“Puerto Rico, my heart’s devotion, let it sink back in the ocean,” sang Rita Moreno as Anita in 1961’s West Side Story. Watching with my 11th-grade film class in Ponce, my hometown on the island’s southern coast, I felt my cheeks burn.
Until recently, most popular references to the island—even those that uplifted its culture—did so from a distance. Esmeralda Santiago’s celebrated memoir When I Was Puerto Rican unfolds mostly in Brooklyn. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights stays exactly there. Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca” reserves its Spanish lyrics for the chorus. Puerto Ricans’ stories, it seemed, were only heard abroad (save for Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina”) once they moved there.
