Table Of Content© 2019 Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón
Published in 2019 by
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Cover artwork, Pentagramas (Staves) series, detail, 2012, 18 x 12 in, paper cutout, by
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Cover design by Rachel Cohen.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword
Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones
Introduction: Aftershocks of Disaster
Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón
PART I: OPENINGS
The Trauma Doctrine
A Conversation between Yarimar Bonilla and Naomi Klein
¡Ay María!
Mariana Carbonell, Marisa Gómez Cuevas, José Luis Gutiérrez, José Eugenio Hernández,
Mickey Negrón, Maritza Pérez Otero, and Bryan Villarini; translated by Carina del Valle
Schorske
PART II: NARRATING THE TRAUMA
WAPA Radio: Voices amid the Silence and Desperation
Sandra D. Rodríguez Cotto
María’s Death Toll: On the Crucial Role of Puerto Rico’s Investigative Journalists
Carla Minet
(note for a friend who wants to commit suicide after the hurricane)
Raquel Salas Rivera
“I’m Quite Comfortable”: Abandonment and Resignation after María
Benjamín Torres Gotay
Narrating the Unnameable
Eduardo Lalo
If a Tree Falls in an Island: The Metaphysics of Colonialism
Ana Portnoy Brimmer
This Was Meant to Be a Hurricane Diary
Beatriz Llenín Figueroa
Another Haphazard Gesture
Sofía Gallisá Muriente
PART III: REPRESENTING THE DISASTER
Our Fellow Americans: Why Calling Puerto Ricans “Americans” Will Not Save Them
Frances Negrón-Muntaner
US Media Depictions of Climate Migrants: The Recent Case of the Puerto Rican “Exodus”
Hilda Lloréns
Accountability and Representation: Photographic Coverage after the Disaster
Erika P. Rodríguez
Lifting the Veil: Portraiture as a Tool for Bilateral Representation
Christopher Gregory
The Importance of Politically Engaged Artistic and Curatorial Practices in the Aftermath of
Hurricane María
Marianne Ramírez-Aponte
Si no pudiera hacer arte, me iba: The Aesthetics of Disaster as Catharsis in Contemporary
Puerto Rican Art
Carlos Rivera Santana
Art and a Threshold Called Dignity
TIAGO (Richard Santiago)
Picking up the Pieces
Adrian Roman
PART IV: CAPITALIZING ON THE CRISIS
sinvergüenza sin nación/sinvergüenza with no nation
Raquel Salas Rivera
Puerto Rico’s Unjust Debt
Ed Morales
Puerto Rico’s Debt Is Odious
Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan
Dismantling Public Education in Puerto Rico
Rima Brusi and Isar Godreau
Puerto Rico’s Fight for a Citizen Debt Audit: A Strategy for Public Mobilization and a Fair
Reconstruction
Eva L. Prados-Rodríguez
Rhizomatic
Ana Portnoy Brimmer
PART V: TRANSFORMING PUERTO RICO
Looking for a Way Forward in the Past: Lessons from the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party
Mónica Jiménez
Psychoanalysis as a Political Act after María
Patricia Noboa Ortega
Authenticating Loss and Contesting Recovery: FEMA and the Politics of Colonial Disaster
Management
Sarah Molinari
The Energy Uprising: A Community-Driven Search for Sustainability and Sovereignty in
Puerto Rico
Arturo Massol-Deyá
Community Kitchens: An Emerging Movement?
Giovanni Roberto
Building Accountability and Secure Futures: An Interview with Mari Mari Narváez
Marisol LeBrón
Afterword: Critique and Decoloniality in the Face of Crisis, Disaster, and Catastrophe
Nelson Maldonado-Torres
Acknowledgments
Contributor Bios
Index
FOREWORD
Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones
Long before Hurricane María, the fiscal and political crisis had invested all
things Puerto Rican with increasing urgency. The threat of total collapse
continues to raise major themes of discussion in a global context: colonial
capitalism, human rights, gender equality, democracy, unpayable debt,
climate change, migration and citizenship, environmental policies, education,
and health care. And yet for many, the newly discovered US “territory” and
the millions of second-class American citizens remain mysterious, or rather
invisible, right before our eyes. Fortunately, there are signs that Puerto Rico’s
and the United States’ long, transnational history—often silenced in the
American mainstream—now commands serious attention from those trying
to come to a better understanding of the legacies of colonialism and of Puerto
Rican resistance.
The willingness to ask a huge array of new questions inspired the
organizers of the conference entitled “Aftershocks of Disaster—Puerto Rico a
Year after María,” held at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New
Jersey, in September 2018. I attended the Rutgers colloquium, and what I saw
and listened to in the give-and-take of conversation that day has stayed with
me. The fact that this event was held in New Jersey—and that other colloquia
animated by a similar spirit have been held in New York, Massachusetts,
Connecticut, Illinois, and Washington, DC—shows, first, the strength of the
ethos of solidarity among diverse diasporic communities and the institutions
they have created as well as the moral sensibility of their allies at universities
and research centers. Second, and equally important, it shows how the full
extent of the disaster is driving the research, writing, and activism of a new
generation of scholars and journalists. This is all particularly encouraging,
especially in view of the drastic budgetary cuts that are proving so destructive
for the Universidad de Puerto Rico at the worst possible time.
Like other islands in the Caribbean, current struggles in Puerto Rico have
roots deep in colonial history, dating back to the old Spanish colony and the
