When Snow Got here to San Juan

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For a number of years within the early nineteen-fifties, Puerto Rico won snow, proper round Christmas. Youngsters in San Juan rode sleds and had massive snowball fights in tropical climate. It wasn’t a miracle or a meteorological outlier. The snow was once a reward from San Juan’s longtime mayor, Felisa Rincón de Gautier, who had fallen in love with snow throughout her years in New York. It was once delivered by way of Jap Airways, which milked the exposure for all it was once value. A tender New Hampshire lady escorted one supply, dressed in a hat and a cable-knit sweater. The snow didn’t value Puerto Rico anything else, however it indubitably got here with strings hooked up. At a time when the independence motion was once being harshly suppressed, in desire of a persisted colonial courting with the USA, the fetishization of the northern “white Christmas” learn to a couple as a gesture of cultural imperialism, which hasn’t ever rather ended. Even not too long ago—because the island continues to stand regimen blackouts of its electric grid, years after Storm Maria—the mayor of a small Puerto Rican the city proposed development an ice-skating rink. WNYC’s Alana Casanova-Burgess stories on why the snow got here and what it intended to Puerto Ricans.

Our tale was once produced in collaboration with “La Brega,” from WNYC Studios and Futuro Studios.