The Hero of the Moment
Artwork by Alejandro Henao López.
“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose.”
—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
I. The Truck Driver
“I’m a one-man show and I’m just trying to help,” says Julio as he stares into the camera lens of his phone. A pair of sport sunglasses rest on his forehead, just above the broad scar that stretches across it. He is broadcasting via Facebook Live to more than 20,000 followers, many of whom have spent the past few weeks watching his impromptu journey unfold. The 40-year-old truck driver arrived in Puerto Rico as a volunteer first responder on October 2nd, twelve days after Hurricane Maria made landfall as a category 4 storm. At the time, the island had no electricity and telecommunications were severely limited. Many living outside of the island turned to social media in hopes of bypassing the dearth of information.
Julio, a self-proclaimed Puerto Rican from the Bronx living in Odessa, Texas, had been in Florida when the storm hit, having arrived just after Hurricane Irma battered the southwest coast of the state. He is tall and broad, with short, thinning dark hair and a boyishly handsome face. His chainsmoker baritone rattles through a chipped-tooth smile. By then, Julio had already recorded several Facebook live videos, which include his time with a group of volunteers who had traveled to Houston after Hurricane Harvey in late August.
It was in the Tampa Bay Airport where Julio became a viral sensation. After Hurricane Maria, he spent five consecutive days attempting to board a flight to Puerto Rico, sharing brief updates via Facebook Live to a growing number of supporters. When Julio finally landed in Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, a group of employees recognized him—he was in the midst of recording yet another live video.
The timing was serendipitous. A few days earlier, on September 28th, CBS News correspondent David Begnaud had reported that licensed commercial truck drivers were needed in Puerto Rico and that anyone interested should register at the Convention Center in San Juan. The message, which included a phone number for truck drivers to call, soon went viral.
For Julio, who claimed to have two decades of truck driving experience and at least nineteen certifications to operate heavy machinery, it was a sign that he was needed in Puerto Rico. Yet after repeated visits to the Convention Center, he claimed that he was being, in his own words, “stonewalled” by FEMA and local emergency management personnel. In the meantime, Julio visited several communities to survey the devastation caused by the hurricane. He also began to distribute some of the monetary donations made to his PayPal account, a permanent fixture of his Facebook posts.
Julio first went to the municipality of Canovanas, to the east of San Juan. There, he spoke with a mother of two who showed him the meager, unhealthy rations she had been receiving since the hurricane. In the same video posted on October 3rd, an older gentleman explains that he has been sleeping in his car, which is parked in front of his home. Although the roof had been stripped away and the walls were gone, the man says that he has to protect what little remains from potential thieves. The last person Julio interviews identifies himself as a former U.S. Marine. He describes the extent of the damage to the surrounding area before acknowledging the lack of aid. With some prompting, he also confirms that Julio has been helping the surrounding community. Before turning the camera back on himself, Julio asks, “And how do you know me?” To which the Marine replies, smiling wryly, “Facebook.”
A second video posted that day shows Julio visiting a makeshift shelter in the same municipality. He is joined by the former marine, who translates for him. One woman at the shelter explains that everyone is living in subhuman conditions. There is no water, no electricity. At this point, it has been two weeks since the storm and disaster relief has already become a contentious, soon to be politicized issue. President Trump had made a quick visit to the island that same day. After a televised briefing, he went to a church in an affluent suburb of the Guaynabo municipality where he infamously tossed paper towels into a crowd of hurricane victims. Mr. Trump had also remarked that the destruction did not compare to that of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, citing the higher death toll, among other factors.
Yet his assessment of the devastation in Puerto Rico seemed to conflict with emerging news reports. On September 28th, Omaya Sosa of the Center for Investigative Journalism reported that the death toll was likely much higher than initial figures. In fact, immediately after Trump’s visit, Governor Rosselló announced that the official number of deaths caused by Maria had been increased, from 16 to 34. Subsequent reports estimated the number of deaths that could be attributed to the storm to be over 1,000. Six months later, the number remained at 64, though an independent investigation of the death count conducted by a team of experts from George Washington University later estimated the number to be closer to 3,000.
There were other things that didn’t add up in the aftermath of the storm. The week prior to Trump’s visit, David Begnaud reported that 3,000 shipping containers filled with humanitarian aid were stuck at port. The story was one of several that raised concerns over what was quickly being perceived as an inadequate relief effort on the part of FEMA and the local government. With many parts of the island still unable to communicate, Julio provided his audience, for better or worse, a raw and unfiltered glimpse into the dire situation on the island.
For example, when Julio visited a temporary shelter in Humacao, a municipality located on the eastern coast, he spoke with a man using an oxygen mask powered by a car battery. Lack of electricity, which would continue to affect roughly half of the island before the end of the year, had become a matter of life and death. The spread of waterborne illnesses such as leptospirosis due to contamination was another issue highlighted by Julio. He filmed a young man in Aguadilla collecting water from a UVC pipe placed in the middle of a stream. In a subsequent video, Julio talked to people waiting in line at Sam’s Club, a popular retail warehouse chain owned by Walmart. He asked questions like whether or not the Puerto Rican government is doing a good job, then strongly criticized Governor Rosselló and FEMA. The interviews are often blunt, more like an interrogation. Undeterred by his broken Spanish, there is an appreciable authority in Julio’s brash, confrontational approach.
After nearly a week had passed, Julio decided to abandon his attempt to obtain a truck and deliver supplies to different parts of Puerto Rico. He did, however, acknowledge that he had been given the option of driving a truck loaded with diesel fuel. By then, Puerto Rico had been nicknamed “Generator Island” due to the hum of generators powering much of the island. The outdated power grid had been stripped away almost completely by the storm, which, in turn, made diesel a critical resource for all sectors of society, hospitals in particular. Julio refused, citing a preference to transport only what were essential items in his opinion, mainly food and water.
The decision to travel to the western part of the island coincided with Julio announcing that, at the suggestion of several followers, he would be “adopting” the towns of Aguadilla and Arecibo. It was a concept that began to circulate weeks after the storm, with Julio serving as one of its early advocates. In Aguadilla, Julio would be joined by a Puerto Rican man from Boston who had come to Puerto Rico to help Julio after seeing his videos on Facebook.
Such drastic action, known as self-deployment, was something that Julio had encouraged both his supporters and critics alike to do. The man from Boston, however, wasn’t the only one to answer the call. Celebrities, athletes, ham radio operators, singers, artists, military veterans, chefs, doctors, and electricians were among a sizable continent of volunteer first responders to travel to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of the hurricane. Their success varied by degree, but their presence was arguably necessary to offset the perceived weak response by the federal government—an opinion likely bolstered by early investigative media reports. Moreover, with a diaspora of close to six million and two major storms preceding Hurricane Maria, there was already a pool of volunteers eager to self-deploy to yet another disaster area.
Disaster relief experts, however, would urge against the practice of self-deployment. For them, civilian volunteer first responders can quickly become a liability within a disaster area, especially if they do not have a specific mission or relevant skill set. They are also likely to consume resources like food, water, and housing that would otherwise be distributed to the victims. Nevertheless, self-deployment became a widespread phenomenon in Puerto Rico (as is the case after most major disasters).
Julio was not the only one to acquire a social media following in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. A military veteran from South Carolina went to Houston after Hurricane Harvey, and then to Florida after Hurricane Irma. The man arrived in Puerto Rico with a small team of veterans not long after Hurricane Maria. Like Julio, he shared daily videos of himself via Facebook Live as his team of volunteers traveled to remote parts of the island to deliver aid and provide assistance. One such video received nearly two million views, which, in turn, generated some local media coverage.
Julio, on the other hand, preferred to work alone. Small, somewhat arbitrary acts of kindness, such as purchasing hot meals for strangers or handing out modest sums of cash, were a common theme of his videos, which would often have to be uploaded hours after being filmed due to the limited connectivity throughout the island. Julio would also record a Facebook live video each morning to interact with his supporters—many of them women, Puerto Rican, or both—as well as to discuss his increasingly ambitious plans. A more grandiose sense of purpose seemed to coincide with such a display of public support on the part of thousands of Facebook users, especially towards the end of Julio’s second week in Puerto Rico.
On October 12th, for example, Julio visited the Boys and Girls Club of Isabela where the facilities were mostly being used to house sick children, including several with respiratory issues. Their generator, though faulty, was the only source of power for the ventilators in use. After speaking with staff, Julio entered the building and interviewed a single parent who was there with his eight-year-old son. The father explained that his son weighed just 25 lbs. due to a severe medical condition. Julio, in turn, directed several pleas to his followers, Caterpillar Inc., and Denzel Washington, a longtime advocate for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. The video would be viewed over 200,000 times. Later, another video showed the sick child being medically evacuated by military personnel, supposedly due to the exposure generated by the video. Julio goes on to characterize this moment as the greatest accomplishment of his life.
The second event was less fateful. More than once during his time in Puerto Rico, Julio had vaguely suggested that he would be able to provide one hot meal to at least 1,000 people. He then announced that he would be working alongside Spanish chef José Andrés and the World Central Kitchen in Aguadilla. Mr. Andrés was also a volunteer first responder. In just over a month since the storm, his organization, in partnership with Chefs for Puerto Rico, provided over two million meals to different parts of the island. Julio claimed that Mr. Andrés reached out to him personally and that he would be working with the Mayor of Aguadilla on logistics.
On October 13th, Julio posted a video showing a line of people waiting to receive a plate of food. AT&T was also there to set up portable charging stations. A few days later, Julio would be in Isabela where Chefs for Puerto Rico and AT&T would again provide hot meals, charging stations, and hotspots for local residents. As he walks past the AT&T tent and a line of people, Julio asserts, “I am not working with them, but we are all working together, if that makes sense.”
On October 15th, two weeks after arriving in Puerto Rico, Julio rented a van in order to realize his original goal: to deliver supplies like food and water to different parts of the island. He also stated his intention to buy a generator for a church in Carolina. Three days later, however, he abruptly announced that he would be leaving Puerto Rico. He claimed to be having issues with his PayPal account and that he would be refunding donations. Julio left the island on October 19th, after a total of eighteen days spent in 12 of Puerto Rico’s 78 municipalities.
II. The Doctor
“I’m just a doc from the Bronx,” says Maria. She is seated in a car, white coat over black scrubs, stethoscope around her neck, dark brown hair tied back in a ponytail. Maria is broadcasting to a few thousand new followers via Facebook Live while on her way home after leading a rally to City Hall in downtown Manhattan earlier in the day.
The march had begun at Columbus Circle around noon. It was Thursday, September 28th, eight days after Hurricane Maria, and Maria yet to make direct contact with her parents. The elderly couple had been vacationing in Sabana Grande, a municipality located in the southwestern part of the island, far from the capital of San Juan, when the storm hit.
Both suffer from chronic illnesses, which, for Maria, was an immediate cause for concern. Her mother, for example, is diabetic. Without electricity, her remaining insulin would soon spoil. Maria’s father, on the other hand, had heart and kidney problems. In the case of a medical emergency resulting from complications due to his illness, the likelihood of receiving any sort of treatment was extremely doubtful. Since the storm, hospitals and clinics were running on generators, if at all. Moreover, the uneven distribution of aid, especially to the more isolated western part of the island, compounded the precariousness of their situation.
Maria was well aware of these factors. She had childhood memories of Sabana Grande and therefore, knew intimately the geography. In an attempt to assuage her concerns, Maria downloaded Zello, an app that turns smartphones into two-way radios, thus allowing for “live open group communication.” Many Puerto Ricans tuned into the Zello app’s Hurricane Maria channel to obtain what little information was available at the time. There, Maria encountered similar stories of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora desperately attempting to track down relatives on the island. As a result, La Doctora, as she had been nicknamed by her fellow Zello users, was inspired to become more directly involved in the recovery effort.
She soon joined a group of volunteers trying to send supplies and a team of medical personnel to the island. She flew to Florida with the ultimate goal of reaching Sabana Grande. Unfortunately, damage to the airports and shipping ports left her stranded for several days.
It was at the Tampa Bay airport where Maria first met Julio. The two Bronx natives approached one another after having spent nearly a week in the airport. A photo from that night posted to Facebook shows them standing back to back, with a caption stating their intention to work together to somehow reach Puerto Rico. They boarded a flight to New York City later that night.
Up until that point, only Julio had developed a sizable following via social media. Upon returning to New York, however, Maria recorded an impassioned Facebook Live video that quickly went viral. To date, the video, which was recorded on the evening of September 27th, has been viewed over 1.5 million times. As a result, Maria accumulated nearly 10,000 Facebook followers. The almost nine-minute clip was recorded in what appears to be a home office. There are several diplomas on the wall behind Maria, who is seated and dressed in medical attire. Before speaking, she pauses for a moment, then introduces herself as a nephrologist and the daughter of Puerto Rican parents. She then tearfully shares that she has not been able to contact them since the hurricane and that both suffer from serious illness.
Maria proceeds to express outrage at the lack of media attention that Puerto Rico had been receiving. She also criticizes the inadequate relief effort being led by FEMA and the local government, thus articulating a latent mainstream narrative of neglect that the Mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín, described as “close to genocide” the next day during a press conference. In the end, Maria invited viewers to meet her near Central Park at noon for a peaceful rally through the streets of Manhattan. The video is in Spanish, though an English version was recorded as well.
The next day, September 28th, around noon, Maria addressed a small, but growing crowd near Columbus Circle, still wearing her white coat and scrubs. She told them that she is putting together a team of volunteer first responders to travel to Puerto Rico, but that she needed help getting to the island. Julio stood beside her, wearing a pair of sports sunglasses with the Puerto Rican flag etched onto the sides. He told the crowd that he was willing to spend the next four months driving delivery trucks in Puerto Rico, later adding that he could also drive “the doc” around the island to help her reach patients in remote areas.
By 12:30pm, the march began moving eastward down 57th Street, along the south end of Central Park. Several passing cars honked their horns in solidarity, while curious bystanders, many of them tourists, observed the noisy procession. The hundreds of marchers were only stopped by traffic lights as they made their way to 5th Avenue. Without a permit, the group did its best to stay together and obey traffic laws. The NYPD later provided them with an informal escort.
Many of the marchers took the opportunity to approach Maria. Some offered to help while others simply thanked her before asking to take a photo. Julio was treated similarly. He beamed proudly at the head of the march with a large Puerto Rican flag waving over his shoulder.
Around 3pm, the crowd made its first stop at Union Square, having covered a distance of nearly three miles within the span of three hours. There, Maria, Julio, and a local activist improvised speeches as volunteers bought water for the group. The march then continued until it reached City Hall Plaza a couple of hours later.
By then, another rally was scheduled to start, nearby at the Federal Plaza. Unlike the impromptu rally, there was a Facebook event page and flyer distributed beforehand. “Emergency Rally for Puerto Rico” had initially been organized as a protest against the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, otherwise known as the Jones Act, but after President Trump waived the controversial maritime law for a period of ten days, the focus shifted toward issues of humanitarian aid and distribution.
It was during the second rally when Julio learned that JetBlue had finally agreed to send him to Puerto Rico. The airline had previously rerouted and cancelled his itinerary numerous times while he was in Florida. Maria, on the other hand, rejected a similar offer. In a Facebook Live video recorded after the rally, she explained that that evening a police sergeant from Sabana Grande had brought a satellite phone to where Maria’s parents were staying in order for them to be able to call their daughter. As a result, Maria was able to hear her mother’s voice for the first time in more than a week before deciding to stay in New York City for a bit longer with the explicit goal of being able to organize a more impactful relief effort. “This is a marathon, not a sprint,” she reminded her followers in subsequent Facebook posts.
About one week later, Maria went to Puerto Rico to pick up her parents. Upon the family’s return to New York City, Maria scheduled a press conference for October 9th, almost three weeks after the storm. The event took place at 161st Street, near the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. The plan was for each member of the family to share a version of their ordeal in the days after Hurricane Maria, but ultimately, only Maria spoke to the small crowd in attendance. Turnout had been lower than expected, with only a few local media outlets covering the event. Inclement weather—it rained for much of the day—was likely a contributing factor.
By then, Maria’s Facebook wall had become a makeshift organizing platform for a nonprofit organization she had created with the intention of leading medical missions to the island. She named the organization Commit To Puerto Rico, thus invoking an ethos of long term commitment to the recovery effort in Puerto Rico. A website was launched by mid-October which listed a nine-member team, with Maria serving as CEO and Chief Medical Officer.
Medical professionals interested in volunteering in Puerto Rico were encouraged to sign up by providing a contact number, the state where their medical license was active, and their medical specialty. They would then be sent to the island in one to three week shifts, so as to avoid fatigue and to be able to contribute to the relief effort without having to place their medical careers on hold. Maria, for example, had postponed assuming a new position at a hospital in the Midwest that she had accepted prior to Hurricane Maria. The first trip appears to have taken place in early November. A second mission was tentatively scheduled for December.
Like self-deployment and other grassroots volunteer efforts, the founding of nonprofit organizations was also triggered by the storm—the timing of which makes sense: donations to the victims peak in the days, weeks, and months that follow a disaster. The army veteran from South Carolina, for example, founded a nonprofit in order to sustain an ongoing volunteer effort in Puerto Rico as well as to manage the flow of donations being sent by more than 20,000 Facebook followers. Maria, however, chose not to self-deploy to Puerto Rico. Instead, she prioritized long term recovery from the onset of her volunteer efforts, with Facebook Live playing an important role along the way. It was a platform that allowed her to keep her followers informed, as well as to vent her frustrations to an active, often sympathetic audience.
Maria does not, in the weeks that follow the rally, appear to mention Julio by name again.
III. The Fraud
Julio hardly makes mention of Maria while in Puerto Rico, except to say that he believes she should be there like him, but that he understands she has a different mission—one that grew out of their differing circumstances; namely, the overwhelming concern Maria had for her parents after the hurricane. Upon her return to New York, however, a sense of urgency to travel to Puerto Rico was replaced with a sense of responsibility to remain involved in the recovery effort. Thus, her nonprofit was born. Julio, on the other hand, did not have any family members living on the island. “All of my family is here,” he admitted during the rally in Manhattan. “But everybody in Puerto Rico is my family now,” he continued. His mission, moreover, had begun weeks before Hurricane Maria—thanks, in part, to a fateful encounter.
In mid-August, Julio recorded a Facebook Live video of himself on a highway road, his truck parked to the side. He appears a bit shaken up. His brakes, which are smoking, had stopped working as he approached a dangerous curve overlooking a steep cliff. Somehow, Julio explains, he managed to slow down in time to avoid a serious accident. About one week later, Hurricane Harvey hit Texas.
Julio shared the video again not long after returning from Puerto Rico. By his own admission, the near-death experience was the turning point that led Julio to travel to Houston, then Florida, New York, and finally, Puerto Rico; an impromptu journey covering thousands of miles in response to three powerful storms making landfall within the span of 26 days.
A four month stay, as originally intended, would have kept Julio in Puerto Rico for the remainder of 2017. Instead, he left in mid-October, promising to return with a team of volunteers in January. Meanwhile, Julio had achieved a sort of cult status among his followers, somewhat akin to that of a reality television star. Many saw him as a hero—there were memes that portrayed him as such. One supporter even composed a salsa tune dedicated to Julio, while others fervently contacted CBS correspondent David Begnaud in hopes of drawing attention to Julio’s story (the two would eventually cross paths at the airport in San Juan and take a photo, though nothing more came of the encounter).
Not everyone was a fan though. There were some who labeled Julio a narcissistic fraud from the onset of his arrival in Puerto Rico. Some even joined a Facebook page which began to publicly question many of the same heroic feats that were celebrated among his followers. The page accused him, among other things, of stealing and/or misusing PayPal donations, as well as exaggerating his accomplishments as a volunteer. Arguments soon broke out on social media between Julio’s supporters and his critics. As a result, both sides circulated petitions to have the other banned from Facebook. Neither received more than 150 signatures.
Cynicism aside, FEMA had issued a press release on October 14th urging hurricane victims in Puerto Rico to be aware of potential scams. Such had been the case in Florida after Hurricane Irma. According to one article, over 8,000 cases of price gouging and fraud were reported during and after the storm.
The Facebook page was likely responsible for Julio’s early exit from Puerto Rico. A complaint to CVS, for example, prevented Julio from purchasing supplies from the store. It had been his intention to deliver items such as food and water to different parts of the island using a rented van. The group also reported his PayPal account for fraud, which, in turn, led to its suspension. Unable to receive donations via PayPal, Julio launched a carefully worded GoFundMe page outlining the sole intent of covering his remaining expenses. All other donations were to be refunded.
The next day, October 19th, Julio flew to New York City. A few days later, he returned to Odessa to reunite with his two children and resume work. The social media backlash, however, continued. At first, Julio attempted to appease his critics, albeit crudely. On Halloween, for example, he recorded a video of himself wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and showing each of the receipts he had collected from his time in Puerto Rico. The perfunctory attempt at transparency did little to convince his detractors. At times, they laced their responses with more personal attacks against Julio. Screenshots of private communication via Facebook messenger and email reveal the extent of the heated exchanges, which include a number of particularly lewd and vulgar remarks by Julio.
Eventually, Julio stopped directly addressing the controversy, which he ultimately condemned as harassment. At the same time, the content of his Facebook Live videos began drifting away from Puerto Rico to other things, such as his two young children or his job as a truck driver. He did, however, appear as a guest on a local radio program in mid-November. To date, it is the only interview Julio has done since his return from Puerto Rico. When asked by the host about the accusations of fraud, Julio simply maintains his innocence. There were no follow up questions.
By December, Julio had adjusted the privacy settings of his Facebook profile. No friend requests, less public posts. He also began blocking people. The Facebook page, on the other hand, did not relent in its crusade to expose Julio not only as a fraud, but as an unstable opportunist with a criminal past. They released mugshots of Julio from prior arrests for misdemeanors like battery and public intoxication and shared anecdotes confirming a pattern of abusive behavior. Julio was more succinct in describing his behavior: “I smoke, I drink, I get arrested.”
Perhaps because he was quick to acknowledge his past transgressions, none of the evidence, nor any of the accusations against him seemed to dissuade his followers from characterizing his deeds in Puerto Rico as anything other than heroic. His past was simply irrelevant in comparison to the heroic image that Julio fostered.
The back and forth between Julio and the Facebook page would go on until late December, when the latter announced that it had been “added to a roster of informational news sites helping with frauds and scams related to Hurricane Irma and Maria.” In other words, the page was slated to become evidence for an ongoing fraud investigation. The Facebook page, which in three months had gained almost 1,000 followers, subsequently became inactive, though not before repeatedly warning Julio that if he did return to Puerto Rico in January, there would be a warrant for his arrest.
Nevertheless, Julio continued to tell his followers that he would be back on the island. He also reaffirmed his desire to buy a generator for a church in Carolina.
Neither was true.
IV. The Bubble
Social media was much less distracting for Maria, a tool more than anything. Since the hurricane, she focused almost all of her Facebook activity on the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico. She had essentially become a ‘citizen advocate,’ an informed activist with a modest platform to raise awareness about everything from beach contamination in Puerto Rico to the deadline to file for federal disaster unemployment.
Gretchen Sierra-Zorita, a founding member of the National Puerto Rican Agenda, had introduced the term ‘citizen advocate’ in an interview with NBC News in which she argued that a shift toward civic engagement would be necessary to ensure the long term recovery of the island. Ideally, citizen advocates like Maria would mobilize others to lobby Congress for things like federal disaster relief funding.
Such was the case on November 19th, when a rally called “United for Puerto Rico” was held in Washington D.C. (both Maria and Julio would endorse and promote the rally, though neither would attend).
Adequate funding for reconstruction—$94.4 billion had been the figure proposed by Governor Rosselló during a press conference a few days earlier—was among three objectives listed on the event website. The cancellation of Puerto Rico’s massive public debt and the elimination of the Jones Act were the other two. To date, none of these objectives have been met.
Volunteerism, though necessary to the early relief effort, was not sustainable. “We don’t have the capacity to carry out on a permanent basis the functions of government,” Sierra-Zorita said. This was evident in the dire conditions on the island two months after the storm—despite the tireless work of volunteers, grassroots organizations, and community brigades. Donor fatigue was another impending obstacle, or as Samantha Penta, Assistant Professor at SUNY Albany, explained in an article published in The Conversation in mid-November:
“When donors have already supported other relief efforts, they may feel that they either can’t or don’t need to give again. Today, that means many people who supported recovery efforts after Hurricane Harvey or perhaps Hurricane Irma are not pitching in to help Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria.”
California wildfires and an earthquake in Central Mexico also diverted attention and resources from the island.
Ultimately, citizen advocacy can be construed as less demanding and more practical than volunteer self-deployment, albeit not as attractive. Maria, however, had taken a hybrid approach. She was a citizen advocate invested in a sustainable, voluntary relief effort of her own design.
There was a steep learning curve, however, when it came to establishing her vision for an organization that provided disaster relief. Within weeks, the nonprofit was forced to abandon its goal of leading medical missions to the island due to problems with securing reliable transportation to and from Puerto Rico. Moreover, the first service trip in November led La Doctora to prioritize the needs of doctors based on the island. As a result, the organization shifted its mission toward coordinating the shipment and distribution of medical supply donations from its warehouse in New Jersey to verified medical care providers in Puerto Rico.
To do this, a subsidiary was created. Among other things, it would focus on partnering stateside doctors with colleagues in Puerto Rico in order to further facilitate the distribution of medical supplies. In this way, Maria maintained the kind of sustainable model of disaster relief she had first envisioned for her organization. However, by mid-December, the overall lack of progress in Puerto Rico was becoming a source of frustration for Maria, which she expressed in a series of Facebook Live videos recorded on December 20th, ninety days after the storm:
“We’re not getting this right...despite our efforts, despite good organizations that were not in existence before [Hurricane Maria]...and it’s still costing lives. That’s my main issue here...that’s why I’m still involved. That’s why the rest of my life is on pause. And when the outcome is the loss of life, it’s so hard to be patient.”
The lack of progress was particularly disappointing for Maria because, after three months, she had begun to feel isolated from everyone except those who shared her dedication to the relief effort. This became apparent, as Maria explained in a live video, at an event where she found herself unable to relate to any topic of conversation that did not concern the situation in Puerto Rico. She recalls even becoming momentarily angry with the other guests, whom she described as being either uninformed or misinformed on the subject. It was like living in a bubble, she concluded, one that had already begun to shrink as time passed.
The disillusionment of Maria and many others coincided with what Duane Hallock of the American Red Cross outlines as the third phase of disaster recovery, with reconstruction being the fourth and final phase. “By this time,” Hallock explains, “the community and survivors are getting tired. They are being worn thin by the stress of the ongoing recovery efforts.”
For Maria, that meant spending the day of the three-month anniversary of Hurricane Maria attempting to procure an insulin pen for her diabetic aunt in Sabana Grande following the news that a former patient she had treated in Puerto Rico had died. To make things worse, media coverage had waned, peaking two months earlier, in the days after Trump’s visit to the island. There were also signs of a widespread mental health crisis and about half of residents were still without electricity. Even with the long and joyous Puerto Rican holiday season approaching, circumstances were overwhelmingly bleak.
Nevertheless, Maria urged her followers to join her in working toward “bursting the bubble,” echoing the plea for citizen advocacy that Sierra-Zorita had outlined the month prior.
V. It’s Just A Phase
The bubble did briefly burst a few months later. On March 20th, hundreds peacefully demonstrated in front of FEMA headquarters in Washington D.C. before flooding a U.S. Senate office building in an act of civil disobedience. Twenty-five individuals were arrested.
Their criticism of the federal response to Hurricane Maria was echoed in a surge of media coverage that day. David Begnaud visited the coastal municipality of Yabucoa, ground zero for Hurricane Maria, to file a report for CBS News on the uneven progress that had been made since September. He noted that 65% of Yabucoeños still did not have electricity, despite the fact that the electrical grid was said to be generating the same amount of power as it had before the storm. The report also highlighted the work of volunteers, who were largely responsible for the installation of new roofs in place of the temporary blue tarps distributed by FEMA.
Mr. Begnaud went as far as to call volunteers the “unsung heroes of the story.” He himself had achieved cult celebrity status among the Puerto Rican community, while amassing a significant social media following. Julio and La Doctora, on the other hand, saw their audiences slowly decline over time.
Maria remained active in the relief effort until March, when she finally moved West to assume the position she had accepted before Hurricane Maria. This came after a trip to Puerto Rico to deliver medical supplies. Upon her return, she announced a partnership with a hospital in the southwestern part of the island, as well as a weekly Facebook Live series she would host to keep people informed about her nonprofit organization. The first and only episode was recorded in March. Months later, the Facebook page and website of the nonprofit organization were deleted.
Julio also removed photos and videos from his Facebook profile. He left Texas once again in late December to head to the northeast, arriving in New York City just before the New Year. There, a new job, a new home, sobriety, and a new relationship with a woman that had followed his journey in Puerto Rico via Facebook, awaited him. His new life quickly unravelled as a series of shocking allegations came to light. Julio was compelled to acknowledge past sexual abuse suffered as a child in a detailed account posted on his profile. This was in response to the accusation that Julio was estranged from his family because of inappropriate sexual contact with his younger siblings during his childhood. Much of this news was publicized by the Facebook page, which had resurfaced. The page also shared that Julio had warrants out for his arrest in at least three states and an upcoming court date in December. Julio dismissed the claims, often citing the lack of consequences as proof of his innocence. He did, however, opt to create another Facebook account in which his relationship with a new woman, this time a single mother, is documented.
Ultimately, Maria went back to being a doctor and Julio went back to being a truck driver—with little trace of the spectacle that had been their lives for the past year or so. The hero of the moment is, after all, fleeting.
*Author’s Note: Names have been changed to respect privacy.
Born and raised in Queens, NY to Puerto Rican and Peruvian parents, Néstor David Pastor is a cultural worker with experience in writing, editing, and translation. He holds a BA in English and Spanish Literature from Binghamton University (SUNY) and an MA in Spanish Literature from Queens College (CUNY). Currently, he is managing editor of Intervenxions, a digital publication of the Latinx Project at NYU, and an editorial assistant at the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA).
Special thank you to Maira Nolasco-Carranza, Pablo Medina Uribe, Laura Kauer-Garcia, Maria Cruz, Elizabeth Angeles, Barbara Calderón, and many more for their help with this story together.