When Snow Came to San Juan

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 December 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:08.7	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:14.8	I'm dreaming of a white Christmas. The way things are going on this planet, I've got to wonder if one day people will have to take their kids to Barrow, Alaska, or Greenland, in order to see a white Christmas, somewhere north of the Arctic Circle.
0:35.0	But since the beginning, Christians all over the world have managed to
0:38.3	celebrate the holiday without sleigh bells and without snowmen. Alana Casanova Burgess is the host of
0:45.3	La Brega, and she brings us a story about a very unusual holiday occurrence. Not quite a miracle,
0:51.5	but close. For several years in the early 1950s,
0:55.9	Puerto Rico received snow right around Christmas.
0:59.8	Alana spoke to people who saw it with their own eyes.
1:04.3	Many years later, as he sat for an interview,
1:07.5	Ignacio Rivera was to remember that distant morning
1:10.0	when his father took him to discover snow in San Juan.
1:15.3	I thought that it was almost impossible for me to have seen snow, but at that time it was something that came from the moon, something strange, you know, like going to Mars,
1:28.5	something out of the imagination.
1:31.0	It had been announced in all the newspapers.
1:34.5	Snow was coming.
1:36.7	It was the early 1950s.
1:39.0	Ignacio was around eight years old, living with his parents in Barrio Obrero.
1:43.9	From watching movies, I know snow was white, but I had no idea of what cold was, because
1:50.0	I never been exposed to under 70 degrees in my life.
1:54.0	You don't know how it falls, how it accumulates, how it turns into ice once it starts to melt.
2:01.6	And it came. Real fluffy snow, cold and fresh from the slopes of the Northeast,
	...

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