What has happened on the streets of old San Juan and the distant west coast and mountain towns of Puerto Rico has been stunning, a hauntingly beautiful display of people power — a full-on awakening augured by the decades-invoked “Despierta Boricua” slogan, one that allows islanders to say things like “ya no es el mismo país” (it’s no longer the same country) and revel in the revolutionary awareness that “somos más, y no temenos miedo” (there are more of us than them, and we are not afraid).

Personally, I’m overjoyed. I have friends out there singing, dancing salsa, doing yoga, banging kitchen pots every night at 8 PM, gyrating to reggaetón mixes. Ricky Rosselló has resigned, and the people have identified a corrupt class of elites while creating momentum to overturn the United States’s neoliberal-colonial project, put in place fresh leaders, and generate a new sense of progressive politics. Their anti-austerity resistance seems to have worked.

Yet, on the other hand, sitting in New York, the hometown of Trump and Wall Street, I’m worried. The removal of Rosselló and the apparent collapse of his pro-statehood, ironically named New Progressive Party (NPP), seems also to coincide with the most sinister of elite desired outcomes: the decimation of Puerto Rican democracy. The current internecine NPP power struggle over who will be the next governor — between Tomás Rivera Schatz, (known locally as “Tommy”), a sinister hard-right figure who prefers to rule with an iron fist, and the moderate wing represented by Rosselló and his secretary of state nominee Pedro Pierluisi, who had dubious connections to lobbying when he was resident commissioner a few years ago — is more evidence of this.