"It's kind of an interesting situation if you're Puerto Rican, but if you're Puerto Rican and superintendent of schools, well, that might be something else," he said.
The situation that non-Puerto Ricans face in New York, with Puerto Ricans defining many elements of the city's larger Latino culture, happens to Puerto Ricans nationally.
Martín Espada, 44, who has published six collections of poetry and is a professor of English and Spanish at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, says this situation partly reflects the dearth of Puerto Rican editors in the publishing industry.
So it was that Juanes came down with two fellow Puerto Rican artists, which under the current (dating back to before the 1900s) situation for that island nation pretty much means part of the commonwealth of the United States and technically US citizens.
In doing so, he was able to speed up approval by various Puerto Rican government agencies, which he said was necessary because of the dire economic situation.
In a meeting with bond analysts in New York on Monday, the president of the Puerto Rican Senate, Eduardo Bhatia, said officials in the United States Treasury and White House had been analyzing the situation carefully, "wondering how they can help Puerto Rico send a very strong signal of stability right now".
Unemployment in Puerto Rico affects about one-eighth of the workforce, though the situation has improved since the early 1980s, when nearly one-fourth of Puerto Rican workers were jobless.
One change you might expect would be some toning down of the show's humor, an alternately surreal and raunchy mélange of situations and jokes involving sex, body parts, sex, children, Sept. 11, Puerto Rican midgets and sex.
Should the island default, the situation could become uglier and launch a number of lawsuits between bondholders and Puerto Rican utilities.
