Disaster Capitalism in Post-María Puerto Rico

On 6 January 2020, the island of Puerto Rico suffered a 5.8 magnitude earthquake. The next day, in the early hours of the morning, they experienced another, stronger 6.4 quake. Since then, the island has been hit by aftershock after aftershock. Though published just prior to these events and focused on Hurricane María, Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón’s Aftershocks of Disaster uses “aftershock” to presciently attend to the ways any catastrophe wreaks havoc, exposes vulnerabilities, and rarely ever has one root cause. In this way, this volume traces the co-imbrication of serial colonization, climate change, police brutality, and disaster that were revealed in María. Indeed, as Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones writes in the foreword, “It soon became clear that the aftermath of María—as has also been said of Hurricane Katrina—reveals much that was concealed” (x).

As the editors write in the introduction, “The concept of aftershocks is mostly used in the context of earthquakes to describe the jolts felt after the initial earthquake. Aftershocks can continue for days, weeks, months, and even years after the ‘mainshock.’” “Aftershocks,” then, is a way of theorizing a larger assemblage of events with reciprocal relationships to other, seemingly disparate, events. “We ask whether Hurricane María should be considered the ‘mainshock’ at all,” Bonilla and LeBrón continue, “or whether the storm and its effects are best understood as the compounded results of a longer colonial history” (2). In their theorization, Hurricane María was a disaster that cannot be separated out from the colonial context in which it formed. Understood in this way, María was no “natural” disaster; the storm and its aftermath were and still are the result of political malpractice.

Among the authors in this volume are activists, artists, academics, journalists, poets, and medical professionals, each of whom provide a novel entry point to understanding María’s aftershocks. Raquel Salas Rivera’s poem, for example, “(note for a friend who wants to commit suicide after the hurricane),” affects the gut-wrenching helplessness felt both by survivors and by their friends, who know that no words will do. Additionally, the anthropologists Rima Brusi and Isar Godreau detail the impact on education, noting the infrastructural, psychological, and physical damage caused by the storm (“Dismantling Public Education in Puerto Rico”). Such a polyphonic experience mirrors the chaos of disaster—that in the midst of destruction, there is no firm sense of place. What unites these authors is “disaster capitalism,” which Bonilla explores in her interview of Naomi Klein in “The Trauma Doctrine.” Moreover, what this illustrates is the experience of learning-in-process for those who survived and how they have had to manage loss without a sense of foundation. The book’s chorus of authors, then, invites the reader to the multiple and contradictory experiences of María, which was not one event but a series of interrelated prior events and still-unfolding events.

The book itself is divided into five parts, each with its own thematic center. Like the eye of a storm, though, these centers offer brief glimpses into destruction that abounds. Part 1, “Openings,” is a considerably smaller section and contains only the aforementioned interview and the short play ¡Ay María! Anchoring these two pieces is the importance of dialogue as a method of processing and conveying information. Indeed, as the authors of ¡Ay María! note, on several occasions audience members got involved in the drama, “blurring the lines between fact and fiction” (Mariana Carbonell et al., 39). Part 2, “Narrating the Disaster,” is largely made up of reflections by journalists that illustrate the important role of a free and independent media capable of holding government officials accountable. Carla Minet, for example, in her “María’s Death Toll,” uncovers the work of investigative journalists who pursued clarity on the then governor Ricardo Rosselló’s statement that “at most, sixteen had died” (74). Part 3, “Representing the Disaster,” contains eight essays by multimedia artists, filmmakers, and photo essayists who address the question of how to tell the story of María. Among these essays is Frances Negrón-Muntaner’s “Our Fellow Americans.” In the wake of the hurricane, many political commentators made great efforts to emphasize Puerto Rico’s Americanness as a cause for sympathy. However, calling Puerto Ricans “American citizens” does not change their colonial status, Negrón-Muntaner notes, urging us to give up the façade of Americanness as a solution. Part 4, “Capitalizing on the Crisis,” examines the socioeconomic environment before María that makes the post-María experience more disastrous. Ed Morales, for example, connects the dots between what he calls Puerto Rico’s “unjust debt” and post-María economic exploitation, pointing out how decades of economic unsovereignty that culminated in $72 billions of debt was used to justify the paltry aid received under the Donald Trump administration (“Puerto Rico’s Unjust Debt”). Lastly, part 5, “Transforming Puerto Rico,” gathers together those who are thinking of a way forward. One of the ways outlined by Giovanni Roberto is via mutual aid organizations like those that helped to mitigate hunger and food scarcity in the wake of María. Through the mutual aid model, “these projects increase collective confidence and effectively demonstrate that we can do things better at the base” (“Looking for a Way Forward in the Past,” 316). The essays in this section demonstrate that one cannot return to “normal” because normal is already marked by disaster, economic and environmental. Forward means, then, working in spite of disaster.

As a whole, Aftershocks of Disaster is ultimately relational, tracing the connections and tensions between past and future events. In “Authenticating Loss and Contesting Recovery” Sarah Molinari employs Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence,” the quotidian experience of small acts of cruelty, to illustrate these tensions.¹ In the case of Hurricane María, it is bureaucratic red tape, governmental ineptitude, and tax exemptions that slowly debilitate the populace. Molinari tells the story of a resident meant to receive funding to repair her roof and to replace damaged appliances, a process that ended up being inordinately long. As the woman awaited repairs to her home, the governmental aid for new appliances was exhausted: “‘Time was up,’ they told her” (252). The money was simply gone and there was nothing she could do about it. Not spectacular violence but an unrelenting banality that bubbles up from the past.

Simultaneously, Aftershocks of Disaster is about Puerto Rico’s ability to “imagine otherwise.” The book bears witness to residents reimagining what it means to be a community member in the wake of María, from creating community kitchens to providing psychotherapeutic services free of charge. Part of what it means to be a responsible community member involves considering the impact of fossil fuel usage and dependency on nonrenewables. For example, in “The Energy Uprising” Arturo Massol-Deyá argues that Puerto Rico “must go from mere aspiration to constructing a responsible and resilient energy model based on renewable-energy sources, such as water, wind, biomass, and, of course, solar power” (300). This, he says, will be one of the first steps toward decolonizing the country. In this way, the volume is a testament to Puerto Rico’s ability to move forward despite disaster and hardship.

More than five years have passed since Hurricane María made landfall in Puerto Rico on 27 September 2017. It is now impossible to think about Puerto Rico without thinking about María. Aftershocks of Disaster lays out what is at stake in post-María Puerto Rico, neatly articulating the relationship between different forms of disaster. Collectively, the authors attend to the ramifications of colonialism and neocolonialism in their drama, poetry, and prose. Moreover, their attention to aftershocks as a theoretical, organizing principle builds a more complex and comprehensive picture of Puerto Ricans as not simply inheritors of colonialism but architects of their own future. As Aftershocks of Disaster makes clear, Hurricane María was only part of the problem. From crumbling infrastructure to austerity, from US governmental interference to an unpayable debt, for hundreds of years before the storm and in the years since, the island has been plagued by multiple Marías. Yet Aftershocks of Disaster makes just as clear that despite multiple disasters and the many shocks and aftershocks they have experienced, Puerto Ricans are working to create their future.

Alejandro Escalante is a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.

[1] On slow violence, Molinari cites Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Javier Auyero, Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).