Every year, hundreds of New York’s elected officials, advocates, lobbyists, and civic leaders travel to Puerto Rico for the SOMOS conference, which is intended to celebrate Latino political power and confront the issues affecting our communities.
This year, we need to ask an uncomfortable question: How can we gather in Puerto Rico to celebrate our political power while people on the island cannot reliably have access to something as basic as water?
Puerto Rico is facing a serious water crisis. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued a drought disaster designation covering 26 municipalities. More than a third of the island is experiencing extreme drought, while another 30% is experiencing severe drought. Water rationing has affected more than 500,000 Puerto Ricans, with residents going without running water for 48 hours at a time.
Even scheduled rationing does not tell the whole story. Earlier this month, at least 60 communities in San Juan and Trujillo Alto went without potable water for days after problems with the Cupey water system.
I have family on the island. I hear about people figuring out where they can bathe, how much water they can afford to buy, and how to organize daily life around a utility that most of us in New York rarely think twice about.
That is what makes proceeding with SOMOS as usual so difficult to accept.
SOMOS has an important history of bringing together Puerto Rican and Latino leaders. Its mission emphasizes translating political gatherings into political action. If SOMOS is truly about using political power to deliver results, there may be no more important moment to demonstrate it than now.
Instead of asking how many receptions we can fit into several days in San Juan, we should be asking why Puerto Ricans still cannot depend on their faucets. Instead of treating Puerto Rico as the backdrop for New York politics, we should center Puerto Rico itself.
The water crisis is part of a much larger story. A decade ago, Congress enacted the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), which allowed billions in public debt to be restructured but transferred enormous fiscal authority from Puerto Rico’s elected government to an unelected Financial Oversight and Management Board.
Puerto Rico’s experience under PROMESA demonstrates the limitations of treating fiscal discipline as economic recovery. More than 650 public schools closed between 2007 and 2019. The electrical infrastructure remains notoriously fragile. Communities are once again struggling for reliable access to water.
Meanwhile, tax incentives now consolidated under Act 60 offer substantial benefits to qualifying businesses and wealthy investors who relocate to Puerto Rico. In 2023, members of Congress called for a federal review of these incentives, raising concerns that they were providing significant tax advantages to wealthy newcomers without delivering comparable benefits to the Puerto Rican people. Furthermore, a 2025 Government Accountability Office review found that recipients of the resident-investor incentive were disproportionately high-income and that evidence of the incentives’ broader economic benefits remains mixed.
The contradiction is difficult to ignore: Puerto Rico can make itself attractive to wealthy investors, luxury developments, and political visitors, yet too many Puerto Ricans cannot count on having water when they turn on the faucet.
This is why SOMOS should not happen this year as business as usual. That does not mean abandoning Puerto Rico. It means doing the opposite.
Turn the conference into an emergency policy summit. Replace some receptions with hearings involving residents, mayors, engineers, and community organizations. Bring New York’s congressional delegation into discussions about federal infrastructure investment. Examine disparities in Medicaid funding and Puerto Rico’s exclusion from SSI, the Jones Act, PROMESA, and the continuing authority of the Financial Oversight and Management Board. Ask what Act 60 has produced for ordinary Puerto Ricans. Demand accountability for reconstruction dollars. Establish concrete commitments that can be measured the following year.
My argument is not that New Yorkers should stop going to Puerto Rico. It’s that we stand with Puerto Ricans. In Spanish, SOMOS means “we are.” This is the moment to prove who that “we” includes.
Anna Correa is a political and governmental communications advisor in New York City.
Good Morning
Ms. Correa article about Somos was well received. It very detail and to the point Thank for for the input