Cristina del Mar Quiles

When she became a Senator for the State of Illinois in 2020, the educator raised in the Puerto Rican neighborhoods of Chicago presented the legislation that her community designed as a protection measure against gentrification, captivating the interest of her colleagues and achieving their approval.

After running and winning 26th Ward for the Democrats in Chicago, she is still skeptical of that party and has her feet firmly anchored in her community.

She became her neighborhood’s Alderwoman thanks to organized groups of workers, immigrants, and the most vulnerable residents in her area, and by positioning herself against the power of developers. Her affordable housing proposals go hand in hand with violence prevention and public health initiatives.

Jessie Fuentes and Cristina Pacione Zayas are two Puerto Rican politicians in Chicago who have experienced government abandonment in various stages of their lives, but who have also witnessed the power of community organizing that achieved anti-gentrification legislation.

The government of Puerto Rico and the Department of Health suffered a judicial defeat in their attempt to stop the lawsuit for damages filed by Jaideliz Moreno Ventura’s family after the 13-year-old teenager’s death on the island municipality of Vieques, due to lack of medical services.

Since Hurricane Fiona struck September 18, the government of Puerto Rico has held more than a dozen press conferences, but in none has it provided information that helps victims and survivors of gender-based violence get specialized aid they need during the emergency, when they are most vulnerable. 

Many of the mothers of femicide victims ignore their own trauma and loss to take care of the grandchildren who were orphaned by sexist violence.

In 1989, when Puerto Rico’s feminist movement fought a battle inside the halls of the Capitol to get Act 54 passed, one of the concessions it had to make was to include in the legislation the possibility that the aggressors would avoid jail time if they participated in a reeducation, or diversion program, to reeducate […]

A year and four months after the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced a $39.5 million obligation to rebuild the Susana Centeno Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Vieques, which Hurricane María destroyed in 2017, the Infrastructure Financing Authority (AFI), the agency to which the Municipality delegated the task of managing the project earlier this year, […]

Rafael Negrón Santos did not lose his home or his job after Hurricane María, but the storm was the end of his relationship with his partner. The struggle to survive in the days and weeks that followed, coupled with the despair caused by life without electricity, the frustration at the number of deaths that the […]

“But you don’t look that sick. Did you walk here, or did someone drive you?” “Your cough isn’t a dry cough, like the virus. It’s a wet cough, like a cold.” On Mar. 19, Carlos Del Valle, a 65 year-old man claimed that a doctor at the Río Piedras Medical Center refused to run the […]

The Government of Puerto Rico’s procurement process for materials and equipment to deal with the coronavirus emergency has been plagued with mistakes, delays, inefficiency, questionable purchases and a lack of details. The Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI, in Spanish) interviewed more than three sources who identified Adil Rosa Rivera as responsible for buying supplies and […]

It took Yahaira Santiago two years to fix the roof that Hurricane María ripped off her home at the La Playa de Ponce sector in the South coast. She had returned home only a few weeks before, when the Jan. 7 earthquake opened the earth in her backyard and left the structure unlivable once again. […]

The death of a teenager in Vieques whose relatives recounted how she died due to lack of medical services there, unleashed the rage of the residents of Isla Nena a week ago. The Viequenses brought cement blocks to the public square, as a protest art installation of sorts, demanding the construction of a proper hospital […]

An elderly woman who dies from complications from diabetes that has been poorly treated, a young athlete who got hurt and cannot be evaluated with x-rays, a community leader with cancer who has to travel on a dirty cot in the back of a plane because, in Vieques, they cannot tend to complications due to […]

When the wind slowed down on September 20, 2017, Puerto Ricans went outside their homes, walked through their neighborhoods, made their way through the rubble and began to account for their losses. Estimates in dollars and cents of what Hurricane María destroyed would take a while. A generalized sense of uncertainty and doom was everywhere. […]