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the 1970s, the US passed taxed incentives spurring the rise of manufacturing on the island, but when this tax break was repealed in the 1990s and early 2000s, Puerto Rico was plunged into a recession that was deeply compounded by the global financial crisis of 2008.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.