The strangest thing about going to Puerto Rico was always the plane, right after boarding or just before disembarking at the Luis Muñoz Marin International Airport in San Juan. Not the smell—which is pungent and alive, the red clay in the soil giving the island a fragrance unlike anywhere else I've ever been—but the people. White people, specifically. Tourists sporting skin that's too tan and teeth that are too white, in flip-flops and T-shirts, talking about where the good food is and how often they've come here to summer. Took in the Old World charm of Old San Juan. Went for a beautiful swim. Saw the castillos and had an amazing guisado (usually with the "d" over-emphasized when it's only supposed to be suggested).

They described a playground, some other island entirely. Maybe that Puerto Rico existed, but I've never been there, and I likely never will. Maybe no one will.

It has been just over one week since Hurricane Maria reached Puerto Rico the night of September 20. One week since an island of 3.5 million Americans went dark, losing electricity across the entire island, and running, drinkable water in more than half of it. One week and the president, too busy getting mad about what football players do during the national anthem, can barely be bothered to acknowledge it, seeking praise for a job that isn't done, bringing up the island's debt like a landlord seeking rent from a patient in a cancer ward.

One week since I last heard from my grandparents, or any of my aunts, uncles, or cousins. No one has power. My calls go straight to voicemail. Someone told my dad his uncle's house is gone. We think everyone is okay, somehow. There's no real way to know and there won't be for some time.

Like a lot of Puerto Ricans born in New York, I was raised with a certain reverence for the island my family came from, even if I didn't appreciate it as a kid. I was born a second generation Nuyorican, that pivotal threshold in a family's lineage where culture is either preserved or lost forever. We went to the island a lot growing up—sometimes twice a year, to visit family or while away a summer. We never had money for a proper vacation, so family was our vacation—my mother worked for an airline, and flying out was easy if you knew the things she did. I saw cousins I loved seeing and cousins I didn't remember, all speaking to me in a language I didn't fully grasp. Like most things you experience as a kid, I thought it was normal—the salsa y merengue playing in the speakers, the maduros I loved and the yucca I hated, the novelas my grandma watched, the roosters that woke me up too early and the coquis that welcomed every night.

On the island, I'd always be a gringo. My Spanish was too clumsy, my dancing too clueless, my tastes too white. But back here, in los Estados, as I pursued higher education and then became a journalist, it didn't matter how bad I was at being Puerto Rican. It was enough to be different. My skin wasn't any less brown.

One recent survey suggests that about half of all Americans don’t know Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. It's an ignorance we accommodate, gently reminding people of this fact when we do something as mundane as recommend the best places to eat and drink when they vacation, telling would-be tourists to not be surprised that Puerto Ricans know English. But that citizenship is a half-truth, anyway. Puerto Rico is a colony in a world where colonies don't really exist anymore, where the concept is so foreign that no one can properly grasp how perverse it is that a population lives under the farce we call a commonwealth, even when John Oliver teams up with white liberals' favorite Puerto Rican, Lin-Manuel Miranda, to explain how Puerto Ricans can't vote for president, how laws were introduced that incentivized corporations to exploit it for profit while exempting them from responsibility, and the Puerto Rican government from any form of recourse in its debt crisis that came to a head this summer.