Hello, my name is Carolina Domenech. This website is the culmination of a year-long capstone project that I have been working on throughout my senior year at Boston Latin School. This class is open only to seniors and is built around the topic of each student's choosing. The process began with a research proposal, which had to be approved by our teachers. Once the topic was decided, every student gathered a plethora of background research to support our topics, which was then used to create a research paper. All of that research, alongside additional information gathering, has come together to become this website that incorporates both the research and interviews I have conducted with historians, economists, journalists, government officials, and legal scholars.

As is clear by the title of this project, my focus was on the gentricication of Puerto Rico. Specifically, the role that Act 60 – Puerto Rico’s tax incentive code – has played in its acceleration. This topic was particularly meaningful because I have grown up watching this change occur. Both of my parents are Puerto Rican, and I have grown up spending my holidays at my dad's childhood home in Miramar. Over the years, I’ve noticed many changes, such as the shift in the faces that I saw around nearby neighborhoods, the new storefronts thar replaced ones that I grew up going to, and a shift in the overall energy of the island. The moment that crystaluzed it for me was last year, when someone told me that their trip to puerto rico wasn’t that great because it felt like any other place in the U.S. That comment shocked me– but the more I thought about it, th more i realized that this was not by accident. It was rathe the result of a series of specific policy decision,s years of economic harships, and a certain kind pf outside wealth that has beem arriving on the island anr demaking it in its own image.

While working on this project, I webt back to Purto rico to do more research and conict interives. I s[ome with people across the political and professional spectrum, including a pro-statehood government official and an independista investigative journalist. Among all of my interviewees, many of their perspectives do not align, That disagreement, I have discovered, is part of the story I aim to tell through this website.

Due to Act 60 and the changes on the island in the past decade, countless communities and traditions have been reshaped. The demographics of the island itself have been reshaped, impacting the cultural landscape of Puerto Rico. Continue reading here to learn more about what gentrification is and how it has impacted the island.