Alana Casanova-Burgess

The city would have to spend public funds on fixing the statue, he lamented, instead of on fixing a pothole.

There are some potholes in Puerto Rico that are old enough to have birthday parties, but the city was going to go ahead and try to repair Juan Ponce de Leon in less than a day.

It felt ridiculous.

Online, people were coping with the absurdity the usual way.

with memes.

I saw it like at 10 a.m., 11 a.m., and I just started brainstorming.

Juan Pablo Diaz, who goes by Juan P, is a political satirist and actor.

He wanted to get something out about the statue really quickly.

Juanpi also rigged a bitmoji to look like a green-bearded Ponce de Leon singing along to the song.

There's a particular line he wrote.

The statue sings, You all know that nothing will be the same without me.

How will you remember colonialism?

It's a punch, because in Puerto Rico, nobody needs a statue to remember colonialism.

It's not in the past.

And so far, around 500 years of Puerto Rico's colonial past and present were being crammed into one single day.

More and more layers were revealing themselves as the hours ticked by.

Potholes, earthquakes, tax incentives.

The literal king of Spain.

And actually, the more Juanpi remembered the day with me, the more pissed off he got.

He remembered that the coverage was taking the vandalism of the statue so seriously, as though it was a national catastrophe.