Jennifer Maritza McCauley on Puerto Ricans, Trump, and the Election

Writer Jennifer Maritza McCauley joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to analyze the fallout from Tony Hinchcliffe’s “floating island of garbage” comment at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. McCauley—whose mother is Puerto Rican—discusses the island’s history and her communities’ reactions. McCauley reads her mother’s self-assured response to Hinchcliffe’s racism and reflects on the country’s distinctive mix of African, Spanish, and Indigenous populations. She also discusses the rights Puerto Ricans have and are denied, given their unusual status as U.S. citizens of a territory rather than a state. She reads from the title story of her collection, When Trying to Return Home, which includes many depictions of Puerto Rican identity.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan:  You are partly Puerto Rican, and you write about that community and identity, so I’m curious where you were when you heard about Trump’s rally and Tony Hinchcliffe’s remark, how your communities reacted, etc.  I was telling Whitney that my family is Sri Lankan, and if he had said that about our island, our WhatsApp groups would have been on fire.

Jennifer Maritza McCauley: Yeah, I will say that they were pretty strong reactions, and they were pretty angry. So my mom, who was born in Guayanilla, Puerto Rico, was the one who told me about it. I had just gotten out of class, and she called me and said, “I know all the horrible things that this comedian is saying about Puerto Rico, but let me tell you, I’m a proud Puerto Rican, so I don’t care what he has to say!” So that’s what she said… Actually, can I read what she texted me?  She wrote something very lovely that I wanted to read.

She said: “Jennifer, I know my island is beautiful. I don’t care what this ignorant man thinks. I was born in a shack with a dirt road in front of it, and that was beautiful. There is warmth in my culture, and that’s beautiful. There are men playing dominoes in my culture, and that’s beautiful. I remember the mountains as a child, and those were gorgeous. Nothing erases that beauty. No matter what they say, it’s a beautiful island. That’s not going to change. That person’s set of values are ignorant to me. Islands are not garbage. This island is gorgeous. My love for my culture is not going to change.” So that’s what my mom texted me. 

Whitney Terrell: That’s amazing! Was that immediately afterward? Was the MSG rally still going on when she —

JMM: No, no, this was much later. I was really angry, but I think that she had a different reaction to it, and I thought that was really interesting. It was just full of pride. It just bolstered her to feel even more pride for her island. So I think that was really interesting, but there was a lot of anger, for sure, a lot of anger, a lot of rage.  

I was angry, but I was also not surprised, unfortunately, because a good bit of the rhetoric that’s been coming out of that Trump campaign that they’ve been projecting since even before the 2016 election bid has been dismissive, divisive, and oft reprehensible to me. 

So I personally was angry but not surprised. And it’s depressing that these kinds of comments in a supposedly progressive country are becoming more commonplace. So I think a lot of us were upset, not surprised and, like my mother said, full of pride. But one of the things that made me so excited was seeing all of the Puerto Rican flags all over my timeline on social media. So many people were supporting Puerto Ricans and coming to our defense. And Puerto Ricans were obviously—at least, the ones that I talked to—very prideful of their culture. So there were a lot of different reactions to it.

VVG: I’m curious about whether any of those reactions were specifically about organizing people to vote against him, facilitating other people’s votes? 

JMM: Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a couple of funny things that were going around that were saying, “The Puerto Rican diasporic trash collection day is election day.” I thought that was pretty fun. There were a lot of things to get people out to vote, but it’s a very complicated issue, too, in diasporic communities on the mainland and on the island regarding their reactions and their frustrations with the American government.

WT: Well as you said, it’s not surprising that Tony Hinchcliffe would say this. Trump, by the way, has been asked about it, and he keeps saying, “Oh, I don’t know. I’m not aware of it. Somebody said something, but I don’t…” He couldn’t say, “I disavow that. I do not think that was a good thing to say,” because, of course, he’s been saying stuff like that all along, right? 

It’s important to say we’re recording this before the election; it’s Saturday. Who knows what’s going to happen between now and the election, and who knows if we’ll even know the results of the election by the time this posts on Thursday. But just last night, Trump gave fake fellatio to a microphone. So maybe that’s going to take over this entire story. Sugi’s looking like she doesn’t know what that is, but it did happen! It’s very disturbing!

VVG: Whitney, stop making stuff up. We’ve talked about this. Stop making shit up. 

WT: I am not! Trump is having a mental breakdown in real time, and I don’t even know if he’s still going to get elected!

VVG: Seems fine to me; seems okay.

WT: One of the things that he’s been relying on is an increase in young male votes from communities of color. And yet it seems like this really did finally break through. I mean a rapper who supported him bailed, and so why this one thing after all the tremendously racist things he said in the past?

JMM: My feelings are that I still need to see what’s going to happen, because I feel like from all of the conversations I’m having, there’s still a lot of division, but I think that there is a lot of solidarity in the sense that Puerto Ricans are proud of their culture. I think they’re very angry because these are reprehensible comments.  I think if you insert any group and then say that their place of origin, the place they care about the most is garbage, you’re going to have a strong reaction to that. 

And then everybody started laughing, too, and I think that was really frustrating, because it wasn’t just this person saying this in a vacuum, it was to an entire crowd was laughing, and they were excited about it. So I think that those images, especially for people within the Puerto Rican community, were absolutely infuriating. 

But, like my mother said, for her that didn’t impact her view of herself because she loves the island. And I think Puerto Ricans are so upset about it because they know how beautiful Puerto Rico is. They know how powerful its people are, and they know the impact that the diasporic communities have had on the U.S.  I think that’s why we know our value, so we don’t like that being stripped away from us.

WT: When you say that there’s still some controversy, in other words—I have a friend who’s from a small town in Missouri who is arguing with her friends from home about them wanting to support Trump and refusing to back down—are there still, within the communities that you’re communicating with, people now saying to those who were Trumpers: “See, I told you! You shouldn’t have liked that guy!” Is there argument there? Or is there a unanimity, like, “Okay, we’re not supporting Trump?” 

JMM: I’ll be honest, from the communities that I’m a part of, people are just kind of staying on the side they were already on. I don’t see a lot of switching, but that’s just the communities I’m a part of. But I do think that you’re seeing a lot of Puerto Ricans coming out, such as Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez, endorsing Harris and things like that. So I think that there’s some reactionary endorsing. 

But I think that where people were internally, they often are still there, because I’ve talked to family members and we talk about who they’re voting for, and they’re like, “Oh yeah, I’m still going to vote for this person” because of such and such and such reasons. So, yeah, it’s wild. I have no idea what’s going to happen.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle.

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Jennifer Maritza McCauley

Kinds of Grace • When Trying to Return Home • Scar On/Scar Off

Others:

“Pennsylvania: anger among Puerto Ricans in key swing state after racist remarks” by José Olivares | The Guardian • Tony Hinchcliffe • “Trump’s Derision of Haitians Goes Back Years” by Michael D. Shear | The New York Times • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 7, Episode 52: “Myriam J.A. Chancy on Haitian American Communities” • “Donald Trump is the First White President” by Ta-Nehisi Coates | The Atlantic | October 2017 • Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton • The Jones Act • “Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny, and Racism” by Shane Goldmacher, Maggie Haberman and Michael Gold  | The New York Times • X: “Bigot Coachella”