Sublime

Coincidentally, The War of the Worlds was published in 1898, the same year that the United States invaded Puerto Rico.11

targeting Black voters.20

By the end of the decade, Masa had developed a reputation for audacious bets.

Under the appointed mainland officials served elected Puerto Rican ones, less powerful but much cannier about local affairs. Chief among these was Luis Muñoz Marín, the leader of the island’s dominant party, who towered over the political scene from the 1940s through the 1960s. John Gunther deemed him “the most important living Puerto Rican.”

In the words of locally born Héctor Tobar, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author, Los Angeles seems to appear to the twenty-first century what New York City had been to its forerunner, “the crucible where a new national culture is being molded, where its permutations and contradictions can be seen most clearly.”

He recited “Puerto Rico, Puerto Pobre,” a poem by Pablo Neruda.

He’d once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way.

grabbed me

He’d go and find the most underserved school in the area—the kind of school that made seven-year-olds line up in the cold at 7:15 a.m. for a security check that took almost an hour to pass through, making them late to class, only to then expel them for tardiness. The kind of school that turned a blind eye to school security officers who maced kids