At the start of October, la Colectiva Feminista en Construcción took over an unoccupied three-story building in Puerto Rico that had been empty for years and repurposed it for community use. They named the newfound space Casa Tomada — which translates to “taken house” in Spanish — and are now operating as a community resource center in the García Ubarri neighborhood of Río Piedras in San Juan. When a nurse recently tested the forearms of two elderly women there, she noticed the elasticity of their skin was reduced, which meant they were severely dehydrated. Within minutes, a member of la Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, the group spearheading this initiative, brought them bottled water.
That action may sound simple, but in Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria, it’s not. Clean drinking water isn’t easy to come by, and the federal aid that should be providing basic necessities isn’t accessible either.
One month after the Category 4 storm destroyed the island’s electrical infrastructure and communications systems, the people of Puerto Rico are still struggling. Around 80% of people are without power and about a third don’t have access to clean water. The two resources are intertwined: Without electricity, water can’t be pumped to residences, and those who do have running water at home are advised to purify it — but the most economical method is boiling, and without electricity, it’s hard for those without a gas stove. In desperation, some have resorted to washing clothes, bathing in, or even drinking contaminated water, which has already wrought a suspected 74 cases of leptospirosis, an animal-borne bacterial disease, resulting in four deaths. Hospitals are unable to operate at full capacity, there are shortages of medicine, scarcity of food, and people grappling with financial strife because they’re out of work — some of them for as long as two weeks prior to Maria, when Hurricane Irma caused a power outage effecting more than one million residents.
The lagging response from the U.S. government is, in part, why la Colectiva Feminista en Construcción is hard at work. The building they’ve occupied is currently open to the public on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and is already filling the gaps left by FEMA and the Puerto Rican government’s apparent inefficiencies.
“How we see it right now, this [building] is the community’s,” 24-year-old group organizer Maricarmen Rodriguez tells Teen Vogue. “We’re just helping them understand how to use the space.”
La Colectiva Feminista is a politically radical grassroots organization that has been active since 2014. Last year, a federal law known as the PROMESA Act was passed under the Obama administration to address Puerto Rico’s $73 billion debt, and the collective grew even more essential to the island’s resistance movement. Their manifesto denounces the U.S.-imposed Fiscal Control Board and its resulting austerity measures, like public school closings and the massive proposed budget cut to the University of Puerto Rico.
They supported a 72-day student strike against the latter and have been central to several other major recent protests. On March 8, their solidarity with the International Women’s Strike started at sunrise by blocking a major San Juan expressway for two full hours. During the May 1 Paro Nacional, a protest against the Fiscal Control Board and its austerity cuts held on International Workers’ Day, they organized their own block of resistance within the greater protest, filled with women playing plena on hand drums and signs bearing anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, and pro-woman messages.
Inside Casa Tomada, signs on the wall read, “Respect our rights!” and “They’ve taken so much from us, they’ve taken our fear.”
“We’ve been very open about our politics and what we stand for, and whenever we give out supplies, we also say to the women, ‘Do you need a condom? Do you want to be open with us? Are you sexually active? Do you need something else that we can give you?’” Rodriguez says, adding that the group helps connect pregnant women with medical services, too.
During la Colectiva’s inaugural week in October, a lawyer-directed workshop explained how to properly fill out the FEMA aid application, an event that was attended by at least 50 people. Overall, Rodriguez says the resources offered by the collective are utilized mostly by families.
“We’re thinking about bringing [in] teachers and other professionals to help the mothers in the community understand how to develop their kids’ needs in terms of school, because right now school is out and they don’t know what to do with their kids,” she says. “A lot of them may have special needs and they haven’t gone to therapy in basically a month, so we want to work with that.”
Carol, a 25-year-old stay-at-home mother, sat at Casa Tomada with an armload of diapers, watching two of her four small children coloring in the playroom. She’s been visiting the facility since it opened, and has applied for FEMA relief, but her family has yet to receive any kind of disaster aid. Her husband has just lost his job because of post-storm problems, and she says Casa Tomada is a much-needed resource.
Despite the collective’s organizational experience, they’ve encountered issues all the same, particularly in gathering supplies. A recent shipment of donations from the U.S., Rodriguez says, was missing much of its contents. “We were supposed to receive a shipment of 300 pounds and we got 40 pounds. We were [waiting at the airport] for five hours,” she says. (Teen Vogue has reached out to FEMA for comment, but did not receive a reply by time of publishing.)
Standing in a small room designated for supply collection and disbursement, Rodriguez tells Teen Vogue that the biggest impact of the hurricane has been in its communities. “All of the houses were built [with] wood, and they’re not there anymore; there’s like, four or five houses. There are 22 people living in a space [the size of a small bedroom] in the communal center that has only half a roof,” she says.
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The group’s first Brigada Feminista, the name for their relief mission brigades, on October 14 delivered food and supplies, and also provided money for multiple tarps to cover the gaping ceiling in the community center.
Rodriguez says that eventually, Casa Tomada will be entirely community-run, and la Colectiva will move on to work on creating more spaces like it. Puerto Rico will prevail — but it’s the people themselves who are making that progress possible. You can support La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción by donating to their crowdfunding campaign via YouCaring.
Related: What You Need to Know About Puerto Rico’s History as a U.S. Territory
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