“How American is Puerto Rico? How American do they want to be?” This was the question Anthony Bourdain posed for his CNN Parts Unknown visit to Puerto Rico in April 2017. And then, six weeks later, Hurricane Maria made its fateful landfall.
Hurricane Maria made its first landfall on the Caribbean island nation of Dominica on Monday, September 18, 2017, as a Category 5 storm with winds topping 160 mph. It was the strongest, most violent hurricane on record to make landfall in the region.
Days later, Maria would become the first Category 4 hurricane to directly affect Puerto Rico in 85 years. Maria made landfall in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico at approximately 0615 (1015 UTC) on 20 September, this according to the official records of the US National Weather Service, with maximum sustained winds of 155 mph, Puerto Rico was still recovering from Hurricane Irma at the time, which had battered the island with high winds just two weeks earlier. Maria was the 8th hurricane of the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season.
By the time Maria finally passed over the island, it left virtually the entire population — some 3 million American citizens — without electricity, and many without homes.
“It has been six weeks since the hurricane, and 70 percent of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million American citizens are still without power,” Anthony Bourdain wrote in his CNN Field Notes on November 1, days before his Puerto Rico-based episode debuted on Parts Unknown. “About 25 percent are without fresh drinking water—people are drinking from streams and other contaminated sources. They are burning their dead. This is, of course, unthinkable. And grotesque. It is also true.”
Bourdain and crew visited Puerto Rico with our cameras in April, five months before Maria.
“We, of course, found the beautiful place we expected: turquoise and gin clear seas, bright greens, colourful and delicious things to eat, a painful history — and a complicated and ambivalent relationship with the rest of a nation who once took them by force, and has held onto them since.
“Things on these lovely islands filled with great food, incredible music, wonderful people who’ve given so much to their country — served its military, been such a vital part of our collective culture — were already tragically absurd. A state of financial limbo, political paralysis, and powerlessness that defies both decency and belief. A Kafkaesque situation that was already bleeding them out.”
In his Field Notes, Bourdain left out the part about then-President Donald Trump famously tossing rolls of paper towels into the crowd during a five-hour presidential trip to Puerto Rico’s reeling capital of San Juan, some two weeks after the hurricane, following complaints that the US government’s handling of the storm's aftermath had been too slow.
Trump tweeted it had been a “great day” in Puerto Rico, but San Juan’s mayor at the time, Carmen Yulin Cruz, saw it differently. She described Trump’s televised meeting with officials as a “17-minute PR meeting,” and added that the sight of him throwing paper towels to people in the crowd was "terrible and abominable.”
As the BBC’s Aleem Maqbool noted at the time, “It may have been a ‘great day’ in Puerto Rico for Donald Trump, but more than 90% of the 3 and a half million people living on this island remain without power and phone communications.
“It means many of them would not have heard his remark about how much the disaster in Puerto Rico was costing the US government.
“Nor would they have seen that he only visited Guaynabo, a wealthy part of town, and joked with people there that they no longer needed the torches being handed out.
“Many of those we have met who are aware of this week's visit say this is more evidence that the president views them as second-class American citizens.”
That idea — the belief many Americans view Puerto Ricans as second-class citizens — would form the focus of an episode that was both sad and introspective by turns. Bourdain was visibly aged by the time Puerto Rico aired on November 17, shoehorned between Parts Unknown’s outings to Sri Lanka and Seattle. Sri Lanka and Seattle rank among Bourdain’s best work on Parts Unknown, but it was becoming clear by this point that the program was exacting a heavy toll.
There are moments of genuine joy and poetry in Puerto Rico, but watching it today, it’s hard to escape the feeling that it was nearing the end of the road — and taking Bourdain with it. Thirteen episodes — a baker’s dozen — would remain of the 91 fresh, first-run episodes Bourdain and his team produced for Parts Unknown overall.
Those remaining episodes would include outings to Uruguay, Armenia, Hong Kong, Berlin, Bhutan, Kenya and Indonesia among outings to more familiar home ground, including West Virginia, Far West Texas and Mardi Gras Cajun country.
The year 2017 marked a notable shift in tone for Parts Unknown, though — more cerebral, more introspective. It was as if Bourdain was considering his own mortality, and more determined than ever to share other people’s misfortunes around the world with what he knew by then to be a vast, global, worldwide audience.
“How American is Puerto Rico?” Bourdain asked, only partly rhetorically. More to the point: “How American do they want to be? How much responsibility are we willing to take for their aspirations, their well-being, their basic rights as humans, as citizens? The answer to that last question appears to be: not much.
“I ask these questions again and again of Puerto Ricans who have stayed and fought and persisted. Who have tried to build up, or at least hold on, to the basic things and services, the very land in the place of their birth. Teachers; doctors; ordinary people who are proud of the work they do, in spite of the fact that their resources, their funding, even their pensions seem to be draining inexorably and hopelessly away. And this was before the catastrophe.
”I hope people watch this episode and get a sense of who we are talking about when we talk about Puerto Rico — and what they have lost.”
You can’t put your arms around a memory — a lyric from the song by Johnny Thunders, one of the original punk rock guitar heroes, and a song referenced often in Bourdain’s travels. Noisy and epic. Thunders, the artist formerly known as John Anthony Genzale, Jr., spent his days, as the music writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine noted on the Rovi database, Spotify’s default music source, churning out tough, sloppy, three-chord rock ’n roll, “and gaining nearly as strong a reputation for his decades-long struggle with addiction as for his music.”
Bourdain could not have said it better. Of himself.
Later, after his original visit, Bourdain circled back to Puerto Rico with musician-songwriter Alfonso “Tito” Auger, who closed out the Parts Unknown episode singing Salimos de aquí (We Come from Here) with his band Fiel a la Vega. As Food & Wine’s Bridget Hallinan would later post on the Condé Nast Traveler site page, “Auger considers himself fortunate. His family is safe and his house is still intact. But the magnitude of the disaster — and the painfully slow path to recovery — has now sunk in.
“‘We don’t know for real what’s going on. We’ve been told six months, nine months, a year to get electricity back, which is the most basic, fundamental thing that we need right now to get everything else going and running,’ (Auger) told Bourdain. ‘We don’t understand why, during the first two weeks, things didn’t move faster. We feel like there’s a lot of bureaucracy going on behind the scenes.’”
It was ever thus.
Still is, in fact. Bourdain was ahead of his time, once again.
Supplementary reading:
https://www.cntraveler.com/story/recap-anthony-bourdains-parts-unknown-visits-puerto-rico
https://eatlikebourdain.com/anthony-bourdain-in-puerto-rico/
Supplementary viewing:
CNN