By Karen Santos
Karen Santos is a Gallatin senior concentrating in Feminism and Artivism in Latin America and the Caribbean. She was a 2022 Gallatin Global Human Rights Fellow. Santos graduated with honors from BMCC, majoring in Writing and Literature. Born and raised in Cuba, she emigrated to Equatorial Guinea where she fell in love with West African languages and cultures. In the summer, she worked in Vieques, Puerto Rico, with HASER (Taking Resilient Socio-Ecological Actions), on their project La Colmena Cimarrona (Maroon Hive). The following reflection was adapted from one of Santos’s summer reflections on the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights Blog
“Warm waters trigger my PTSD. The water is warmer before a big storm.”
Ian – while swimming in La Esperanza.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been coming back to Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón’s Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico before and after the storm. The multiple readings in this book helped me learn and think critically about disaster capitalism, shock, and trauma doctrine, but also about how communities recognize each other, organize and challenge imperial and national institutions and powers. In the book’s introductory conversation between Bonilla and Naomi Klein, the latter mentions an idea of environmentalist Juan Rosario about colonialism being a war over imagination and how this makes it more difficult for Puerto Ricans to push back ideas that do not benefit the archipelago.1 But are colonialism and imperialism and the trauma they cause just battles over the colonial citizen’s imagination? What happens with the imagination of those that do not live in the archipelago? Do imperial citizens — a category that excludes colonial ones, as they do not enjoy the same rights — have any responsibility for their government’s doings? How does imperialism frame their imagination too?
Often, I think that when people talk about Puerto Rico, they refer to a fixed image in their mind and not to the actual territory and experiences in which important events happen. This imagined island, I believe, is composed of three frames or three moments of imagination:
First: The visualization of the big island as the whole of Puerto Rico, without knowing, thinking, and acknowledging that Puerto Rico is an archipelago: multiple islands form it. Each one deals with colonial and national problems, and location-specific challenges as well.
Second: Puerto Rico as a Tropical Paradise — and this ties to Krista Thompson’s ideas on tropicalization.2 A beautiful, warm, almost-empty space from where natural resources and bodies are to be consumed, extracted, and reimagined by foreigners.
Third: The living conditions of Puerto Ricans living in the archipelago are harsh and almost unbearable. A place — an unknown, blurry territory — where corruption is rampant, where there is no industry, and that depends on the United States for everything they do.
All three points are troubling, but the last one is even more concerning as it lacks the historical perspective and understanding of what is happening in Puerto Rico, why Puerto Rico is a colony, and what that means. It overshadows the very concrete repercussions of having no representation in the federal government, the impossibility of voting in presidential elections, and the fact that, to the United States, Puerto Rico is another property.
Lately, I’ve been thinking of how suffering and trauma are treated on topics about Latin America and the Caribbean. Sometimes it seems that artistic and sociopolitical innovations have only come to life after a traumatic event, a disaster. While I understand that this approach might be helpful in some contexts to denounce state violence, Human Rights violations, and injustices in general, framing suffering as a moving force can be problematic. It presupposes that meaningful change can be set in motion only after the “right” amount of trauma has been absorbed by particular bodies. This methodology can take away the agency of the people living under challenging circumstances by erasing their rebellious activities before the traumatic moment, as if trauma is a flame that ignites and moves something that was not there before. It can also blur the responsibilities of all actors involved. Those directly causing trauma (the government or the Navy in the context of Vieques, for example), and our responsibility as imperial participants in how we live within and engage with the US empire and its politics.
Over the summer, I spent a little over two months in Vieques, 40 minutes by ferry from Ceiba, a municipality in northeast Puerto Rico. During my time there, I collaborated with HASER, an NGO that is the fiscal sponsor of La Colmena Cimarrona (Maroon Beehive). La Colmena is a robust, holistic project that focuses on food sovereignty and practices solidarity economy, agroecology, and beekeeping as ways of healing the land and healing and empowering the community. Near two-thirds of Vieques was expropriated by the US Navy in 1941 and 1947-48. That is a land that never went back to Viequenses. When the people kicked the Navy out in 2003, the military transferred those areas to the US Fish and Wildlife Services. The US government chose to do that instead of thoroughly cleaning the land of hazardous military waste and returning it to its owners. Civilians still can’t live there. This circumstance proves to be particularly challenging on an island that works hard to create sustainable initiatives of production and consumption.
In my time with La Colmena, I participated in some of the activities they usually organize. In June, for example, they hosted their first-ever summer camp for young Viequenses. This was an important activity as the participants worked and learned about agriculture and history of Vieques and Puerto Rico, but they also were paid for their labor. Proper remuneration is a very urgent topic in the humanitarian world, as many volunteers collaborating with NGOs come from the same struggling communities the organizations serve. La Colmena also hosted workshops on preparing lotions and candles with easily accessible materials, caring for gardens and produce, harvesting rain, and making bio ferments. They also centered their actions on the importance of bees and flowers, how to bring back indigenous techniques in agriculture, soil fertility, and crop association. As I see it, La Colmena’s emphasis on indigenous and maroon ways of understanding the land and modes of consumption challenges those considerations of agency as a product of recent trauma, responses fixed in time, motionless when apparently there is no violence. Their actions are undoubtedly informed by trauma and needs, but they have chosen to focus on indigenous and maroon experiences of thriving. Part of their success comes from their attention to using local (from Vieques) and national (Puerto Rican) ways of challenging new settler colonialism policies by emphasizing food sovereignty and establishing solidarity networks in the archipelago and the region. They are successfully incorporating the past to articulate more extensive claims about returning the land to the community and the legitimacy of occupying spaces that are rightfully theirs. This can help to think of the unthinkable: a sociopolitical reconfiguration of Puerto Rico and, more extensively, Latin America and the Caribbean, where we, as its citizens, can decide our countries’ futures.
- Bonilla, Yarimar, et al. Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico before and after the Storm, Haymarket Books, Chicago (Ill.), 2019, p. 24.
- Thompson, Krista A. An Eye for the Tropics Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. Duke University Press, 2006, p. 5.