“Those who do not know history are bound to repeat it.” is a tale one might call as old as time, a saying we hear a lot throughout life that hardens when we approach topics like history, rights, and politics. The original version was: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” by George Santayana, although there are a few other versions like, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” and the one which titles and begins this article. They all boil down to the same thing though: there is a high cost to forgetting or pushing aside our past. Fear gripped me whenever I heard it, cautious of my studies, cautious of my actions. They were words that instilled respect for what was in me. I would always remember, you have to learn from history, it’s important to look back and build the future with awareness. It’s important to know how we got here, what doesn’t need resurgence. Why does this matter now more than ever?
History is the foundation in which we build our present. We take the past and shape it into what we want for the future — whether it’s to lead by example or to avoid the same mistakes. It’s vital to look back and see how far we’ve come and what previous paths looked like. Today, in an era where things move too fast and our existence seems like a constant marathon just to keep up, more and more of our lives and our past seem to get lost in the whirlwind of it all. As a Puerto Rican, there are certain events that have marked our history, but as the years pass, they seem to fall through the cracks. It’s not that there was uncertainty in whether we were or weren’t forgetting our past, it’s that I hadn’t seen just how easy it was for our little island to drape the present over the past and see only the new cloth.
I’d thought that the 2020 election results were the end, especially after we had gone through a summer of fighting for change just the year before. We made international news, the Puerto Rican people had made their corrupt and offending governor Ricardo Rosselló resign. The summer of 2019 was one for the books, it put us where we needed to be: on the path to change. However, the 2020 election results shoved us right back to where we started: the New Progressive Party, “PNP” for its Spanish initials, had won again. It felt like we’d moved two steps forward just to dance them all back. Of course, the new governor was not Ricardo Rosselló, but it was still someone from the same party. The trust the people had for the PNP had been broken in 2019, but by 2020, as the election results show, it seemed like everyone had forgotten.
I knew there were many factors that made the 2019 protest the big event that it was — media coverage, the chat scandal, and the comments elected officials had made offending every Puerto Rican, made it easier to band together as a nation and fight for the same cause. I knew the chances of it lasting as a constant feeling, a constant reality where we stood up together against a government that had failed us time and time again were slim. The elections were proof of that. There’s something about a bipartisan system that simply makes it hard to crack it down, to tear the nails it has embedded in a nation. My hopes dwindled as the years passed, the summer of 2019 seemed like nothing more than a fever dream, a proud moment where Puerto Rico was not its government but its people.
It was something that by 2024, as the elections drew close, I had put in a memory box under my bed. By the night of November 5th, with the first results of the election trickling in, this box was riddled with dust and spiderwebs. We were so close to change, something tangible and felt that said “this bipartidism that has shaved and broken our stability is finally falling,” but again, it wasn’t enough.
If anything, it solidified the reality that as a community, history seems to slip through our fingers. Jenniffer González Colón, a candidate with attitude, immaturity, and a campaign full of false promises that, almost two years in, has borne no fruits, won the elections. Two terms as Comisionada Residente which were invisible at best and mediocre at worst, yet she still won the 2024 elections, and we were right back where we started: with a PNP candidate and a crumbling island. Now, roughly a year and a half into her term, she has been the target of criticism, unhappy voters, and a hurting island. At the face of criticism from unsatisfied citizens, the governor never even addressed some of the claims, she simply stated that people who didn’t like her administration could take “a chill pill” since she wouldn’t be resigning.
Why is it important to remember our history? I believe we’re currently facing delicate political climates, both on the island and the mainland U.S., which directly affects us. When we can’t even remember why the summer of 2019 was so important and why criticizing your party affiliation or the governor you voted for is important, we risk the possibility of falling through the cracks, losing autonomy, rights, stability, and power. Didn’t our governor, while campaigning, promise us to cancel the Luma Energy contract? Even by the fifth month mark of her first year as governor she kept saying it: “Luma se va.” Yet, all this time later we are still at the same crossways, and facing another rise to our electricity bill. Why do we forget? How do we move forward without keeping tabs on these things? I know this is a more nuanced and complicated topic, but can this be the initial spark, asking ourselves, why?
We keep becoming apathetic, because as these things keep happening, it feels like an endless cycle. Because we forget. We forget we’re the same people who rose and helped each other during Hurricane María, and forget we’re the same nation who stood against a governor that laughed about making fools out of his people.
We forget, and in doing so we sentence ourselves to never seeing change.
As a young woman constantly trying to cherish and remember her history, seeing the current state of my country and the world hurts. However, nothing prepared me for seeing how vividly and happily Puerto Ricans were celebrating the arrival of military convoys to their waters. This is not about my political beliefs or affiliations, once again, it’s about history. For a moment, it seemed as if an entire country had forgotten why the Marina was pushed out of Vieques. For a country with no real jurisdiction over who is President of the United States and as so, Chief of its military, it seems dangerous to me to receive their troops without questioning why they’re here, and even worse, celebrating their arrival.
It was a punch to the gut, something that cemented my belief in how dangerous the path we’re walking is, to see people campaigning in favor of the military presence on our island. Some, even going as far as saying that pushing the Navy out was a mistake, as if there weren’t cancer statistics to show the damage of their presence. There is precedent to current events, if only you looked a little harder and into the past.
Who suffers when we forget, if not our country? Who do we disappoint when we don’t learn, if not our ancestors? And how, just how, do we move forward if we become complacent to mediocrity and apathetic to failure? Why would we believe we have no power? It’s complacent to let others strip us of our history, and it’s ignorant to refuse to learn and remember it.
In a world like today, where every second, word, and action matters, letting our history be forgotten, and choosing to repeat it by neglecting its study, is the greatest mistake of all. Is the saying “Those who do not remember their history are forced to repeat it” just a saying, or is it a prophecy happening again and again? I guess we have only ourselves to answer that.