The view southward from the Asomante hills outside the Puerto Rican town of Aibonito is spectacular, reaching all the way to the Caribbean coast. A pretty little town situated in the island’s southeastern Cayey mountain range, Aibonito has the highest altitude in Puerto Rico—twenty-four hundred feet. It’s known for its cool climate, its bucolic scenery, its flowers, and its chicken farms.

In the small valleys around the town, many of the long, low, tin-roofed chicken breederies—polleros—were smashed to smithereens, and their occupants killed, during Hurricane Maria. In the middle of last week, when I visited, the dead chickens had been buried, but there was still wreckage strewn around the blasted polleros. The eye of the storm came right through these hills on September 20th and was especially fierce along the exposed ridgelines. The winds, whipping in at a hundred and fifty-five miles an hour, ripped apart wooden houses; they also turned most of the leaves on the trees in the surrounding forests from green to brown. Along the road leading up to Aibonito from the capital city of San Juan, which is a two-hour drive, there is—as everywhere else on the island—a dismal panorama of ruined houses and businesses, toppled and twisted trees, and downed utility poles.

I went to Aibonito in the company of a friend, Ana Teresa Toro. A talented journalist in her early thirties, Ana Teresa comes from Aibonito; she had always spoken proudly to me of her home town, and promised to show it to me one day. (She is also a newlywed; her wedding took place in the brief lull between Hurricanes Irma and Maria.)

Now we had our chance. In Aibonito, Ana Teresa took me to meet her aunt and uncle, who live in the same house where her grandmother, a traditional healer, had lived and worked until her death, a few years ago. We walked to Aibonito’s central plaza to admire its unique red, white, and blue “mural de la bandera,” representing a detail of the Puerto Rican flag, which Ana Teresa’s cousin Humberto had painted, using an entire house as his canvas. The flag’s single illuminated star, which had stood on a stanchion on the rooftop, had been destroyed by Maria. Humberto had painted the mural as a patriotic gesture, and, as Ana Teresa pointed out, it was a pro-independence flag—its blue was the distinctive baby-blue of the independistas, whereas the Puerto Rican flags of those who are pro-statehood favor a darker hue.

After Hurricane Maria, Ana Teresa and her husband, Modesto, didn’t go on a honeymoon but, instead, flew to Boston and sought assistance from the Puerto Rican community there. They had also met with mayors and businesspeople to solicit help for the island. Ana Teresa told me that she was happy to have helped make “a small contribution” to a fund-raising campaign, organized by several philanthropic organizations, that had raised about a million dollars for N.G.O.s involved in relief efforts on the island. But she had returned home, nonetheless, feeling extremely depressed. Looking around at the beat-up places of her Aibonito childhood, Ana Teresa also knew that, henceforth, things would probably not improve in Puerto Rico but get worse.

Like most of the other Puerto Ricans I met, Ana Teresa was outraged and wounded by the things Donald Trump had said about Puerto Rico. She felt more deeply than ever that she and her fellow Puerto Ricans were second-class U.S. citizens. During her recent U.S. trip, she told me, one politician had come up to her and said, in a whisper that was intended to be confiding as well as comforting, “Don’t worry, we’re going to push for statehood for you.”

For Ana Teresa, a proud Puerto Rican nationalist, the remark was a crushing reminder that most non-Puerto Rican U.S. citizens are blissfully ignorant of the island’s cultural heritage, its history, and some of its people’s national aspirations. “I know that it didn’t occur to the mayor that he was hurting my feelings, nor did it occur to him that I might possibly aspire to anything higher than full U.S. citizenship,” Ana Teresa said. (Since 1917, when Puerto Rico was made an unincorporated U.S. territory, its citizens have been American citizens, but they do not have congressional voting rights, nor can they vote for President.)

A view from Ramón Rivera’s property in Aibonito, Puerto Rico. The town is situated at an elevation of twenty-four hundred feet in the island’s southeastern Cayey mountain range. Photograph by Christopher Gregory for The New Yorker

Puerto Rico’s neo-colonial status is shared with the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam, which, along with Cuba and the Philippines, were the Spanish colonial possessions acquired by the United States after its military victory in the Spanish-American War. Both Cuba and the Philippines eventually became independent.

As it turns out, two of the last battles of the Spanish-American War in Puerto Rico took place just outside Aibonito on the bluff overlooking the island, at the edge of the Asomante hills. On August 9, 1898, a column of American troops probing into the central highlands met heavy resistance at Asomante from Spanish troops who were dug into the hilltop along a trench line. The U.S. troops were led by Major General James H. Wilson, a celebrated veteran of the American Civil War, on the Unionist side. (He was famous, among other things, for having captured the defeated Confederate President, Jefferson Davis.) Wilson’s troops retreated after coming under heavy fire; several American soldiers were wounded in the fracas. Three days later, his troops made another attempt to take the hilltop, and were again rebuffed, with several more men injured.

The war, such as it was, had already ended for the Spaniards, however. The next day, hostilities ceased when Spain agreed to surrender its forces and to relinquish Puerto Rico and its other colonial territories. A month later, on September 13, 1898, in the Protocol of Peace, as it was called, Spain formalized its defeat by a vote of 161 to 48 in the Spanish parliament, the Cortes. While Spain entered the twentieth century as a defeated nation on the world stage, the United States launched itself forth with swagger as a new and expansionist military player.

As for Puerto Rico, the U.S. victory over Spain meant a new form of political vassalage. Like neighboring Cuba, Puerto Rico had also had a pro-independence movement and launched several short-lived revolts that had been quelled by the Spaniards. Instead of receiving its emancipation, however, from 1898 onward Puerto Rico became a virtual American colony, under the authority of the U.S. military, which also appointed Puerto Rico’s governor. In 1914, the U.S. Congress rejected a unanimous vote made by the rump Puerto Rican legislature in favor of Puerto Rico’s independence. In 1917, by another act of Congress, Puerto Rico was made an unincorporated U.S. territory.

The place where the Asomante battles took place is known nowadays as Trinchera, or Trench. The bluff where the siege lines were laid is just a short walk downhill from the house of Ramón Rivera, a heavy-equipment operator who works for the municipality of Aibonito, and who owns the lands thereabouts. Rivera, a handsome man of seventy-two, lives alone above the bluff in a concrete bungalow, its windows still covered with plywood, which, he said, had withstood Maria without damage. He had lost power like everyone else, and was still without electricity. He shrugged; the power would eventually come back. He was O.K. He and Ana Teresa made their introductions and swapped family names; Rivera said he knew her uncle. She smiled happily and said to me, “One way or another, we’re all connected in Aibonito.”