Infrastructure and Colonial Difference in Puerto Rico after Hurricane María

Abstract

Hurricane María wiped out the infrastructures that helped sustain modern life in Puerto Rico. As communities, organizations, and the government responded to the disaster, the politics of infrastructure took on a central and urgent role in debates about colonialism, debt, life, and death. This paper describes everyday life in the days and weeks that followed María, focusing on the strategies people used to obtain essential services such as power and water. People mobilized family and community networks, along with material objects including buckets and gas tanks, into improvised infrastructures that compensated, however inadequately, for what was destroyed. This article considers how state and corporate forms of governance shape day to day survival through people's entanglements with these emergency infrastructures. It argues that the experience of obtaining food, water, power, and other necessities in the aftermath of María revealed, in an embodied way, the racialization of Puerto Ricans as colonial subjects.

Nonsovereign Racecraft: How Colonialism, Debt, and Disaster are Transforming Puerto Rican Racial Subjectivities

“…The cultural and educational programming previously sponsored by the ELA was far from sustainable, as seen in drastic budget cuts to agencies such as the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, the headquarters for which is now slated to become a hotel (Meléndez García 2019); the public television network WIPR, which is up for privatization (Hernández Mercado 2020); and the public school system, battered by the closure of more than four hundred schools, which is roughly a third of the schools Puerto Rico had before 2016 (Brusi 2020). With the declaration of the debt crisis in 2016, this debilitated cultural apparatus began to collapse, along with local roadways, the electric grid, and other forms of infrastructure, thus making undeniable Puerto Rico's colonial status and subordinate racial position (Ficek 2018;Lloréns and Stanchich 2019).…”

Frail modernities: Latin American infrastructures between repair and ruination

“…Recalling again the case of the Samarco mining disaster in Brazil, in moments such as these, ruination leaves its marginal position to become an existential condition, automatically turning the affected environment into "a place of memory and forgetting, a site of present struggle, a site of future transformation, and a medium of ongoing, even chronic, toxicity" (Creado and Helmereich 2018, 37). Something similar was experienced in Puerto Rico in September 2017 in the wake of the passage of Hurricane Maria, whose more lethal consequences were not caused by the hurricane itself, but by the fact that after its passage "infrastructures that helped constitute modern colonial subjects were gone, along with the promise of progress and development with state investment in the wellbeing of the population" (Ficek 2018, 109), causing "something like the end of the world" (Ficek 2018).…”

Zombie infrastructure: A legal geography of railroad monstrosity in the California desert

“…The zombie was formed in the context of ongoing US colonial presence in Haiti, a means of understanding legacies of racialized and enslaved labor. In extending the use of the word zombie to railroad infrastructure, I consider how infrastructure indexes the state’s relationship to its denizens (Ficek, 2018) and reflect on what Manu Karuka (2019: 42) calls railroad colonialism, in which the colonial state attempts “to confine myriad possible futures into the death threat of imperialism.” In zombie infrastructure, the already-imperial railroad is the zombie that is being reanimated by a new bocor: Cadiz Inc. In this way, I take seriously Hurston’s framework of the zombie and apply it to a seemingly dead infrastructure—the transcontinental spur line—that is reanimated by a new master.…”