Cart
INTRODUCTION
The joke landed badly. On October 27, 2024, in the last stretch of the presidential campaign, a comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe took the stage at the hallmark Madison Square Garden to warm up the crowd for Donald Trump and paused to share what he apparently considered an observation: “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” By morning, the machinery of outrage had cranked into motion. But the outrage, however predictable, missed the more interesting point, which was what the joke required of its audience. For it to work—for it to “land,” in the comedian’s parlance—the crowd had to feel, somewhere below explicit thought, that Puerto Rico occupied a specific position in the American imagination: close enough to be useful, distant enough to be mocked. This is a position that has been carefully maintained for more than a century, and deliberately so. Sigmund Freud, in his study of wit and its relation to the unconscious, observed that jokes function as a kind of smuggler: They get past the internal censor what sober speech would never permit. Hinchcliffe wasn’t being outrageous. He was being honest about what the room already believed.
Puerto Rico has been a United States territory since 1898. Its residents are American citizens who can be drafted into American wars but cannot vote in American presidential elections unless they reside on the mainland. Its infrastructure has been in a state of managed deterioration for decades, periodically catastrophic, as after Hurricane Maria in 2017, the devastating storm that left an estimated 4,645 people dead (Kishore et al., 2018), when the head of the government of the wealthiest nation in history responded, among other ways, by throwing paper towels at a crowd of survivors. Juan Flores called the island “a postcolonial colony” (quoted in Duany, 2002, p .122). Its political status is, more than a century after American troops first landed, still unresolved, still cycling through the same arguments, generation after generation, while the physical condition of the place continues to deteriorate. The debates are, for anyone who has been following them with any patience, somewhat dizzying—not because the positions are complex, but because the repetition of them has become its own form of stasis.
And yet Puerto Ricans have demonstrated, with remarkable force, that they are not passive witnesses to this arrangement. In the summer of 2019, hundreds of thousands took to the streets in what became one of the largest protests in the island’s history, demanding the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló over leaked messages that exposed his administration’s sexism, cronyism, and contempt for the population it governed—and he resigned, proof that collective action against oppression, when it is fearless enough, can still compel the powerful to yield.
The comedian had his laugh in October 2024. The island waited, and when its moment came—fifteen months later, watched by four billion people around the world within a single day—it did not argue. It made everyone move. In February 2026, Bad Bunny—born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, thirty-one, from a coastal town on Puerto Rico’s northern shore—took the stage at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, and performed for thirteen minutes almost entirely in Spanish, becoming the first artist to do so at the most-watched television event in the United States. Within the first twenty-four hours, the performance had reportedly reached more than four billion views globally across broadcast and digital platforms combined. The set was a tableau of the island and its diaspora: barbershops and bodegas, elders bent over a domino table, women getting their nails done, a coco frío stand, a piragua shaved-ice cart, shelters assembled from cinder blocks. And then there were the light poles—a detail that required no explanation for anyone who has lived through the apagones, the blackouts that have long plagued Puerto Rico and that, for many on the island, have come to feel less like interruptions than like a condition of life itself. At its center was a wedding—which turned out to be real. A couple had invited Bad Bunny to their ceremony; he invited them, instead, to have it there, at halftime, to be married in front of the world.
One of the evening’s most affecting moments came when Bad Bunny placed one of his Grammys in the hands of a small Latino boy—an image that many viewers found impossible to separate from the story of Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old with the hat with long bunny ears who had recently been arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) alongside his father outside their home in Minneapolis and transferred to a detention center in Texas. The resemblance, many viewers noted, was striking. So, for that matter, was the name: conejo, in Spanish, means bunny.Ricky Martin appeared to sing one of Bad Bunny’s most politically pointed tracks: “Lo Que le Pasó a Hawaii,” which translates, with calculated ambiguity, as “What Happened to Hawaii,” and which is also, of course, what happened to Puerto Rico, and what tends to happen to any territory absorbed by a larger power that finds it useful but not equal. When Bad Bunny closed the show, he recited the names of every country across the American continent, said “God bless America” in English, and threw a football into the stands engraved with the words “Together, We Are America.” He was not borrowing the phrase. He was expanding it, reclaiming “America” for the entire continent, rather than a single country in its upper portion.
Bad Bunny won the cultural war but Frantz Fanon was there first. In February 1952, the Martinican psychiatrist published a short essay in the French Catholic journal Esprit under a title that sounded, deceptively, like a clinical document: “The ‘North African Syndrome’” (Fanon, 1952). The young psychiatrist had recently completed his psychiatric internship at the Grange-Blanche Hospital in Lyon, France, where he had been observing something that resisted categorization. North African patients kept arriving with the same constellation of complaints—diffuse pain, fatigue, an exhaustion so profound it seemed to settle in the bones—and yet no organic cause could be found to account for any of it. French doctors had developed a response to these complaints that was itself a kind of diagnosis: The patients were malingering, or at least exaggerating, driven by what one physician had memorably termed the bellyache of “a man who doesn’t like work” (Fanon, 1952/1967, p. 6).
Fanon turned this inside out. What if the syndrome, he asked, revealed not a pathology of the patients but a theory of inhumanity embedded in the institution charged with their care? Thediagnosis said nothing about the bodies of North Africans. It said a great deal about the racism of French colonial medicine. During his internship, Fanon had watched doctors address North African patients without the formal vous that basic courtesy required—speaking to them as children or inferiors, a gesture so routine it barely registered as cruelty. The patient, he wrote, was never encountered as a singular person but as the embodiment of a collective fantasy: “the dead weight of all his compatriots” (p. 8). One patient put it plainly, with a lucidity the diagnostic apparatus was not designed to record: “It is because I am Arab that they don’t treat me like the others” (p. 5).
I came to a similar conclusion forty years later, in a very different city and context. I had not yet read Fanon when I began working in a mental health clinic in Philadelphia’s barrio, where another diagnosis was circulating under the radar: the Puerto Rican syndrome. The phrase had been coined in the 1950s by U.S. Army psychiatrists observing something unsettling in Puerto Rican soldiers returning from the Korean War—rages, seizures, catatonia, suicide attempts, episodes of spectacular bodily disturbance for which examinations found no organic cause. They gave the condition a name that attached pathology to nationality, as if the soldiers’ ethnicity were itself the diagnosis.
What struck me, once I was deep enough into the clinical work, was how familiar the symptoms were. This was hysteria, the very disorder that had led Freud, in the previous century, to discover the unconscious and invent psychoanalysis. The condition had been officially retired by mid-century. The first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published in 1952, had removed it from the diagnostic lexicon, apparently confident that renaming a thing constituted scientific progress. But the symptoms hadn’t gone. They had reappeared with a new label, now attached to a racialized population at a particular political moment, and that moment, it turned out, mattered enormously.The Puerto Rican syndrome emerged at the point when Puerto Rico’s status was being renegotiated—or rather, restaged. In 1952, the same year the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual buried hysteria, Puerto Rico adopted a new constitution redesignating the island as a Commonwealth, or, in Spanish, Estado Libre Asociado: a Free Associated State. In practice, it meant that Puerto Ricans could still be drafted but still couldn’t vote for president, still couldn’t fully participate in the Congress that governed them. The association had to be declared permanent and eternal, which is the kind of insistence that tends to signal anxiety rather than confidence. What could not be resolved politically found expression elsewhere. It came out, as it tends to, in the body.