No Me Quiero Ir De Aquí: Return, Resistance, Rhythm, and Abuelo’s Legacy in Puerto Rico
A photo essay by Rosa Alemán | Part of #MyDiyMFA Art Residency 2025
When I arrived in Santurce, I didn’t go to the beach. I didn’t stay at my hotel to rest. I went directly to my grandfather’s factory.
Abuelo Fredy, a self-taught engineer with an eighth-grade education, built and ran a hot dog cart factory in Barrio Obrero for nearly fifty years. From the 1970s until the hush that followed Hurricane María, his machines were the lifeblood of our family. When the storm silenced them in 2017, something in Abuelo quieted too. Alzheimer’s moved in quickly. The man who had spent his life welding futures out of scrap metal and mentoring others into trades and food carts lost the coordinates of his days.
The factory still stands, a workshop at ground level with three floors of apartments stacked above it—every detail designed and built by his own hands. It is both relic and reminder: of endurance, of invention, and of how fragile the pulse of place can be. From the roof, you can see the glint of Condado’s shoreline resorts, so near yet so far from the working rhythms of Barrio Obrero.
Abuelo Fredy taught people in his community to build food carts and sustainable livelihoods. He welcomed those with nothing except will and taught them how to turn steel into sustenance. Some started as apprentices in his shop and ended up as push cart vendors and restaurant owners in Old San Juan and throughout Puerto Rico. Others carried the craft with them to the States. For him, it was never just about the machines. It was about the possibility of building something real, something lasting, out of nothing but vision and persistence.
Returning to that space was like stepping into memory and mission at once. I could still hear the clang of metal, still see myself as a child running across the factory floor, collecting scraps to build my own miniature carts, my imagination stoked by his blueprints. The peeling walls and rusted bolts carried silence and the hum of what once was, grief and inspiration braided together.
As part of #MyDiyMFA art residency—a self-directed, multi-site learning journey rooted in place, pedagogy, and creative praxis—this visit was a homecoming fused with responsibility. My recent months had been spent reflecting at Walden Pond, immersed in Thoreau’s philosophies of observation, simplicity, and design. But here, on my grandfather’s terrace, theory met inheritance. The factory became both text and thesis. The lessons I had wrestled with in the woods—about building a life out of intention—stood embodied in the walls he raised, the terraces he built, the community he sustained.
Coinciding with my return was the unfolding of another residency—Bad Bunny’s concert series in Hato Rey, No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí. I had followed Benito’s music and iconography for years from afar, and even saw him live at Fenway Park in Boston in 2022. But to be on the island while he staged a months-long residency felt uncanny, like history folding in on itself. He wasn’t just giving a concert; he was asking us to consider what it means to stay, to belong, to build a future on our ancestral land with our hearts and hands.
On the morning before the show, I visited La Sala Libre at Casa Saffra—an interactive archive for diasporic stories of Puerto Ricans living in the United States.
The documentary installations carried voices of those who left and those who returned, those who stayed and those who still dream of coming back. In a dim alcove, a camera and chair waited for anyone willing to testify.
The questions curated on bookshelves and scrawled across its walls echoed my own: ¿Qué perdemos cuando nos vamos? ¿Qué reconstruimos cuando regresamos?
Standing there, I thought of my mother scraping together money to bring us back whenever life in the States collapsed for us. I thought of Abuelo’s dream of permanence, how he built apartments above his factory so we would always have a place to land. La Sala Libre felt like a mirror, reflecting the story of our family’s comings and goings, and asking: what will you do to preserve what was given to you?
That night at el Choli, the air was thick with humidity and Puerto Rican pride. Outside, people came dressed in living history: pava hats once worn by sugarcane workers, bomba skirts swirling with flags, guayaberas ironed crisp. Each garment was more than fashion—it was semiotics in motion.
The pava carried the memory of laborers who cut cane under a punishing sun, its straw brim a humble shield turned into a crown.
The bomba skirt, once forbidden under colonial rule, spun its defiance into a spectacle of color and rhythm. Even guayaberas—shirts of field and fiesta alike—became signs of dignity reclaimed.
The crowd wore our ancestors, stitched history into fabric, and brought it into the present as celebration. My own outfit—oversized black overalls and a gray T-shirt—was a nod to the workers of neighborhoods like the ones that raised me.
Inside, I climbed to the very last row of the stadium. Up high in the stands, from “el monte” del Colise de Puerto Rico, the crowd looked like an ocean: strangers pressed together, pulsing in rhythm, whole sections swaying as one. The LED camera lanyards handed to us upon entering el Choli flashed in unison, a constellation of light.
Even this felt symbolic: the act of turning an audience into a galaxy, every light a star in a shared constellation. The empty seats beside me quickly filled with young people ready to dance, perreo babies having the time of their lives.
Soon our row became its own party, a makeshift dance floor high above the stage, as if we were suspended in a drifting cloud of love, appreciation, and gratitude, feeling the shared heartbeat of place and time, together.
Benito appeared on a stage built as a fully functioning casita, rooftop turned spot-lit stage. A casita is never just a house—it is a symbol of rootedness, of modest belonging. By staging his performance on that roof, he elevated domestic space into public power, insisting that the home itself, humble and fragile as it may be, is worthy of being seen.
El Conejo Malo moved through landscapes recreated in set design—plantain groves, mountain ridges, a neighborhood patio buzzing with music. Each scene functioned like a signpost: plantains for sustenance, mountains for endurance, patios for community. He pulled the island itself into the arena and said: Look at us. This is who we are.
Between songs, his words hit harder than any bass drop. In a soft, gentle voice, he reminded us to look after our elders, to respect one another as neighbors, to stay, to invest in each other, to raise our children here, to hold onto land, language, art, music, fashion and tradition as inheritance.
He was speaking directly to the questions I had carried with me from Abuelo’s factory in Barrio Obrero: Will my family stay anchored in our home the way my grandfather dreamed we would, could, and should? Will we hold fast to Abuelo’s dream, or will his vision dissolve in the shifting sands of economy and time?
And then came the music. The songs I had sung for years alone in my car now rose around me in a chorus of nearly twenty thousand souls. Never had I felt more Puerto Rican than when those songs of love for the island, born of struggle and reckoning, rose around me—tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans and Diasporicans singing, dancing, and draping themselves in the living rhythms and fashions of Borikén.
When Benito performed “El Apagón” and the lyric rang out—“De aquí nadie me saca… dile que esta es mi casa, donde nació mi abuelo”—the entire stadium roared. The line itself was a semantic charge: house as inheritance, grandfather as anchor, staying as act of rebellion. The sound reverberated like a living heartbeat, shaking concrete and steel, vibrating in my chest. It felt like being held. It felt like the crowd itself was answering my grandfather’s silence with a vow: we belong here y de aquí nadie nos saca.
Toward the end, the chants began: “¡Qué lindo! ¡Qué lindo! ¡Qué lindo!” The words, usually tossed off in passing, on this night became a ritual incantation. To call something lindo is to name it tender and beautiful, to affirm its worth. But shouted by thousands, it became a declaration: we are beautiful, what we are doing together is beautiful, our island is beautiful, our endurance is beautiful. On the screen, you could see Benito’s tears. And I thought of Abuelo. The beauty we were naming wasn’t just El Conejo Malo on stage. It was us. It was the land. It was the rhythm and timbales of Abuelo’s machines and his love of family folded in on itself like stainless steel pressed into shape, into music, into collective memory.
The link between my grandfather’s work and Benito’s art residency was clear. One man welded food carts and taught others how to feed their families. The other welded songs and built a global stage presence—anchoring his fame back home in Puerto Rico to nourish our pride and affirm our cultural endurance. Abuelo filled Barrio Obrero with the clang of machinery and the rhythm of dreams in motion, the air smoky with fresh alcapurrias and pinchos grilled to perfection. Benito filled San Juan with chants, joy, and a call to celebrate home—or to find our way back to it. Each in their own way, they offered the same message: stay rooted, come home, and never forget that our joy has always been the root of our resistance, the backbone of our strength.
When I left the arena, sweat-drenched and aching from dancing for three hours straight, I carried more than a concert. I carried conviction. My grandfather’s factory may be quiet, but it is not empty. Its walls still hold laughter, blueprints, and echoes of work songs sung by hopeful men dreaming of better futures—their salsa and boleros blasting from an old FM radio held close. These memories are evidence that we have always had a place to return to. The concert reminded me that preserving Abuelo’s legacy is not nostalgia—it is survival.
For the first time since studying at the University of Puerto Rico in 2005 and living in Río Piedras as a young student, I considered moving back to the island. To photograph daily life in Santurce, to document the streets at dawn and the people waiting in line at the panadería for cafecitos and pan de agua sold by the pound. The murals in Río Piedras, fleeting art scrawled across El Paseo de Diego. So much of it stages, testimony, protest.
The concert made me want to root #MyDiyMFA not only in Walden’s quiet woods but also in the noisy, stubborn persistence of Barrio Obrero and the shifting neighborhoods of Santurce. It made me want to extend my creative practice from the silence of reflection to the hum of Boricua persistence and perseverance—to build, as Abuelo once did, something lasting out of scraps and vision, out of what the world might call nothing.
What my grandfather taught me with the hum and buzz of his machines and his inexhaustible will, Benito reminded me with song and stage: imagination is not abstract. It is welded into our tools, stitched into our clothes, carried in our chants, passed from generation to generation.
The symbols of that night—pava hats and bomba skirts, the rose-colored casita, and the galaxy of people glowing like starlight—live within me now. They whisper: no me quiero ir de aquí. I don’t want to abandon Abuelo’s dream or let his legacy fade. I don’t want it to be forgotten—not now, not ever. And not just for me, but for all of us who still have something to build from scratch, who still believe in staying rooted en nuestra Borinquen querida.
When my plane touched down in Boston and I came back to the cottage, the air was cooler, the silence immediate. The pond shimmered in late summer light, steady and unchanged, its surface holding the night sky.
I carried with me the heat of San Juan, the chants of nearly twenty thousand voices, the memory of the medley of music and machines in Abuelo’s workshop, and the icons of a concert that turned into collective remembering. Here, in the woods of Walden, I hear them still. They ink into the quiet like an undertone, reminding me that every walk around this pond, every page I write and re-write, is also part of that larger rhythm.
I return to this makeshift home not to retreat, but to keep building—between Walden and San Juan, between memory and imagination, between the inheritance I carry and the chants still echoing in my chest: “¡Qué lindo! ¡Qué lindo! ¡Qué lindo!
Yo no me quiero ir de aquí.
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