Activists in Caguas, Puerto Rico, Fight for Vital Living Spaces
By Erin Sheridan, The Indypendent Published November 22, 2018
Maritza Hernández, a member of the squatter collective Urbe Apie, compares
Caguas to any "small town in America."
Maritza Hernández, a member of the squatter collective Urbe Apie, compares
Caguas to any "small town in America."Erin Sheridan
The main thoroughfare in Caguas, Puerto Rico, a city of nearly 150,000 people,
remains desolate for hours at a time. Its buildings, ranging from pale pinks to
bright orange and lime green, appear vacant. Many of the storefronts have
boarded windows as if the shopkeepers left in a hurry and haven’t looked back.
Hurricane Maria hit Caguas, 19 miles south of San Juan, with the same
devastating force that met other municipalities on Puerto Rico’s eastern coast.
But for locals, it was a common sentiment that life in Caguas was already
careening in an unsustainable direction well before last year’s hurricanes —
Irma, followed by the even more devastating Maria — were even on the radar.
City blocks abound with vacant apartments, a situation caused not only by Maria
but also in large part by landlords who are holding out for a flood of foreign
investment. Puerto Ricans have long expected an influx of wealthy mainlanders
in what some activists characterize as the island’s “third invasion.”
Post-Maria, Puerto Rico is struggling under a new wave of austerity measures
imposed by the Financial Oversight and Management Board — set up by Congress in
2016 to restructure its debt.
The island’s government is aiming to privatize its public resources and is
incentivizing mainland investment in tech and the island’s tourism economy.
Business elite from the mainland, ready to take advantage of tax breaks, arrive
prepared to buy up entire blocks of land. Caguas’ convenient location, just
inland from the big city, would be the next logical step in the line of
gentrification — cheap property within driving distance of San Juan and
world-renowned, pristine coastline.
The future looks bleak in Caguas. Just over 37 percent of the city lives below
the poverty line, well above the national average of 14 percent. Homelessness
and displacement have reached unprecedented levels in this small city, where
the local economy has long struggled to compete with chain stores based on the
mainland.
The situation is not dissimilar to that of Manhattan, where 20 percent of
retail space remains vacant as property owners hold out for corporate tenants
willing to pay rents mom-and-pop shopkeepers can’t. But Maritza Hernández, a
member of the squatter collective Urbe Apie, compares Caguas to any “small town
in America.”
“You know what happens,” Hernández says, pointing down an avenue of vibrantly
colored, empty storefronts. “They put in a mall and they build a Walmart and
then nobody comes to the [local] shops anymore.” According to Puerto Rico’s
Centro De Periodismo Investigativo, Puerto Rico has a higher percentage of
Walmarts per square mile than any US state.
“And then if the [landlords] are not reasonable and they want really high
rents, then nobody rents them,” Hernández explains. “That’s what happened here.”
Pinpointing the root of Urbe Apie’s mission, she says, “Nothing was more
evident post-Maria. We cannot depend on the government, we cannot depend on
anybody. If we don’t provide for ourselves, nobody is going to help us.”
It is difficult to say precisely what Urbe Apie translates to in English. One
of the group’s founders, Omar Ayala González, characterizes the meaning behind
the group’s name in poetic terms, as “an invitation to walk, to connect with
spaces, to discover and activate them for the benefit of all.”
For Caguas residents whose poverty was exacerbated by the storm, community
organizations like Urbe Apie played a life-saving role. Hernández estimates
that soon after Maria Urbe Apie’s small team of volunteers “were feeding 400 to
500 people every day” out of their mutual aid center — one of dozens of
grassroots, de-facto hurricane relief stations that sprang up across the island
in the absence of federal relief.
Urbe Apie quickly shook its reputation as a collective full of “los pelúz,” she
laughs. The phrase means hairy people, a common derogatory term for leftists in
Puerto Rico.
Relationships were forged over hot meals. Volunteers coordinated trips to check
on neighbors. The organization took over various vacant spaces throughout
Caguas, utilizing them as distribution centers that formed a solidarity economy
still thriving today.
The impact is evident. While it may seem unlikely that a predominantly young,
loosely-organized urban squatter organization like Urbe Apie and citizens of
this majority working-class city could maintain a productive relationship, that
is precisely what happened.
After feeding so many people in such dire circumstances, “They’ll never forget
you,” Hernández says and smiles. She exchanges greetings with everyone she
passes in the street. For each of them, she recalls a compelling backstory.
“I watched her teaching students in the orchard,” shares Hernández as a
middle-aged woman waves from across the avenue. Local students are required to
complete “green hours” in order to graduate high school and Urbe Apie offers
garden space to surrounding schools. “The way she talks about the herbs, the
plants, ‘Here, touch this, smell this, isn’t it wonderful?’ I thought, ‘This
woman is amazing.”
Besides its gardens and mutual aid center, Urbe Apie maintains a patchwork of
squats that include a clothing exchange, a kitchen, a cafe, a gallery space, a
library, a bicycle repair shop, living quarters and even a building where
addicts can exchange needles. The organization has also worked to provide
condoms for local sex workers.
An Alexandria of their own: Unlike the ancient library, Urbe Apie’s lending
room has sprung out of ruin.
Unlike the ancient library, Urbe Apie’s lending room has sprung out of ruin.
Erin Sheridan
In every space the organization occupies — on walls, on doors — there is
poetry, murals of graffiti. Members regularly organize community art classes at
one of the collective’s larger buildings. “In a world where you have no control
over anything, at least you can paint a wall,” says Hernández.
Not all of Urbe Apie’s buildings are rented. Hernández — who describes herself
in English as an “uncharacteristic” representative of the group because she,
unlike many of her younger counterparts, has a background in contract
negotiations — has been able to bargain with landlords.
When Urbe Apie does decide to squat at a location, it first carries out a
thorough investigation before deciding to occupy the property.
“The Spanish were very good at keeping records,” says Hernández. “So everything
that happens with the building has to be registered. We ask questions like,
‘Who’s the owner?’ ‘What’s going on?’ ‘What’s happening [with the property]?’
‘Are they interested [in working with us]?’ We try to approach the owners
sometimes if we know.”
Many landlords are simply choosing not to rent out unoccupied buildings,
holding out for tenants willing to pay exorbitant prices as the island
gentrifies. In Puerto Rico, squatting has long been a solution to the island’s
housing crisis. Nearly one in five Puerto Rican homes are built illegally on
abandoned government land. An estimated half of the island’s homes are built
without official permission, a process that Hernández and others attribute to
close-knit, family-based community networks through which land and property
have been shared across generations.
Urbe Apie is charting fairly new territory in taking over effectively
abandoned, privately-owned properties. As long as the owners of the properties
lay no claim to the unused buildings, or otherwise have no
intentions of renting them out, the collective says it is well within its
rights to utilize the abandoned spaces for the sake of struggling residents.
Once Urbe Apie determines that the squatting is viable, members move in and
begin to revitalize the space. At the collective’s largest building — housing
living quarters, a bike repair shop, a library, a meeting space and two rooftop
terraces — members have faced off with the law.
“The first time [the owners] came over with the lawyers and said, ‘If you don’t
leave in five days we’re going to bring the police,’” says Hernández.
She and others knew that the owners would have to bring a court order to kick
Urbe Apie out, so the volunteers decided to stay. This particular building,
just past the city center, sits abandoned because it is the subject of an
inheritance dispute and remains unclaimed by either party.
“Until then,” furthers Hernandez, “we don’t even know if the person coming over
has any authority to kick us out because if it’s [in] succession, they need
everybody to agree.”
The next eviction tactic the alleged owner took, according to Hernández, was to
accuse the occupiers of theft. The police stopped by to let Urbe Apie members
know that there were photographs of them “stealing doors.”
“Even the lieutenant of the state police came over,” she recalls. “Why would
they mess around with some people taking a door from an abandoned place if
there’s nobody claiming the door?”
Hernández describes her love for the building. The volunteers who live inside
and maintain the adjacent orchard, she says, are even more attached to the
place than her because they’ve created a home inside.
But she has a wider vision for Caguas. Hernández has submitted proposals to
open a convenience store and has completed the construction of two community
gardens in collaboration with neighbors. The collective will soon open a
cabaret-style cafe, teatro and event space, El Reflejo, where local artists and
musicians will exhibit work.
Hernández is perhaps more of a pelúz than she is aware. Though she presents an
image akin to a professional working mom, she has, for instance, adopted a
pigeon that she found dying and nursed back to health. It now flies around her
house and sits on her shoulder when she goes outside.
She and other Urbe Apie members are nursing Caguas back to health as well. They
maintain a positive outlook, embracing uncertainty as part of the uncharted
territory of building the city up from the grassroots.
Puerto Rico can’t achieve a real recovery with do-it-yourself organizing. That
will ultimately take the state mobilizing and directing the necessary
resources. That’s not happening right now in Puerto Rico. For Urbe Apie
activists and members of similar collectives that have sprung up amid the
mutual crises of gentrification and hurricane devastation, theirs is not merely
a struggle over squatting but is also about holding on to vital living spaces
as the island shifts rapidly around them.
Occupation comes out of necessity.
“There is a phrase people use here when they occupy buildings,” Hernández says,
staring proudly at a makeshift community garden next to the contested squat.
“Aquí vive gente, ‘people live here.’”
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Erin Sheridan
Erin Sheridan is a journalist and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York.
