Olga Dies Dreaming

Three key pieces of historical context are necessary for understanding the role that Puerto Rico plays in Olga Dies Dreaming. The first is this commonwealth’s relationship with the United States. The US gained control of Puerto Rico as spoils of the Spanish-American War of 1898. Today, Puerto Ricans are US citizens and have a nonvoting representative in Congress, but they cannot vote in US elections. At the same time, the island’s economy is tied up with that of the US: In the 1970s, the US passed taxed incentives spurring the rise of manufacturing on the island, but when this tax break was repealed in the 1990s and early 2000s, Puerto Rico was plunged into a recession that was deeply compounded by the global financial crisis of 2008. Thus, Puerto Rico is inherently tied to the US as a commonwealth, but its citizens are not granted the same rights as those born in a US state. The incomplete and fluctuating autonomy of Puerto Rico means many Americans don’t even have a good sense of how the island is connected to the US—so much so that former President Donald Trump often referred to Puerto Rico as another country, one whose residents are not US citizens.

The second key context is the revolutionary movement in Puerto Rico. In the novel, Johnny and Blanca Acevedo were revolutionaries involved with the Young Lords, an organization established in 1968 and modeled on the Black Panther Party. The Young Lords conducted grass-roots advocacy for Hispanic people’s access to healthcare, education, housing, and employment; as is apparent in Blanca’s work, the Young Lords were also a nationalist movement that sought independence for the island. When this group lost energy in the late 1970s, Olga’s mother joined up with the much more militant Los Macheteros, a group that used violence to achieve their ends, leading protests, robbing banks, and staging other attempts to undermine US control of Puerto Rico.

The third historical context is the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA)—a real act passed by Congress in 2016, just before the plot of the novel takes place. As a measure to restructure Puerto Rican debt accrued during the financial crisis, the act put in place a seven-member control board. However, this board has been criticized for prioritizing US business interests and punishing Puerto Ricans. In the novel, Blanca attempts to convince Prieto to vote against PROMESA, but he is blackmailed into blocking the legislation and then into blocking its oversight committee hearing.