Suppose you return to your island and discover that almost everything has improved.
The airport is brighter. The road from the airport has been repaired. Houses you remember with broken shutters have beautiful windows, and someone has finally done something about that abandoned building near the water. There is a café where you once wished there were a café. The coffee is excellent. We should allow the coffee to be excellent. If we have to make everything ugly before we can explain what has gone wrong, we have already surrendered too much of the argument.
You walk farther. A familiar house has become accommodation for visitors. So has another. The grocery has changed, although it still sells groceries, and the old route to the shore now involves an argument about where you may pass. Your cousin is living somewhere else. The woman who used to know your mother is living somewhere else. A young man brings your coffee and, when you ask about the neighborhood, tells you how wonderful it is to work here. You ask whether he lives nearby. He laughs before answering.
From the terrace, the sea is as beautiful as it has ever been.
What, exactly, has been lost?
You can still find the island on a map. You can buy a ticket and arrive. But the people who made it home are harder to find, and the life you knew there costs more than you can pay. The visitor sees a place much improved. You see familiar walls around a growing absence. Both of you are looking carefully.
The difficulty is that the building really has improved. A resident is delighted to sell. A visitor is considerate. Another resident can no longer pay the rent. These people can all be telling the truth. The arrangement makes one person’s gain arrive as another person’s loss, without requiring either person to understand the whole arrangement.
Bad Bunny’s “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii,” released on DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS in January 2025, gives the fear a voice. It connects the threatened loss of familiar land and neighborhood with departure, memory, and cultural persistence, using Hawaiʻi as a warning addressed to Puerto Rico. The song moves between affection for the place and anxiety over who will be able to remain in it.[1] What happens when the world falls in love with a place, and the people living there can no longer afford the relationship?
A song can bring that question into a room before anyone has agreed on the statistics. You may recognize your grandmother in its concern for displacement long before you know how much of a rent increase came from visitor accommodation, how much from damaged housing, or which law would make the greatest difference. The song has made a condition worth investigating feel impossible to ignore.
The part of a place you cannot book
In his January 2025 TIME interview, Bad Bunny described the distance between visitors enjoying Puerto Rico and residents living with its daily problems. He connected that distance to the experience of someone who enjoys the attractive parts of another person’s life without staying for its difficulties. He also said that listeners could reach their own conclusions about the song and investigate its meaning.[2]
A visitor buys a few days. A resident has to make a life through the whole year, including the weeks no one would choose for a holiday.
Take electricity. In our imagined neighborhood, a visitor might have a miserable evening when the power fails. The resident who operates a small refrigerator-dependent business may have a miserable balance sheet. A parent may have to rearrange the next day. The accommodation owner may install a backup system and charge a price that reflects its availability. The visitor can then purchase protection from a problem that the wider neighborhood still has to bear. The guest can have steady power while the family next door still loses it. A better holiday has been built on top of an unresolved public failure.
The distinction also operates when nothing dramatic happens. Your holiday ends before the school needs repairs. Your rental agreement does not ask you to organize care for an older relative. You are not expected to attend a municipal meeting, teach a child the names of things, or discover which neighbor has a ladder. You may do some of these things when you return often enough and form relationships. Many visitors form real ties and take care of people they meet. But you can have a wonderful holiday without taking on the work that keeps the neighborhood going.
This makes the common invitation to experience a place “like a local” rather interesting. How local would you like to become? Local for breakfast? Local for the music? Local when the roof needs fixing and the person who can fix it has left because he could earn more elsewhere? People are allowed to rest. An economy that sells the pleasurable parts of everyday life must still support the people who maintain the rest.
Consider what you know when you know a neighborhood. You know which walk is pleasant after dark. You know that a particular silence means something is wrong next door. You may know who needs a lift, who is reliable in an emergency, and whose claim that the event begins at six should be interpreted with generosity. Much of this knowledge never becomes a transaction. Nobody sends you an invoice for recognizing your child on the street. Its value becomes obvious when it disappears and you have to replace it with money, travel, paid care, or worry.
That is why a move can be financially survivable and still be costly. The rent in the next town may be lower. The rent is only one line. Add the journey to work, the lost exchange of favors, the difficulty of sharing care, the distance from someone who cannot travel. You might find that an apparently cheaper home requires a more expensive life. A price comparison between two dwellings can be perfectly accurate while answering too small a question.
A close community can also be restrictive. It can enforce prejudices, burden women with unpaid obligations, or make privacy difficult. Some people leave because leaving is the first chance they have had to become themselves. A place worth defending must leave room for that departure, and perhaps for a return after becoming someone the neighborhood did not expect.
I want people to have a real choice about staying. That is a stronger demand than counting how many have stayed. A person who keeps a roof only by giving up safety or every other hope has paid too much. And if leaving is the only way to earn an ordinary living, we should be careful about calling the move free. Nobody put the person on a plane. We have yet to explain why every workable road led to the airport.
Who is included in your island?
The title of this book makes a claim that needs examining. Your island. Whose island? A renter’s? A landowner’s? A person who was born there and lives abroad? A person who arrived later and has spent years working, raising children, and caring for neighbors? You can belong to a place without owning land in it. You can also own land where you have never lived. The word “your” carries both claims, and the gap between them runs through this book.
A deed gives its holder powers that a memory cannot. Memory sustains other obligations. Citizenship or residence may provide a voice in public decisions without providing the money to win a private auction. A community can feel a strong claim to a shoreline while a dispute over access proceeds through rules demanding other kinds of evidence.
Suppose a family has lived in a rented home for twenty years. The owner, who also lives on the island, decides to sell it to someone else who lives on the island. The buyer intends to operate visitor accommodation. Everyone in the transaction is local except the future visitors. When the household’s lease ends, it has to find somewhere else. Would local ownership, by itself, have protected them?
Now reverse the arrangement. A newcomer purchases a damaged building, restores additional apartments, rents them on long leases, and earns an ordinary return while living nearby. There may still be legitimate questions about the purchase and its effects. But birthplace does not answer those questions for us. We have to look at the homes made available, the terms of occupancy, the use of public resources, and the power people possess to challenge harm.
Capital can exercise pressure through a local company. A person living abroad can send money that keeps a family housed. Within the word “community” there are owners and renters, older people hoping to pass on an asset and younger people wondering whether they will ever acquire one. A serious defense of the community has to survive those differences, alongside the history of unequal wealth and decisions imposed from elsewhere.
Consider someone from the diaspora: the people and families who have left an island but remain tied to it. Imagine someone who left, worked for years in a higher-wage economy, and now wants to purchase a house near family. The wish is understandable. The savings may also make it possible to outbid someone earning a local wage. Cultural belonging and purchasing power have arrived in the same person, but they are doing different kinds of work. Calling that person simply an outsider loses the history of departure. Calling every purchase a homecoming can conceal its effects on the next household.
Hawaiʻi is more than a warning
To understand the place invoked by the song, we can listen to another composer.
In her 1898 autobiography, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, Liliʻuokalani recalls being asked to write a national air. Hawaiians had been using the British anthem on state occasions; the king wanted music through which the country could express itself. She describes completing her composition in a week and introducing it with a church choir. Earlier in the chapter she writes, “To compose was as natural to me as to breathe.”[3]
Here is a queen writing about musical practice, remembering a choir and an assignment. The author comes into focus as someone who makes things. Later in the book, defending her people’s claim to a voice in their future, she also complains that American newspapers circulated accounts about her while excluding her replies.[4] Music had offered a means of expression; the channels through which political judgment traveled could withhold it. We can hear a difficult possibility in that combination: the outside world may enjoy a society’s cultural expression while remaining remarkably incurious about what its people say they need.
The Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown in 1893. Liliʻuokalani protested the proposed annexation in 1897; the United States annexed Hawaiʻi in 1898.[5] Puerto Rico’s transfer from Spanish to United States rule in 1898 followed a different history and legal route.[6] A comparison has to preserve those differences, including the distinction between the queen’s royal claim and the many claims of people living in Hawaiʻi.
It is worth pausing over the existence of that protest. An island that is described from outside as an acquisition appears from inside as a society making an argument. That difference is not a matter of picturesque detail. It changes who has reasons and who merely has resources. When we read the world as a collection of resources, the people already there can begin to look like complications in a development plan. When we read it as a collection of societies, development has to explain itself to people with purposes of their own.
Across those different histories runs a question about the authority to define a place’s future. Who is entitled to say what improvement means? Who can refuse a bargain? Who gets described as obstructing progress when the progress would remove them from the place being improved?
Living Native Hawaiians continue to have their own voices and claims. Puerto Ricans, too, are arguing about their future, including disagreements over political status among people who may share concerns about housing. A song enters that conversation and can change its reach. The work of deciding continues.
Return to our improved street. One household sells at a price that will transform its finances. Perhaps the owner can finally retire. Perhaps the proceeds help a child through education. An argument that treats this family’s gain as unreal would be neither fair nor persuasive. Yet if enough households sell to buyers who use the homes intermittently, the street can lose the ordinary density of relationships that made it a neighborhood. Each sale may be reasonable for the seller. The combined result may be something that many sellers and non-sellers would not have chosen together.
No meeting voted to empty the street. The buyer considered a property, the seller an offer, and the tenant a notice. One by one, each decision made sense to someone. Together they changed a neighborhood. Looking for one person who ordered the change will miss how it happened. The rules had made some choices easier than others long before the first sale.
Now imagine that the street’s value depends partly on the people who are leaving. The food, music, care, informal safety, and everyday activity are among the reasons visitors want to be there. A person can help produce that value for years without acquiring an ownership claim on it. If the value later appears in a property price, the legal owner may capture a gain that many people helped create. This observation does not by itself tell us how to divide the gain. So “the market valued it more highly” leaves a question unanswered: who helped make it valuable in the first place?
You can hear the problem especially clearly when a place is praised for being authentic. Authenticity is not manufactured by a sign announcing that authentic experiences are available inside. It depends on people pursuing lives that are not wholly performances for customers. A neighborhood made entirely available for visitors may become less capable of generating the thing visitors came to find. The more thoroughly everyday life is converted into a product, the more maintenance the product may require to resemble everyday life.
There is something faintly absurd in paying to watch an imitation of what people can no longer afford to do naturally. It is also possible. A street can keep its colors, its dishes, and a carefully timed musical performance while losing the social arrangements that gave those things their place. Cultural preservation can then become a matter of retaining appearances after the people carrying the culture have been pushed elsewhere.
Nostalgia can make demands of its own. In a January 2025 NPR conversation, Alana Casanova-Burgess questioned pastoral visions of Puerto Rican identity that can exclude Blackness and reggaeton, and the selective longing of people away from the island.[7] The caution bears on anyone defending home: residents need the freedom to change a culture as well as carry it forward. A returning visitor’s perfect memory may be an uncomfortable assignment for the people still living there. A protected building is useful. A person who can afford to live in it, and has some say in what happens inside, is useful too.
Here is the test I would put before any new investment: what becomes possible for the people who live here? Follow the young adult trying to move out of a parent’s home. Follow the older person who needs care nearby. Ask the worker how long it takes to reach the new job. The answers may conflict; a project can help one household and burden another. We should see those differences before an arrival count is allowed to speak for everyone.
The neighbor leaves. The lease changes. A child grows up and discovers that the price of an ordinary beginning has moved beyond reach. By the time the transformation is complete, it may be explained as the natural result of decisions no one now remembers making. Yet housing markets operate through rules about building, renting, lending, ownership, and public expenditure. Those rules express choices, including choices made long before the current residents had a say. The fact that changing them is difficult does not turn them into weather.
This book begins with music because music can bring the stakes within hearing distance. It must proceed into money and institutions because recognition alone cannot renew a lease or make a damaged house safe. That means checking claims we like as closely as those we dislike. Tourism can pay a household’s bills and help raise its rent. We need to understand how both can happen on the same street.
The sea in our opening scene was never the whole island. Neither was the price of the houses facing it. Somewhere between the view and the deed is the continuing work of making a home, and the question of who gets to carry on doing that work.
The sea keeps no record
of the rent.
At the last lit window
someone folds a lease
beside a child’s drawing.Both pages
show a house.
The world has noticed the place. Next we need to follow what arrives with its attention.
Sources and notes
- Bad Bunny, “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii,” official visualizer, Rimas Entertainment, January 5, 2025; song credits and text.
- Solcyré Burga and Andrew R. Chow, Bad Bunny interview, TIME, January 5, 2025.
- Liliʻuokalani, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen (Lee and Shepard, 1898), chapter V, “Hawaiian Music, and a Ducal Guest”. Original English public-domain text.
- Liliʻuokalani, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, chapter LVII, “Hawaiian Autonomy”.
- U.S. National Park Service, “ʻIolani Palace: A Hawaiian Place of History, Power, and Prestige”, including the queen’s June 17, 1897 protest.
- U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Comprehensive Housing Market Analysis: Puerto Rico, as of July 1, 2025, p. 2.
- NPR, “Bad Bunny & the Battle for Puerto Rico”, January 15, 2025, conversation with Carina del Valle Schorske and Alana Casanova-Burgess; transcript published by North Country Public Radio.