The reporting existed before the famous platform arrived.
In an October 2022 interview, journalist Bianca Graulau described the collaboration that brought her work into Bad Bunny’s “El Apagón” video. His team had approached her after seeing her reporting. The resulting documentary, Aquí Vive Gente, gave work on displacement a vastly more visible setting. The interview describes her editorial freedom and months of earlier investigation.[1]
An audience had been assembled for music. It was also invited to encounter journalism.
People outside Puerto Rico may have encountered the problem for the first time through the video. Graulau and the residents had been doing the work long before. A famous stage brought them a much larger audience. They had brought something worth hearing.
The collaboration suggests one possible relationship between cultural power and other kinds of work. A popular artist can help attention travel. A journalist can supply evidence. Residents can describe what needs to change. An institution may possess the authority to make a decision. Each can help the others. Each is answerable for different work. The person with the largest audience is not necessarily the person who knows most about the permit, the budget, or the lease.
A community does not need one hero who can do everything. It needs people whose different skills can work together, including after the audience moves on.
A song can remain in someone’s mind for years. A hearing can still take place on a Tuesday morning when the people most affected are at work.
The person at the microphone
Imagine a public meeting about a development. Residents have come to ask about traffic, access, housing, and employment. An official listens. The official may be sympathetic, evasive, well prepared, or exhausted. Before judging the response, there is a practical question: what can this particular person actually decide?
Perhaps the authority can change the site plan but cannot change the national tax rules. Perhaps it can require a study but lacks the money to build a road. Perhaps another agency controls the permit that matters most. A promise made at the microphone may concern something within the speaker’s power, something that requires another institution’s agreement, or something the speaker cannot deliver at all.
Make those limits clear before asking people to trust a promise. Who signs the relevant decision? Which legal rule governs it? Where does the funding come from? What happens if the agencies disagree? There should be an office that owes you an answer. Being sent from one desk to the next is not a form of public service.
In Puerto Rico, these limits matter greatly. It is a United States territory, and the Constitution’s Territory Clause gives Congress broad authority over it. Residents lack full voting representation in Congress. Living in Puerto Rico also does not give them a vote in the presidential general election, though presidential party primaries are different. Puerto Ricans living in the states can vote there if otherwise eligible.[2] Where a person lives affects how they can vote. Puerto Rican ancestry does not take away the vote.
At the same time, Puerto Rico has its own constitution, elected government, courts, municipalities, and public agencies. Those institutions make consequential decisions. Local officials have real powers. Congress has other powers that matter greatly, while island residents lack the same voting rights in federal elections as residents of a state.
The people living with a decision can have little voice in making it. A decision can have great importance for a household whose route to influencing it is comparatively weak. The household may be able to vote out a local official who struggles to change the federal condition shaping the problem. It may direct anger toward the nearest visible authority while a decisive part of the arrangement sits beyond that authority’s reach.
This helps explain why political status enters questions that seem, at first, to concern only a bill, a road, or a dwelling. Status determines parts of the decision-making structure. It does not tell us what every local official will do with the powers available, or eliminate the need to evaluate their choices. A constraint can be real and can also become a convenient explanation for a failure that had a more immediate cause.
The opposite mistake is to discuss local competence as though the larger structure were irrelevant. A capable administration still operates within legal and fiscal limits. It cannot solve a problem by exercising a power it does not possess. Ask what the official could have done, and what would have required powers held elsewhere. That is a better starting point for blame or repair.
A budget with more than one author
PROMESA, the federal law enacted in 2016, added the Financial Oversight and Management Board. The board has major powers over fiscal plans, which are plans for public finances, and over budgets. It also checks that fiscal plans and budgets meet the law’s terms. In the budget process set out by law, the elected branches of government submit proposals. The board checks whether they meet the required rules. Under conditions set out in the law, the board can certify, or formally approve, a budget it has drawn up itself.[3]
These are far-reaching fiscal powers, with limits set by the law. The board is an entity within Puerto Rico’s government created by federal law, rather than a federal department or a replacement legislature.[4] To understand a dispute, read the power involved. Neither “the board can do nothing” nor “the board decides everything” will get us far.
For a household, fiscal decisions arrive through services and costs. A budget affects whether an office has enough people to process applications, whether maintenance happens before a failure, and how much a public body can contribute to a project. A formal commitment to affordability has to pass through these ordinary administrative resources. The law can give an agency a duty without giving it enough staff to do the job.
Keeping a budget under control and providing a good service are closely linked. It is costly to confuse thrift with letting things fail. Deferring necessary maintenance can make a future repair more expensive. Cutting a small administrative function can delay a much larger investment. Spending money without a workable plan can waste resources urgently needed elsewhere. Before cutting the line in the budget, find out what work it pays for.
Consider an office that helps stalled housing projects move forward. Its salaries appear in the budget. Without that work, projects may face more delays, building costs may rise, and families may spend longer in temporary homes or put off their plans. The office can look costly on its own and worth the money when we count those wider costs. The reverse is possible too: an office may receive plenty of money and get little done. Ask what work the spending makes possible.
This is why a budget debate deserves more than a contest between the words “cuts” and “investment.” What has to happen for the money to produce the intended service? What fails if the money is removed? Can the process be improved? Which costs are merely being moved to another institution, another year, or an unpaid member of a family?
A household can be made to balance the public budget in ways that never appear in the public accounts. Someone spends hours pursuing a missing document, drives farther because a service has closed, or leaves paid work to provide care that was previously available elsewhere. These adaptations may be admirable. They are also costs. If the public account ignores this work, it can claim a saving that was really a bill handed to a family.
Fourteen billion dollars and an ordinary switch
In a report publicly released in July 2026, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, or GAO, found that federal agencies had obligated, or legally committed, about $14 billion for Puerto Rico’s grid recovery and modernization since 2017. Only a limited amount had been paid out, and progress on completing the work was limited. The report found problems with reviews, staff turnover, complex funding rules, and coordination. Responsibilities and goals had not been fully written down. No formal process brought all the relevant bodies together to coordinate the work.[5]
Fourteen billion dollars committed. A resident still needs to know whether the lights will stay on.
A funding commitment still has to become paid-for work. A project may still require design, review, procurement, equipment, people, and a sequence of approvals. Funds tied to one program may carry conditions different from funds tied to another. The contractor can be ready while the necessary approval is missing; an approval can be complete while equipment is unavailable. The project moves only when the pieces are ready in the right order.
For the resident using a light switch, the internal distinctions offer little immediate comfort. Electricity either arrives or it does not. Yet those distinctions become essential when the question turns from describing failure to fixing it. A shortage of money, an unclear responsibility, a missing piece of equipment, and a rule requiring revision are different obstacles. Sending more money toward the wrong obstacle may leave the switch in exactly the same condition.
Draw the chain of decisions before making another speech about urgency. It connects each necessary step to the body responsible, identifies the information that body needs, and makes the next unresolved decision visible. The map has to be maintained as responsibilities change. Otherwise the public receives a diagram of the system as it used to work while the project waits in the system that now exists.
This sounds less dramatic than a confrontation. Sometimes a public fight is needed to make officials act on what the map shows. Public attention can force an institution to explain a delay, reveal a contradiction, or stop shifting responsibility. But after the explanation, someone still has to change the process. The cultural moment and the administrative work have different tempos. A durable response needs room for both.
Environmental and historic-preservation reviews also serve purposes. A faster decision can be a better decision when unnecessary duplication has been removed. Speed becomes dangerous when it simply prevents affected people from understanding a project or bypasses safeguards that were catching real harm. Find out which checks protect people and which merely repeat work already done. Remove waste without removing the protection.
The same logic applies to housing. A resident waiting for a repair needs officials who can get the work moving. A resident beside a proposed development needs officials who can check the plans carefully. Both need public offices with the staff and skills to do their jobs well.
Puerto Rican music can reach people who know little about the institutions described in this chapter. It can make a language, a sound, or an ordinary cultural practice central to a global audience’s experience. Recognition changes who and what the world takes seriously. A place repeatedly described through its problems can hear itself presented as a source of invention and pleasure.
There is real power in that change. If people believe that everything worthwhile comes from elsewhere, they may accept poor terms just to gain outside approval. Cultural confidence can make another stance imaginable: the place already produces something the world wants. The terms of the encounter can therefore be discussed.
Confidence can improve a negotiation without guaranteeing its outcome. A popular culture does not automatically give its practitioners control over distribution, property, or finance. The people whose work makes a place desirable may still possess weak claims on the income it generates. The people making the culture need ways to keep a fair share of the value it creates. That can mean an organization they control or a contract they have the power to negotiate.
A cultural enterprise might need rehearsal space, training, reliable venues, legal support for contracts, or access to distribution. A community organization might need records, a meeting place, and someone who can continue the work between public events. These are less glamorous than the moment the world pays attention. They are among the means by which attention can leave something behind.
The artist’s role remains open. An artist may choose to support an organization, draw attention to a problem, create employment, or simply make work of great value. Fame does not make an artist responsible for running the island. Nor should a society’s ability to defend ordinary rights depend on whether a celebrity finds the issue compelling that week. A useful institution serves people whose stories never become a song.
The reporting collaboration at the start of this chapter shows a more modest and potentially repeatable form of connection. Existing work gained access to a larger audience. The distinction between the work and its amplification remained important. A society can benefit when prominent people make room for expertise and testimony instead of claiming to replace them.
For listeners, the movement from recognition to participation can begin with a very specific question. Which decision is still open? A general concern about displacement can become attention to an actual proposal, a budget hearing, a registry, or a public commitment. There is a place to use your concern: a choice that has not yet been made.
The people who are missing from the room
A meeting can be open to everyone and still keep many people out.
The meeting may take place during working hours. The documents may be difficult to obtain or understand. Travel, care responsibilities, language, disability, and fear of antagonizing an employer or landlord can affect who attends. A public record of the comments received tells us who managed to participate through that process. It cannot tell us, by itself, that everyone else was satisfied.
The risk is particularly serious when the people affected are dispersed by the very process under discussion. A household that has moved away may still care deeply about what happens to the neighborhood but have less opportunity to attend. A young person who would have formed a household there may never appear in the local record because the home was never available. The future resident is difficult to consult. The absent resident is easy to forget.
An open microphone is only a beginning. Useful information has to arrive early enough to affect choices. People need to know which parts of a proposal can change. A comment that receives a reasoned answer is different from a comment merely entered into a file. When a decision goes against a community’s preference, an explanation of the evidence and trade-offs makes the disagreement more intelligible and more open to challenge.
There is no guarantee of harmony. Residents may disagree about a project because their interests differ. A shopkeeper may welcome foot traffic that a nearby household experiences as noise. A property owner may value a price increase that a renter fears. A younger resident may want opportunities an older resident finds disruptive. Good participation makes those differences visible rather than inventing a single community view for an official to approve or dismiss.
It also has to include people who would benefit from change. Protecting every existing preference can exclude those who need new homes, new work, or a different use of space. The person already secure in a neighborhood may be well placed to resist construction, while the person who needs a home has no address there from which to organize. Fairness requires attention to both the cost of changing and the cost of refusing to change.
One useful discipline is to ask a proposal’s supporters and opponents to describe the household whose needs their preferred outcome serves least well. The question changes the atmosphere. A supporter has to confront someone who might be displaced or burdened. An opponent has to confront someone whose opportunity might be denied. Neither side loses the right to argue. Each gains a more complete account of what its argument would do.
Powers that can be joined
Puerto Rico faces serious limits, but they have different causes. Some come from powers held by the federal government. Others concern public money, the staff and systems in public offices, or the roads and services people need. Still others concern the power buyers or sellers hold in a market, or how a particular decision is made. Treating every limit as part of one problem that cannot change makes it harder to see where action is possible.
A municipality may be able to improve a process within its authority even while a larger constitutional question remains unresolved. An agency may be able to publish useful information, coordinate reviews, or enforce an existing condition. A community may be able to secure representation in a process or establish a form of tenure with the necessary legal support. These actions do not settle the larger debate. They can change the position from which people participate in it.
The larger debate remains legitimate. People can seek a different political relationship while also pursuing improvements under the current one. They can disagree about the ultimate arrangement and cooperate on a shared immediate need. Insisting that every practical effort wait for the final constitutional answer would give uncertainty a veto over daily life.
The opposite demand, that people stop discussing political status and focus only on immediate administration, would conceal how the structure shapes those daily choices. A society can need competent repair and a serious argument about who is entitled to set the terms of the repair. The two conversations belong in contact.
Having power to act means, in part, having real choices when a problem arises. A household with a secure home and skills it can use in different jobs has more choices. So does a public office with accurate records and staff who can do the work. A society gains choices through productive businesses, confidence in its culture, and ties to others that extend beyond one source of income. None can avoid depending on others. Each may be less likely to be left with no good choice.
That is the direction in which the song’s warning can lead. The fear of losing home becomes a question about the arrangements that make a home durable, and the powers through which those arrangements can be changed. The next island will have some familiar pressures and a different map of authority. We should cross the water with our questions intact and our assumptions ready to be revised.
Sources and notes
- Thalíe Ponce, interview with Bianca Graulau, Indómita, October 5, 2022. This establishes the account of the collaboration and Graulau’s reporting role, not a measured policy effect. See also the official “El Apagón — Aquí Vive Gente” video, released September 16, 2022.
- Congressional Research Service, Political Status of Puerto Rico: Brief Background and Recent Developments for Congress, R44721, June 6, 2024, pp. 1–4. The chapter uses the constitutional and representational framework, not the report’s then-current legislative forecasts. See also the National Archives’ Electoral College FAQ for the presidential-election distinction.
- 48 U.S.C. § 2142, budget development, approval, and certification under PROMESA. The statute describes the circumstances and sequence for board certification.
- Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, Frequently Asked Questions, concerning its legal status and statutory functions.
- U.S. Government Accountability Office, Puerto Rico Grid Recovery: Limited Progress Toward Stability and Opportunities Exist to Improve Federal Assistance, GAO-26-107772, published June 2 and publicly released July 2, 2026. The chapter describes the report’s findings, not a claim that every condition remained unchanged afterward.