SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — As Hurricane Maria roared over Puerto Rico in September 2017, Marena Pérez and Aureo Andino hunkered down inside their ballet studio. The couple never imagined that they, their daughter and Pérez’s parents would live there for three months, sleeping on pullout couches and relying on a gas generator.
The Category 4 hurricane flooded Pérez and Andino’s house with 4 feet of water. Unable to return home, the founders and directors of Mauro Ballet decided to open their doors to the community, teaching a free dance class each afternoon.
“It became an oasis for dancers in Puerto Rico,” said Andino. But Mauro Ballet still struggled — the dance company didn’t make money for 18 months.
It survived in part thanks to support from the Flamboyan Arts Fund, a $22 million initiative propelled by Lin-Manuel Miranda and his family, and funded mainly by money raised during a 2019 run of Miranda’s acclaimed Broadway musical “Hamilton” in San Juan.
“Artists always get left out of the conversation,” Miranda, an award-winning writer and performer whose parents were raised in Puerto Rico, told The Associated Press. “We wanted to make sure they were not forgotten in relief efforts.”
Instead of being forgotten, artists assumed essential roles, helping the archipelago grieve from Maria’s devastation and articulating the challenges Puerto Ricans faced.
“You can use the arts in so many ways to express your feelings, and to heal,” said Pérez.
The Flamboyan Arts Fund has supported 110 Puerto Rican arts organizations and 900 artists. Now the Miranda family and the D.C.-based Flamboyan Foundation are committing an additional $10 million to Puerto Rican arts and culture.
Despite federal funding cuts to arts and humanities, the new phase of giving is meant to go beyond emergency relief — helping arts and culture thrive and even become an economic driver for the archipelago.
“It just gives us too much back,” said Miranda, 45. “If you have ever enjoyed the work that comes from this island and its descendants, to invest in that future is important.”
Healing arts
Hurricane Maria led to an estimated nearly 3,000 deaths, most of them related to the lack of power, clean water, and other services. Damages surpassed $115 billion, and power outages lasted 11 months in some places.
The destruction was so vast that Marianne Ramírez Aponte, executive director and chief curator of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in San Juan, worried the cultural sector could not overcome it.
What happened instead was “quite the opposite,” she said.
Arts groups opened their spaces as relief hubs and activated mutual aid networks. “Cultural brigades” deployed their talents to comfort and entertain.
“It was a horrible situation, but we were able to prove the importance of art in the social process,” said Yari Helfeld, executive director of the community theater company Y No Había Luz.
Helfeld got requests to perform from isolated communities in Puerto Rico’s central mountains just weeks after the storm. She was surprised to be asked for theater when people still struggled to access food and water.
“They said, ‘You’re helping heal the spirit,’” said Helfeld.
Artists could also channel and contextualize the public frustration over the U.S. territory’s slow recovery. Maria exposed the consequences of what many Puerto Ricans still consider a colonial relationship with the U.S.
Help from federal and local government came slowly and sometimes not at all. Federally imposed austerity measures tied to massive public debt exacerbated economic woes. Power outages disrupted daily life.
After over 120,000 Puerto Ricans left the archipelago in search of stability, a wave of U.S. and foreign investors and remote workers descended, worsening displacement and prices.
Poetry, paintings and performances confronting these realities helped people “process intellectually, emotionally, what had happened to the country,” said Ramírez Aponte.
Artists like Rayze Michelle Ostolaza Oquendo expressed the territory’s hopes and disappointments.
“I have a dream, and it’s simple: to be allowed to be from here, to die on this land and whistle like the coquí, it’s not much to ask,” she wrote in her 2024 poem “Ser Puertorriqueño,” or “To Be Puerto Rican.”
A new phase
Money from the Flamboyan Arts Fund supported fellowships for Ostolaza Oquendo and other writers. It helped pay studio rent and wages, and restored a flooded wing of the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico.
The funding bolstered the sector’s resilience, equipping museums and cultural centers with solar panels and batteries, emergency food and first-aid kits to continue arts programming and support communities after disasters. A sweeping effort to digitize 1,200 art pieces and artifacts across the archipelago became a lifeline during the COVID-19 pandemic, when museums could continue their programming online.
The Miranda Family Fund and the Flamboyan Foundation planned to wind down the project after granting all $22 million. Instead, they’re committing more and encouraging donors to join them.
“Because it’s been successful, but mostly because it’s needed still, we’ve decided to continue it,” said Kristin Ehrgood, who co-founded the Flamboyan Foundation with her husband Vadim Nikitine and serves as its CEO. “Funding for arts and arts organizations continues to decline.”
President Donald Trump has proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, all of which support Puerto Rican institutions. The Puerto Rico Humanities Council saw its 2025 general operating grant cut by over half.
Ehrgood said the two families want the new funds to also go beyond emergency relief, amplifying Puerto Rico’s talent and even stimulating its economy.
This month, Latin music superstar and 2026 Super Bowl Halftime Show headliner Bad Bunny completed a 31-concert residency in San Juan estimated to have injected $733 million into the local economy on top of a multiyear Amazon Music partnership that will support local causes.
His newest album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” is a celebration of his homeland that showcases local musicians and beloved musical genre like plena and salsa. It also calls out the territory’s political status and fight against displacement in songs like “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,” or “What Happened to Hawaii.”
Miranda called Bad Bunny’s approach “brilliant.”
There are more artists who can carry those messages, if they’re backed.
“To support voices that speak on behalf of the island and tell the story of the island is a net plus,” said Miranda. “Puerto Rico always tell us what’s going on.”
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