Alana: It wasn’t just any Monday morning in Puerto Rico. It was January 24th, 2022. And there was a lot of anticipation. 

ARCHIVAL – Pelota Dura

Ferdinand Perez (Pelota Dura): Bueno, mis amigos hoy se supone que todos los titulares y durante todo el día estuviéramos hablando del comienzo de clase, señores… 

Alana: For one thing, kids in Puerto Rico were going back to in-person classes, even though the pandemic was still in full swing. Some students hadn’t been in a classroom for two years, because of the earthquakes in the south. And also, on this Monday, the King was coming. 

ARCHIVAL – WAPA Radio 

WAPA: “El Rey Felipe Sexto viene a la isla con motivo de la celebración de los quinientos años de la ciudad capital de San Juan…” 

Alana: The actual King of Spain. 

ARCHIVAL – SPAIN NATIONAL ANTHEM 

Alana: Felipe Juan Pablo Alfonso de Todos los Santos de Borbon y Grecia (or King Felipe the Sixth) was coming to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the founding of San Juan. His visit had been postponed from the year before, and the press was poised to cover three carefully choreographed days of meetings. They had the official schedule, and they were ready to tell us about it.

ARCHIVAL

Telemundo – “Donde se realizarán los actos protocolares…”

Teleonce: “los actos protocolares”

Notiseis: “como parte de los actos protocolares habrá una transmisión simultánea….” 

Alana: Those actos protocolares – all of that pomp and circumstance –  were in service of a bigger goal, according to TV analysts. Now, as a US colony, Puerto Rico can’t go around making trade deals with other countries. But the King was coming with Spain’s minister of commerce. So talking heads on TV, like a former governor, kept saying the visit could spell investment for Puerto Rico. You know, deals, deals, deals. 

ARCHIVAL – Teleonce PR

Alejandro Garcia Padilla: El mundo entero a través de la visita del rey, nos ve, digan a esa casa se puede entrar, en ese lugar podemos invertir.

Alana: So, the stakes were high when we woke up that Monday morning, logged onto Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, and saw photos nobody was expecting. 

ARCHIVAL – sound effects

Alana: According to police, the statue of the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon in Old San Juan had been vandalized sometime around 4:30am. Although vandalized seemed like an understatement.

In photos, we could see this green, bearded sculpture lying on the ground, face up next to his white pedestal. He was broken in two: Ponce’s legs had come off from his body just below his medieval puffy shorts. Part of his base had come off too, so he was surrounded by chunks of rubble.  

The real Ponce de Leon had been appointed by Spain as the first governor of Puerto Rico in 1509. His statue had been pointing south, perhaps towards the original capital city, Caparra, with his other hand on his hip. But on the ground, it looked like the statue was holding his finger up in the air, as if he wanted to say just one more thing before everyone stopped listening. He looked small. 

ARCHIVAL – WKAQ 

Ruben Sanchez:  ¿Que paso? ¿Quién hizo esto? ¿Por qué? 

Alana: For many media commentators, like talk radio show host Ruben Sanchez on WKAQ, the big reaction was horror, shock, dismay. The statue, he told Mayor Miguel Romero, had been there since he was a little boy. 

ARCHIVAL – WKAQ

Ruben Sanchez: ¡Eso está ahí desde que yo soy chiquito! 

Alana: But actually, it had been up in that plaza since the 1890s, right off the famous Calle San Sebastian, next to the church of San Jose, the same church that King Felipe was scheduled to visit the very next day. The mayor had the royal plane’s arrival time at his fingertips.

ARCHIVAL – WKAQ

Ruben Sanchez: Entonces, a qué hora usted espera a Felipe?  

Miguel Romero: Eh, pasada la – entre 5:45 a 5:50 debería estar llegando aquí a Puerto Rico, Rubén. 

Alana: Sometime between 5:45 and 5:50 that very afternoon. 

ARCHIVAL – WKAQ

Miguel Romero:  A lo mejor el rey ni cuenta se da de ese tipo de cosa. 

Alana: Perhaps, the mayor said… the monarch doesn’t even notice these kinds of things. Maybe the protest wasn’t even about the royal visit. 

But it absolutely was. 

Even before 7am, a group called the Fuerzas Libertarias de Borikén had taken responsibility for pulling the statue down. They hadn’t been heard of before, and they haven’t been heard of since. But the message was: “no kings, and no gringo invaders.” They were linking Ponce de Leon, a symbol of Spanish colonialism, to people from the United States moving to Puerto Rico for tax incentives, displacing Puerto Ricans. Whoever was behind the group, they had gotten everyone’s attention.

Coming up after the break: an empty pedestal. This is La Brega.

BREAK

Rafael Capó: I immediately called a friend and we came here like really, really early.  Just sort of to see it. I needed to see this statue on the ground.

Alana: Rafael Capó García leads Memoria Decolonial, a group that gives counter-narrative history tours. 

Rafael: It was me and probably three other people interested in what had happened. And then you had the press, you had municipal employees outraged with how you could deface this monument.

Alana: Rafael already knew the statue really well. He used to be a high school history teacher, and he’d bring his students to Old San Juan for field trips, teaching them to question whether violent colonizers were really heroes and champions who deserved to be on a pedestal. So, when he saw Ponce de Leon lying on the ground, he felt… hopeful?

Rafael: I was!  I was hopeful. I was excited that, that we were going to finally have these conversations, much needed conversations.

Alana: But that conversation, about who really represents Puerto Ricans, and Puerto Ricanness… it didn’t seem like there was gonna be time for it to happen. 

Because by 8:30 am, Mayor Romero had already made a promise in interviews. He sounded confident, even breezy, standing next to the empty pedestal, speaking with a reporter from El Nuevo Día. 

ARCHIVAL – El Nuevo Día

Reporter: Le han dado un estimado de cuánto tardaría en que esté.. 

Miguel Romero: Bueno, el estimado es que durante el día de hoy se va a estar trabajando y la colocamos hoy mismo.

Alana: He expected the statue to be back up that very same day. 

Rafael: So the municipal government had to run, had to hustle to get this statue up because in their minds, they couldn’t allow the King of Spain to visit San Juan and see this symbol of Spanish heritage on the ground. 

Alana: Did you think that they would be able to do it? 

Rafael: So it’s pretty ridiculous. I didn’t think they would be able to do it because the statue was broken in half. Imagine, like, it takes them forever to fix a pothole, right?

Alana: It was actually Mayor Romero who acknowledged the pothole problem that morning. The city would have to spend public funds on fixing the statue, he lamented, instead of on fixing a pothole.

ARCHIVAL

Romero: En lugar de nosotros, utilizar dinero para tapar un boquete. La tenemos que utilizar dinero para arreglar eso. 

Alana: There are some potholes in Puerto Rico that are old enough to have birthday parties, but the city was going to go ahead and try to repair Juan Ponce de Leon in less than a day. It felt… ridiculous.

Online, people were coping with the absurdity the usual way: with memes.

JuanPi:  I saw it like at 10:00 AM, 11:00 AM and I just started brainstorming.

Juan Pablo Diaz, who goes by JuanPi, is a political satirist and actor. He wanted to get something out about the statue really quickly.

JuanPi: I thought, well, I can do a parody of a song because the, the music is already there. I just had to change the words. It’s the King of Spain. What is a good song? A good recognizable song? The Statue is Broke. Partío…  Corazon Partío… Alejandro Sanz, let’s go. 

ARCHIVAL – JuanPi parody

Song:  La propiedad común así no se daña, ahora que va a pensar de mí en rey de España 

JuanPi:  Su majestad me va a ver así de jodido, quien me va arreglar si amaneci partío. 

ARCHIVAL  – JuanPi parody

Song: Buena forma de acabar este mes de enero, y cómo este bochorno sobreviviremos.

JuanPi:  Eh, eh. La tienes ahí. ¡Dime! [laughs]

Alana: [laughs] Su májestad me va ver así de jodido [laughs] 

JuanPi: Su majestad me va a ver así de jodido.

ARCHIVAL – JuanPi parody

Song: …Jodido…quien me va a arreglar si amanecí partido…

Alana: JuanPi also rigged a bitmoji to look like a green bearded Ponce de Leon, singing along to the song. 

ARCHIVAL – JuanPi parody

Song: Ustedes saben que sin mi nada es lo mismo; como recordarán ahora el colonialismo? 

JuanPi: Cómo van a recordar ahora el colonialismo. 

Alana: There’s a particular line he wrote – the statue sings: you all know that nothing will be the same without me, how will you remember colonialism? 

JuanPi: O sea, siempre en la comedia, yo busco una puita pa pa pa pa señalar cosas.

Alana: It’s a punch. Because in Puerto Rico, nobody needs a statue to remember colonialism. It’s not in the past. And so far, around 500 years of Puerto Rico’s colonial past and present were being crammed into one single day. More and more layers were revealing themselves as the hours ticked by. Potholes. Earthquakes. Tax incentives. The literal king of Spain. 

JuanPi:  I think Puerto Ricans laugh to get less pissed off.  

Alana: And actually, the more JuanPi remembered the day with me, the more pissed off he got. 

JuanPi:  Eso fue un papelóncito – ahora me estoy empezando a acordar de cosas. 

Alana: He remembered that the coverage was taking the vandalism of the statue so seriously, as though it was a national catastrophe. 

JuanPi:  Esa noticia se trató como si hubiese sido, olvídate. Es el desastre, la catástrofe nacional.

Alana: For example, here’s a comparison to the attack on the Twin Towers on 9-11. 

ARCHIVAL

Ramon Rosario: Leo, y cuando se tumbaron las torres gemelas, estuvimos años discutiendo esto. 

Leo: Pero no es lo mismo…

Juan Pablo Díaz: Estábamos en pa… saliendo de pandemia. ¿Tú te crees que España está pendiente? Ahí: “Mira, que vandalizaron una estatua de Juan Ponce León”. Sabrá Dios cuánta gente en España está de acuerdo con lo que se hizo, ¿entiendes, o sea?

Alana: And there was a disconnect between the way the government and the press were handling the story and the anger and mockery that we were seeing online. 

There were Valentine’s day cards like – “you knock me over like Ponce de Leon” – and jokes about the statue being too high to get up off the floor at a party, asking someone to get him a sandwich. People were playing with the idea of honoring other, more deserving figures instead, photoshopping Boricuas like Iris Chacon and Bad Bunny up on Ponce de Leon’s old spot. 

Because the thing is, in Puerto Rico, there’s no shortage of people who deserve to be honored on a pedestal. If you ask around Old San Juan – or even in that same square, Plaza San Jose… you’ll hear so many better options than Juan Ponce de León.

Person 1: Any other person, honestly. But yeah, I just won’t like to see him. 

Baseball players. Musicians. Poets. 

Person 2: Pues, Roberto Clemente.

Person 3: Mi cantante favorito. Sí. Tego Calderón.

Person 4: Julia de Burgos, tremenda poeta, escritora, un orgullo para la mujer. 

Boxers. Independence activists. Ricky Martin. 

Man: Tito Trinidad o Miguel Cotto

Young man: Ramon Emeterio Betances. Mariana Brassetti. Those are just the persons that pop up 

Man: Yo diría que una persona como Ricky Martin, qué mejor ejemplo para representarnos.

Man:  En Puerto Rico, hay talento en todos lados. 

Alana: I heard creative responses, ideas for things that aren’t even human. Like a tree, or a goddess. 

Javier: Puede ser un árbol, una ceiba. [off mic: eso sería espectacular] a la diosa de la fertilidad taína, Atabey.

Alana: I heard enthusiasm, to the point of yelling.

 Alana: Y quién quieren ver ahí arriba?  

Young man: Tremenda pregunta. 

Young woman: ¡Una mujer! ¡Una mujer! ¡Por favor!

Alana: And I heard the names of tons of talented and distinguished Boricuas.

Man:  Pero hay un montón.  

Alana: Icons who inspire SO MUCH devotion. 

Woman: Pues como que el corazón, como que wow.

Alana: Growing up, my mother – and I’m sure, probably your mother too –  would point out Puerto Ricans everywhere. She still does.

Alana’s Mother Olga Casanova-Burgess:  Hi. I just wanted to tell you that I saw the Jimmy Fallon show and I, I heard the Pleneros de la Cresta. Did you know that they’re from Ciales?

Alana: I can’t remember my English father ever leaning over to celebrate someone’s Englishness. But in Puerto Rico and its diaspora, we have a thing for people representing the archipelago, competing for it or championing it in some way.

That’s why, this season on La Brega, we’re bringing you stories of Puerto Rican champions. 

We’re going to meet fighters who have represented us in courtrooms and in boxing rings, and icons who have worn Puerto Rico on their sashes and on their jerseys. We’re going to go to the cultural battlefields where Puerto Rico is a country, and carrying the flag takes on even more meaning. What does it mean and what does it take to champion Puerto Rico as a nation, unflinchingly, and with boundless pride.

And perhaps this is why the events of January 24th 2022 felt and feel so absurd: because there was an empty pedestal just sitting there, and a pantheon of heroes to fill it. And yet, the government insisted it should be Ponce de Leon up there. And that they could resurrect his statue in just a day – and the hours were ticking by. So, coming up after the break, remember: five hours to go until the King arrives. This is La Brega.

BREAK

Alana: By 1pm, a city crew had removed the statue of Ponce de Leon (or the two pieces of it) from the plaza. No one knew the whereabouts of the shattered colonizer. But with five hours left until the king’s arrival, we got a glimpse. 

Someone – it seemed likely that it was a municipal employee – had recorded an 8 second video that I can only describe as art. The opening frame shows one of those blue quilted blankets people use to protect precious cargo. A left hand pulls the fabric back….

ARCHIVAL

¿Quién tengo aquí, papi? 

Alana: And reveals… 

ARCHIVAL

Al señor 

Alana: Ponce de Leon’s face.

ARCHIVAL

Ponce de Leon. 

Alana: And gives him a short, swift slap.

ARCHIVAL

Unh, huelebicho. 

Alana: It’s hard to keep a straight face even just remembering the video; it has derailed our editorial meetings and makes it hard to even record these lines. The comedic timing is impeccable, but it’s also deep. In life, Ponce de Leon was a violent conquistador. As a statue, he was glorified on an adorned pedestal. But now, he was broken in two and casually slapped. 

That’s not to say everyone agreed. It’s typical, when a controversial monument is vandalized, for some people to see it as an affront to heritage and an effort to rewrite history. And there were people who certainly felt that way, and were offended. Online, there were arguments in comments sections and on Facebook posts about what the statue really represented.

Luis Pérez:  Bueno, mi impresión es lamentable. 

Alana: The director of the Museum of San Juan was giving voice to that reaction in interviews: 

ARCHIVAL

Luis Pérez:  Estamos ante un atentado contra el patrimonio artístico y cultural del pueblo de Puerto Rico, una estatua que está en esta plaza desde el siglo diecinueve. 

Alana: And that’s because Juan Ponce de Leon isn’t ONLY a person who existed and who enslaved and killed Indigenous people and Africans. He’s also a symbol of Spanish heritage – and part of a conversation about what it means to be Puerto Rican, and who represents our origins. And the statue of him isn’t just any monument. It says a lot, and I mean that literally.

ARCHIVAL

Frank Arredondo (as Juan Ponce de Leon): Yo, Juan Ponce de León colonizador y primer gobernador de la isla de Puerto Rico. 

There’s a short film from 1957 that was made by the Puerto Rican government, and narrated by the statue. It tells the story of the Spanish conquest. 

ARCHIVAL

Frank Arredondo (as Juan Ponce de Leon):  Aquí mi estatua. En una tranquila plazoleta.

It’s a real rewriting of history, with only scant acknowledgement of any violence. The last line makes a big claim. The people of Puerto Rico are a tree, and he – Ponce de Leon – is the root.

ARCHIVAL

Juan Ponce de Leon: Pueblo puertoriqueño, árbol del cual yo, Juan Ponce de León, soy la raíz. 

Alana: If the actual statue could really talk, it would tell a much more complicated story about Puerto Rican identity. Rafael Capó has written about it extensively. 

Rafael Capó: The earliest mention that I found was in 1877, a journalist in the conservative newspaper Boletín Mercantil mentioned how Puerto Rico needed to honor its conquistador, right? And he mentioned that just like in Mexico, Hernán Cortés was the Mexican Moses, right? Who was venerated by all. Ponce de León should receive the same treatment in Puerto Rico.

Alana: Four years later, there’s another newspaper report about the statue. It has been made in New York, and is arriving in San Juan. And the material is notable. It’s made from two bronze cannons that had been used to defend Puerto Rico from a failed invasion by the British in 1797. This is one of the defining moments in Puerto Rican history: when Sir Ralph Abercrombie attacks San Juan with a massive fleet and thousands of soldiers. 

Rafael Capó: The people that defend Puerto Rico are not just Spanish soldiers. 

Alana: Black Puerto Ricans, creoles, whites, men, women – everyone came together to fight off the British. And many historians say that this is the moment that the Puerto Rican nation was created. So when the statue is put up in 1882, those who had pushed for it were celebrating a connection to Spain with this other element baked in. 

Rafael Capó: For me, the statue and Hispanic heritage has always been really interesting because of how it sort of has become, not so much now, but definitely during the 20th century when the U.S. was trying to Americanize Puerto Ricans, a lot of them sought refuge in Hispanicity. 

Alana: It was a way of saying: we aren’t Americans. 

Rafael Capó: We are something else. And rooting themselves in European and Hispanic Spanish heritage was sort of a defensive mechanism. 

Alana: Being Spanish was special, different. For example, there’s a debate that comes up in 1908, for the 400th anniversary of Ponce de Leon arriving in Puerto Rico. 

Rafael Capó: The official historian of Puerto Rico, Cayetano Coll y Toste, is adamant that Juan Ponce de León has his own national holiday. He’s a hero in Puerto Rico, and he specifically mentions, and I love this quote, he says: “Hopefully, all conquistadors of the Indies would have been as benevolent as Juan Ponce de León was with the Indigenous peoples of Puerto Rico.”

Alana: This is simply not true. 

Rafael Capó: Because it’s always that Puerto Rico is an exception, right? That we are somehow devoid of racism because in our historical origins, thanks to Spanish civilization we were conceived through mixture and tolerance from the beginning. And this narrative is always constructed by positing that there is an other that is racist and refuses to mix. And those are the British and that is the United States.

Alana:  So, at some point though, you get up on the pedestal.

Rafael: So, getting up on the pedestal was not the plan.

Alana: It was around 2pm, a little less than four hours before the king of Spain was slated to arrive in Puerto Rico on this fateful day. 

Municipal workers had been readying the base to receive the repaired statue. One of them had left a ladder. 

Rafael Capó: He put a ladder there and he left and I looked at my friend I was like, well fuck it. 

Alana: And when Rafael got up there, he did the Ponce de Leon pose: a finger in the air, and a hand on the hip.

Rafael Capó: Tan pronto me paré allá arriba, algo me dijo cabrón haz la pose. Como que si ya estás aquí, haz la fokin’ pose. 

Alana: Were you trolling them a little bit? 

Rafael Capó: I was definitely trolling it. I had no intention of staying the entire day.  And yeah, I stayed there maybe for an hour.

Alana: It was long enough to make some news: that a protestor had delayed the installation of the statue. They took it very seriously.  

ARCHIVAL – El Nuevo Día

El Nuevo Dia: …hubo una manifestación que lo impidió cuando un hombre se trepó al pedestal… 

Alana: After Rafael’s pose, some other protestors started arriving. It was getting close to the deadline. 

Laura: I, I didn’t know how it was going to end. 

Alana: Laura Pérez is a journalist based in San Juan… and an editor for La Brega. She had been reporting for a wire service that day. And had been in the plaza for nearly five hours. 

Laura:  At some point I realized there were policemen walking into the plaza. They were wearing riot gear, and they were – well intimidating. 

Alana: It was 4:45, an hour to go.

Laura:  People actually started screaming at them, and what they were saying something I’ve heard before in these kind of circumstances: “how come I see you don’t answer the call when my safety is at risk? But how come it is you’re here now when I’m protesting?” 

Alana: The riot police marched forward, forcing people out of their way, and forming a line around the pedestal. Creating space for the municipal workers who had just arrived with the repaired statue. 

Laura: When they started trying to get Juan Ponce de Leon out of the pickup that’s when I realized oh this is heavy and not an easy task. 

Alana: Municipal workers brought a couple of cherry pickers with them – they’re like a small crane with a basket on the end. They had wrapped yellow straps around the now intact statue, so it looked like Ponce was wearing a ziplining harness. He was hanging from the crane while workers in the baskets and on the ground tried to position him on the pedestal. There was a live stream, so we could all watch through splayed fingers. 

Laura: All of sudden the statue is just flying in the middle of the square (laughs) he’s just flying but he’s crooked, not like a superhero that knows how to fly.

Alana: He was at an angle, as though he was really ziplining, and they couldn’t quite place him as he swung around. 

Laura:  And I’m not sure that they know what they’re doing.

Alana: An hour went by…

Laura: It seemed like they were just improvising. They were just trying to make it work with whatever materials, and tools they have for whatever it is they do as a living, which is not putting statues back up on a pedestal, I’m sure about that. 

Alana: Because the top part of the pedestal had also crashed down that morning, the base was now shorter, and there didn’t seem to be an easy way to install the statue.

Laura: And they had to put it back down and then Ponce de Leon was again lying on the floor of the square, where the day started. 

Alana: And meanwhile, in the live feed from the airport…

ARCHIVAL – El Nuevo Día live stream:

Anchor: Ya está bajando el rey, Felipe Sexto…. O está por bajar. 

Alana: The King’s plane had landed, a few minutes early… at 5:35.

ARCHIVAL – El Nuevo Dia live stream:

El Nuevo Dia live stream:  Ahí lo vemos. Acompañado del gobernador de Puerto Rico. 

[Puerto Rican anthem]

Alana: It was an unforgettable spectacle: a split screen with the King on one side, getting a red carpet welcome, and the conquistador statue on the other, swinging from yellow nylon straps. The audience was Puerto Rico, even though it seemed like the show had been put on for someone else. 

Laura: We’re always thinking about what others think of us, but not what we think of ourselves. That’s Puerto Rico.  

Alana: It was just before 7pm when the bronze statue of Juan Ponce de Leon was finally reinstalled, with his legs attached to his body, and his finger pointing to the south. The king had yet to drive past the site. But, something was wrong. The statue leaned to the left. Like, a lot.

Adrian:  You couldn’t in good faith stand back and look up at that pedestal and say, Juan Ponce de Leon is standing tall and proud and straight. You know?

Alana: Adrian Florido is a reporter at NPR who covers race and identity in the US. And when I told him I was starting this season with this story, he remembered a recording he had made for his side project, documenting Puerto Rico in sound.

Adrian: A lot of times when you’re recording and documenting, you don’t know what it means yet. And I think that’s true of what happened with the Ponce de Leon statue. 

Alana: Adrian had followed the movement to remove statues of confederate generals and other figures, and this moment of reflection that a lot of communities around the world had had about their monuments. 

Adrian: Who are our heroes? You know, like, who are we honoring?  Let’s put the statue in a warehouse for a while till we decide what to do with it. A lot of places said, “no, we’re not putting that back up. It doesn’t represent our values anymore.”

 Other places have left their pedestals just blank and empty, you know, which forces a conversation about what used to be there and what isn’t there now, and maybe what should be there. And maybe there, like, aren’t answers to that question necessarily. But it forces people at the very least to reflect on it.

Alana: That clearly wasn’t happening here – there just wasn’t going to be time to discuss what this particular statue says about Puerto Ricanness, or Puerto Rico.

Adrian got there just after it had been reinstalled, and there were protestors heckling and pointing out that, yes, the statue was most definitely crooked. 

Crowd: ¿Como está la estatua? ¿Cómo está la estatua? ¿Como está la estatua? Eso está virao! 

Alana: And spoke with the director of public works for San Juan, Raul Garcia.

Raul Garcia: Raul Garcia, director de operaciones y ornato del municipio de San Juan. 

Adrian:  I asked him, is that, did you put it up the way it was before? Like, ’cause it looks, people are saying it looks a little crooked.

Adrian in tape:  Está en el el lugar exacto en la posición exacta, porque muchas de los que estaban protestando ahora mismo les parece que como que quedó un poco chueco, algo así.

Adrian: Virao is the word that Puerto Ricans use, chueco is the word that we Mexicans use.

Raul Garcia: Está en el lugar exacto y en la posición exacta que le corresponde. 

Adrian: He said we put it back up exactly the way that it should be.

Raul Garcia: Le falta un poco el pedestal, pero ciertamente es un asunto ya de construcción que estaremos trabajando más adelante. 

Alana: He says the pedestal is missing but that they’d be fixing it soon.

Adrian:  I was curious to know whether he’d had the conversation with anybody about whether that was the right decision to make, given what was happening in other places, where these sorts of statues had been toppled. 

Adrian in tape: Aquí decidió no hacer eso, porque?

Raul Garcia: Aquí hay una estatua que está desde el siglo XIX colocada y sencillamente tomamos la determinación de colocarla en el lugar que le corresponde.

Adrian: This is a statue that has been here since the 19th century, of course we were gonna put it back up.

Alana: It’s not a political situation, it’s just simply that the administration decided to put it back up. 

Adrian in tape: Tampoco hubo conversación sobre si se debería revaluar la estatua. No, esa conversación tampoco. 

Adrian: Did you talk about this?

Raul Garcia: Es esa conversación, no la tuvimos sencillamente. 

Adrian: He said, he said no. Like, you know, without hesitation, like, of course not. 

Alana: We asked the municipal government for an interview and for comment, and they did not respond. 

The King did make a visit to the church next to the statue during his visit, but he didn’t walk past it. It seems unlikely that he saw it at all, given how far away his driver parked. 

We’ll never know if the King of Spain noticed the tiny, crooked colonizer. But frankly, I don’t think most people care if he saw it or not.

Four years later, Ponce de Leon is still slanted. The city never did fix the pedestal, so the effect is that the statue is leaning to the left and is also lower to the ground. Knocked down a peg, literally. It’s telling a different story than it used to. 

I’ve heard a lot of fantasies about what could happen next. What if Ponce de Leon keeps leaning and just crashes to the ground again? And then what? If the bronze from the cannons that the statue is made out of is so important to a story about Puerto Rican identity, what if it were melted down and forged into a new monument? Who could we replace him with? What story would that tell?

Or… what if the pedestal were left empty, to invite us to reflect on who actually represents us? What would we learn about Puerto Ricanness if we really had that conversation, about who has championed Puerto Rico, and who our heroes are? 

So… we’re going to do just that.

Alana: From Futuro Studios, I’m Alana Casanova-Burgess, and this is La Brega. In this season: Puerto Rican champions. 

Danny Mejia: Todo el mundo empezó a gritar, puerto rico puerto rico puerto rico 

Eduardo Pérez: Todo para. You don’t get that anywhere else, that’s awesome. 

Iris Morales:  people would often say, are the young Lords coming? And I would say, the Young Lords are here. (laughter) That would be me.

Damaris:  Nosotros hemos hecho el sacrificio máximo que hemos podido

Luis Sanz:  Imagine that your cuatro is bleeding. For me, the cuatro is everything.

Alberto Mercado: Y yo tenía en mis manos la bandera de Puerto Rico, porque a mi me la entregaron en mis manos. 

Belinda Torres-Mary: America has told her, who do you think you are coming to this country? You don’t belong here. And she’s like no, who do YOU think YOU ARE, to treat me that way? 

Alana: On the next episode of La Brega, we honor a campeón we all love to hear: el cuatro.

This episode was reported and written by me, Alana Casanova-Burgess. It was produced by Ezequiel Rodriguez Andino, and edited by Maria Garcia and Laura Pérez. Additional editorial support from our senior producer, Nicole Rothwell. 

Original art for this episode is by Tania González. Special thanks this week to Mark Pagán, Yarimar Bonilla, Adrian Florido, Tito Roman, Olga Casanova-Burgess, Elliot Burgess, and Alex Owen.

The La Brega team includes Nicole Rothwell, Ezequiel Rodriguez Andino, Laura Pérez, Liliana Ruiz, Roxana Aguirre, Maria Garcia, and Marlon Bishop. 

Fact checking this season is by Laura Moscoso and Tatiana Díaz Ramos. 

Sound design by Jacob Rosati. Mixing by Stephanie Lebow, Julia Caruso, and JJ Querubin. Scoring and musical curation by Jacob Rosati and Stephanie Lebow. Our theme song is by IFÉ. Original music is by Balún.

Our executive producers are Marlon Bishop and Maria Garcia and me, Alana Casanova-Burgess. 

Legal review by Neil Rosini and Pro-Journ. 

Futuro Media was founded by Maria Hinojosa. La Brega is a production of Futuro Studios. This season of La Brega was made possible by the Mellon Foundation.

Check out our website, labregapodcast.org,  for transcripts and more information about this episode. And if you want access to the entire season right now, ad-free, sign up to support us as a Futuro Plus member, at futuromediagroup.org/joinplus 

Talk to you soon, bai.