In 1952, the mayor of San Juan, Felisa Rincon de Gautier, partnered with the now defunct U.S. carrier Eastern Airlines to transport two tons of snow from New Hampshire to Puerto Rico. The snow was a gift to the island meant to enchant Puerto Rican children with a “white” American Christmas. The spectacle represented an unfair economic transaction: planes brought capitalist instant gratification in the form of snow, and returned to the U.S. filled with the Puerto Rican cheap labor that would populate el barrio.
Puerto Rico’s colonial captivity is condensed in the “gift” of melting snow.
Melting Snow is a dig into the past, an act of media archeology, contextualizing the filmmaker’s Grandparents’ experiences to make sense of the present and examine the way American narratives are told, and often warped. As our world crumbles and restructures, Melting Snow forces a reckoning of the motivations and politics behind the United States’ relationship to the island and the anomaly of the oldest colony in the world.
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