I’m watching a man order a tripleta without knowing what it is—I guess he likes the sound of it, the notion of something tripled. Instead of engaging with the person he’s ordering from, whom one could reasonably discern is aware of what the sandwich consists of, he turns to other tourists. “What is a tripleta?” he asks these people who are as clueless as he is about this Puerto Rican item. (It contains two kinds of pork and steak, and such excess as well as the inclusion of beef suggests U.S. influence, but I’m not really sure of its date of origin.)

There are different kinds of tourists, of course. Some are just embarrassed of their ignorance and would rather commiserate on it with their ostensible countrymen. Others seem to relish in their ignorance, act absolutely stunned by the possibility that Puerto Rico could be different from the U.S. when they didn’t need a passport to get here and the currency is all the same. They ask me, without a greeting, Do you speak English? or Do you talk English? As though they’re in a desperate hurry and everyone they’ve encountered thus far has rebuffed them in their plea for directions. The fact is, they’re in Viejo San Juan and basically everyone could tell them where to go in English. They call it the “Old Town,” lately. I don’t know how or why this started, but it gives the distinct feeling that these people think they’re in a Disney World attraction.

One tourist recently came up to me and asked in Spanish where to eat traditional food. I gave her a recommendation, but I had to temper it when she wanted me to confirm that it would serve comida rica. “En Viejo San Juan, la comida… no es muy rica,” I had to say, because occasionally good places tend to be wildly inconsistent and the consistently good places are extremely expensive. Good food sometimes turns into a bad memory when the bill comes.

My husband grew up here in Viejo San Juan and it’s also where he works. If you talk to him, or his mom who moved here in the ’80s, or any other local, they will tell you how much things have changed over the decades—for the worse. If you have a car, you’ll never go to the supermarket here, because it’s overpriced, with a lacking selection and old produce. There are few stores that would cater to the daily doings of a regular life: no bakery, no tailor, no dry cleaner. You can buy waffles in the shape of a penis or vulva, though. The buildings are filled with AirBnBs. Over the years that I’ve lived here, I’ve felt the emptying out of residents. It’s palpable. That affects the food.

There’s an outpost of a local chain here that we had come to rely on for empanadas, french fries, and a couple of classic cocktails. It was like a miracle for a while, an oasis in the desert: We could go out for a serviceable dinner in an air-conditioned space and not spend over $100. But then it changed. The new bartenders ceased to know how to make a martini or a Negroni. The food was taking longer and longer to come out. On our last visit, which we decided really had to be our last—but who knows, honestly—we didn’t even get our empanadas while the table next to us, which had been sat after us, received four different main courses. 

We had become regulars at this place, to an extent, and it didn’t really help, because of the employee turnover and the fact that they experience so much of a transient clientele—and because I do notice that tourists and many locals alike do not tip properly. There’s simply no reason for anyone working in service to care unless they’ve served you before, and because most hospitality workers can’t afford to live in the neighborhood and have to schlep themselves to these jobs, they don’t see us as neighbors. That wasn’t the case when I first moved here: I’d say hi to someone in the streets while walking Benny, and later I’d see them at their job when I stopped in for a drink or a bite. 

Conversations about tourism are old: I’ve lectured on culinary tourism; Valene Smith published the edited volume Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism in 1989; tourism as travel for pleasure emerged in the eighteenth century. 

But overtourism is a new phenomenon, and the false senses of “home” and locality provided by AirBnBs exacerbate this (and if you did not know, AirBnB is on the BDS list).

The proliferation of short-term rentals is an expression of Naomi Klein’s “disaster capitalism,” especially here. “The number of units operating as short-term rentals in Puerto Rico jumped to more than 25,000 in 2023 from about 1,000 in 2014,” according to the Associated Press. What happened between 2014 and 2023? A tax break for foreigners was put in place in 2012 that picked up interest; in 2017, there was Hurricane Maria; in 2020, there were earthquakes and a pandemic. The archipelago’s population is declining each year. Still, the tourists come, and they stand outside their AirBnBs with their luggage blocking the sidewalk. Puerto Rico being a colony of the U.S. and having a corrupt, right-wing local government means no one has an inclination to regulate these things—and the market cannot regulate itself, despite what capitalists might think.

Americans are trained to consider changes that are political and economic—human-made changes—as natural and inevitable. This behooves the rich and powerful, who can act as though their wealth and influence are simply the correct order of things, even as cancer patients and single mothers end up on TikTok hawking crap to pay their bills. You see it with ChatGPT and other conversations about generative AI: The notion that one must get on the bandwagon… for what? Going where? (Toward the lining of losers’ pockets and the further degradation of culture, the environment, and education, I suppose.) AirBnB is one of these things, too, especially when it is a contributing factor to demographic changes that lead to negative developments in the character of a neighborhood or city.  

Food and travel writer Emiko Davies has written about this in terms of Florence:

In the “Tourism Gentrification” chapter of 2018’s Handbook of Gentrification Studies (available to download after the paywall), the author Agustín Cocola-Gant does a big service to the gentrification conversation by making a distinction between how it operates in places where the economy is robust and places where the economy is tourism-based. He writes, “housing in historic cities is again being rehabilitated by tourism investors, in a process in which tenants are supplanted by transient visitors as the former represent barriers to capital accumulation.” That’s what’s going on in Viejo San Juan: Gentrification isn’t the influx of middle class people with white-collar jobs—these hardly exist here—but of this deepening tourism dependence.

Cocola-Grant just published a piece in The Guardian about the effects of AirBnB and short-term rentals on Lisbon, something that strikes a very strong chord when I think about San Juan: “The result is a city that welcomes foreign wealth but excludes many of its own citizens, prioritising the desires of global consumers over the needs of local communities. The current housing crisis reflects a stark disconnect between wages and property prices – with housing costs approaching those of global cities in a country where salaries remain among the lowest in Europe.” 

I don’t have a positive note on which to end: This is an ongoing crisis, and human decision-making when it comes to planning trips, deciding values, and being aware of policy plays an incredibly big role. Tourism might be a big money-maker, but at what cost? If the comida no es rica, what’s the point? 

Note: We hope to move to New York soon, for anyone wondering. It’s just been more delayed than we anticipated by factors outside our control.