Cruise passengers drifted through the streets of Old San Juan on Thursday as shop owners took plywood down from store windows and painted over graffiti demanding Governor Ricardo Rossell resign.
On a colonial plaza behind the governor's mansion, a small group of men and women laid out the shoes of people who died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, each decorated with a blue flower.
The shoes were first laid out on the steps of the US territory's capitol last year as a protest against government refusal to acknowledge the premature deaths of thousands of people due to the damage wrought by the September 2017 storm.
On Thursday, less than 12 hours after the island's largest public protest in years, the shoes became part of a far-flung effort to forge a sustainable protest movement to turn Rossell out of office.
The spark was the leak of hundreds of pages of online chats of the governor and his aides slinging vulgar jokes and insults about women, gays and even the dead from Hurricane Maria.
But the kindling for this week's two large protests against Rossell, participants say, was years of mismanagement, corruption and cutbacks, including the closure of hundreds of schools and the collapse of the electric grid after Maria.
"Rossell represents something, a corrupt system. A system that laughs at the living, that laughs at the dead," said Kique Cubera Garcia, a 41-year-old documentary maker who was helping lay out shoes. "Ricardo Rossell is the straw that broke the camel's back. We're going to throw him out."
"I'm committed, more strongly than ever, to move ahead with the public policies that we've worked for so hard in all areas of the government," Rossell said in a written statement Thursday morning. "I strongly believe that it's possible to restore confidence and that we'll be able to reconcile after this painful and sad process."
"A lot of bad things are happening in Puerto Rico," Trump tweeted, adding that "The Governor is under siege" and deriding San Juan Mayor Carmen Yuln Cruz, a frequent critic of both the president and Rossell, as "a despicable and incompetent person who I wouldn't trust under any circumstance."
He alleged that much of relief funding approved by Congress after 2017's devastating Hurricane Maria "was squandered away or wasted, never to be seen again," and said "much of (Puerto Rico's) leadership is corrupt, & robbing the U.S. Government blind!"
The mayor responded on Facebook, saying "I understand you are unwilling and unable to understand DIGNITY when it hits you straight on. I also understand you cannot condemn corrupt, misogynistic, homophobic, and abusive behavior. After all, if you did, you would be passing judgement (sic) on yourself."
"The country is starting to make its voice heard in new ways," said artists Gloribel Delgado Esquilin, who was helping lay shoes on the Old San Juan plaza. "There's no way of predicting what's going to happen here."