The Shadow of Palestine in Puerto Rico
Community vandalizes Brock Pierce’s recently acquired Children’s museum building in Old San Juan. Credit: Comité Boricua.
There is an ominous feeling on the desolate streets of old San Juan. This gloom is made tangible by drastic changes that are immediately visible. The residents are gone, either by reluctant migration to the U.S. for perceived economic opportunities, or through forced displacement. Gone with them is the way of life that made Old San Juan what it once was. A Friday night on Calle San Sebastian is now a sleepy experience, peppered with a few bars that now largely cater to the latest gringo invasion. Those who remain, having lost their communities to Airbnbs and crypto pioneers, continue to make their feelings clear. “Gringo go home” is graffitied on the walls in English, made legible for the incoming colonizers. Still, this direct message from the natives has not deterred the influx of settlers. Many of them come to Puerto Rico because of Act 60, formally called Ley 20 y 22, instituted by governor Luis Fortuño in 2012. Act 60 allows foreigners to reap fiscal benefits while Puerto Ricans are subjugated under the U.S.-imposed fiscal control board who brutally oversees the economic governance of Puerto Rico. Very much like the Homestead Act of 1862, which accelerated the settlement of the western lands seized by the United States by granting white settlers 160 acres of surveyed public land, Act 60 promotes the relocation of settlers or individual investors “to stimulate economic development [of Puerto Rico] by offering nonresident individuals 100% tax exemptions on all interest, all dividends, and all long-term capital gains.” This law is accompanied by the designation of 98.5% of Puerto Rico including 99% of its beaches as opportunity zones. Opportunity zones are defined as “economically distressed communities, defined by individual census tract, eligible for preferential tax treatment to spur private and public investment.” What in 1862 was a ground invasion under the philosophy of Manifest Destiny is expressed today through Dictatorship for Democracy, the philosophy of PROMESA.
The tension now between gringos and Puerto Ricans is felt even in the most remote corners of Puerto Rico. Speculating settlers comb the archipelago snatching up properties as they benefit from both the disaster capitalism prompted by Hurricane María and the economic squeeze of PROMESA. Settlers, now growing in number as Puerto Ricans migrate into the U.S. as a result of this neoliberal perfect storm, have become more brazen with their entitlement, racism, and exploitation, evident in the documentation of exchanges between settlers and Puerto Ricans posted online. Wealth manager Kira Golden, who infamously declared in an interview that Hurricane María was “amazing for the island,” is the developer behind the purchase of eight properties in Río Piedras, pushing out its long-term residents after raising the rent by $300 a month. In Rincón, Martin William Drew (CEO of Planet Rincón, a real estate development business) became angry at a worker when he was refused service for failing to abide by the Covid mask policy at a local Econo supermarket. Drew spat in the face of the worker who promptly retaliated by punching him in the mouth. In 2021, Refugio Puerto Rico, a self-described “budding permaculture farm and wellness retreat,” posted an ad seeking two persons with construction or welding skills. The job offered no salary, only room and board and reimbursement for expenses related to the job. In Mayagüez, entrepreneur Thomas Bowen, owner of the now defunct Island Axe sports bar, sought to hire “two sales reps with no accents.” Bowen gloated online that settlers like himself “will continue to take over” to create “a Hawaii 2.0.” While the looming prospect of statehood hangs over the head of Puerto Rico, it is not Hawaii that Puerto Rico is poised to mirror, but rather, Palestine.
Composite of infographic image of Disappearing Palestine by Friends of Al-Aqsa and U.S. Marine Occupation of Vieques (red) by César Ayala Casás 2006, UCLA
The most influential settler in Puerto Rico is the crypto venture capitalist Brock Pierce. Pierce, whose net worth is about 2 billion dollars, was raised in Minnesota by his Christian missionary mother. Pierce’s missionary upbringing––untethered from its settler colonial roots––appears to shape his vision of a “Puertopia” described by Crypto bloggers as a “crypto-libertarian Jerusalem.” This reference to Al-Quds (Jerusalem) in occupied Palestine, which currently serves as Israel’s illegal capitol, is more than a coincidence. Pierce has significant ties to Israel, which appear to be both ideologically and strategically motivated. In 2022, Pierce appeared alongside Donald Trump’s secretary of State Mike Pompeo and New York City Mayor Eric Adams at an event held by the Israel Heritage Foundation (IHR). The main objective of this Zionist organization is “to strengthen Israel’s security, encourage worldwide Aliyah or immigration to Israel, and support sovereignty throughout Israel, including Judea and Samaria,” or as it is commonly known, the West Bank, encompassing one of two remaining Palestinian territories. During his speech, Pierce touched on a range of subjects: saluting Israel as a hub of innovation despite being a small country, defending the need for law and order, and stating his support for Israel and all of its causes.
Given the reception Pierce has received in Puerto Rico, it is no surprise that he would look to Israel occupying Palestine, a small innovative country with a native population who refuses to yield, for answers. Brock Pierce has faced very public protests in Puerto Rico and his properties have been repeatedly vandalized. Countering this poor public image requires multiple strategies. One of Pierce’s tactics has been electoral politics, including a presidential run in 2020 and another for Senator in Vermont in 2021, which resulted in his dropping out of the race to start a pro-crypto super PAC, One America. Pierce’s most successful strategy, however, has been the establishment of his philanthropic project, Integro Foundation. Through Integro, Pierce wields significant funding power over start up nonprofits, small entrepreneurs, and environmental conservation projects. Indeed, Pierce has interest in co-opting and coercing the public. But if this is his tactic to assert soft power over Puerto Rico, then what would be the accompanying hard power tactic? Perhaps his flamboyant adoration of Israel might provide a clue.
Brock Pierce visiting with Prime Minister Netanyahu on February 20, 2022. Instagram
Pierce visited Israel earlier in 2022 to meet with multiple members of the Knesset, including Benjamin Netanyahu himself. Pierce told the Jerusalem Post of his visit, “I’m not really seeking anything. I’m talking to a number of governments around the world… But Jerusalem has been on my list of places to spend some time for a while…this trip serves multiple functions. I’m just offering information… I don’t want to say the specifics, but let’s just say I had conversations around things like national security, and other things that are critical to America’s future.” On this trip, Pierce was accompanied by his chief of staff Yidel Perlstein, who also happens to be the community board chairman in Borough Park Brooklyn and the first Hasidic Jew to fill the position. If Pierce is in the business of world making, the Zionist model which he publicly praises and has cultivated deep ties with seems to be what he imagines for Puerto Rico, making the brutal apartheid regime and current genocide of Palestinians in Gaza a future possibility for Puerto Ricans. Pierce isn’t the only Crypto venture capitalist in Puerto Rico invested in Israel. Others like David Malka and Jordan Fried have bankrolled $1 million to charter the Airbus A330-200 that transported over 150 Israeli Defense Force reservists from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv. They also contribute $1.5 million to pay for supplies including bullet proof vests. In this way, the settlers exploiting and capitalizing off of Puerto Rican misery wrought by disaster capitalism and the neoliberal economic dictatorship of PROMESA are able to privately fund the genocide of Palestinians as they publicly profess their admiration for the settler colonial Zionist state. This is not the first time Puerto Rico and Palestine have been linked in this way.
The small island of Vieques lies to the east of the Puerto Rican mainland alongside Culebra, while Isla de Mona flanks the mainland on the west. In 1941, the U.S. military forcibly removed an estimated 10,000 people from Vieques at gunpoint and relocated them to the center of the island. The rest of Vieques became a war zone, used for the deployment of as much as 3 million pounds per year of live artillery and explosives into Vieques’ land and sea, containing napalm, depleted uranium, lead, and other toxic chemicals. This violence took place for more than 60 years. The people’s protests against this military occupation that converted their land into a bomb testing site went largely unheard, until in 1999, when the navy accidentally dropped a 500lb bomb on a lookout post, killing a 35-year-old David Sanes, who worked at the base as a security guard. The struggle in Vieques then rippled out into the world, catalyzing actions, civil disobedience, and marches across the globe, where the anticolonial and anti-imperial struggle in Puerto Rico aligned with other struggles like Palestine. At the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York, for example, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition marched with Puerto Ricans in the diaspora. In 2001, George W. Bush announced the closure of the U.S. Naval base, and the people of Vieques finally succeeded in pushing them off of their land in 2003. However, the impact remains. Only 1,600 of the 4,000 hectares suspected of having munitions have been surface cleared. Further, unusually high concentrations of toxic metals like mercury, uranium, and arsenic are found in viequenses’ hair and urine. Residents in Vieques have significantly higher rates of heart disease, liver disease, diabetes, and infant mortality rates with a 280% higher chance to develop lung cancer compared with Puerto Ricans in the mainland. And yet, the island of Vieques does not have a hospital. It does, however, have luxury tourism destinations like the W Hotel, which was purchased by Brock Pierce in 2022.
Banner, Vieques Solidarity Event, Puerto Rican Day Parade, NYC June 10, 2001. Al- Awda.org
In 1999, local fishers place a cross that reads ‘no more lost lives in Vieques’ on top of an abandoned tank in remembrance of David Sanes. Photograph: Jose Jimenez/Primera Hora/Getty Image
What settler colonial occupation ultimately produces is dispossession, apartheid, and genocide. The creation of the settler colonial state of Israel produced the Nakba, or the catastrophe as Palestinians know it, removing 700,000 Palestinians from their land and destroying over 500 Palestinian villages, just as a Manifest Destiny doctrine produced a Trail of Tears for the Cherokee, Muscogee Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw, forcibly removing them from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States. This was what the people of Vieques experienced at gunpoint in 1941 at a much smaller scale and what Puerto Ricans now fear as they confront the latest iteration of settler invasion. While there are particularities that make the settler colonial occupation of Palestine and Puerto Rico distinct, what brings them close together is the integral role of the United States in the maintenance of each project. The most recent data shows that the United States committed over $3.3 billion in foreign assistance to Israel in 2022. About $8.8 million of that went toward the country's economy, while 99.7% of the aid went to the Israeli military. For Puerto Rico, which has been subjugated under U.S. colonial rule since 1898, the subordination of the land, its resources, and its people shift with time according to U.S. interest. It is well understood by now that “settler colonialism is a structure, not an event.” The latest iteration renews the settler colonial violence of the Homestead Act through neoliberal measures like Act 60, driving entrepreneurs/pioneers into Puerto Rico where they are circling the wagons all across the archipelagos.
Guerrilla artist intervention in San Juan, Photo: Ruth Figueroa Couvertier
For Puerto Ricans, this danger is two-fold. First, it faces the power of a wealthy crypto class who profits from the colonial arrangement, acquiring land and economic power and wielding a tremendous amount of influence over the archipelago. As we have seen, this crypto class has expressed its affinity and even allegiance to Zionist settler colonial project which has already demonstrated for them its methods in attempting to “eliminate the native,” providing a template to confront the growing hostilities settlers in Puerto Rico regularly face. Second, as the growing entrepreneur/pioneer population gains political power as new residents of Puerto Rico, they may begin to exercise their electoral power and join this chorus, potentially pushing for statehood. Settlers would then become Puerto Ricans, as citizens of the state of Puerto Rico, ensuring the erasure of the Puerto Rican people and their culture. But the rich history of Puerto Rican anti-colonial resistance reverberates today in the defiant cry of “Gringo Go home.” The people of Puerto Rico will not go quietly. Inevitable confrontation is promised. For this reason, Puerto Ricans scream “Que viva Palestina!,” denouncing the Zionist occupation of Palestine and calling for an end to the genocidal bombardment and ethnic cleansing in Gaza by the hands of Israel. For Puerto Ricans, Palestine is intimately understood through the lens of the Puerto Rican struggle. The shadow of Palestine looms over Puerto Rico.
Shellyne Rodriguez is an artist, educator, writer, and community organizer based in the Bronx. Her practice utilizes text, drawing, painting, collage and sculpture to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.
Ruth Noelia Figueroa Couvertier (they/them, she/her), a Comparative Literature graduate, is an Afro-Boricua-Caribbean, black, and socialist femme person who believes in the independence of her land, Boriken, and the liberation of all occupied territories. She currently works as an educator and gallery assistant in Loíza, Puerto Rico.