Infrastructure and Colonial Difference in Puerto Rico after Hurricane María

Bibliographic Data

ID2292963
AuthorsRosa E Ficek (University of Puerto Rico at Cayey, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume26
Issue2
Pages102-117
Publication date2018-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransforming Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1051-0559 • E-ISSN: 1548-7466
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/traa.12129
OpenAlexW2893371247
LanguageES
Citations received29
References cited10

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

Business · Colonialism · Corporate governance · Everyday life · Government (linguistics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Racialization · Sociology · State (computer science · Law · Urban Planning and Governance · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · Water Governance and Infrastructure

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