SPEAKER_17: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Some companies are big, others are small. To Robert Half, their hiring needs are equally huge. At Robert Half, our specialized recruiting professionals elevate their expertise with proprietary A.I. tools to transform candidate discovery, assessment, and selection. Whether sourcing talent locally or in any geography that works for you, Robert Half can pinpoint hard to find candidates in finance and accounting, technology, marketing and creative, legal, and administrative and customer support. At Robert Half, we know talent. Learn more at roberthalf.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. On the show this week, we're bringing you an episode of a new podcast called La Brega. And to tell us about this series is Alana Casanova Burgess. Host and co-creator and producer of La Brega, stories of the Puerto Rican experience, co-production from WNYC Studios and Futuro Studios.
SPEAKER_03: I say that in my dreams now. The name of the show, La Brega, is a word in Puerto Rican Spanish that doesn't really have a great English translation.
SPEAKER_17: But to illustrate the concept, we're going to start with a cell phone video that was taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, when the people of Puerto Rico were living in the dark. Some Puerto Ricans were without electricity for months on end, and everyone had to find ways to cope. And in the video, two people are standing in a carport. And so a woman is recording her father, and they're showing off this invention.
SPEAKER_11: They've got like the body, the drum of a washing machine.
SPEAKER_03: Okay. And then in the middle, what do you call that? The like spoke that comes out of the middle of the washing machine? The agitator, the spinner or something?
SPEAKER_17: The agitator, that is correct. I think I had googled that at one point.
SPEAKER_03: The agitator has bicycle handlebars attached to it.
SPEAKER_03: And this woman's father is so excited to show off this bicilabadora. So he's, you know, he's moving the handlebars back and forth and showing how it froths up, how you get like a good lather in the soak.
SPEAKER_07: And they're just making like the most of this terrible situation.
SPEAKER_03: So they're exclaiming like, look, it washes so well, you don't have electricity, but you don't need it. And you get a workout while you're doing it. And they're just like having a funny time. And they're like, you know, Puerto Ricans are really creative. I know everybody says that about themselves. We're such a creative people. But you're all wrong is the thing. Low key flex. But we've been through a lot. And so there's this sort of celebration in the video. And then at the same time, I knew from talking to my own family members how raw your hands get from like washing everything by hand in water, how like everybody just had to do the most for months. Like my aunt didn't have electricity for nine months. So they can't get power back for themselves. They can't like reconnect the electricity because the infrastructure is so poor and the government is failing them. But they find this workaround so that their hands don't have to like crack after weeks and then what will become months of washing your laundry by hand. And so when I was thinking about how to describe the name of the series, La Brega, to listeners, one of the first things that popped up was this YouTube video that I had watched like three years ago. So what is La Brega? Can you define it for us?
SPEAKER_17: Sure. It is a word that Puerto Ricans use. We use it all the time.
SPEAKER_03: It's this like catch all word for I'm struggling with something. I'm in the hustle. I'm in the situation that I can't solve. I can't actually like have any resolution to it. Right? So, for example, you can't solve the problem that you don't have electricity. But you can like attach some bicycle handlebars to the agitator of your washing machine and you can kind of make do. Maybe you have a terrible boss. You can't fix that problem. You can't resolve it. But you're like, all right, I'm just like I'm grappling with it. I think grappling is a good one. But we use it all the time. And I think I only really realized this after Maria. I was reporting for On the Media and I was able to actually make a montage of I was asking people like, how are you doing though? Like, but how are you doing really? Which is a hard question to ask when everybody like nobody really wants to get into their feelings because how do you then crawl out of them? And people would say like, oh, you know, you got to get used to it. I get costumbrare. And I was like, wow, we get used to things. Like a lot. And that doesn't seem entirely healthy all the time. And there's this like celebration of resilience like, oh, Puerto Ricans are so resilient. We're so resilient. But like, why are we resilient? And then then comes that word, like, how are you doing? Well, aqui en la brega, bregando. Why? That's the you're also just coping and hustling and grappling with something instead of resolving, solving it.
SPEAKER_17: I mean, this is evidence of the fact that, you know, we have to talk for a long time to define this thing. That it's kind of hard to define in English. Like there isn't like a, you know, an easy equivalent. What do you think that is?
SPEAKER_03: I don't know, but I, I would love to loan this word. Like, what has the pandemic been if not for like one long brega? Fair. Yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_17: So you've made a whole podcast series called La Brega. Tell us what motivated you to make it and what you wanted to accomplish with the series. We wanted to tell really rich, beautifully told stories about a place that really doesn't get talked about very often on our own terms.
SPEAKER_03: You know, we hear about whether it should be a state, what the Democrats want, what the Republicans want. But very rarely are we talking about our own experience with, for example, austerity policy. You know, like, what does that look like? What does our own history look like? Why do our suburbs look the way they do? Just like making everything about ourselves. And so, you know, we put together this team, we've got musicians and artists and reporters and producers and editors who are both from the diaspora and from the island because, you know, it is a really complicated identity. And so we wanted to marry those two parts of ourselves together and make like one team, like one Avengers squad. And at the same time, we wanted to talk to ourselves, obviously. And so early on in production, we realized, like, we've got to make these episodes in both English and Spanish so that we don't leave anybody out.
SPEAKER_17: That's so cool. So like, if you go to the La Brega feed, you will find English language and Spanish language versions there side by side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can pick the one you want to listen to. We've been hearing that a lot of people listen to both of them and then find like the Easter eggs, like the details that change.
SPEAKER_03: That are different between them. Yeah. Or couples where one person speaks one language better than the other. They listen together and then discuss. I love it.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah, I love it too.
SPEAKER_02: So we're going to feature one of the stories that you made for the series and fittingly to 99% Invisible.
SPEAKER_17: It's the one about the Levittown in Puerto Rico, sort of the built environment story of the series. So to start, what is Levittown and what's your family's connection to the place?
SPEAKER_03: Well, we say Levittown, but it's spelled the same way as Levittown in New York, say on Long Island.
SPEAKER_17: Yes. And for people who don't know, Levittowns were these mass produced suburbs that were like kind of the model suburbs and there's one in New York and there's one in Pennsylvania. And it was news to me that there's one in Puerto Rico too. Built by the same company.
SPEAKER_03: Built by the same company. Can you tell us a little bit about the Levittowns in general and what they were made, what the point of Levittowns were in the US and Puerto Rico?
SPEAKER_17: I think that their purpose was slightly different in Puerto Rico, but in New York, their purpose was post-war cheap housing for returning veterans, essentially.
SPEAKER_03: You know, you could take a new highway out to your new house that was going to be built in exactly the same way. You were going to have like a couple bedrooms, but you could add another one if you needed. You'd have brand new appliances and you would have a new school for your kids, a water tower, a library, police, the whole thing. So they were just these plopped down communities, basically.
SPEAKER_11: Five years ago, this was a vast checkerboard of potato farms on New York's Long Island. Today, a community of 60,000 persons living in 15,000 homes, all built by one firm. This is Levittown.
SPEAKER_17: One of the things about them beyond their sort of cookie cutter manufacturing way that they existed is that they pioneered some restrictive housing covenants. You were not allowed to be a personal color or a black person in a Levittown in the US. Correct. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: And I think about this a little bit with the Levittown in Puerto Rico, is that in a way, you had all these migrants coming from the island to New York. And you had a lot of white flight into the suburbs away from Puerto Ricans, away from people like my relatives, my family. And then when Puerto Ricans went back to the island in this wave of reverse migration in the late 60s and 70s, the company then sold us houses. So it's like, yeah, they made money twice. And my grandparents moved there when they moved from the Bronx back to the island in the early 70s. They are from another part of the island called Sialis, which is up in the mountains. It is beautiful. The views are gorgeous. There are streams, there are waterfalls, there are underground rivers. It's so beautiful. And my aunt lives there and I could never understand as a kid why I would have to visit Levittown, which is a...
SPEAKER_17: Which is not that, I take it. Which is not that. It is a lot of concrete.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, there's a beautiful mango tree in the front, but it's still like it's no Sialis. And it is so hot and so flat. But at the same time, it's sort of beautiful in its way.
SPEAKER_03: In what way is it beautiful?
SPEAKER_03: I mean, the houses all came in either white or a cream color. They had no color. And unlike the houses in the New York Levittown, these are all cement, so you can paint every surface of them. And so they can sometimes be quite colorful. You kind of get these Sherbert colors. And people also change them a lot, you know, like added a second story, added some Trinitadia, which is a kind of Bougainvillea. They added personality to it.
SPEAKER_17: So why did you want to make this story? What does the Levittown in Puerto Rico represent to you?
SPEAKER_03: Someone else says this in the piece, but I'm going to steal it. But it's sort of Puerto Rico in a nutshell. You have this boom and bust story about this desire for modernity and for middle class success and the American dream. But also this bust, there's so many foreclosures, so many empty homes. It's so hard to find a job that pays enough to have a house. And so it sort of follows that boom and bust idea, but it also is about negotiating this desire for a kind of Puerto Rican success, like this nostalgia for the mountains and for having chickens and a farm. You know, you've got your backyard, but you also have this successful modernity that my family must have really craved, I think. So I just wanted to look into that and figure out why it exists and what it did for people, what it does for people.
SPEAKER_17: Okay, so we're going to play the piece now. This is the English version of episode two of La Brega. It's called Levittown, where the good life begins. And we're going to start a few minutes in with the backstory of how the Levittown company came to develop land in Puerto Rico.
SPEAKER_03: Instead of a potato field, in Puerto Rico, the company started out in 1962 by buying nearly 440 acres of flat swampland in the town of Tuabaja, about 20 minutes from San Juan. They built drainage canals to empty into an artificial lake. I've seen the engineering diagrams and they're impressive. They originally planned to build 3,000 homes, but by 1977, there would be over 11,000. And just a short walk from the beach, they sold out quickly. The first models offered were Broche de Oro, El Camafeo, La Dia de Ma, La Alaja, and La Esmeralda, the one with two stories, which my grandparents purchased from friends when they decided to leave the Bronx in the early 70s and come back home. Or at least to a new home. Here in Levittown, the tagline was, Don de la buena vida comienza, where the good life begins.
SPEAKER_03: Ilda Rodriguez lives in a Camafeo model with her daughter, Paula. Ilda was five when they moved in in 1964.
SPEAKER_08: Perhaps just the second or third family there.
SPEAKER_03: They're not just pioneers. Their story is entwined with Levittowns. Ilda's parents started their family in the States before deciding to come back home to the island. Her uncle was working for the Levitt company, and he offered Ilda's father a job building the Levittown houses in Puerto Rico.
SPEAKER_08: And the opportunity for him to own his own home.
SPEAKER_08: The houses are like so many others in Puerto Rican suburbs.
SPEAKER_03: Flat roofed cement rectangles with Miami windows. These had built-in planters and carports, marquesinas, framed in decorated cinder blocks. And the catalog really pushed the cinder blocks.
SPEAKER_03: All the homes came with new General Electric appliances and were wired for telephones. In the 1960s, this was all a sleek, modern dream. Remember, this had been a mangrove swamp with lots of palm trees. When Ilda's mother opened the front door, the marquesina, the carport, would be full of crabs.
SPEAKER_08: Ilda's daughter, Paula, lives with her in Levittown.
SPEAKER_03: She's starting her career as a math teacher, and she remembers that her grandmother had even found crabs in the washing machine.
SPEAKER_03: They'd get into the motor and rattle around if you turned it on. There were so many that people would collect them in metal buckets, clean them, and cook them.
SPEAKER_08: She'll never forget how many crab legs they ate.
SPEAKER_03: The marquesinas were also where Sunday service was held in the early days, before Ilda's father, Dontonio, helped to found the local Catholic parish. Ilda was in the first graduating class of the elementary school, named for John F. Kennedy. There was a man-made lake, which still exists, but back then there were paddle boats, too. In the U.S., Levittowns were famous for excluding black and Jewish home buyers, and there were rules about everything from lawn maintenance to line-drying clothes. But there was none of that in Toa Baja. And in the late 70s, Ilda remembers a Levittown that was totally lit.
SPEAKER_03: Scouts with cars would drive around the different sexiones and report back about what parties were happening on a Friday night. A wedding, an anniversary, a birthday.
SPEAKER_03: They'd arrive unannounced, get invited to join, and then they'd be the last to leave, dancing boleros all night long.
SPEAKER_03: I like imagining my grandparents in this landscape, with Cheo Feliciano playing in the distance and neighbors dancing in marquesinas. And maybe after so many years of hearing about the U.S. Levittowns, this is what success looked like to them. Life in a modern suburb instead of a return to the lush but rustic countryside in Cialis. And as it turns out, that appeal of Levittown, it helps tell a bigger story about how in the mid-20th century Puerto Rico's future ran headlong into the American Dream.
SPEAKER_07: That's Paula, Ilda's daughter again.
SPEAKER_03: Antonio, her grandfather, knew a lot about Levittown's place in Puerto Rico's history.
SPEAKER_03: He was from that generation, she says, that went from being really poor, he grew up without shoes, to going on to get his high school degree later in life and of course to own his own house.
SPEAKER_07: So Luis Muñoz Marin, the first elected governor of Puerto Rico, is well known for pushing the idea that the island's prosperity would come not from statehood and not by independence.
SPEAKER_03: Silvia Alvarez-Curbelo is a Puerto Rican historian. She's also the author of Un Pais del Porvenir.
SPEAKER_03: She finds the time that is going to happen, like a point on the horizon, some kind of future of possibility. And Puerto Rico has historically been eager, striving for modernity, she says. Governor Muñoz would promote a massive program, Operación Mano de la Hombre, also known as Operation Bootstrap, to transform the island and reach that porvenir. Operation Bootstrap echoed the New Deal in the United States. It was a massive remaking of the Puerto Rican economy, and actually of the whole island. Government programs gave tax breaks to U.S. companies and engineered a shift from agriculture to manufacturing. And for Muñoz, it was this path to modernity because agriculture was for him like the symbol of backwardness. Of course, it was the agriculture of sugar, one crop agriculture.
SPEAKER_21: So it was no paradise, really?
SPEAKER_02: No.
SPEAKER_21: No. And industrialization was the thing of the future. Once again, the Pais del Porvenir.
SPEAKER_03: To understand why Levittown was such a dream, it's worth understanding what it wasn't. Have you seen photographs of how people used to live in the forest here in Puerto Rico?
SPEAKER_03: Jorge Lissardi Pollock is a professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Puerto Rico.
SPEAKER_18: For example, in this place called El Fanguito, it's a slum built over a swamp.
SPEAKER_03: These were wooden houses on stilts perched over water. In 1940, the average life expectancy in Puerto Rico was 46 years, nearly 20 years shorter than it was in the States. A lot of people used to live with no running water, no electricity, no baths.
SPEAKER_03: Some 70 percent of people lived in the countryside, and housing was a key part of Operation Bootstrap. It was— The way in which the government demonstrates that it was possible to modernize the country and clean up the slums.
SPEAKER_18: Broad avenues in San Juan lead to residential districts where houses resemble those in Florida, California, or Texas.
SPEAKER_13: Cringeworthy films like this one, called Fiesta Island, marketed Puerto Rico as a prospering outpost that was looking more and more like the United States.
SPEAKER_13: Everybody grows and loves flowers in Puerto Rico. These are red ginger blossoms. Forms for everybody. Housing gets top priority in Puerto Rico's booming economy.
SPEAKER_03: Doña Fela, the mayor of San Juan during this period, looked back on it in a documentary in the 1980s. The miracle was that we created middle class, which was created from one day to the other.
SPEAKER_03: And that newly minted middle class, moving from the campo to the city, needed homes. In 1960, roughly 40 percent of housing in Puerto Rican cities was considered substandard. In Washington, D.C., the federal government was creating incentives for single family homes and highways, and Puerto Rico got them too.
SPEAKER_18: Just following the promise about a good life in the U.S., that everybody should have their own house, their own patio, their own car. We just follow that promise.
SPEAKER_03: So if I say Levittown to you, what is the first thing that you think? The topic of the middle class, the topic of freedom.
SPEAKER_03: Up until the Cold War, Washington cared very little for Puerto Rico, if at all. But as Cuba became the poster island for communism in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico became a capitalist counterpoint. When I think of Levittown, I think of the Cold War to obvious, on the Cold War promises.
SPEAKER_18: And one way the U.S. fought back against dictatorships and communism was by giving Puerto Ricans the chance to own the land.
SPEAKER_03: So they will become owners, and owners won't rebel against their own property.
SPEAKER_18: They won't do that. This isn't only true of the Puerto Rican Levittown. William Levitt of Levitt & Sons once said, quote,
SPEAKER_03: no man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do. Governor Muñoz embraced Levittown and attended the ribbon cutting for it in September of 1963. It was widely covered in U.S. papers. These homes with their gardens and their garages for a car everyone was expected to have would be the model for housing in Puerto Rico for the next 50 years. But there wasn't room for everybody in this version of Muñoz's vision of porvenir. San Juan's mayor, Doña Fela, said the creation of a middle class overnight was a miracle. But actually, it was a very intentional miracle, and one with extremely mixed results. The part of this economic transformation that isn't talked about much is how many people supposedly had to leave in order to make it work. For local technocrats, the problem was that there was no way to create enough jobs to employ everyone. There were too many people on the island to create a middle class, and that idea led to some horrible policies. Today, we know more about the shameful project that sterilized roughly a third of Puerto Rican women and the birth control movement. But it wasn't only that. In 1946, a government report estimated that around a million people would have to leave in order to make the island prosperous. And by the late 40s, the government would get involved. Really involved. We'll be right back. This is La Brega.
SPEAKER_17: We'll hear the second half of Alana's story, which explores how Levittown became the place for Puerto Ricans returning from the U.S. right after this. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. When you're working on the go, how can you make sure the confidential information on your laptop screen is safe from wandering eyes? 3M has the answer with the new 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filter. Using Nanoluver technology, 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filters deter visual hackers while providing a 25% brighter experience over other privacy filters. In fact, it's 3M's brightest privacy filter yet, the perfect balance of screen clarity and visual privacy. It's a new type of privacy filter built for an era where our screens are wherever we go. Try the new 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filter and stop worrying about confidential or personal information escaping your computer screen. Everything that appears in your screen is for your eyes only. Visit 3M screens dot com slash brighter to get your new 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filter today and work like no one is watching. 3M screens dot com slash brighter. Chances are you're listening to 99% invisible on your phone, probably while you're on the go. Think of all that you do on your phone the moment you leave your front door, whether it's looking up directions, scrolling social media, or listening to your favorite podcast. It requires an amazing network. That's why you should switch to T-Mobile. T-Mobile covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else and helps keep you connected with 5G from the driveway to the highway and the miles in between. Because your phone should just work where you are. It's your lifeline to pretty much everything you didn't bring with you. So next time you head out, whether you're taking a trip or going to work or just running errands, remember T-Mobile has got you covered. Find out more at T-Mobile dot com slash network and switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. See 5G details at T-Mobile dot com. We're back with the second half of Levittown, where the good life begins. Here's Alana Casanova Burgess again.
SPEAKER_03: And we're back to La Brega. We've been talking about an American style suburb whose story is, in many ways, the story of the island in the 20th century, at a time when Puerto Rico was being remade in America's image. The government was trying to transform Puerto Rico's economy, moving from agriculture to industry and making a middle class. The government realized that without the massive exodus of people, economic growth in Puerto Rico would be maybe hinder or slow down.
SPEAKER_03: Edgardo Melendez is the author of Sponsored Migration, a book about Puerto Ricans moving to the U.S. He describes an engineered exodus, a, quote, campaign to turn every Puerto Rican into a potential migrant. The Puerto Rican government would create levers and wedges and pulleys to make modernity work for those who stayed, but only by encouraging others to leave. At the same time, the U.S. government wanted cheap labor in cities like New York and Chicago, and so encouraging migration was also in their interest. Puerto Ricans come here to New York and to elsewhere to find jobs, to get better education opportunities and other opportunities for their children.
SPEAKER_03: The Puerto Rican government had positions like Director of the Migration Division of the Department of Labor, based in New York. Here he is on WNYC in 1955.
SPEAKER_09: They are now on the first rung of a ladder, which many of our own fathers and grandfathers began to climb just a generation ago. So they created all these programs to help migrants get social services from local governments like New York, English classes, helping kids with their documents so they can move easily to schools in the U.S., all that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_14: There was an expectation that Puerto Ricans would assimilate easily, but that didn't pan out.
SPEAKER_03: Puerto Ricans were being rejected in the United States, even though they were citizens, right? And of course the cultural and linguistic differences.
SPEAKER_14: So there were members of Muñoz's government who looked for another solution to what they saw as the problem of overpopulation.
SPEAKER_03: That argue, well, for migrants it will be easier to incorporate, I mean assimilate in Latin America because of the common culture and language.
SPEAKER_14: But even in the early 50s, the government sent a representative to Brazil to consider creating a colony of Puerto Rican migrants there. The U.S. government nixed this. Not only did they not want Puerto Rico negotiating with foreign governments, but it would also get too messy to have a bunch of U.S. citizens living in Venezuela or the Dominican Republic.
SPEAKER_03: And yes, they made sure there were plenty of flights to the U.S. And that's what gets us to the first Eastern Airlines flight to San Juan in 1951, the one that broke Pan Am's monopoly.
SPEAKER_10: We consider it both a privilege and an obligation to offer Puerto Rico the kind of transport service upon which the continuing progress and prosperity of this island depends.
SPEAKER_03: Governor Muñoz had lobbied for expanding airline access to make it easier for Puerto Ricans to leave the island. But when he made the argument, what he said was that Puerto Ricans deserve to go looking for jobs as much as anyone else in the States.
SPEAKER_03: It stings when I think about all these machinations to get a million people to leave, to get families like mine to leave, that we were a sacrifice worth making for that shining porvenir. But people wouldn't just leave for good. Because of the island's relationship with the U.S., it was easier for Puerto Ricans to come and go. Many, like my grandparents, would decide to return. And for them and many others coming from cramped and cold walk-up apartments, the dream of success looked a lot like Levitown.
SPEAKER_04: Now, Levitown is an important phenomenon because it's basically an area built by return migrants.
SPEAKER_14: The flow is no longer one way, as thousands of Puerto Ricans have decided to return home.
SPEAKER_18: Eastern Airlines announces a final boarding call for service to San Juan, Puerto Rico.
SPEAKER_03: August 1971, CBS News. Some have saved enough money to buy small, trim homes in new suburbs, in developments like Levitown, for instance, where life has as distinctly American a flavor as a suburb's name.
SPEAKER_03: Levitown has a reputation for being a place settled by the returning diaspora.
SPEAKER_21: I think that is like an intermediate space. The historian Sylvia Alvarez-Curbelo says Levitown was a bridge between the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
SPEAKER_03: For returning Puerto Ricans, there was a nostalgia, as several people have told me, for a life in the countryside that existed before Puerto Rico's big transformation, before people left. Carport in the front, platanos in the back. You have to plant a guava tree, a lemon tree, and, you know, like the staples of a garden in Puerto Rico.
SPEAKER_21: And Levitown's patios had room for that.
SPEAKER_03: In Levitown, I think that many of the New Yorkans wanted to have a Puerto Rico that was already vanishing in some way.
SPEAKER_21: My grandfather, Nicolas Casanova, kept ducks and chicken and even geese in his suburban backyard.
SPEAKER_03: It's a detail I hadn't thought about until Sylvia described that longing. But it wasn't an easy fit for everyone returning from New York. One resident told me, not on tape, that she felt bullied by a teacher who scolded her for speaking English. It was a common story in the 70s, featured in news reports quoting teenagers in Puerto Rican high schools. People were laughing at me because, you know, I didn't know Spanish.
SPEAKER_01: They would, you know, you would say something wrong, you know, they'd be trying to correct you, but most of the time they would laugh. They make fun of you the way you talk Spanish or something.
SPEAKER_12: They say if you say a wrong word in Spanish, something like that, they start saying, oh, you can't speak Spanish right, and things like that. And they start calling you gringo. Schools in Puerto Rico even started offering Spanish courses to the returning migrants to help them fit back in.
SPEAKER_03: Unhappy with life in the States and slow to assimilate in a hostile Puerto Rico, the Níoricans say they're in limbo, not knowing where they belong.
SPEAKER_03: Níoricans returning from the States not only struggled to fit in, they also struggled to find a job, and they weren't the only ones. Ilda, the resident we heard from earlier, says her family had a hard time making ends meet after returning from the States. In Levittown, the mortgage payment on their house, the camafeo model, was $62 a month. That was a lot for their family.
SPEAKER_08: When we moved here, the cost of the house was $2,500. Her father, Dontonio, had worked building the Levittown houses, but when they had all been finished in the late 70s, his next job didn't pay enough to make the monthly payment.
SPEAKER_03: There came a moment where he was on the verge of desperation, and her parents were deciding whether they'd give up the house and leave again for the United States, when something happened that changed their fortunes.
SPEAKER_03: Ilda can see the scene in her memory. One day, her father got home. He sits down at the dining room table, and he opens the newspaper. Her mother, Dona Luci, is in the kitchen.
SPEAKER_03: Come here, he says. She looks over his shoulder.
SPEAKER_03: Ilda could hear her saying, no way, really, no way. She could see them both with huge smiles on their faces, full of happiness.
SPEAKER_08: Dontonio had won the lottery, first prize.
SPEAKER_03: With that money, he paid off the house. A few streets away, his sister was also struggling to pay. He helped her out, too.
SPEAKER_03: If not for the lottery, they would have gone back to the States. Maybe someday her parents would have returned to the island, but they wouldn't have kept the house.
SPEAKER_03: Instead, she's been in La Vitan now for 55 years, and despite all the good times, all the memories, and all the promises, Ilda says that the way life is in Puerto Rico, she wants to leave. It's the crime, the shrinking pensions, the lack of opportunities.
SPEAKER_08: But also, people used to say neighbors are your real family. Everyone would help each other, care for each other.
SPEAKER_03: Today, Ilda says, if you die, they find you by the smell.
SPEAKER_08: This is so dark, but the truth is that there are so many empty homes in La Vitan now.
SPEAKER_03: Nearly 15 years of a fiscal recession has taken its toll, and then came Maria. According to figures from 2018, over 20% of the houses in La Vitan are vacant. The elementary school, the one named for John F. Kennedy, was closed as part of an island-wide shutdown of hundreds of schools.
SPEAKER_07: Paula, Ilda's daughter, says her mother saw La Vitan's best days. She lives at home, loves this place, but knows her and her friends have seen its decline.
SPEAKER_03: It wasn't just dancing in the streets. There were also walkways between the sections, and now they're all closed. It's dangerous to walk alone, and the beach that borders the north side of La Vitan, Punta Salinas, is contaminated.
SPEAKER_03: And Ilda can't imagine late-night chats outside with neighbors. In the original designs, La Vitan's balconies were all open, but today they're caged with security bars. La Vitan's lake, once an amenity, overflowed during Maria. The dam was opened without warning, and houses and streets near it flooded. Ilda and Paula's home didn't flood, but other people had to be rescued from their roofs, or flee in the dark. Four people died.
SPEAKER_19: Every time I go to work, I take the 165 road, La Uno Seicinco, that's the road that takes all Dorado, La Vitan, San Juan, and you can see how deteriorated La Vitan is actually, post-Maria and before Maria. That's Sixto Aza Cortis, a friend of Paula's and longtime La Vitan resident. After Maria, out of boredom, they made nuestro podcast with some other friends.
SPEAKER_20: And one of the episodes is about their home.
SPEAKER_03: They discussed the awful experience of the hurricane, and they talk about a book of short stories based in La Vitan. And, over an hour into the episode, Sixto poses a huge question to the group.
SPEAKER_20:
SPEAKER_03: Did La Vitan fail? And his answer, he told Paula and I recently, is yes. You could actually see how La Vitan could mirror perfectly the failed experiment of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and that's just my opinion, and how at the same time it could be mirrored as the failed experiment of the American dream.
SPEAKER_03: He sees it in the run-down baseball fields, in the abandoned houses, in that drive to work every day on the 165.
SPEAKER_19: And that many people, you know, they left Puerto Rico, their own home, their own picket fence, their white picket fence with their dog and their family and their house.
SPEAKER_03: The financial crisis and austerity policy has blanketed the whole island. More than angry, it makes me sad, you know, that we're in this time, but this is not only La Vitan. This is Puerto Rico in a nutshell.
SPEAKER_03: There was something about La Vitan that required a winning lottery ticket to achieve. The promise wasn't a home, it was a house. And that suburban model of development was defined by sprawl that clutters the landscape, and by mortgages that have become foreclosures. It wasn't enough to build houses if you couldn't create an economy in which people could afford to stay in them. The porvenir that Governor Luis Muñoz Marin had promised had already started to crumble with a recession in the 1970s. Silvia Alvarez-Curbelo told me about a diary that he kept for a couple of years during that time. And it was like he was surprised by the change.
SPEAKER_21: He spoke about the traffic, about the people that were like in a hurry. He spoke about the trouble with youth, juvenile delinquency and so on. He sounds like kind of just a grumpy old man.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, people are rushing around too much these days, the kids, right? He sounds a little, uh, yeah. Yes, because the times accelerated too much.
SPEAKER_21: Too much progress. Too much porvenir.
SPEAKER_02: Too much porvenir and the unraveling of the porvenir into many porveniras.
SPEAKER_21: It was not only one. It's as though the vision of having a house got tied up too closely with the American dream and with an unsustainable consumerism.
SPEAKER_03: So, Levitan can feel like a metaphor for the failures of Puerto Rico's economic experiment. But last time I was there, I saw it through new eyes. I took in the interesting things that were showing through the cracks. Cézanne Cardona Morales is the author of a collection of short stories called, ironically, Levitan Mon Amour, the one Paula and Sixto discussed in their podcast.
SPEAKER_08: We are here for the, I think, the tour.
SPEAKER_06: The tour. Yes, the tour of the house, the house of the house. Cézanne and I met under the rust-streaked belly of the Blue Water Tower a couple of weeks before the pandemic outside what used to be a public library.
SPEAKER_03: Like so much else in Puerto Rico, even before COVID, it was closed. The site that is being built on the left is a map of the area.
SPEAKER_06: The map that is going to be used has information that is passing through here.
SPEAKER_03: It's part of the aerial map, he says. I checked this out and he's right. Pilots have to tell air traffic control that they're passing it on their way into the airport. In other words, I'm not the only one.
SPEAKER_06: Levitan keeps surprising him.
SPEAKER_03: Every time he comes here, despite the detritus and the decay, he sees colors that call his attention.
SPEAKER_06: Writing about this place was his way of making a kind of peace with his country, with Puerto Rico through the fiscal crisis, the deterioration, the difficulty of making ends meet.
SPEAKER_03: To leave the resentment about what wasn't and appreciate what is. I asked him, after all this historical research, if I'm trying to see the beauty in Levitan, could he give me some pointers?
SPEAKER_06: Well, it depends on what you consider beauty.
SPEAKER_03: Look at what time has done to this place. Look at the rust at the shuttered businesses.
SPEAKER_06: Looking at closed storefronts gave him the possibility to invent, to imagine businesses that maybe didn't actually exist, and walk along the boulevard, which is called Avenue Boulevard, a redundant name that tickles Cécane.
SPEAKER_06: It tickles me now, too. And much more does as well.
SPEAKER_03: A few steps away from where we sat, the public high school is named for Dr. Pedro Alpisucampos, Puerto Rico's independence icon. Right there in Levitan, the American suburb. And then there's the water tower, which doesn't actually hold any water. It's a monument to uselessness, a symbol of a failure to have functional infrastructure.
SPEAKER_06: And yet it's still an icon, visible from the highway, from the streets, and from the sky.
SPEAKER_06: It's empty, and yet it's become like our own Eiffel Tower, he says, appealing to Cécane precisely because it doesn't work.
SPEAKER_03: I remember something Paula shared on her podcast about how she sometimes imagines that there's a mermaid in the water tower. It's a vision from Aquamarine, a teen movie from 2006 that you should feel no rush to go see. In the movie, there's a mermaid in a water tower.
SPEAKER_03: I imagine mermaids up there now, too.
SPEAKER_03: I had hoped to end this journey in my grandparents' Levitan, but then the pandemic hit. So instead, this summer, I drove from Brooklyn to Long Island and peered up at this other water tower in this other Levitan. While the Puerto Rican one towers over a busy commercial strip, this one is quiet, tucked into some residential streets that curve into each other and are named for plants, like Azalea Road and the San Francisco River. I could hear the drip, drip, drip of water falling from the tank. There's a baseball diamond there, too, and a basketball court, and a group of teenagers were playing. Someone was walking their dog. The lawns were tidy, but there were no guava trees, no lemon trees. This light blue water tower also says Levitan in big letters, although frankly it's not as impressive, maybe not as tall as the Puerto Rican one. I imagined getting some bolt cutters for the chain link fence and getting to the circular door at the base of the tower. I could open the hatch, like the ones on a submarine, and instead of climbing whatever ladder lies on the other side, I could open another hatch and arrive at the other Levitan, as though the water towers were portals. I'd arrive, bypassing airplanes and airports and the danger of a COVID-19 transmission, on Avenida Boulevard. I'd go to Panadería Lemmy and I'd order a box of quesito. Then I'd walk to my cousin's house, the same one my grandparents moved to when they were looking for something between one dream and another. In the room where I sleep when I visit, there's a view of the water tower.
SPEAKER_03: La Brega is a co-production of WNYC Studios and Futuro Studios. This episode is available in Spanish as well, and you can listen to either wherever you get your podcasts through La Brega's podcast feed. This episode was produced by me with help from Mark Pagan. It was edited by Luis Trelles, Marlon Bishop and Mark Pagan. Fact checking by Istra Pacheco. Engineering is by Stephanie Lebeau, Leah Shaw-Damron, Rosana Caban, Gabriela Báez and Alicia Baítúk. Original music for La Brega was composed by Balún and our theme song is by IFE. Additional music from Frankie Reyes. Art for this piece was done by Fernando Norrát. Leadership support for La Brega is provided by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, with additional support provided by Amy Liss. Deep gratitude to WNYC's Andy Lancet for his generosity with archival tape. Thanks also to Rebecca Ibarra and Yarimar Bonilla for their ears and to Carmelo Esterich, Francisco Rodriguez Suarez and Mirmarie Grau-Gonzalez for their expertise. And special thanks to Sofia Enlucinda Bordali and Olga Casanova-Burgis. Thanks also to Esequiel Rodriguez Sandino. In the next episode, a very different story about the shadows of the Cold War in Puerto Rico and a dark legacy we're still dealing with. Hasta la próxima.
SPEAKER_17: Thanks to Olana Casanova-Burgis and La Brega for letting us share their story. Go listen to them all. They're fantastic. Our feature that wrapped around their story was produced by Emmett Fitzgerald and our senior producer Delaney Hall. Music by our director of sound Sean Riel. Mixed by Amita Kanatra. Kurt Kohlstedt is 99PI's digital director. The rest of the team is Christopher Johnson, Vivien Ley, Joe Rosenberg, LaShama Dawn, Chris Berube, Katie Menya, and Sophia Klatsker and me, Roman Mars. 99% Invisible is a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is scattered about the North American continent right now, but is centered in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, an independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radio-topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. But our home for beautiful nerds is 99PI.org. Radio-Topia from PRX.
SPEAKER_17: Great sleep can be hard to come by these days, and finding the right mattress feels totally overwhelming. Serta's new and improved Perfect Sleeper is a simple solution designed to support all sleep positions. With zoned comfort, memory foam, and a cool-to-the-touch cover, the Serta Perfect Sleeper means more restful nights and more rested days. Find your comfort at Serta.com.
SPEAKER_13: When the weather app says rain, the McDonald's app says McDelivery. Order McDelivery in the McDonald's app.
SPEAKER_00: And participating in McDonald's delivery prices may be higher than at restaurants. Delivery fees may apply.
SPEAKER_05: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruit Loops, just so you know. Fruit? Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruit Loops, the same way you say studio. That's not how we say it. Fruit Loops. Find the Loopy side.
