The mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Carmen Yulín Cruz, is a petite woman with a large personality. Yulín, as she is known, has earned international renown since Hurricane Maria for criticizing Donald Trump’s lackadaisical response to the catastrophe. She has at the same time earned the ire of the President, who, in typically petty fashion, has lashed out at her several times in response to her criticisms, at one point tweeting that she had been “nasty” to him. Soon afterward, she appeared in public wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with that same word.

Last week, despite her feud with Trump, Yulín joined the island’s other mayors for a brief meet-and-greet session with the President during his hasty visit Puerto Rico. When her turn came to shake hands with Trump, she recalled to me recently, she said to him, “It’s nothing personal, Mr. President, it’s about the people of Puerto Rico.” But Trump didn’t respond to that, she said, and avoided direct eye contact by staring over her head. “That wasn’t hard for him to do, since I’m only five feet tall,” she said, laughing.

A few days ago, I met Yulín in her post-hurricane fiefdom, the Coliseo Roberto Clemente, a sports arena in San Juan where she has established an emergency headquarters for herself, her staff, and a volunteer corps. Much of the floor of the arena was occupied by a stockpile of donated food and water for San Juan’s neediest residents. Some of the food pallets were stamped “Hurricane Harvey,” and appeared to be surplus from the catastrophe that had recently struck Houston. Hanging above the stadium’s bleachers were several illustrated banners advertising various corporate donors, including Suiza, a producer of milk and fruit juice, and Chobani yogurt. There was also an American flag. (A large Puerto Rican flag, whose colors are also red, white, and blue, was displayed outside, over the building’s entrance.) In the hallways upstairs, cots had been set out for homeless families, and downstairs a kitchen operated to provide hot meals for them and for the city’s thousand employees and their families.

Volunteers at the Coliseo Roberto Clemente assemble food packages to be handed out in San Juan and elsewhere in Puerto Rico. Photograph by Christopher Gregory for The New Yorker

Yulín, who is fifty-four years old, has a ready-for-action style: when she entered the stadium, she went straight into a huddle with some young volunteers wearing matching T-shirts and led them in a rousing chant. She wore a white, military-style shirt with epaulettes and green outdoor pants tucked into tall combat boots.

When we were introduced, I jokingly expressed my pleasure at meeting such a “nasty” person. Yulín smiled. “An insult from Mr. Trump is a badge of courage, thank God,” she said. She had lived on the mainland for twelve years, she said, and from that experience she knew that “there’s a stark contrast between a country with a big heart and a President with a big mouth, who doesn’t seem to have any limits on how he disrespects people that do not think or believe or act as he expects them to.”

We discussed the Trump Administration’s response to Maria, and Yulín enumerated the ways that she believed the federal government—and Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Roselló, a political rival and a member of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party—had failed to meet the island’s needs. “Things did not get off to a good start,” she said. “The supply chain of aid has not been robust or continuous. The logistical support seems to be insurmountable. We have been unable to get the most rudimentary of communications, and, more than not having water or energy, the lack of communication—you really cannot communicate with people, and so we don’t have the big picture, the details of the realities that are being confronted every day by citizens and mayors and volunteers.” Yulín spoke admiringly about the speed with which individual and corporate donors, the Puerto Rican diaspora, several members of Congress, and mayors of other U.S. cities had come through with aid. “The private sector and the mayors have come through; Trump’s and Pence’s visits here”—Vice-President Mike Pence visited a few days after Trump—“were just P.R. exercises.”

Yulín, who graduated with honors from Boston University and has a master’s degree in public policy from Carnegie Mellon, has been in Puerto Rican public life since 1992. In 2008, she won a seat in Puerto Rico’s legislature, where she served until winning the San Juan mayor’s race, in 2012. Her party, the Partido Popular Democrático, defines itself officially as “pro-Commonwealth” and is in favor of maintaining, but improving on, Puerto Rico’s current relationship with the mainland, and supports neither statehood nor independence. Yulín is known to be personally in favor of Puerto Rico’s independence, but, like many of Puerto Rico’s politically-ambitious-yet-mainstream politicians, she is careful to use terms like “sovereignty” and “dignity” instead of “independence” outright. Yulín is expected to run for governor in 2020, when Roselló’s current term is up. (He assumed office this January, the same month as Trump.) The island’s voters are divided between those favoring statehood, those favoring the status quo, and those favoring independence. In a referendum held in June, the results were overwhelmingly in favor of statehood, but only twenty-three per cent of the electorate voted. Many Puerto Ricans abstained, seeing the vote as a political exercise organized by Roselló’s government. Still, support for statehood has undeniably been on the rise. A recent opinion poll conducted by the newspaper El Nuevo Día offered what may be a more realistic breakdown: fifty-two per cent in favor of statehood, twenty-seven per cent in favor of the current status, and fifteen per cent in favor of greater autonomy or independence.

Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz and her staff. Photograph by Christopher Gregory for The New Yorker

When I met with Yulín, her voice was hoarse, and she became emotional at times, tearing up when she spoke about the victims of Maria whom she was “unable to reach.” The elderly and the ill, she said anxiously, were still at great risk in places where relief supplies and medical help had yet to arrive. “This is like a slow death,” she said. “The patient is going into respiratory failure, and if we don’t get to them in time we’ll lose them.” (On Thursday, Trump tweeted his impatience with Puerto Rico’s continuing need for help, saying that the federal government “cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders . . . in P.R. forever!”)

There was one thing for which she wanted to give Trump due credit: temporarily lifting the highly unpopular Jones Act, a law from 1920 that prohibits ships from nations other than the United States from transporting goods directly to Puerto Rico. At the same time, she said that she wished the President would lift it for good. If “the people of China” wanted to send a ship filled with aid to Puerto Rico, she explained, they wouldn’t be able to, because of the Jones Act. It was only fair, she thought, for Puerto Rico to be freed from its enforced dependency on the United States government. “We deserve that,” she said. (On Sunday, ten days after it was suspended, the Jones Act was reimposed.) Yulín also said, “maybe Mr. Trump should do something about Puerto Rico’s debt, rather than just talking about it.” Last week, during his press conference in San Juan, Trump cavalierly spoke about “getting rid of Puerto Rico’s debt,” which caused an anxious flurry of activity among the island’s bond-holders; in the days that have followed, other members of the Administration, including the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, have contradicted Trump’s words, leaving them to join the legion of other apparent public misstatements the President has made since taking office.

Yulín told me that, for all its miseries, Hurricane Maria has offered the people of Puerto Rico the opportunity to turn their history around. The people’s spirit of solidarity and resilience had filled her with love and pride. “I had always been logically proud to be a part of this nation. It is now ingrained in my DNA,” she said, tearing up again. “Maybe we needed that. Maybe we needed to know that we can’t be looking for others long-term, but we have to look at ourselves and know what we want to become. so that we can build it together. And, whatever we want to become, it has to include everyone.”

When I asked Yulín what kind U.S.-Puerto Rican relationship she wished for in the future, she shot me a look and chose her words carefully. “I’d like it to be a real free, associated sovereign country”—a reference to the formal arrangement between the U.S. and Puerto Rico, which in Spanish defines Puerto Rico as a U.S. “territorio libre asociado”—“with ties to the United States in which each one of us knew our duties and responsibilities. But I would also like to partake in the vastness that the world has to offer. We’re small in size but we’re huge in dignity. And we deserve that. We deserve that.”