Tara Rodríguez Besosa looked tired. The founder of Puerto Rico’s El Departamento de la Comida, a sustainability-minded San Juan cafe qua food hub, she had been traveling for months — back and forth from the island to California, Brazil, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, New York City, Denver, Philadelphia, and, in mid-June, Detroit, where she was on the coordinating team for food-themed programming at the Allied Media Conference (AMC), an annual convergence of radical artists and activists. When the conference was over, she would go for a week to another conference in St. Louis before heading home again. Moderating a panel on “Recipes of Resilience” — an exploration of how cooking can facilitate recovery from individual and collective trauma — she remarked that once she got home, she planned to retreat to her newly purchased land in the mountains outside of Caguas. She needed, she said, to figure out how to “survive and thrive out of the spotlight.” Five days later, she was profiled in Vogue.
One of the most visible faces of Puerto Rico’s sustainable agriculture movement, Rodríguez Besosa has been inciting a food revolution on the island for almost a decade. In 2010, she started Departamento as a community-supported agriculture program — one of the first in Puerto Rico — that aggregated produce from farms across the island and sold it to approximately 150 families and restaurants in San Juan. That evolved, in 2012, into a vegetarian cafe and retail space, housed in a converted garage in Santurce, San Juan’s gentrifying arts neighborhood. It moved into a more formal space near the beach in tourist-friendly Puntas las Marias in 2016.
At the warehouse, Rodríguez Besosa says, the San Juan restaurant scene saw El Departamento as a fringe endeavor — “just hippies in the park, queer people making food out of a garage.” The move was intended to prove that a local, sustainable food system was possible in Puerto Rico. For decades, small family farming had been in the doldrums, as the island converted to monocrops of sugarcane, coffee, corn, and bananas. Save for indigenous root crops like taro and malanga, fresh vegetables were often scarce; most restaurant kitchens got their tomatoes from Costco. But El Departamento thrived by the beach, garnering even more attention from mainland media, and partnering with a nearby community garden to offer classes and workshops.
All of that came to an end on September 20, 2017, when Hurricane Maria hit. The hurricane destroyed the island’s fragile electrical grid and knocked out telecommunications, leaving 3.5 million people without power, internet access, or phone service for months. The physical devastation wrought by the storm was all-encompassing. Roofs flew off; flying debris crashed into buildings and choked the roads.
In San Juan, streets far inland from the ocean were flooded with several feet of water, as was El Departamento. In the weeks following Maria, the shuttered restaurant was robbed multiple times. Rodríguez Besosa and her partners quickly decided that El Departamento de la Comida would not reopen. “It was just disaster mode. So we decided to put it on pause.” One day when chef Vero Quiles went in to check on the state of things, she found a man sleeping in the office.
Rodríguez Besosa wasn’t there when Maria made landfall. She was in New York City, in a backyard in Bushwick, celebrating what she and a clutch of other queer and Latinx food activists hoped would be the start of a new collaboration between allies in Puerto Rico and the mainland. But as the storm’s impact became clear, what was supposed to be a celebration turned into a night of shared fear and trauma. It turned out that the evening was the start of something new — just not quite in the way they had planned.
Since Maria, brigades have been an organizing force across Puerto Rico. In the storm’s immediate aftermath, squads of friends and neighbors mobilized across the island to clear the debris that choked the roads and deliver critical aid to devastated communities. They chainsawed downed trees, cooked meals, entertained kids, and supplied water filters and solar lanterns to towns cut off from the grid — ordinary people acting as first responders when there was no outside help on the horizon.
But in an odd way, that backyard potluck spawned its own loose-knit brigade — a sprawling network of collaborators in Puerto Rico, from the Puerto Rican diaspora, and from the outside world. They’re united by a holistic vision that seeks not just to reconstruct Puerto Rico’s farms, but to effect a wholesale reinvention of its food system and the relationship Puerto Ricans have to it, to each other, and to the outside world.
One of the first things Rodríguez Besosa did while trapped in New York was team up with nonprofit organization Americas for Conservation + the Arts and its founder, Irene Vilar, a Puerto Rican-born philanthropist now living in Boulder (and a granddaughter of Puerto Rican revolutionary Lolita Lebrón), to launch an initiative called the Fondo de Resiliencia de Puerto Rico, or the Resilience Fund. Its first lofty goal: to send brigades of volunteer workers to 200 Puerto Rican farms and food projects over the next two years.
During Maria, farms — often isolated in the mountains and vulnerable to high winds and mudslides — were particularly hard hit. In December 2017, Department of Agriculture Secretary Carlos Flores Ortega estimated that 80 percent of Puerto Rico’s agricultural crops had been destroyed by Maria, at a cost of as much as $2 billion. The first Fondo de Resiliencia brigade ended up visiting a farm in Yauco to install a new roof and rain catchment system and dig a latrine over Thanksgiving. Then, and in the many weeks that followed, small crews set out across the island to repair roofs, clear roads, install irrigation lines, build hoop houses, re-seed crops, and more. As of August, the Fondo had sent brigades to more than 50 farms.
Before Maria, Puerto Rico’s farming economy was already in tenuous shape — and had been for decades, ever since the United States government launched a multimillion-dollar program in 1947 to transform Puerto Rico’s economy from its rural, agrarian roots to an urbanized, industrial one. In the ensuing decades, thousands of farmers left the countryside for factory jobs in San Juan and other urban centers. Between 1950 and 1965, Puerto Rico lost 104,000 fishing and farming jobs and more than half a million Puerto Ricans as an unemployment crisis forced thousands to leave the island altogether. In the 21st century, outmigration has accelerated again, spurred by the debt crisis, spiking unemployment, austerity measures imposed by the PROMESA fiscal control board, and now, of course, Maria.
In April, a brigade — traveling in a colorfully painted bus dubbed the “Guagua Solidarida” — had traveled to Finca Palenque, a 24-acre hardwoods farm outside Ciales that once boasted 2,000 fruit trees and 11 different kinds of bamboo. There, Maria had destroyed the main house. Down the hill, the chicken coop collapsed and rafts of debris from neighboring properties landed helter-skelter in the trees. The volunteers demolished the damaged house down to its cement pad. Only the bathroom, penciled marks ticking off the growth of Armando Ascencio and Nina Medina’s kids on the wall, remained.
The goal, said Medina, is to rebuild the farm in trust for their kids. Someday, maybe, they’ll be able to offer workshops and host visitors, as a sort of agritourism retreat. “It would permit us to live and work on the farm, and that is the total win-win situation,” she said, noting that right now she was working part-time in Rincón, while her husband, an arborist, was on the other side of the island working in the El Junque rainforest. But that was all at least a year away. Right now, they needed a place to live.
In early May, a second brigade arrived, organized by the North Philadelphia collective Philly Urban Creators and that same city’s community arts initiative Wholistic.Art, and including some of the folks who’d made up the very first Fondo brigade at Thanksgiving. They were there to rehab a smaller house down the hill, a step up from the shipping container that was at that moment the only shelter (and in which Ascencio had ridden out the storm). The day before that group arrived at Finca Palenque, they’d installed two roofs at a farm and apiary on the west side of the island, near Aguada.
“When you get into, like, even looking at relief organizations,” says Charlyn Griffith, founder of Wholistic.art, “it’s often white volunteers. And the reality is that there is value in connecting communities of color across the water, across geography, across culture, across language, and saying we’re going to figure out how to bridge it because ours is a shared experience.” Philly Urban Creators’ Jeannine Kayembe, Griffith’s partner in life and business, stressed how in this case, people of color were showing up for other POC in need.
As they spoke, sitting on a log in a clearing, the pair’s ears bristled with tiny orange pins: They were getting treatments from a volunteer acupuncturist. Fostering wellness and solidarity, explains Rodríguez Besosa, is just as important to the brigades as the material work of rebuilding structures and reseeding agricultural land.
“A lot of our farmers — a lot of people in general — have been through a very devastating situation,” says Rodríguez Besosa. “Not only economically devastating, but emotionally and physically devastating. So that’s something we think is important, to give support to farmers and to people that work within resilient food economies in Puerto Rico.”
Naomi Klein has written of the future of Puerto Rico as a battle between those who seek collective sovereignty over the island’s resources and the bankers and cryptocurrency nuts keen to remake it as a playground for the elite. Both are utopian projects, and both come down to a simple question: Who is Puerto Rico for? Is it for Puerto Ricans, or is it for outsiders? And after a collective trauma like Hurricane Maria, who has a right to decide? Can political and economic sovereignty include space for outsiders? In the case of the Fondo, yes: because Rodríguez Besosa isn’t doing this alone.
Ora Wise, a New York-based chef and activist who’d also been at that Bushwick potluck, and whose house had been partially turned into a seed-collection center after the hurricane, traveled to Puerto Rico in January, staying there for three weeks. Born in Jerusalem and mostly raised in the Midwest, Wise is a veteran of solidarity movements, and met Rodríguez Besosa at the Allied Media Conference back in June of 2017, where she’s the culinary director. Before becoming a chef she had worked with refugee groups in the West Bank, where, as in Puerto Rico, she points out, a formerly agrarian society has been been displaced, and where access to food is controlled by an outside force. In the West Bank, that force is Israel; in Puerto Rico, it’s the U.S. government, which, through the Jones Act, places high tariffs on the import of goods, and enables Costco and Walmart to dominate the market. Before September 2017, 85 percent of Puerto Rico’s food was imported, including such staples of Latin American cooking as rice and beans.
“It impacts the culture, the health, and the economy of the colonized people,” she says. “For me it was about figuring out ways to see food sovereignty as central to decolonial movements globally.”
In recent years, farmers, students at the University of Puerto Rico, and advocates such as Rodríguez Besosa and grassroots agroecological groups like Organización Boricuá have been leading a movement to increase family farming and plant the seeds of Puerto Rican food sovereignty. Though the storm was a setback, the certainty of this mission has only gained in strength. Now, more than ever, they see a sustainable food system as key to Puerto Rico’s economic and political self-determination.
“It is a very, very horizontal exchange,” Wise says of equitable, community-driven food production. “I am learning so much about all kinds of ingredients and the agricultural system here [as well as] the culture of resistance and history.”
In May, Wise, Rodríguez Besosa, and Vero Quiles met up on the patio of a boutique vegetarian bed and breakfast called the Dreamcatcher Hotel to start making a long-planned pop-up dinner a reality. Dubbed “Nuestra Mesa,” the four-course vegan meal was billed as the return of Departamento de la Comida — the first in a hoped-for monthly series and the kickoff of a new phase of the Fondo de Resiliencia’s work. (The next one is scheduled for August 31.)
Dreamcatcher owner Sylvia de Marco has been a Departamento de la Comida client since she opened the inn, in the Ocean Park neighborhood, in 2012. In the early days, she’d set out baskets of produce from the CSA share for guests to cook with in the communal kitchen, and she says she often sent guests to El Departamento — fresh produce and vegetarian food being elusive in San Juan. Maria left the inn without electricity until December 1, though it was up and running two weeks after the storm on generator power. But since January, she says, business has boomed, and many of her guests are looking for ways to help.
“There has been immense interest from people that are coming here, asking what can they bring, where can they drop it off,” she says. “But it’s very unorganized in general.” She turned to Rodríguez Besosa for help, “Looking for basically a little bit of orientation on how to answer all of these requests of people that were looking to do volunteer work,” she says.
De Marco estimates that since December, maybe 20 Dreamcatcher guests have worked on Fondo de Resiliencia brigades; when Wise came down in January she cooked for a brigade for a week, and De Marco opened up the Dreamcatcher to her as a prep kitchen. Now, on the second Friday in May, the Dreamcatcher was turning its kitchen over to her again.
For three days Wise and Quiles prepped and strategized. They sourced produce — purslane and parsley, tomatoes and eggplant, radishes and luminous red okra — from six local farms, including Josco Bravo (profiled by Eater in December) and Siembra Tres Vidas, run by Daniella Rodríguez Besosa, Tara’s sister, in the hills outside Aibonito. They roasted calabaza for soup and made gnocchi from malanga and chia. Quiles took charge of the dessert, a sesame sorbet with cacao. Wise handled the sauces, whisking together an explosively herbal blend of basil, mint, and cilantro that would be drizzled atop grilled watermelon salad. Along with Rodríguez Besosa, they wrestled with the messaging.
“It’s really important for us to keep in mind that what we’re doing here is being done in other places around the world and a lot of our network is not only people local to Puerto Rico,” Rodríguez Besosa says. “Like, this connection?” — she gestures to Wise — “Ora’s not Puerto Rican.” The idea, she continues, is to keep expanding the net, bringing more and more people into the web of their work.
“We have our relationships with agroecological growers, local farmers, all these things,” points out Wise, “but it’s a very difficult, complicated process that we go through to build that knowledge and those relationships. So this is an opportunity to share that, to bring someone in. So then they get to know those farms, they know where your calabasa comes from, they know where the eggs come from.”
“It’s skill sharing,” says Rodríguez Besosa.
“It’s relationship sharing,” says Wise.
On the night of the dinner, 40 or so people gathered at twilight in the courtyard of the Dreamcatcher. It had rained earlier, but by 7:30 the skies had cleared; candles were lit and the coqui were chirping, ecstatic in the humid dusk. Some of the assembled were friends and family; others were Dreamcatcher guests — though not many, as the dinner sold out almost as soon as it was announced. A few were local activists invited by the Fondo. The acupuncturist and massage therapist who would the next day travel to Finca Palenque were there, as was a former video game designer who moved to Puerto Rico last August and now works on the Fondo’s seed distribution project.
As Wise and Quiles plated courses in the kitchen, with Rodríguez Besosa serving as expediter, de Marco poured the wine and the guests caught up with each other. But underneath the gentle gossip and praise for the food lay a steely clarity of purpose. Puerto Rico is old news, one guest remarked, digging into the gnocchi with weary humor. The media came, they reported, and when the story got boring, they moved on.
But that’s nothing new, pointed out another. The United States has never cared about Puerto Rico; the momentary spotlight post-Maria was the anomaly.
Otto Flores, a Patagonia brand ambassador who also works with the nonprofit Waves for Water, installing rainwater systems on farms working with the Fondo, chimed in with a common refrain. Maria, he said, didn’t cause Puerto Rico’s problems, it merely stripped back the veil that had kept them hidden. Now, the urgency of the task at hand is impossible to deny — by Puerto Ricans and by the outside world.
“It’s a great opportunity for us to start from zero and do it right,” he said. “I think that the people who have stayed will benefit from that, and the people who are here to do the right thing are going to benefit from that, and not just monetarily… Tara has done a great job getting these volunteers here to work from abroad and giving them a purpose. There’s a lot of people that come to help, and they don’t have a clue what they want to do when they get here.”
After the chayote gratin was passed — splashed with a sauce of turmeric, roasted garlic, and almonds and dressed with fried fresh herbs and that luminescent okra — Rodríguez Besosa and Wise emerged on the patio.
“When I’ve come to Puerto Rico in the past,” said Wise, “I reached out to a Boricua friend of mine in the States and said, ‘How can I come here in a way that’s not perpetuating colonialism? Not just coming and enjoying this place, and taking, and not learning about the people and the land in a deeper way, and giving back?” This, she hoped, was a step in the right direction. “You’ve got to feed yourself to free yourself.”
“At the end,” said Rodríguez Besosa, “the only important thing about tonight is that you come out understanding a little bit more about the place that you live or the place that you’re visiting, and that we actually start practicing more solidarity in Puerto Rico, which is something that we really need to heal.” The dinner, she would later elaborate, was also healing her: “I really missed feeding people.”
But that night, as they spoke, the rain returned with renewed strength and the diners under the trees scrambled to grab their glasses and huddle together under the roof of the outdoor kitchen. Singer Andrea Cruz was about to play. The 2018 hurricane season would start in 21 days, and the prospect of another storm — even a minor one — was impossible to ignore. Through the food and the wine and the music and the rain, everything was little ragged, but around the table, all were keen to see what the next course would bring.
Martha Bayne is a writer and editor in Chicago. Adnelly Marichal is an independent photographer and filmmaker based in Puerto Rico and New York.
Fact-checked by Pearly Huang
Editor: Erin DeJesus