We headed south from Ponce's central square—not helpful. Dullness, and then burbs. Might as well be in the crummier parts of northern California, except for the emancipation monument, the plaque commemorating the Ponce Massacre of 1937, and the Masonic temple.
Heading east was worse. Dullness, then run-down burbs. (Albeit clean! This city is incredibly clean. Have I mentioned how clean it is?) A convenience store attached to a gas station—dimly visible in the left of the below photograph—was manned by bored female teenagers who doled out gum and Gatorade from behind thick metal bars. The good thing was that the charming old façades hadn’t all been bulldozed, giving some parts of the near east side of downtown a friendly postapocalyptic charm.
But we also headed northeast in search of the Cross of El Vigía, a dramatic giant cross on a hill overlooking the city. And so we wound up in the neighborhood of El Vigía. And there we found a place that made the entire trip worthwhile.
El Vigía isn't bad, as slums go. The houses are a hair short of actually falling down and have both electricity and indoor plumbing. Kids rollerblade while housewives watch the streets. They also brazenly spray paint their names on dumpsters, but who cares about dumpsters? The ever-watching housewives do not appear to care about the dumpsters, and private property is not tagged. The stray cats are scrawny and the dogs don’t bite, and in what other urban slum in America are you going to run into two kids riding a horse? Plus, the cops lounge around outside a dinky pool halls and schmooze with the locals.
It’s lively enough that you can kinda sorta forget the rattletrap construction or the abandoned buildings or the lack of anything remotely resembling a proper grocery store. Now, I don’t want to exaggerate its liveliness—El Vigía is not East L.A.—but it lacks the depressing heat-death-feeling of, say, Bridgeport, Connecticut.
In fact, it’s a lot like Belmont, Trinidad, where Amma grew up, only with far more street life and a bit more graffiti. Plus a WIC office. And here I’m invisible, while Amma is the American tourist who gets glances. Which may of course also be related to the fact that she’s beautiful.
I can’t help it, I’m an American. Some cultures, men would fight those who dare scope their woman. Others, they’d pretend nothing was happening. Mine, though, well, we smirk right back. Once, when I was in Mexico, I couldn't help noticing a scantily-clad passing woman at a café in the Condesa neighborhood. My acquaintance sitting across from me, an Anglo dude from West Texas, elbowed me and said, with a big proud shit-eating grin on his face, "That’s my wife!"
Americans. We’re like that.
Thankfully, Puerto Ricans are like that too.
Ironically, when we spotted the cops outside that run-down pool hall, I got nervous and started to cross over to the other side of the street. Amma grabbed my arm and said, "Pumpkin, we’re not in Mexico. This is the United States. Relax."
This tiny island with 1.3 percent of the American population manages to produce 10 percent of federal corruption convictions, but the end result of all that vigilance is that it enjoys an American-style police force. Frex, officers offered to help guide us when they spotted us sitting at the Bayamón metro station, something unlikely to happen in Mexico. Police professionalism explains the adherence to parking regulations—better than South Boston, I’ll tell you that—and the good driving.
On the other hand, with 18,000 state police, 5,000 municipal cops, and 56,000 (!!!) private security guards, I’m not sure why Puerto Rico still has a homicide rate of 21 per 100,000. Even Louisiana, where the NOPD was involved in a murder-for-hire scandal and pays less than the Puerto Rican State Police, only hits 13 per 100,000.
We can add a serious mystery to Puerto Rico’s ugly architecture, incongruously-placed slum, and metric gasoline sales: high crime.
Any thoughts as to why that is? I'm quite puzzled myself.
Yes. Three and a half billion dollars of cocaine go through here every year. A lot of it through Ponce, actually.
Money leads to crime and corruption. It doesn't actually affect actual life here, as far as I can tell after three years residence.
Posted by: Michael | September 03, 2007 at 08:26 AM