Like Mart\u00ednez Ocasio, I grew up in a small town: he in Vega Baja in the north of Puerto Rico, I in San Lorenzo in the south-east.<\/p>\n
His mother was a schoolteacher and his father was a truck driver with no connections in the music industry. My mother, far removed from the media world, worked in a factory.<\/p>\n
My childhood, like his – as the artist once described in an interview with The New York Times Magazine – felt “far away” from the bustle of San Juan, even though the capital was only a 45-minute drive.<\/p>\n
Each trip to the so-called metropolitan area was quite an event: waking up early, dressing nicely, deciding what we might eat for lunch.<\/p>\n
Most often, those trips centred around Plaza Las Am\u00e9ricas, a massive shopping mall where, as Mart\u00ednez Ocasio once said, “you didn’t even know where you were standing”.<\/p>\n
Like him, I learned English as an adult and speak it with a non-native accent, despite being a US citizen, as all people born in Puerto Rico are.<\/p>\n
For many of us, mastering another language often depends on whether we can afford private classes.<\/p>\n
It’s no small detail that, according to the latest US census data, only 22% of the island territory’s population feels it can speak English “very well”.<\/p>\n
Disconnected by limited public transportation, without tourists or major events, daily life in our towns moved slowly, all while shaped by a public debt crisis and a subsequent bankruptcy that caused profound political, social, and economic turmoil.<\/p>\n
Over the past three decades, fiscal hardship has left us with a fragile electrical grid vulnerable to hurricanes, mass migration, violence, school closures, and a diminished public university.<\/p>\n
Back in 2018, in the song Ser Bichote, from his debut album, the artist sang: “Schools are closing while puntos open. So what do I do? Tell me, I’m asking you.”<\/p>\n
The “punto” is what we call the places where illegal drugs are sold, the ones our parents always warned us about.<\/p>\n
Perhaps only we, Puerto Ricans, understood the reference, and the rest were content to just dance to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like Mart\u00ednez Ocasio, I grew up in a small town: he in Vega Baja in the north of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":418003,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-418002","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418002\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/418003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}