Truthdigger of the Week: Carmen Yulín Cruz, Mayor of San Juan

At first she denied any plans to run. Once she entered the race, she strung together a series of small coalitions—including the LGBT community, students, Dominican immigrants and taxi drivers—to form a base of support.

Such allies helped her defeat a formidable opponent—a three-time incumbent, Jorge Santini.

“People don’t realize they have the power,” she recalled in an interview several years later. “People don’t realize that if they come together, there are more of them than those who occupy the seat that I’m in right now.”

Cruz’s criticism of the mainland’s relationship with Puerto Rico began before Trump’s presidency. Speaking before Congress in 2015, she asked that Puerto Rico be allowed to enter into commercial agreements with foreign countries to help the territory confront its crippling debt. “Puerto Rico has been denied these tools far too long,” she said. “And as long as our options are defined by the powers of this Congress, we will always be at your mercy. The measure of our success will always be limited by the vastness of your control over our affairs.” Cruz is a member of the Popular Democratic Party, which supports maintaining the island’s commonwealth status, as opposed to statehood.

Two years later, in the midst of Hurricane Maria, Cruz’s devotion to the people of Puerto Rico withstood the test of crisis. She ran a command center in the Roberto Clemente Coliseum, where she and hundreds of others sheltered as they waited for the storm to pass. “Some of the mayors that I have been able to reach or have reached me are scared of voicing their concern, because they are concerned if they do, they won’t even get a bottle of water,” she said. “That is a sad situation in a democratic society.  When fear takes a hold of people, then you know something isn’t working.”

In an interview with The Washington Post, she described the “horror in the streets” and the “sheer pain in people’s eyes” after the hurricane.

Cruz also said that “if President Trump were to say, ‘I’m going to go to San Juan to see that nasty mayor,’ I would receive him with open arms, because democracy is larger than me. … He was democratically elected. He represents the United States of North America and he deserves all the respect that office brings with it.”

Her words bear more weight since she was photographed in a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Nasty” during an interview with Univision. She later confirmed that the shirt was in direct response to Trump’s verbal assault on her. “When someone is bothered by someone claiming lack of drinking water, lack of medicine for the sick and lack of food for the hungry, that person has problems too deep to be explained in an interview. What is really nasty is that anyone would turn their back on the Puerto Rican people,” she said.