in the island was our main source of discontent. The private companies LUMA and Genera PR sell overpriced unreliable electricity, and as many water distribution plants depend on electricity to pump water, we are continually left without these two essential services. Private hospitals and private schools started to close as they became less profitable after the exodus. Still, those benefiting from the people’s suffering continue to push forward a narrative of privatization and development (referring to gentrification) as progress.
La Privatización Fracasó (Privatization Failed) was a small mobilization print and radio campaign led by the volunteer team at the socialist paper Bandera Roja. This phrase quickly jumped into marches, social feeds, and was eventually being repeated by mainstream journalists and politicians. What began as a response to a shared cultural experience of struggle forced the media and the political class to admit what people already knew from experiencing nightly blackouts: privatization had failed.
Puerto Rico No Se Vende is a coalition-based, organizing policy and media campaign that seeks to educate and create points of pressure and discussion about Act 22 and its impacts. The campaign has a local strategy to expose the lack of government transparency, and denounce the economic and environmental impact and eliminate Act 22 (currently Act 60); as well as a federal strategy, which seeks to ensure adequate IRS oversight of Act 22 beneficiaries. Through reports, like Pain & Profit: The Act 22 Donors Influencing Puerto Rico’s Elections and Pain & Profit: The Act 22 “Charities” That Take From Puerto Rico & Give Little in Return, the campaign generated press coverage in outlets from El Nuevo Día to The New York Times, sparking public debate about how millionaires use Puerto Rico as their tax haven.
As part of the cultural strategy, Puerto Rico No Se Vende also created cultural moments that make the fight against displacement visible. This year, the coalition hosted Open Mic: En Defensa de Nuestro Encanto, bringing together poetry, music, a tattoo party, and collective resistance under one roof — connecting culture to the political struggle. These interventions are designed not just to inform, but to share our own stories, build belonging, and expand the base.
These moments demonstrate how cultural strategy produces power that can unite people, and shift what was considered possible. They allowed us to learn important lessons that we then started implementing into our political work, we worked so that abstract policies could become personal. Today, as San Juan becomes less recognizable to its own residents and tax incentive schemes accelerate displacement, the fight for culture is the fight for Puerto Rico itself. The Bad Bunny residency that fills stadiums each weekend is more than entertainment. It is a mass ritual of Puerto Rican identity, where people gather in traditional attire, eat our food, and dance to our music. But even as culture thrives inside, outside the venues neighborhoods are being remade for tourists and investors. This contradiction is the terrain we are organizing on: culture as both the site of our survival and the target of our exploitation.
From our history and present we can see culture as a counternarrative, shifting the common sense against colonialism and towards an archipelago that is ours to claim. Puerto Rico belongs to us, our people.
