Melting Snow centers around the 1952 event during which the mayor of San Juan partnered with Eastern Airlines to transport two tons of snow from New Hampshire to Puerto Rico. The snow was a gift, meant to enchant Puerto Ricans with a white, American Christmas. As the spectacle unfolds, an unequal transaction is revealed: planes brought capitalist instant gratification in the form of snow, returning to the U.S., filled with the Puerto Rican cheap labor that would populate el barrio. As the snow melts, we begin to understand Puerto Rico’s colonial predicament condensed in the empty gift. Water tracks the diaspora to the mainland, taking on various forms as it completes its natural hydrologic cycle, a visual illustration of colonialism backwards and forwards in time: we travel from the fading mirage of melting snow to an approaching hurricane Maria, washing away the fiction of America as a paternalistic colonial power.
