A U.S. Territory With Complicated Trump Ties Is In Crisis — And No One Is Talking About It
gist
Edgar Gomez turns Puerto Rico’s water emergency into an account of daily life without showers, toilets, laundry, or dependable rationing. He treats drought as one pressure among deeper failures: water lost through aging infrastructure, political neglect, displacement, and development that strains public resources. The essay’s sharpest lens is inequality. Wealth buys cisterns, solar panels, and private workarounds; everyone else is expected to improvise. Gomez calls that survival practice “resolvemos,” but presents it as evidence of institutional failure.
ideas
- Drought is only part of the explanation. Gomez contrasts the governor’s account with a report that 59% of collected water is lost or unaccounted for through inaccurate meters, unauthorized consumption, or leaks.
- Rationing assumes that water arrives. The planned two-days-on, two-days-off schedule bears little resemblance to the weeks-long outages Gomez and people he knows have experienced.
- Private workarounds make scarcity unequal. Cisterns, solar panels, gym showers, and bulk purchases protect people with money, mobility, and storage while exposing everyone else to greater harm.
- The crisis belongs to a wider politics of displacement. Gomez connects failing utilities to tax-driven gentrification, luxury development, threatened coastal access, and public disinvestment.
- Improvisation is both survival and an indictment. “Resolvemos” names Puerto Ricans’ resourcefulness while showing how government failure transfers essential work and expense to households.
quotes
“There are no real winners, just varying degrees of losing.”
“Even when it does rain, Puerto Ricans are left in the dry.”
“The reality is that for many of us there hasn’t really been water at all.”
“This latest water crisis is just a drop in the bucket of our collective frustration.”