San Juan Roots

San Juan Roots You already carry this. We just bring it back to you. San Juan Roots — the history, culture, and soul

There is a version of every dish we make that is technically correct, and there is the version that tastes right. They a...
08/20/2026

There is a version of every dish we make that is technically correct, and there is the version that tastes right. They are almost never the same plate.

The correct one follows the recipe. The right one has something in it that never got written down anywhere, because whoever makes it learned by standing next to somebody in a kitchen in Bayamon or Cayey or the Bronx, watching, not measuring. Nobody in that kitchen ever said a quarter teaspoon. They said until it smells right.

That is why you can order the same dish at a very good restaurant, eat all of it, and still feel like something was quietly removed.

Most of us are carrying one plate like that. You can cook it yourself and it comes out fine, and fine is not the word you are after. 🍽️



So many of our recipes were never written down at all, which is how families lose a dish in a single generation the moment the person who made it passes. Which one is yours?

Quick correction for anyone who thinks the drum runs bomba. It does not. The dancer does.In the batey the dancer steps o...
08/20/2026

Quick correction for anyone who thinks the drum runs bomba. It does not. The dancer does.

In the batey the dancer steps out and throws piquetes at the primo. Sharp little bursts. A snap of the skirt, a stomp, a sudden turn. The primo has to catch every single one of them in real time on the drum, not the other way around. The whole art form is built on a musician chasing a dancer, and everybody in the circle knows the second he misses one.

More than three hundred years old, built by enslaved Africans on the sugar coasts of this island, and it is still the only circle where you can put a grown man on notice just by moving. 🥁

Follow the page for more of this. Have you ever stepped into the batey yourself?

July 23, 1967. For the first time in our history, we were asked directly.Three choices on the ballot: commonwealth, stat...
08/19/2026

July 23, 1967. For the first time in our history, we were asked directly.

Three choices on the ballot: commonwealth, statehood, independence. Turnout was 66 percent. 707,293 votes cast. Commonwealth took 60.4 percent, statehood 39, independence six tenths of one percent.

Those numbers carry an asterisk that matters. The main pro statehood party boycotted the vote, and so did the independence parties, which is exactly why that last figure looks the way it does. But the boycott split the statehood movement wide open. The people who refused to sit it out walked away from the old party and founded the New Progressive Party, and within a few years they had the governorship.

So the plebiscite designed to settle the question did not settle anything. It built the party that has been fighting over it ever since, and we have been going back to the ballot box on this every decade or so for the fifty nine years since. 🗳️



No status plebiscite binds Congress to do anything at all, which is a large part of why we keep voting and the answer keeps not arriving. Have you ever cast a ballot in one?

September 20, 2017. Maria took the power, the cell towers, the phone lines and the internet in a single night. One signa...
08/19/2026

September 20, 2017. Maria took the power, the cell towers, the phone lines and the internet in a single night. One signal stayed up.

WAPA Radio, 680 AM, ran on a diesel generator and never went off the air while the storm passed over us. For days afterward it was the only station broadcasting on the island. The anchors slept about three hours a night. Luis Penchi worked more than twenty five hours straight at the height of it.

What the programming turned into does not really have a name in radio. People walked to the station, or got word in somehow, and the announcers read it out on the air. This person is alive in Utuado. This family needs insulin in Yabucoa. Tell my mother in Orlando that we are okay.

An AM signal, the oldest technology on the island, did the one thing that every modern system failed to do that week. It let us find each other. 📻



For weeks afterward the station cut its day back to about seventeen and a half hours, from 4:45 in the morning until 9 at night, to stretch the generator fuel. Where were you when Maria came through?

08/19/2026

There is a place five thousand miles from here where people still call themselves Boricua, and most of us have never been told about it.

August 1899. San Ciriaco crossed this island and left thousands of us with no work and no roof. Hawaii needed cane workers and the recruiters came looking. In November 1900 the first group sailed out of San Juan. Ship to New Orleans, train all the way across the continent, then a boat to Honolulu. Close to six thousand of us made that trip inside two years, and almost none of them ever came back.

They landed in plantation camps beside Japanese, Filipino and Portuguese workers. They had brought the cuatro and the guiro with them, and they played our mountain music in the cane. The Japanese workers heard that scraping gourd and started calling it kachi kachi, scratch scratch, and the name stuck for a hundred years. Their great grandchildren are Hawaiian now, born and raised, and they still call themselves Borinki. 🌺

They sent us to the far side of the world. We stayed ourselves anyway.

Still here. Still us.

Joselino Oppenheimer was born in Ponce in 1884, a descendant of enslaved Africans, and he spent his days walking behind ...
08/19/2026

Joselino Oppenheimer was born in Ponce in 1884, a descendant of enslaved Africans, and he spent his days walking behind oxen. He was a plowman on the sugar plantations. Everyone called him Bumbun.

At night he went home to La Joya del Castillo, a poor barrio in the city, and tried out new songs on the pandereta in doorways and front rooms while the neighbors crowded in. He wrote about the men he worked beside. He built rhythms that moved the way hooves and plows move, because that was the sound in his body all day. He led the first plena band anyone can point to. Then he set the plow down for good and became the first man on this island to make his living as a plenero.

He died in 1929, at forty five. Plena has outlasted him by nearly a century and it still does exactly what he built it to do, which is carry the news of ordinary people in a form nobody can confiscate. 🥁



Plena earned the nickname el periodico cantado, the sung newspaper, because the lyrics reported what had just happened in the barrio that week. Which plena do you know by heart?

Antofagasta, Chile, 1959. The world basketball championship.Juan Vicens, the guard out of Ponce everybody called Pachin,...
08/19/2026

Antofagasta, Chile, 1959. The world basketball championship.

Juan Vicens, the guard out of Ponce everybody called Pachin, took us to a bronze medal at that tournament and made the All Star team. Then the voting came in and they named him the best basketball player in the world. Not the best in the Caribbean. Not the best on a good night. In the world, in 1959, from an island of two and a half million people.

He played college ball at Kansas State, then came home and gave the rest of it to us. Four Central American and Caribbean Games, two world championships, two Olympics, and most of his damage done in a Leones de Ponce uniform in front of people who had known his name before anyone else did.

The coliseum in Ponce carries his name now. He passed in 2007. There are still men in that city who will tell you they watched him play and then go quiet for a second. 🏀



He was voted the world's best while playing against national teams from countries many times our size, which is part of why the honor has never been repeated by anyone from here. Who is the athlete your family always brings up?

Somebody will always try to sell you the fancy version. Tiny cup, big price, a mint leaf placed with tweezers, and a nam...
08/19/2026

Somebody will always try to sell you the fancy version. Tiny cup, big price, a mint leaf placed with tweezers, and a name nobody in your family has ever said out loud.

Meanwhile the real thing lives in a chest freezer three houses down. Coco, parcha, tamarindo, maiz if she is feeling ambitious. A dollar, maybe two now. No stick, no menu, no receipt. You squeeze the bottom of the cup and work your way up like everybody else.

Here is the part people love. The story goes that limber got its name from Charles Lindbergh, who landed here in February 1928 and was handed a cup of frozen juice, and the name stuck the way our mouths said it. Whether it happened exactly like that or not, we took a pilot's last name and turned it into dessert, which may be the most Boricua thing on record. 🍧

Tag someone who knows exactly whose house to go to. Who was the limber lady in your neighborhood?

Summer of 1969, East Harlem. The Sanitation Department was skipping the neighborhood and the garbage was stacking up on ...
08/19/2026

Summer of 1969, East Harlem. The Sanitation Department was skipping the neighborhood and the garbage was stacking up on the sidewalks in July heat.

The Young Lords went down to the department and asked for brooms. They were refused. So they swept the streets themselves, week after week, and nobody downtown noticed a thing. Then on July 27 they stopped sweeping and started stacking. They dragged the uncollected garbage into the middle of Third Avenue at 111th Street until traffic could not move. By August 17 they were setting it alight in the intersections.

They named it the Garbage Offensive on purpose, after the Tet Offensive. The point was never the trash. The point was that a city quietly decides which neighborhoods count, and that we had noticed, and that we were done being polite about it.

By that November, sanitation was an issue in the mayoral race. 🗽



The Young Lords began in Chicago as a street organization before the New York chapter turned it toward this kind of neighborhood organizing in 1969. Did you grow up hearing about them at home?

Between 1950 and 1960, more than four hundred thousand of us left the island. On a population of roughly two and a quart...
08/19/2026

Between 1950 and 1960, more than four hundred thousand of us left the island. On a population of roughly two and a quarter million, that is about one in five people, gone in a single decade.

Operation Bootstrap moved us off the farms and into the factories, the factories could not hold everyone, and a seat on a plane to New York got cheap enough that a family could scrape it together. So one person went first. Then that person sent for the next.

Almost every one of us can name them. The aunt who found the apartment. The father who went for one season and stayed thirty years. The grandmother who wrote letters home every week for four decades and never lived on the island again.

None of them thought they were making history. They thought they were finding work. 🛫



By 1960 there were close to nine hundred thousand people of Puerto Rican birth or parentage living in the mainland United States, the large majority of them in New York. Who went first in your family?

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