Since Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico has worked to rebuild amid long periods with no power and very little access to information. One year later, the lights are mostly back on — but many problems remain. 

Tanzina Vega, host of WNYC's The Takeaway, spent the last week in Puerto Rico speaking to dozens of residents about recovery efforts and life on the island post-Maria. She spoke with WNYC's Richard Hake about what she's heard.

"One of the biggest themes that's come up this week, among the many, are a theme of resilience and a theme of reckoning with colonialism — what it means to be a colony of the United States," Vega says, referring to Puerto Rico's status as an unincorporated U.S. territory. "Because there's a sense of being neither here nor there for a lot of folks, they've decided to take the rebuilding of the island into their own hands and really attempt to get back to a sense of normalcy, whether it involves the federal, state, or local government, or not."

The latest death toll from Hurricane Maria has been reported at 2,975 people, and the widespread loss of electricity, cell reception, and internet isolated some communities for months. The crises have been widely reported on, but Vega says people on the island also feel like the mainstream media narrative has overlooked their own rebuilding efforts on the ground. They say there's too much emphasis on what the island has lost, and the common narrative is often driven by President Trump's response to the disaster — like his recent tweets attempting to debunk the hurricane's death toll by claiming Democrats made it up as a smear tactic.

But the story looks different in Puerto Rico.

"That's one name that rarely comes up, if at all," Vega says of Trump. "The reality on the ground here is yes, they hear what the president is saying, but it's not top of mind. People are much more interested in, 'Where do we go from here?'"

For many in Puerto Rico, that question entails a growing awareness of their colonial relationship to the U.S., especially as it impacts their day to day lives. Puerto Rico has been an unincorporated American territory since 1898, after the U.S.'s victory in the Spanish-American War. Islanders are U.S. citizens by birth, but Puerto Rico is self-governed — and since it's not a state, Puerto Rico's rights and privileges in Washington are limited. Puerto Ricans, for example, don't have voting power in Congress, and they can't vote for president. In the wake of Maria, different factions of the island have been challenging the colonialist status quo and calling for change. Some Puerto Ricans, like Governor Ricardo Rosselló, have advocated for statehood. Others are calling for independence, with Maria's aftermath cementing the conviction that the U.S. is neglecting the island.

The relationship between the island and the U.S. mainland becomes further complicated with the current Puerto Rican diaspora. According to the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, there are approximately 3 million Puerto Ricans on the island — now, there's nearly twice that number in the continental U.S.

But Vega says that even across the diaspora, Puerto Ricans continue to rally together after the storm.

"People thought because of this colonial relationship with the United States they often thought they couldn't rebuild, that they weren't able to do it. And what many people found is, you know what, they could," Vega says. "People have really walked away from this with a sense of community, and a broader sense of resilience."