Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Reimagining Recovery: Debt, Mutual Aid, And Disaster Governance In Puerto Rico, Sarah Molinari

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study analyzes the politics and lived experiences of debt and climate disaster recovery in Puerto Rico. It examines mutual aid and debt resistance in relation to governance techniques and overlapping crises marked by the U.S. territory’s bankruptcy, the aftermath of Hurricane Maria (2017), and culminating with popular mobilizations in the summer of 2019 that propelled the governor’s resignation. Tracing the ways that the post-hurricane social disaster and debt crisis are mutually constitutive, I investigate a case of women-led grassroots mutual aid organizing in the east-central municipality of Caguas, Puerto Rico and a political movement calling for a citizen audit …

Nonsovereign Racecraft: How Colonialism, Debt, And Disaster Are Transforming Puerto Rican Racial Subjectivities, Isar Godreau, Yarimar Bonilla

Publications and Research

Using the concept of “racecraft” to describe the state production of racial subjectivities, we argue that this process has been increasingly compromised in Puerto Rico by a lack of sovereignty and by the current socioeconomic crisis. We argue that the state-sponsored idea that Puerto Rican white and mixed-race identities operate separately from the US racial framework is receding. Based on the unconventional use of an open-ended question for racial identification in a survey administered to over one thousand Puerto Ricans, we found: a reluctance to identify racially, an awareness of a normative “whiteness” that excludes Puerto Ricans, and a tendency …

Postdisaster Futures: Hopeful Pessimism, Imperial Ruination, And La Futura Cuir, Yarimar Bonilla

Publications and Research

This essay discusses how Puerto Ricans are imagining and building new futures out of a political context of material and affective ruin that is not guided by the promise of a modernist future or the palliative anticipation of a sovereignty to come. It examines how the politics of ruination might lead to a “hopeful pessimism” that could break with the nostalgic immobility of the arrested present. It concludes by exploring the possibilities of an emerging cuir (queer) futurity that breaks with raced and gendered scripts of postcolonial sovereignty to envision a new postdisaster future.

The Public Reckoning: Anti-Debt Futures After #Rickyrenuncia, Sarah Molinari

Publications and Research

This essay argues that the summer 2019 mobilizations in Puerto Rico and the renewed demand for a debt audit help to imagine anti-debt futures that disrupt the terms and temporalities of public debt and indebted lives. The essay discusses one form of debt resistance-a comprehensive citizen debt audit-as central to deepen the process of public reckoning marked by #RickyRenuncia and to build upon the landscapes of protest and solidarity emerging in its wake.

The Coloniality Of Disaster: Race, Empire, And The Temporal Logics Of Emergency In Puerto Rico, Usa, Yarimar Bonilla

Publications and Research

This essay uses the case of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico to discuss “the coloniality of disaster”: how catastrophic events like hurricanes, earthquakes, but also other forms political and economic crisis deepen the fault lines of long-existing racial and colonial histories. It argues that disaster capitalism needs to be understood as a form of racio-colonial capitalism and that this in turn requires us to question our understandings of both “resilience” and “recovery.” The article focuses on the “wait of disaster” as a temporal logic of state subjugation and on how Puerto Ricans responded to state abandonment through modes of autogesti� …

Cultural Heritage And Local Ecological Knowledge Under Threat: Two Caribbean Examples From Barbuda And Puerto Rico, Rebecca Boger, Sophia Perdikaris, Isabel Rivero-Collazo

School of Global Integrative Studies: Faculty Publications

While the impacts to the infrastructures in Barbuda and Puerto Rico by Hurricanes Irma and Maria have received attention in the news media, less has been reported about the impacts of these catastrophic events on the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of these Caribbean islands. This report provides an assessment of the impacts on the cultural heritage by these storms; tangible heritage includes historic buildings, museums, monuments, documents and other artifacts and intangible heritage includes traditional artistry, festivities, and more frequent activities such as religious services and laundering. While the physical destruction was massive, the social contexts in which these …

Puerto Rico: Necrópolis, Yarimar Bonilla

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Dios En Carne: Rastafari And The Embodiment Of Spiritual Blackness In Puerto Rico, Omar Ramadan-Santiago

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my dissertation, I examine how the Rastafari community in Puerto Rico constructs, reshapes, imagines and embodies blackness as a personal, political, and ideological identity. I argue that my interlocutors refuse non-black privilege and choose blackness, an act that is understood as identification not with subjugation but with power. I consider their identification with blackness and enactment of this identity as a performance. My analysis, based on 22 months of ethnographic research, and utilizing ethnography, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews, explores how my interlocutors claim blackness as a spiritual identity. In doing so, they demonstrate the metaphysical nature of race …

The Leaked Texts At The Heart Of Puerto Rico’S Massive Protests, Yarimar Bonilla

Publications and Research

With Governor Rosselló refusing to step down, Puerto Ricans are gathering today in what could be the island’s largest-ever protest.

Authenticating Loss And Contesting Recovery: Fema And The Politics Of Colonial Disaster Management, Sarah Molinari

Publications and Research

The chapter discusses how institutional regulators of disaster recovery "authenticate" loss and contribute to the process of disciplining disaster subjects. Drawing on ethnographic research after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, the chapter suggests that alternative grassroots approaches to disaster recovery point to a reimagining of "recovery" organized around a framework of support and affective relations.

Bad Bunny, Good Scapegoat: How 'El Conejo Malo' Is Stirring A 'Moral Panic' In Post-Hurricane Puerto Rico, Yarimar Bonilla

Publications and Research

Article examines the Moral Panic around the music of trap artist Bad Bunny in Puerto Rico

Book Review-The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On The Disaster Capitalists, Sarah Molinari

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Climate Change, Colonialism, And Second-Class Citizenry: A Case Study Of The Impacts Of Hurricane María In Puerto Rico, Aislyne Calianos

Senior Honors Projects

The hurricane season of 2017 was a historic one, with mammoth storms making landfall one after another, in what seemed like an unrelenting assault on our coastal cities and communities. Hurricane Harvey inundated Houston, Irma plowed through Florida, and Maria devastated Puerto Rico, but one of these storms was unlike the others. Why is it that the American citizens of our southern states were able to recover so much more quickly than our citizens in Puerto Rico? In the era of climate change, we will be forced to reckon with the modern legacy of colonialism, as vulnerable communities must face …

Confronting The Present: Migration In Sidney Mintz’S Journal For The People Of Puerto Rico, Ismael Garcia-Colon

Publications and Research

Sidney Mintz’s field journal for The People of Puerto Rico, published in 1956, is a valuable source for historical anthropological work. Until now, however, it has remained a hidden treasure for the anthropology of migration. By the late 1940s and 1950s, migration was central to the lives of Puerto Rican sugarcane workers and their families, and Mintz recorded important details of it. His journal shows how people maneuvered within fields of power that were full of opportunities and constraints for people seeking to make a living by migrating. Thanks to Mintz, anthropologists can learn about working-class Puerto Ricans’ experiences, lives, …

La Culpa La Tiene Derrida: La Praxis Deconstrucionista De Buitrago Y Sus Implicaciones En Mi Quehacer Archivístico, Marisol Ramos

UConn Library Presentations

En esta presentación discutiré como el antropólogo Carlos Buitrago, durante su periodo decontrucionista, influyó mi carrera académica en el campo de la archivística. En mi trabajo trazare el camino recorrido junto con Buitrago, primero como su ayudante de investigación en 1992 en un proyecto analizando los repartos vecinales del pueblo de Adjuntas (1824-1832), luego en 1993, trabajando juntos en el Archivo General de Puerto Rico donde me introdujo a los archivos de aguas de Guayama y el tema de los sistemas de riego en este pueblo durante el siglo XIX, y más tarde en 1999 cuando compartió conmigo sus transcripciones …

The Colonial Legacies Of “Fiesta Island”: A Critical Study Of Live-Music Events Production In Puerto Rico, Anilyn Diaz

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the historical relationship between the state and national culture in Puerto Rico as seen through the case of the entertainment industry, specifically live-music events production. The dissertation is located within two bodies of literature: critical post-colonial cultural studies of cultural industries and cultural policy, and cultural approaches to scholarship on collective action and state-civil society relationships in neoliberal contexts. The research design includes archival work and analysis of organizational material, supported by a cultural ethnography approach to semi-structured informant interviews and group interviews. The interviews focus on the historical development, cultural legacies, and practices of the entertainment …

Ethnicity: Contemporary Ethnicity In The Inner Bluegrass (Fa 601), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Foklife Arhives Project 601. Collection of materials related to Ethnicity, a project documenting ethnic heritage in the inner Bluegrass, sponsored by The Living Arts and Science Center, the Kentucky Folklife Program of the Kentucky Historical Society, and the Lexington Public Library. This collection includes audio and written transcripts of those interviews. Also included are various administrative and program related papers.

Conjuring The Close From Afar A Border-Crossing Tale Of Vieques’ Activism And Obama-Empire, Víctor M. Torres-Vélez, Sarah Molinari, Katharine Lawrence

Publications and Research

After more than 60 years of military occupation, 30 of these under violent military practices, a social movement forced the U.S. Navy from the island of Vieques. This victory would not have been possible without the highly effective organization of civil disobedience carried out on the island. But the sum total of the actions that eventually forced out the U.S. Navy, neither happened exclusively within the boundaries of Vieques, nor was carried out by Viequense residents alone. In this article we want to suggest that this amazing victory—a testament of people’s will in the face of globalization—is also a border- …

Survivorship, Infertility And Parenthood: Experiencing Life After Cancer In Puerto Rico, Karen Elizabeth Dyer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

While incidence rates are increasing for many cancers in Puerto Rico, mortality rates are declining (Torres-Cintron, et al. 2010), resulting in growing numbers of survivors and creating a situation in which long-term survivorship concerns are beginning to emerge as priorities. The importance of quality-of-life among survivors of cancer is increasingly being recognized among healthcare providers, although there remains a gap in knowledge of how young adult survivors cope with long-term treatment-related physical effects, such as infertility, and of the impact of cancer on survivors' social relationships and future goals.

Because understandings of "cancer survivorship," as well as of reproduction, vary …

Claiming Equality: Puerto Rican Farmworkers In Western New York, Ismael Garcia-Colon

Publications and Research

n July of 1966, a group of Puerto Rican migrant workers protested against police brutality and discrimination in North Collins, a small farm community of western NewYork. Puerto Rican farmworkers made up a substantial part of the population, and had transformed the ethnic, racial, and gender landscape of the town. Local officials and residents produced and reproduced images of Puerto Ricans as inferior subjects within US racial and ethnic hierarchies. Those negative images of Puerto Ricans shaped the way in which local authorities elaborated policies of social control against these farmworkers in North Collins. At the same time, Puerto Rican …

Playing And Eating Democracy: The Case Of Puerto Rico's Land Distribution Program, 1940s-1960s, Ismael Garcia-Colon

Publications and Research

In the early 1940s, the colonial government of Puerto Rico with the consent of the U.S. federal government began to elaborate a land reform. Under Title V of the Land Law of 1941, the government established resettlement communities for landless families. One of their goals was to transform landless agricultural workers into an industrial and urban labor force by teaching them “democratic, industrial, and modern” habits. Government officials distributed land to landless families through lotteries, portraying the ceremonies as acts of democracy. Community education programs produced literature, films, and posters aimed at fostering development and political participation. The colonial state …

Buscando Ambiente: Hegemony And Subaltern Tactics Of Survival In Puerto Rico’S Land Distribution Program, Ismael Garcia-Colon

Publications and Research

A land distribution program in the community of Parcelas Gándaras in Cidra, Puerto Rico, transformed the lives of formerly landless workers. Examination of the working conditions and social relations of workers before the program (1890s–1945) and their economic strategies, migration, and networks after becoming small landholders (1945–1960s) shows how they used their land to accommodate their practices of everyday life and their tactics of survival. Local ruling groups became hegemonic through the establishment of land distribution communities. The habitus of the new landholders expressed the ways in which they engaged in economic, social, and political activities shaped by the new …