Like Martínez Ocasio, I grew up in a small town: he in Vega Baja in the north of Puerto Rico, I in San Lorenzo in the south-east.
His mother was a schoolteacher and his father was a truck driver with no connections in the music industry. My mother, far removed from the media world, worked in a factory.
My childhood, like his – as the artist once described in an interview with The New York Times Magazine – felt “far away” from the bustle of San Juan, even though the capital was only a 45-minute drive.
Each trip to the so-called metropolitan area was quite an event: waking up early, dressing nicely, deciding what we might eat for lunch.
Most often, those trips centred around Plaza Las Américas, a massive shopping mall where, as Martínez Ocasio once said, “you didn’t even know where you were standing”.
Like him, I learned English as an adult and speak it with a non-native accent, despite being a US citizen, as all people born in Puerto Rico are.
For many of us, mastering another language often depends on whether we can afford private classes.
It’s no small detail that, according to the latest US census data, only 22% of the island territory’s population feels it can speak English “very well”.
Disconnected by limited public transportation, without tourists or major events, daily life in our towns moved slowly, all while shaped by a public debt crisis and a subsequent bankruptcy that caused profound political, social, and economic turmoil.
Over the past three decades, fiscal hardship has left us with a fragile electrical grid vulnerable to hurricanes, mass migration, violence, school closures, and a diminished public university.
Back in 2018, in the song Ser Bichote, from his debut album, the artist sang: “Schools are closing while puntos open. So what do I do? Tell me, I’m asking you.”
The “punto” is what we call the places where illegal drugs are sold, the ones our parents always warned us about.
Perhaps only we, Puerto Ricans, understood the reference, and the rest were content to just dance to it.