When Snow Came to San Juan

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 December 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For several years in the early nineteen-fifties, Puerto Rico received snow, right around Christmas. Children in San Juan rode a sled and had a giant snowball fight in the tropical weather. It wasn’t a miracle, or a meteorological outlier. The snow was a gift from San Juan’s longtime mayor, Felisa Rincón de Gautier, who had fallen in love with snow during her years in New York. It was delivered by Eastern Airlines, which milked the publicity for all it was worth. A young New Hampshire girl escorted one delivery, wearing a hat and a cable-knit sweater. The snow didn’t cost Puerto Rico anything, but it certainly came with strings attached. At a time when the independence movement was being harshly suppressed, in favor of a continued colonial relationship with the United States, the fetishization of the northern “white Christmas” reads to some as a gesture of cultural imperialism that has never quite ended. And even recently—as the island still faces routine blackouts of its electrical grid, years after Hurricane Maria—the mayor of a small town proposed building an ice-skating rink. WNYC’s Alana Casanova-Burgess reports on why the snow came, and what it meant to Puerto Ricans.

Our story was produced in collaboration with “La Brega,” from WNYC Studios and Futuro Studios.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
0:09.2	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Grebnik.
0:22.7	The way things are going on this planet, I've got to wonder if one day people will have
0:27.5	to take their kids to Barrow, Alaska or Greenland in order to see a white Christmas, somewhere
0:33.2	north of the Arctic Circle.
0:35.1	But since the beginning, Christians all over the world have managed to celebrate the
0:38.8	holiday without sleigh bells and without snowmen.
0:43.0	Alana Casanova Burgess is the host of La Brega and she brings us a story about a very unusual
0:49.1	holiday occurrence, not quite a miracle but close.
0:52.8	For several years in the early 1950s, Puerto Rico received snow right around Christmas.
0:59.7	Alana spoke to people who saw it with their own eyes.
1:04.8	Many years later, as he sat for an interview, Ignacio Diveta was to remember that distant
1:09.7	morning when his father took him to discover snow in San Juan.
1:13.2	I thought that it was almost impossible for me to have seen snow, but at that time it was
1:23.6	something that came from the moon, something strange, you know, like going to Mars, something
1:28.8	out of the imagination.
1:31.5	It had been announced in all the newspapers.
1:34.8	Snow was coming.
1:37.0	It was the early 1950s.
1:39.1	Ignacio was around eight years old, living with his parents in Barrio Obrero.
1:44.2	From watching movies, I know snow was white, but I had no idea what cold was because I
1:50.2	never been exposed to under 70 degrees in my life.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WNYC Studios and The New Yorker, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.