The Island: The Making and Unmaking of Modern Puerto Rico

NBC News Senior White House Correspondent Gabe Gutierrez offers an urgent, necessary tale of on the precarious realities and politics of modern Puerto Rico, detailing the decade of alleged financial exploitation, federal negligence, and American ambivalence that pushed the most populous US territory to the brink and examining what must be done to insure the island’s survival.

For decades Puerto Rico has been on its own. Underfunded and largely forgotten by the US government, the island has pivoted between financial and natural disasters, struggling without Congressional representation. While Hurricane Maria exposed the federal government’s failure to aid Puerto Rico in its time of greatest need, the storm also laid bare a systemic crisis that had been building for years—what critics have called a slow-motion train wreck of American neglect, institutional exploitation, and financial ruin with profound human consequences.

Now veteran NBC News reporter and senior White House correspondent Gabe Gutierrez, who has covered the island’s storms and its people for years, tells the urgent story of how Puerto Rico came to this precarious moment in its history, uncovering how decades of questionable policies have culminated in the tumultuous last ten years. Whether it’s the US hedge funds who leveraged the island into bankruptcy, or the federal bureaucracy that has robbed the island of the autonomy to shape its own destiny, the mismanagement of Puerto Rico has stretched across the island’s governorships, as well as US presidential administrations and political parties.

With each passing year, this negligence comes at a steeper price to US taxpayers, but more importantly, to those who live there. Through moving portraits of the people working to preserve Puerto Rico for future generations, Gutierrez demonstrates the human cost of the recent turmoil that has left everyday Puerto Ricans with few good options and reinvigorated the island’s independence movement as they seek a viable future for their home.

What emerges is an eye-opening narrative of American ambivalence about an island so deeply tied to our imperial past. A seasoned journalist’s ambitious examination of how difficult it can be to change American institutions, The Island shows how our failure to care adequately for Puerto Rico represents a failure to reckon with our own history.