It is a truism that in Puerto Rico they paved paradise, more ironic when we consider Puerto Rico’s culture closely identified national identity with a pristine, unspoiled landscape. By the twentieth-century Puerto Rican cultural identity was firmly established, so writers and artists abandon myths of a timeless and serene landscape moving instead to depictions of the reality of an often-brutal environment. Ecoerasing representations of an Isla of eternal springtime plummet after hurricane catastrophes 1899’s San Ciriaco and 1929’s San Felipe-Okeechobee. Bucolic landscapes become increasingly unsustainable in the twentieth century due to the impact of humans on the landscape, specifically infrastructures designed around fossil fuels (cars and the electrical grid) all within a capitalist economy dependent on the U.S. New advances in predicting and tracking hurricanes—from differential equations to hurricane hunter airplanes—would provide artistic inspiration as it became easier to “see” hurricanes. By at least mid-century, writers and artists are engaging with facets of ecology, geology, and meteorology in ways that reflect material reality as they also stress the dream of political independence. Hurricanes again become, as they had been in early modern times, agents in the story of the Nation, providing dynamic metaphors and characters that offer proof of Puerto Rican resilience.