Puerto Ricans living in Detroit: a view to two crises highlights 'powerlessness'

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/11/puerto-rico-detroit-bankruptcy-debt-crisis

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An economy sliding into a deep recession over the past decade. A depleted tax base. Ever-increasing jobless rates. The onslaught of comparisons between Puerto Rico and the city of Detroit has proliferated as the once-prosperous Caribbean island has careened toward insolvency.

Both faced fiscal crises of remarkable proportions – Detroit, which emerged from the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history in December, confronted a debt of $18bn; Puerto Rico’s total bill is $72bn – due in part to similar circumstances: residents fled elsewhere for more prosperous opportunities, while violence grew in proportion to a dwindling population.

But while parallels exist between Detroit’s rise and fall and the run-up to Puerto Rico’s financial woes, expatriates who currently live in the Michigan city say the island has faced several unique problems of its own.

Related: Economic exodus means two-thirds of Puerto Ricans may soon live in states

Detroit’s plunge into bankruptcy, for example, began decades ago, said Jorge Chinea, director of the Wayne State University Center for Latino/a & Latin American Studies.

“Detroit’s population erosion has had a longer span that began with the civil uprising in the late 1960s and has gotten worse with the expansion of the suburban area,” said Chinea, who lives in Clinton township, located about 45 minutes north-east of Detroit.

In Puerto Rico, while problems may have been long brewing under the surface, the island saw steady population growth from the 1950s until 2004, when the trend reversed. The decline was compounded by a recession that began in 2006, according to a report from the Tax Foundation, when foreign companies began fleeing the island in droves, taking tax revenues with them.

Chinea lived on the northern side of Puerto Rico, near the city of San Juan, until he was a teenager. The island he remembers as a kid was “an idyllic paradise”. His family lived next to a farm lush with fruit trees; it rained up to three days a week. “We bathed in the rain in those weeks,” he said.

Chinea’s family left for New York City’s Spanish Harlem in the late 1960s. When he left to attend college the following decade, he set his sights on the midwest, where he has remained ever since. The 61-year-old makes it a priority to still visit the island once every two years, and observes that the greatest similarity is the marginalization of both communities.

“Both areas are heavily populated by nonwhites ... that have been relegated to the margins of a mainstream economy,” Chinea said. “You have a community ... that’s made up of 80%-90% African Americans, and then you have the population in Puerto Rico that’s, of course, heavily islanders that are US citizens, but are disenfranchised in a way that parallels what some people in Detroit view as their own powerlessness.” For Puerto Ricans, that powerlessness is the lack of voting representation in federal elections. For Detroit residents, he said, it’s a perceived lack of power to improve the city.

But while both places have found themselves in similar financial circumstances, the financial relief available to the two is markedly different. As a territory of the United States, Puerto lacks the authority to file for bankruptcy, which Detroit did in 2013. The US territory is instead forced to ask Congress for exemptions on trade laws, or additional financial authority to petition for bankruptcy protection.

“But that will depend on whether the Republicans in Congress will accept that,” Chinea said. “Politics, right?”

Osvaldo Herrera, a Puerto Rican native who lives in south-west Detroit, says the island has experienced a significant “brain drain” thanks to a lack of jobs – a familiar storyline for Detroit residents.

Unemployment rates have soared as high as 30% on the island, Herrera said, which explains “why a lot of Puerto Ricans” who attended college would flee upon graduation. (In 2008, Detroit’s rate hovered close to 17%.)

“What kind of jobs would they get?” Herrera said.

A report from the New York Federal Reserve issued in April downplayed concerns of a brain drain in Puerto Rico, saying the overall proportion of college-educated residents on the island increased from 2011 to 2013 “in part because people without college degrees have been leaving in higher numbers”. However, Puerto Rico’s out-migration has continued apace over the past decade. Similarly, Detroit’s population dropped 25%, from nearly 1 million to under 700,000, in the previous decade.

Disastrous financial transactions in the mid-2000s orchestrated by Detroit’s former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick played a forceful role in the final years before the city eventually succumbed to bankruptcy. Kilpatrick, a former rising star in the Democratic party, was sentenced in October 2013 to 28 years in federal prison for corruption.

That stands out for Elsie Aquino, a graduate student in Wayne State University’s college of education who was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico.

“Both have had corrupt governments serving the interests of the US government and corporations, but not that of the people,” Alquino told the Guardian in an email.

From the perspective of an outside visitor, the vibe of Detroit may appear to have improved since it emerged from bankruptcy. The city’s downtown is now booming, with a staggering influx of investment in recent years. Restaurants are buzzing with activity, flush with extensive waits; apartment vacancies are virtually nonexistent. But these improvements belie a continued struggle in neighborhoods outside the downtown district.

In Puerto Rico, as Aquino describes it, tourists who trek to the island “probably say that we have it all”.

“However, little is known about the poverty that exists on the island,” she said, pointing to the unfortunate reminder that 45% of Puerto Ricans live below the poverty line.

Chinea recalls an epigram familiar to Michigan residents who felt the brunt of the economic recession in 2008: when the nation gets a cold, Michigan gets pneumonia – and, by extension, Detroit has borne the brunt of the disease.

It’s similar for Puerto Rico, he said.

“Because whatever impacts the United States economy either positively or negatively impacts Puerto Rico – mostly, in this case, negatively, because the United States is undergoing a recession,” Chinea said.