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Energy Islands
E n v i ron m e n ta l Com m u n ic at ion, P ow e r , a n d C u lt u r e Series Editors Phaedra C. Pezzullo, University of Colorado Boulder Salma Monani, Gettysburg College Editorial Board, Advisory Committee Robert J. Brulle, Drexel University Giovanna DiChiro, Swarthmore College Xinghua Li, Babson College D. Soyini Madison, Northwestern University Curtis Marez, University of California San Diego LeiLani Nishime, University of Washington Tarla Rai Peterson, University of Texas El Paso 1. Energy Islands: Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico, by Catalina M. de Onís
Energy Islands Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico
Catalina M. de Onís
University of Califor nia Pr ess
University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Catalina M. de Onís Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Onís, Catalina M. de, 1986– author. Title: Energy Islands : metaphors of power, extractivism, and justice in Puerto Rico / Catalina M. de Onís. Other titles: Environmental communication, power, and culture ; 1. Identifiers: LCCN 2020051958 (print) | LCCN 2020051959 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520380615 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520380622 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520380639 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Power resources—Puerto Rico. | Energy policy—Puerto Rico. Classification: LCC HD9502.P92 D4 2021 (print) | LCC HD9502.P92 (ebook) | DDC 333.79097295—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051958 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051959 Manufactured in the United States of America 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Para Tata, Hilda y Nitza, con mucho afecto And to all those imagining and implementing more just, equitable, and sustainable relations
Con t en ts
List of Figures
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Acknowledgments Abbreviations
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Map of Puerto Rico
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I n t roduc t ion
Amplifying Puerto Rican Voices in Power Struggles 1 Pa rt On e
For m i ng E n ergi es Rou t e s/Roots/R a íc e s I
Recuerdos familiares [Family Memories] 29 Ch a p t e r On e
Dis/empowering Terms of an Energy Rhetorical Matrix 37 Rou t e s/Roots/R a íc e s I I
Hydrocarbon Hauntings 62 Ch a p t e r T wo
Experimenting Energies of Defense, Disease, Development, and Disaster 68
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Pa rt T wo
Pow er i ng t h e Pr esen t a n d F u t u r e Ch a p t e r T h r e e
Generating Methane Metaphors to Fuel and Fight Extractivism 97 Rou t e s/Roots/R a íc e s I I I
Account-ability in un revolú 120 Ch a p t e r Fou r
(Re)wiring Coalitions for Radical Transformations 126 Rou t e s/Roots/R a íc e s I V
“Las cosas del barrio” 146 (No) Conc lusion
Delinking for Energy Justice 151 Appendix: Puerto Rico and US Diasporic Organizations and Initiatives Notes
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References Index
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Con t e n t s
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F igu r es
Map 1. Puerto Rico
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Photographs 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
Ruth “Tata” Santiago Local community members Titi Consi My grandparents My dad and his cousin My dad and his sister Imperial Uncle Sam PROMESA is poverty AES and the fiscal control board Commonwealth Oil Refining Company, Inc. Countermonument Rafael Trelles Vieques ferry dock Community center rooftop solar panels Fishers Youth from El Coquí area
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2 22 30 32 33 35 41 50 52 63 65 67 76 93 108 124
17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.
After Hurricane María IDEBAJO members inspect a solar generator Convivencia Ambiental bird-watching Hery Colón Zayas Colectiva Feminista members prepare to march Energy actors protest against AES Home rooftop solar installation
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127 140 147 149 167 173 174
Ack now le dgm en ts
The interconnected energies of numerous people move throughout this book and provided me the necessary endurance to bring Energy Islands to completion. Without these individuals, I never could have begun, let alone finished, this project. The hard work, generosity, and encouragement of research collaborators, mentors, colleagues, students, friends, and family have buoyed me and created an archipelago of support. I deeply appreciate all those who contributed to this book, amid the calm and choppy waters of life. First and foremost, I have immense gratitude for the people I met and collaborated with in Puerto Rico, who stopped to offer directions; trusted and welcomed me into their communities; and taught me that struggles for justice are paradoxically both exhausting and energizing. Though I cannot name everyone who made this book possible in Puerto Rico, I wish to thank Víctor Alvarado Guzmán, José Atiles-Osoria, Melba Ayala, José Luis “Chema” Baerga, Liani Cabán Reyes, Marcel J. Castro-Sitiriche, Mabette Colón Pérez, Hery Colón Zayas, Carmen Concepción, Vanesa Contreras Capó, José Cordero, Shariana Ferrer-Núñez, Ismenia Figueroa, Adriana González, Ismenia González Colón, Adneris Hernández, Ariel Hernández, Carmen De Jesús, Daniel De Jesús, Mary Ann Lucking, Alexis Massol-González, Arturo Massol-Deyá, Ernesto Olivares Gómez, Efraín O’Neill-Carrillo, Lionel Orama Exclusa, Miguel A. Ortiz, Cecilio Ortiz Garcia, Marla PérezLugo, Martha G. Quiñones-Domínguez, Robert Rabin, Marjorie Rey, Yaminette Rodríguez, Juan Rosario, Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero, Ruth Santiago, Nelson Santos Torres, José Claudio Seda, Roberto José Thomas Ramírez, Zaida Torres Rodríguez, Rafael Trelles, Jesús Vázquez Negrón, Maria Zayas, and Cacimar Zenón. Among these remarkable individuals, Ruth “Tata” Santiago made this xi
book possible. She read multiple excerpts, responded to my countless questions, and treated me as a family member. Her good humor, perseverance, and ability to bring people together have inspired me beyond words, as she courageously and tirelessly applies her legal and other knowledges to struggle for the survival and well-being of her neighbors and all of Puerto Rico. As you say, Tata, “Somos un equipo.” Seguimos en la lucha. Several professors and colleagues formally and informally mentored me and encouraged and influenced my thinking and writing. Phaedra C. Pezzullo has been an enthusiastic mentor, whose transformative research has had significant impacts on my scholarship and advocacy efforts. I appreciate her intellectual generosity and work as an activist-scholar who both theorizes and practices care. Stacey K. Sowards has been a wonderful, unwavering guide for the past ten years. My first publishing experience as a graduate student was under her editorship, and since then she has been with me every step of the way. Hilda Lloréns’s smart scholarship, wisdom, and collaborative energy enlivens this text. Mil gracias, compañera. May the various connections we created—across several years, time zones, and geographic-diasporic spaces—endure. I also deeply appreciate my academic family at Willamette University: Pablo Correa, Cindy Koenig Richards, Jonneke Koomen, Rosa León Zayas, Shirley Ley, Trina Morgan, Delia Olmos-García, Maegan Parker Brooks, Vincent N. Pham, Gordy Toyama, and Patricia Varas. Cindy, Maegan, and Vincent, I always will thank you for transforming my life with your friendship and for showing me, by example, how to be a teacher-scholar and a better human. Additionally, many thanks to La Chispa environmental justice coalition and SOAR Center student collaborators and to Emilia Cubelos, Karen Espinoza, Karla Garcia Hernandez, Brando Martin, and Maria del Rocio Ortiz Chavarria for co-creating numerous life-giving experiences. At the University of Colorado Denver, Soumia Bardhan, Hamilton Bean, Yvette Bueno-Olson, Faye Caronan, Larry Erbert, Sarah Fields, Mia Fischer, Stephen Hartnett, Lisa Keränen, and Michelle Médal provided me a space to communicate this book’s early formulations and shared the excitement of project milestones. I also appreciate many undergraduate and graduate students who I had the honor of learning together with at CU Denver. Additional individuals who shaped my scholarship and different stages of this book include: John Arthos, José Castro-Sotomayor, Karma R. Chávez, Gloria Colom, E. Cram, Yarí Cruz Ríos, Michael Deas, Roberto Delgado Ramos, Arlene Díaz, Debbie Dougherty, Danielle Endres, Andrea xii
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Feldpausch-Parker, Lisa A. Flores, Carlos G. García-Quijano, Constance Gordon, Vivian Halloran, Maria Eliza Hamilton Abegunde, Sara Hayden, Nitza Hernández López, Kim D. Hester Williams, Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Yaejoon Kwon, Marisol LeBrón, José Ángel Maldonado, Joan Faber McAllister, Megan Morrissey, Norma Musih, Tiara R. Na’puti, John NietoPhillips, LeiLani Nishime, Kent Ono, Willy Palomo, Renu Pariyadath, David Naguib Pellow, Tarla Rai Peterson, Emily Plec, Laura Pulido, Alaí Reyes-Santos, Jennifer Robinson, Anaís Delilah Roque, Jen Schneider, Steve Schwarze, Samantha Senda-Cook, Leah Sprain, Ted Striphas, Lemir Teron, Robert E. Terrill, Omar Sosa-Tzec, Carlos Tarin, Anjali Vats, and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano. Special thanks to Darrel, Jen, Sara, and Steve, who, across the years and miles, helped to keep me afloat. And to Nitza, whose loving kindness, poetry, and paintings have brought sunshine to many lives and have inspired several aspects of this book. My sincere thanks to the University of California Press Environmental Studies team. Editor Stacy Eisenstark’s dedication to this project has been impressive, exemplified by her thoughtful attentiveness to the publication process and critical editorial insights. She was a wonderful editor amid the pandemic, which makes her support all the more appreciated and admirable. Thank you to Environmental Communication, Power, and Culture series editors Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Salma Monani; to Sara Fan, Kate Hoffman, Teresa Iafolla, Robin Manley, Lyn Uhl, and the series editorial board at UC Press; and to David Peattie of BookMatters and copyeditor Athena Lakri for her laudable attention to detail. I also am grateful to an anonymous reviewer and three self-identified reviewers, José Castro-Sotomayor, Alaí Reyes-Santos, and Stacey K. Sowards for offering smart, detailed feedback during the review process, which greatly improved Energy Islands. I deeply respect their activist scholarship and am honored that they agreed to review and endorse this book. Víctor Alvarado Guzmán, Marcel J. Castro-Sitiriche, Nitza Hernández López, Rosa León Zayas, Hilda Lloréns, Efraín O’Neill-Carrillo, Lionel Orama Exclusa, Cecilio Ortiz Garcia, Marla Pérez-Lugo, Vincent N. Pham, Ruth Santiago, Steve Schwarze, Roberto José Thomas Ramírez, and Rafael Trelles generously reviewed chapter drafts and/or provided important factchecking confirmation. Their observations, critiques, and affirmations helped me to continue writing when I began to question whether I should finish this project. I also thank Alexis Dietrich for providing initial interview suggestions, Isabella Mejia and Emilia Cubelos for being wonderful research assistants, and Mabette Colón Pérez for her beautiful cover art. Ac k now l e d g m e n t s
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Additionally, I thank those individuals who have supported me beyond academia. Thank you for being there during all of these years, Diane Donnelly, Edda Ligia and Maritere Irizarry, Marie-Luise Klotz, Dorothee Machai, Hayleen Matlock Garcia, Ivan Meyers, Lila Michael, and Kendra Switzer Tucker. My family in Puerto Rico, José Irizarry Remotti and Teresa Segarra, warmly welcomed me into their home and loaned me a car for research site access. I appreciate their patience and generosity. My family members Carlos de Onís Irizarry, Victoria de Onís, Ann Ellsworth, and Jim Robison have offered me so much, and I am here today because of them. Thanks to my dad for patiently helping me to reconnect with my Puerto Rican roots, including spending countless hours chatting with me about language, culture, and identity. Mi hermanita has been supportive in all the ways one can imagine, sharing her positive energy and warm spirit. I honor my mom and her unflagging hard work, so that I could access formal and other educational experiences over the years, and for encouraging me to read and write. My partner, Jim, experienced my physical, mental, and emotional absences during many months and years, so this book could come to fruition and, much more importantly, so that I could focus on environmental, climate, and energy justice advocacy in Puerto Rico, documented in and exceeding the pages of Energy Islands. I thank him for sacrificing his health and for sharing his unconditional love. With his humor, encouragement, and companionship, he sustained me during my eating disorder and recovery, as did my sister, who never stopped believing in and feeding me. The research informing Energy Islands was funded by the Waterhouse Family Institute, the IU Office of Sustainability, the Organization for Research on Women and Communication, Willamette University, and CU Denver. After the UC Press covers its publication costs, La Iniciativa de Ecodesarrollo de Bahía de Jobos, Coquí Solar, and La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción members will receive book sale proceeds to support their ongoing efforts to envision and enact alternative worldmaking. The author and publisher appreciate permissions to republish portions of three previously printed essays, which appear throughout this book: “Fueling and Delinking from Energy Coloniality in Puerto Rico.” Journal of Applied Communication Research 46, no. 5 (2018): 535–560. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of the National Communication Association. “‘Es una lucha doble’: Articulating Environmental Nationalism in Puerto xiv
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Rico.” In Racial Ecologies, edited by LeiLani Nishime and Kim D. Hester Williams, 185–204, 2018. Reprinted with permission of the University of Washington Press. “ ‘Pa’ que tú lo sepas’: Experiences with Co-presence in Puerto Rico.” In Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method, edited by Sara McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard, 101–116, 2016. Reprinted with permission of the Pennsylvania State University Press.
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A bbr ev i at ions
AEEPR/PREPA Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica de Puerto Rico [Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority] AERA Alianza Energía Renovable Ahora [Renewable Energy Now Alliance] AMANESER Alliance for Sustainable Resources Management AOGP Aguirre Offshore GasPort AOSIS Alliance of Small Island States CEDDA Ciudadanos en Defensa del Ambiente [Citizens in Defense of the Environment] CORCO Commonwealth Oil Refining Company, Inc. DRNA Departamento de Recursos Naturales y Ambientales [Department of Natural and Environmental Resources] EPA Environmental Protection Agency FDA Food and Drug Administration FERC Federal Energy Regulatory Commission FOMB Financial Oversight and Management Board IDEBAJO Iniciativa de Ecodesarrollo de Bahía de Jobos [Ecodevelopment Initiative of Jobos Bay] IEEFA Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis INESI Instituto Nacional de Energía y Sostenibilidad Isleña [National Institute of Energy and Island Sustainability] IRP Integrated Resource Plan ITEAS Instituto Tropical de Energía, Ambiente y Sociedad LEI London Economics International MIPR Misión Industrial de Puerto Rico xvi
NOAA PREB PROMESA RPPR USCG UTIER
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Puerto Rico Energy Bureau Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act Resilient Power Puerto Rico United States Coast Guard Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y Riego [Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers Union]
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Rojo
Aguada
Aguadilla Adjuntas
Barceloneta
Arecibo
Coamo
Hatillo
San Juan
Barceloneta Cayey
Santa Isabel
Coamo
Map 1. Puerto Rico consists of an archipelagic formation in the Antilles. The largest island is accompanied by the smaller human inhabited islands of Vieques and Culebra to the east and uninhabited Mona Island to the west, among many other keys.
Juana Díaz
Jayuya
Caguas
Fajardo
Mona
Vieques
Culebra
20 miles
Humacao
Puerto Rico
Guayama Arroyo
Mona
Salinas
Cayey
20 miles
PUERTO RICO
Peñuelas Guayanilla Ponce Guánica
Yauco
Adjuntas
Fajardo
Cataño Dorado Loíza San Humacao Carolina Juan Bayamón Guaynabo
Loíza Carolina
Vega Baja
Caguas
Guaynabo
Cataño
Bayamón
Dorado
Utuado LaresSanta Salinas Isabel Guayama Arroyo
Juana Díaz
Jayuya
Cabo Rojo
Mayagüez
Vega Baja
PUERTO RICO
Utuado
Arecibo
Peñuelas Rincón Yauco Guayanilla Ponce Guánica
Lares
Hatillo
Puerto Rico
The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Ralph and Shirley Shapiro Endowment Fund in Environmental Studies.
Introduction Amplifying Puerto Rican Voices in Power Struggles
Standing at five feet tall, Ruth “Tata” Santiago is accustomed to people underestimating her. One breezy May 2015 evening in Salinas, Puerto Rico, I interviewed this lawyer and community activist about her experiences in different advocacy contexts. Our conversation in her home spanned time and space, punctuated by neighborhood dogs barking and a few cars passing. Santiago reflected on growing up in the Bronx in the 1960s, before moving to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and then to Puerto Rico at age twelve, where her father drove a sugarcane truck along what many locals called “la ruta del hambre” [the hunger route] because of the extreme poverty pervading the area.1 In her unfamiliar surroundings, she experienced “a totally new world,” learning Spanish in school and the history of her parents’ home in Puerto Rico, where she ultimately decided to live, after completing her studies on the US East Coast. Since the 1980s, Santiago has defied expectations and confronted intersectional oppressions. This community lawyer continues to agitate for autogestión [autonomous organizing] and apoyo mutuo [mutual support] by fusing her grassroots organizing with her legal knowledges.2 To recognize her unwavering involvement with the Iniciativa de Ecodesarrollo de Bahía de Jobos (IDEBAJO) [Ecodevelopment Initiative of Jobos Bay] in Salinas and other grassroots groups, Santiago received the Sierra Club’s 2018 Robert Bullard Environmental Justice Award. IDEBAJO is organized by residents in Salinas and nearby Guayama and is considered a nonprofit under Puerto Rican law. The organization’s network supports several grassroots initiatives, including projects coordinated by the Comité Diálogo Ambiental [Environmental Dialogue Committee].
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Figure 1. Ruth “Tata” Santiago, a lawyer and longtime community organizer, speaks during a public hearing, organized by AES Corporation representatives. Guayama, Puerto Rico, December 12, 2019. Photo by Víctor Alvarado Guzmán.
During one of our many conversations, Santiago discussed her motivations to continue struggling for her community. Catalina de Onís: What gives you energy? Tata Santiago: Ah! You do! People do! Right?! We all do! I mean, I tell you, sometimes I’m here working alone, and I’m writing something or looking for some information, and I’m like, “Oh, my God, I have to do this!” And it’s interesting because, of course, I’m learning, and I’m the eternal student, and I love to learn, but when we get together in a group, it’s so wonderful because everyone brings different values to the table, different contributions to the group, and people just surprise us all the time, you know. Sometimes you’ll think you know somebody and sometimes you may be critical of people or someone may be not following up with something, and sometimes they’ll surprise you with this wonderful piece of information . . . I’m sort of motivated by combativeness, too. I mean, I feel that there’s so much injustice, so much environmental, social, economic injustice that, you know, we really have to combat it. And it’s sort of fun. Right?! [laughter]. It’s like, this may be Goliath, and we may lose this thing. But we’re gonna give ’em a good fight, and everyone knows what the truth is, and, they may get away with it, but they’re gonna get discredited in the process, too. It’s not gonna be easy. [laughter]
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Onís: So, when you talk about combativeness, is there a story you can share that epitomizes a time when you felt energized by that confrontation? Santiago: Well, it’s usually when you start cross-examining people. . . . they bring big-time experts from wherever. Mostly from the States, of course. And they’ll say, “Oh, Mr. So and So, Mr. Smith, he’s the prime authority on this and that,” and then you start talking, cross-examining, especially, and impeaching them and finding the big lies, and people seeing that and being sort of surprised because this was supposed to be a top-credentialed person here telling us how to do this, and yet he looks so bad sometimes. That . . . that is fun! [laughter] . . . There’s this big-time lawyer in San Juan who has introduced me . . . to another big-time attorney, as someone who is not what she seems to be. “Ella no es lo que parece ser.” She looks like a little Black girl from the south kind of thing . . . but she’s actually a little bit tougher than that.
In this fight for justice, Santiago’s work reveals Puerto Rico’s deeply flawed electric system, and she, alongside many other community members, is working to dismantle currently operating and proposed fossil fuel plants that disproportionately harm rural, southern communities. Puerto Rico’s centralized electric power system requires an urgent transformation. Seventy percent of electricity generation comes from the south to meet the more populous north’s 70 percent of total power demand.3 The grid almost exclusively depends on coastal facilities fueled by imported animal and plant fossils that are burned primarily in four places. 4 According to the US Energy Information Administration, in 2020, the archipelago’s electric energy mix consisted of less than 3 percent renewables.5 Meanwhile, many fossil fuel industry and political allies are pushing to shift the archipelago’s historical and ongoing heavy reliance on imported petroleum (Bunker C oil and diesel) and coal to methane gas. 6 Energy Islands: Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico documents, assembles, and evaluates various discourses, narratives, naming practices, and metaphors constituting master and marginalized existences. These rhetorical materials take many forms, including testimonials at public gatherings, rap lyrics, news reports, blog posts, and embodied acts of protest, among many other artifacts and performances. Studied in specific situated contexts, these expressive energies enable and constrain possibilities for a more livable present and future. In particular, I research how, when, and for whom the overarching metaphor and heuristic of energy, with its fluid
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figurative-material-literal relationships to power, islands, and archipelagoes, matters in historical and contemporary controversies in the archipelago and beyond. I argue that demonstrating their inseparability is vital for rethinking these terms for energy justice praxis, which requires an intersectional deep dive into powerful structures and everyday expressions of energy that attends to the embodied emotional, mental, and physical labor of colonized/racialized peoples. Ultimately, this book seeks to convey capacious understandings of energy beyond a narrow focus on powering individual dwellings and workplaces, by addressing and amplifying the human energies required to create and challenge energy infrastructures and technologies. This focus centers the physical labor required of workers involved in the fossil fuel industry, including job losses and individual and familial migrations, as well as the exertions of people organizing for energy justice within and across coalitions and community groups.7 Detailed later in this chapter, Archipelagoes of Power functions as a heuristic for analyzing these relational energies to challenge reductionist colonizercolonized binaries and homogenizing tendencies that paint all of Puerto Rico with one broad brush, failing to account for place-based differential experiences with energy and power. Following José Castro-Sotomayor’s caution against the Western tendency to privilege space over place to favor global discourses, I focus on Puerto Rico to grapple with how corporate polluters and crony politicians—both at US federal and local governance levels—target rural frontline/coastline communities, often home to dark-skinned and Afro-descendant people with few financial resources. Importantly, I also examine how certain individuals and groups in these places fight back and create alternative existences that spark, sustain, and strengthen communal connections and possibilities. 8 To approach this archipelagic site of struggle, each chapter engages an energy metaphor of exigence. These concepts—in addition to islands, archipelagoes, energy, and power—function as theoretical constructs that provide an energetic powerhouse of critical perspectives and practices for making and breaking oppressive meanings, understandings, assumptions, and methods. In many cases, engaging these metaphors by contemplating, critiquing, and communicating their figurative, material, and literal shapes and effects enables a melding of theory and practice to attend to and intervene in actions that stymie or support just, equitable, and sustainable energy transformations, in what ways, and for whom. Unmaking oppressive relations for major
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power shifts in all forms requires historicizing and illuminating the tenacious presence and communicative enactments of empire, colonialism, white supremacy, and other entwined lethal patterns and structures amid struggles for a good life. This book contends that one means for approaching this crucial task is in metaphoric terms.9 In this first chapter, I emphasize amplifying to listen to and raise the volume of Puerto Rican voices that resist and refuse dead-end relationalities rooted in master logics that normalize extractivism and expendability. This attention to everyday expressions of energy seeks to amplify place-based liberatory alternatives shaping Puerto Rico’s crises before and after hurricanes and earthquakes. Together, Santiago and her fellow collaborators create a counternarrative that deviates from popular depictions constituting this “Isla del encanto” [Island of Enchantment]. Local political elites, tourist industry heads, and the US government employ this slogan to communicate a utopic island mirage that elides quotidian realities in Puerto Rico.
Compounding Crises The disastrous 2017 hurricane season and the earthquakes and aftershocks in December 2019 and throughout 2020 substantially worsened longtime energy and other prolonged crises in Puerto Rico.10 Mainstream US media reports tended to decontextualize and dehistoricize Hurricanes Irma and María and the seismic disruptions that followed a few years later. This framing simplifies and ignores needed discussions about the intersection of empire, disaster and racial capitalism, illegal debt and austerity, experimentation, and corrupt energy companies and politicians, as well as grassroots resistance and inventive ways to experience good lives.11 For now, however, I limit this complex milieu to discussing impacts on electricity access and mass displacements during recent extreme climate-related and seismic events and return to longer histories in subsequent chapters. Climate science confirms that tropical storms are increasing in severity and frequency, tied to uneven anthropogenic climate disruption and a hydrocarbon-based economic system, which aggravates these hazards.12 Epitomizing these impacts, Hurricanes Irma and María barreled through Antigua, Barbuda, the US Virgin Islands, the Dominican Republic, and other Antillean islands in September 2017.13 In Puerto Rico, Hurricane
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María made landfall as a category four storm and caused flooding, more than one hundred thousand landslides, and weakened already poorly maintained roads, bridges, schools, and other structures. On the tailwinds of Hurricane Irma just two weeks before, María downed 757 transmission line towers and damaged 1,247 transmission line segments.14 Millions of individuals were without power for months, and many rural households still lacked grid access almost a year later.15 The customer hours of lost electricity service neared three billion, marking the longest blackout ever recorded in the United States and the second longest globally.16 The power disruption also led to sewage water treatment facility discharges, job losses, bankruptcies, and generalized anxiety and uncertainty. Additionally, the system’s failure threatened the survival of oxygen therapy and dialysis patients and those requiring refrigerated medicine, while pushing already overburdened medical services to the brink. The obsolete grid fell with grave consequences, as about three thousand people died indirectly from this flawed design, built by unsustainable material and political power structures.17 Aggravating these existing vulnerabilities and realities, the earthquakes and aftershocks that rattled residents with a retraumatizing force in late 2019 and throughout winter and spring 2020 damaged several power stations.18 Although no tsunamis resulted, the Costa Sur plant was located in the seismic impact zone and became temporarily inoperable.19 The damaged facility, which generates a large percentage of Puerto Rico’s power, led again to outages and exacerbated the existing problems preceding and following María. In May 2020, electric utility officials claimed the Costa Sur plant would be operational by late summer 2020, requiring more than $25 million dollars in repairs.20 However, equivocating messages and secretive deals continued the uncertainty. The controversies involving Costa Sur and many other powergeneration sites in Puerto Rico are featured throughout this book, given their connections to ongoing injustices. The humanitarian crisis and unlivable conditions, including inadequate access to electricity for necessities, accelerated the out-migration of many Puerto Ricans to the United States.21 Although Puerto Rico’s population count is close to three million, a 2019 US Census Bureau survey and a 2019 American Community survey revealed that between 165,000 and 200,000 people left the archipelago from 2018 to 2019.22 These numbers represent dispossession accelerated by the hurricanes and other compounded crises.23 Of those who remained in the archipelago after the 2017 hurricane season, the January 2020 earthquakes displaced at least twenty thousand people, 6
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with about seven thousand individuals seeking shelter in makeshift camps.24 While the local government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic warned people to stay at home, gender-based violence, austerity measures, job losses, and hunger exacerbated displacements and other forms of suffering, as many residents struggled to survive. Worsening these brutal realities, summer 2020 blew in the strong winds and rains of Tropical Storm Isaías, which caused extensive flooding, landslides, and multiday electricity losses. Given the entanglements of climate disruption, empire, colonialism, and disaster and racial capitalism, human movements in search of more livable conditions between the United States and Puerto Rico are far from new, as migration has been a consistent impact of modernization and colonialism in Puerto Rico.25 Nativist and xenophobic ideologies and discourses tend to link these racialized bodies with polluting the United States.26 Meanwhile, movements of material pollution occur, exemplified by coal controversies within and beyond Puerto Rico. US-owned AES Corporation is responsible for the privately owned 454 megawatt carbonera [coal plant] in the rural municipality of Guayama. Twenty-year-old Mabette Colón Pérez, who lives in the Miramar neighborhood beside the facility, and who created this book’s cover image, expressed during a spring 2020 interview, “Quieren detener la propagación del coronavirus, pero nadie mira la plaga mayor que seguirá matándonos día a día por los siguientes años. Hay una pandemia mayor que el COVID-19 y sólo tiene tres letras: AES.” [They (Puerto Rico government officials) want to stop the spread of the coronavirus, but no one looks at the bigger plague that will continue killing us day by day for the following years. There is a bigger pandemic than COVID-19 and it only has three letters: AES.]27 Investigative journalist Omar Alfonso published several reports on this company in 2018 and 2019, documenting AES’s illegal activities. 28 Inaugurated in 2002, the plant generates at least 300,000 tons of coal ash every year. This combustion byproduct has led to a massive disposal problem: a five-story ash pile that menacingly occupies the property’s grounds.29 AES promoted coal combustion residual use to create Agremax, a blend of fly and bottom ash, as fill material in at least 40 construction projects as early as 2005. According to anthropologist Hilda Lloréns, who has conducted ethnographic research on this controversy for years, AES deposited coal ash in landfills in Peñuelas, Salinas, and Humacao, in addition to burying this substance in more than a dozen municipalities throughout Puerto Rico, especially in Guayama, Salinas, Arroyo, and Santa Isabel, which are I n t roduc t ion
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predominantly Afro-Puerto Rican communities.30 In all, this corporation has disposed of millions of tons of ashes throughout the archipelago, which contain radioactive isotopes, heavy metals, and arsenic. AES employees also have distributed this material above the south coast aquifer, which provides the only source of drinking water for thousands of people.31 Members of the Resistencia contra la quema de Carbón y sus Cenizas tóxicas (RCC) have protested these injustices, confronting AES representatives, police, and government officials in acts of civil disobedience, encampments, and legislative activities, among other tactics.32 In response, the Puerto Rican government and local police have mobilized what Marisol LeBrón documents as “extreme force” against those opposed to the toxic assault of their communities, evident in elevated rates of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.33 Additionally, corporate officials have targeted the Dominican Republic and Florida as dump sites—materializing what Lloréns and Santiago call the “Coal Death Route.”34 This course originates in Colombia, home to the largest open-pit coal mining operation in the world. Back in Puerto Rico, this decades-long struggle continues. At a December 2019 gathering with AES officials, a room full of residents assembled to protest the plant. Santiago shared that each speaker was allowed five minutes to make their comments. When my time was up, people came up and donated their ticket numbers and time so that I could continue. Víctor [Alvarado Guzmán, a community member and local legislative advisor] started collecting the tickets, which he later used to give Dr. Osvaldo [Rosario, an environmental chemistry professor and scientific expert for several community and environmental groups in Puerto Rico] more time. It was wonderful teamwork in the midst of such a vile situation. It seems so incredible that all the abuse and injustice is hard to overcome. At one point, Jimmy Borrero from Peñuelas said that he’d risk his life if AES ever tried to take the ash to their town again. The AES people looked spooked. Certainly, they didn’t take it lightly.
These experiences and testimony illuminate the formidable energy realities that residents confront and work to combat collaboratively. Santiago’s fluency in English and Spanish positions her as a community spokeswoman. Many public meetings with US governmental and corporate officials are conducted in English, although the majority of Puerto Ricans most impacted by fossil fuel energy projects only speak Spanish or are not comfortable speaking English publicly.35 All of these interactions require tremendous energy.
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Defining Energies Human beings understand, articulate, and experience energy in a multitude of ways. While the term finds its English denotative origins as “forceful or vigorous language,” the concept’s meaning has evolved to include other significations.36 In contemporary times, the field of physics defines energy as “the capacity to do work, or the ability to move an object against a resisting force.”37 The term also sometimes is situated scientifically as primary energy, end-use energy, and useful energy.38 Political discourses of energy security, energy dominance, energy independence, energy sovereignty, energy poverty, energy democracy, and energy justice provide a vocabulary for the challenges, controversies, and inequities that circulate between and constitute various publics today.39 On a personal level, someone may be described as or read themselves as energetic or lacking energy.40 From everyday talk to policy discussions, experiences with encountering and expending energy are ever-present and are shaped by cultural and linguistic identifications and differences. Turning to the Spanish language and Puerto Rican perspectives, the noun ánimo means energy, mood, strength, will, spirit, or when someone takes action, while the infinitive dar ánimo signifies to cheer, to encourage, or to support.41 Given my interest in everyday forms of energy expressions, I frequently asked individuals in Puerto Rico: “¿Qué le da ánimo?” [What gives you energy?], as evidenced by this chapter’s introduction. For Santiago, energy was imagined as communal, a process of eternal learning, combativeness against injustice, and fun. Other interviewees described energy as a “desire to serve” one’s community and to inspire others; as a convergence that makes life; as power; as what “fuels society” in the form of electricity, with fossil fuels or renewables; as a force that can be used well or wasted; as something “transformed, transmuted, and transferred”; and as “everything.”42 Just as material energy is transferred and received in different forms, including in wires, gases, liquids, or solids, so too do rhetorical understandings of this concept implicate various energetic forms and content.43 Accordingly, I define rhetoric as “the capacity of symbolic and material energies to move others and ourselves to act (or not) in the world.” With this definition in mind, the following question guides this book: How do various individuals and organizations communicate energy controversies and experiences to contest, constrict, and/or cultivate self-determination, coalitional politics, and alternative futures in Puerto Rico and in the Puerto Rican US diaspora? My efforts to
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engage this research offers a response to requests by some Puerto Rican collaborators to challenge a narrow victimhood and trauma-centered master story by writing a counternarrative about local community struggles and solidarities, amid competing interests and often lethal systems of domination.44
Amplifying Rhetorical Energies One of the primary challenges confronting social movement actors and activists is how to invent arguments that feel present for different audiences by amplifying particular perspectives, problems, and possibilities. Amplification is inseparable from energy in terms of both physics and communication. In the first sense, this effect uses an amplifier to strengthen a signal or wave, which increases power. In the related second sense, amplification involves strengthening rhetorical energy to achieve greater impact, as activists, scholars, and practitioners increase the voltage of their rhetoric. Amplification is one means for achieving presence, what Phaedra C. Pezzullo describes as “indicat[ing] when we feel as if someone, some place, or something matters, whether or not [they/]she/he/it is physically present with us.”45 Individuals and groups mobilize various tactics to (try to) enact this feeling. Such efforts range from projecting different symbols on buildings, to communicating the magnitude of a problem by making the description and significance equivalent to the weight and/or size of some material object, to airing interviews and news reports on local radio to literally amplify neglected points of view, experiences, and counternarratives.46 In addition to making places, peoples, problems, and possibilities feel present, amplification also can function as an enactment of voice. Eric King Watts highlights the disciplining and silencing of outlaw voices in relationship to loss, wastelands, degeneration, decay, and noises. His work encourages rethinking what speaking forms are valued, beyond a limited focus on human expressions of eloquence. Voice emerges “from the openings that cannot be fully closed; from the ruptures in sign systems, from the breaks in our imaginaries, from the cracks in history.”47 These enactments may be appealing or appalling. When evoked to advance justice and more livable conditions, uncertain and potentially risky exchanges work to disrupt business as usual, which thrives on capitalist, white, and heteropatriarchal domination. 48 From the potentially transformational, powerful, and unsettling effects created by the ruptures, breaks, and cracks from which voice as happening 10
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emerges, “muted” voices exist in “communities choking on the dust of coal and [other fossil fuels] made to stand up for the polluter or else.”49 Watts’s theorizing resonates with mounting calls to associate the widespread racial justice mobilizations of 2020—to topple the powerful interlocking systems, ideologies, and rhetorical energies constituting anti-Black racism, militarized policing, white supremacy, capitalism, coloniality, and transphobia—with environmental racism.50 Extractive industries and their political accomplices disproportionately harm and kill the same communities that are targeted by police brutality and criminalized by the state, too often denying the physical ability to breathe in both instances. People who are Black, Indigenous, Latinx—including Afro-Latinx and Indigenous Latinx—and Asian and Pacific Islander, among many other racialized groups, and low-income and low-wealth communities are devalued and sickened by corporate polluters and their political cronies.51 These communities contribute least to greenhouse gas emissions and yet experience disproportionately large effects. This injustice is what Pezzullo and Robert Cox call “the cruel irony” of climate disruption.52 The Global North’s extractivist economy, colonizing powers, and exploitation of resources elucidates the continued oppression rendered by logics of domination.53 Many climate justice advocates, including Olúfẹ ́mi O. Táíwò and Doreen E. Martinez, argue for the importance of rethinking and renaming climate change in terms of climate colonialism. Martinez writes that the climate is “being colonized and forced to alter, modify, and—as catastrophes indicate—it is rebelling and resisting the assault upon it. Mother earth is responding and calling out through floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and droughts.”54 Confronting the violences of environmental racism and climate and energy injustices, marginalized communities often are the most materially deprived of financial and infrastructural well-being, although these groups often have other forms of wealth that are incalculable in capitalism’s value system.55 These alternative resources can include rhetorical materials that are essential for imagining and enacting more livable environments and sustainable, self-determined energy relationships. A rhetorical focus examines energy-related exigencies and how they are powered by oppressive ideologies and communicative acts—as well as challenged—amid and in response to everyday stressors and (the increasingly not-so) exceptional emergencies. To study these rhetorical energies, this book interconnects environmental and energy rhetorical studies,56 Latinx environmentalisms and de/coloniality,57 Puerto Rican rhetorical studies,58 I n t roduc t ion
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Puerto Rican environmental and energy studies,59 and island and archipelagic studies. 60 Following calls by Michelle Holling and Bernadette Calafell for increased inquiry on “Latina/o vernacular discourse” to decenter privileged rhetoric, I approach frontline/coastline enactments of voice as important sites for meaning and community making and insist this embodied, experiential knowledge is essential for uprooting structural injustices. 61
An Energy Ethnography in Archipelagoes of Power This volume contributes to a burgeoning body of what I understand to be energy ethnographies. This research genre examines power and energy struggles in different situated contexts by drawing on fieldwork and personal experiences, partially or fully, for archive creation and critique. 62 Power has many different definitions and is a contested, heavily discussed term in both technical and everyday circles. Energy Islands approaches power as (1) converting energy at a particular rate, while noting that different communicators often use power and energy interchangeably in colloquial exchanges;63 (2) constructing a hierarchy of domination; and (3) encapsulating both individual and collective agencies in the form of poder, a Spanish word for both power and the ability to act. 64 Martinez writes, “History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.”65 In response to this critical work, this energy ethnography engages power dynamics in an entwined rhetorical-material field that diverges from mainland continental ground. Energy Islands approaches islands and archipelagoes as vital symbolic and material sites for navigating the energy- and power-related tensions of crisis and care, stagnation and struggle, harm and hope, loss and love, and isolation and interconnection in a time of overwhelming and mounting socioecological calamities. 66 Such a geographical orientation inspires this book’s guiding concept: archipelagoes of power. 67 This heuristic decenters mainland and continental ways of being, knowing, and communicating to center islands as a material metaphor. This concept attends to relationalities of geographic forms (e.g., land, water, islands, and archipelagoes), individuals, and organizations that generate formations that contaminate, clash, construct coalitions and community, and challenge, among many other power-filled 12
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actions in different configurations, points, and time periods. I define archipelagoes of power as a network of entities/islands at various levels and hierarchical and horizontal nodes across and within structures and institutions that enable and constrain agency for diverse actors. These relationships find energy in fluid and dynamic intersections and movements at global, transnational, transcolonial, national, territorial, regional, and local levels that are entangled like seaweed rather than linearly situated. Such configurations include a multilevel governmental net and implicate corporations and military forces. Concurrently, everyday actors, including social movement actors, and nongovernmental organizations are influenced by and respond to these archipelagic formations, as individuals and groups navigate and work to de/ construct these connections. In Puerto Rico, top-down political dictates from the US government work in concert with and against the territorial Puerto Rican government in different moments throughout history. The archipelagoes of power concept examines the ways in which the Spanish and US empires and multinational corporate officials have imposed their will on civil society, while local elites often have aided, and sometimes challenged, these endeavors. Additionally, the divisive local political party system, organized by three stalemated perspectives in response to Puerto Rico’s status, also contributes to this milieu. These parties are the Partido Nuevo Progresista (pro-statehood), the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (proindependence), and the Partido Popular Democrático (procommonwealth, or current status). 68 A deviation from these entrenched partisan groupings, different movements—like the Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana and community solidarities committed to mutual support and alliances—take shape within Puerto Rico, with the US diaspora, and with other island and archipelagic locales, among many other configurations. Ultimately, archipelagoes of power maps power(ful) relations from above, below, and everywhere in between. In scholarly and popular press texts, “archipelago(es) of power” language tends to be referenced briefly, without sustained analysis of the concept and the importance of material archipelagoes and islands beyond their utility as a relational metaphor. Academic uses of the phrase usually mention Michel Foucault’s carceral archipelago, as the theory relates to subjectivity and surveillance, discipline, and punishment that are dispersed and expansive—creating the image of assorted islands. 69 Discussions about archipelago(es) of power also include the underground group Anonymous, the medicalized gaze, and architecture, revealing the variety of topics informed by this conI n t roduc t ion
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cept.70 Importantly, these uses illuminate the disassociation of this metaphor from emplaced and embodied understandings of island and archipelagic geographies, cultures, and politics. Such removal and erasure may be generative conceptually, but this tendency also risks further marginalizing island and archipelagic peoples, amid the material shrinking, eroding, and polluting of many of the geographic bodies they call home. Accordingly, this energy ethnography joins efforts to resist the erasure and marginalization of noncontinental forms by delving deeply into archipelagoes of power as they relate to energy politics and everyday energetic expressions in Puerto Rico. Islands cover about two percent of the globe and are home to about 10 percent of Earth’s human population.71 These complex marine and coastal environments hold paradoxically fluid yet finite boundaries that inhabit various formations, including archipelagoes, isles, islets, reefs, atolls, cays, and keys. Mirroring the complexities and diversity of these spaces, the interdisciplinary field of island studies covers a wide range of topics. Contributors to the Island Studies Journal and the International Small Island States Association critically engage tourism, renewable electricity, climate disruption, rural youth education, the Anthropocene, textiles and clothing, migrations and diasporas, biodiversity, place names, Small Island Developing States initiatives, colonial legacies, research methods, and much more.72 Islands and the spatial imaginaries they configure exist all around—physically and figuratively. According to Alison Mountz, these formations are “highly unique, idiosyncratic, disparate and yet revealing, offering spatial form, pattern, and logics that are everywhere reproduced.”73 In colloquial and popular culture exchanges, islands hold numerous meanings and associations. Many dominant representations feature sunny vistas with palm trees, sand, and tropical fruit drinks to characterize places of what Julie Sze calls eco-desire that contain magical, green allure, epitomized by the film South Pacific, with strong links to imperialism and militarization.74 The 2017 failed Frye Festival in the Bahamas, which promised luxury accommodations and a musical festival for those wealthy enough to afford event and airline tickets, capitalized on popular island imaginings. The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, trash islands in different oceanic bodies, and artificial islands for diverse purposes, ranging from renewable energy generation to conspicuous consumption, point to how these spaces are de/constructed and de/valued. Carceral archipelagoes, quarantining on metaphoric and material islands, military bases for chemical weapons testing and storage, a midway point shaped by the paradox of encounters and isolation, an 14
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“island” countertop in the center of some kitchens, and Kashi’s (Kellogg’s) Island Vanilla organic cereal are several other ways to conceptualize and constitute these marine-coastal forms.75 Such cultural components point to how different actors and forces literally and metaphorically consume islands and how these geographies can be both intoxicating and toxic.76 Additionally, in energetic, environmental, and climactic terms, microgrids powered by solar and wind energy islands and urban heat islands also symbolize these formations. Depending on one’s embodied and emplaced perspectives, islands can be places of both refuge and risk, and, amid seismic shocks and rising seas, they also may be home.77 Sze argues that islands can generate a wide variety of emotions, more than with other landmasses, as these noncontinental places tend to evoke the paradoxical experiences of freedom and entrapment and pleasure and pain.78 Islands symbolize precarity and perseverance, as they configure and are configured by contested understandings, values, and worldviews. Many of these geographic formations include the frontlines/coastlines of turbulent tides, unpredictable precipitation, shrinking shorelines, food and energy injustices, water scarcity, and disaster-driven displacements. These urgent problems result from ways of being and destroying that celebrate avarice, violence, and dispossession, while devaluing and denying care, dignity, and other necessary conditions for individual and communal thriving.79 The Pacific island nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu potently epitomize this urgency—as Indigenous inhabitants respond to and many refuse the drowning of their culture and material existences. 80 Important for considering these struggles and their relational entanglements are archipelagic formations. Material archipelagoes are energetic sites that regularly face efforts to minimize their existence. Tiara R. Na’puti introduces archipelagic rhetoric to study how different texts marginalize and center these areas. She examines Indigenous Chamoru experiences in Guåhan (Guam) to trouble land centrism and this logic’s complicity with expansionist projects and discourses constituting colonization and militarization. Na’puti argues for the decolonial communicative practice of remapping to generate alternatives to colonial ordering grounded in “epistemic, relational, and geographic forms of violence.”81 She asserts, “Islands are understood primarily as tiny, micro, and barely worthy of being mapped or placed at the margins (if they are depicted at all).”82 Such (lack of) representation marks “these locales as uninhabited, unnamed, unknown, and/or seemingly unimportant.”83 Studying an island context that challenges this perspective, she seeks to unsettle national stories I n t roduc t ion
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and colonial representations. 84 To do so, Na’puti takes “a holistic perspective that reconfigures Oceania as ‘a sea of islands,’ neither tiny nor deficient but rather a vast network of power.”85 This reorientation rejects master orderings and meanings constituting limits and borders to feature liminal spaces shaped by pluralities and hybridities. 86 These sites are contested places that position oceans as large, interconnected regions that are not constrained by the edge of landscapes. Observing and honoring the blurring of land, sky, and water requires illuminating how island inhabitants work toward creating good lives with sea and oceanic ti(d)es. Citing Lanny Thompson, Na’puti notes the concept of archipe-logic—an archipelagic studies methodology that finds its routes/roots in communicating “ways of thinking about, with, and from archipelagoes.”87 Thompson highlights the importance of traversing relationships, including their spread, across different spaces and temporal periods. Archipe-logics “emphasize discontinuous connections” and “complex spatial networks” that move and are fluid based on various (re)configurations and assemblages entangled with empire. 88 Thompson’s Imperial Archipelago research archives expansionism and conquest in texts and images documenting the US “possessions” of Guåhan, Cuba, Hawai‘i, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. His critical engagement helps to explain US Americanization strategies, including stories of evolution and “the family of man” trope, to create, maintain, and legitimize hierarchies based on class, gender, and race. 89 I argue these insights exemplify what Yaejoon Kwon calls “transcolonial racial formations” and what Natalia Molina describes as “racial scripts.”90 Together, these concepts function to advance oppressive power dynamics that target colonized places and racialized peoples across time and locations by relying on similar stories and repeated arguments derived from already-extant rhetorical materials. Importantly, these formations and scripts are mutable and can be countered in alternative structures and rewritings. Reading Puerto Rico as a site of competing and complementary power dynamics, I diverge from most energy studies scholarship that examines continental US and Western European contexts and from most island and archipelagic studies by focusing specifically on energy struggles.91 Joining urgent pleas that refuse the swallowing up of islands and their inhabitants by corruption, venture and green capitalists, rising seas, the increasing intensity and frequency of hurricanes, typhoons, and tsunamis, and many other threats, this energy ethnography carries a deep archipelagic concern.92 I call for addressing scalar limitations (and possibilities) to resist the language of con16
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quering “new” research terrain, biased by a “mainland” context, to instead work deeply and creatively with constraints by engaging in perspective taking and critiques that unsettle assumptions.93 Accordingly, I center archipelagic realities shaped by subaltern, subterranean, and southern relations.94
“Going South” with De/coloniality “Going South” provides one means for thinking through and enacting the decolonial theoretical and methodological commitments of Energy Islands. According to Raka Shome, “going South” recognizes that dispossession need not be hemisphere-bound. Certain places and communities that are situated geographically north are part of the Global South, just as portions of the southern hemisphere can experience Global North conditions.95 For example, a study of Trinidad and Tobago troubles popular climate justice framings that mark the Global North as carrying all emissions culpabilities, while exonerating a monolithic Global South.96 In Puerto Rico, disparate experiences shape everyday life, as financially privileged individuals tend to consume at unsustainable levels, while others exist without basic necessities.97 Poverty rates now exceed 50 percent of the population.98 Both before and after hurricane and earthquake disasters, some residents relied heavily on electricity, while others lacked and continue to lack access.99 Nuancing Global South–Global North dynamics seeks to emphasize that Puerto Ricans and others in the archipelago are not a monolith and have differential experiences with electricity access, wealth, and income, among many other considerations. These differences expand when including the islands of Vieques and Culebra.100 Thus, it is an oversimplification and inaccurate to label the archipelago as wholly part of the Global North or Global South. “Going South” also requires addressing the resilient nature of colonial legacies and logics and how they are communicated by different actors. Constitutive of empire’s stubborn presence are the discourses, tropes, narratives, and other rhetorical materials that (re)construct and normalize this oppression. Shome contends that “whereas in the past, imperialism was about controlling the ‘native’ by colonizing her or him territorially, now imperialism is more about subjugating the ‘native’ by colonizing her or him discursively.”101 To this claim, I would add the enduring effects of colonialism in the form of what Danielle Endres calls its “discursive apparatus.”102 In Puerto Rico and elsewhere, both territorial and discursive colonialism exist I n t roduc t ion
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and co-constitute each other, evincing how human and other bodies of water, land, and ideas are interconnected.103 The power dynamics of modernity’s racialized system categorizes, capitalizes on, and controls based on dichotomous hierarchies that mark colonized peoples as subhuman and uncivilized to enact coloniality.104 These systemic harms tend to operate beyond a colonial government and take shape in legal, political, economic, and other forms of control, fueled by ideologies and discourses of domination that persist in the present day.105 Recognizing these patterns of power, Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Eve Tuck caution against reducing understandings of and communication about settler colonialism and other forms of dispossession and conquest to events, as this framing erases structural and enduring colonial violence.106 As many individuals and groups insist, colonies still exist today, exemplified by Puerto Rico, Guåhan, and other US “unincorporated territories” of the US “empire-state.”107 Puerto Rico’s status makes for a slippery position, as the archipelago floats in the interstices between internal and external colonialism and coloniality.108 In 1952, Puerto Rico gained its current commonwealth or estado libre asociado [freely associated state] designation, which marks “a myth of constitutional decolonization,” given that Puerto Ricans face US legal, political, economic, English-language, and other constraints and disciplining.109 Including and theorizing beyond political decolonization, Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh propose alternatives to coloniality via decoloniality. This counter concept and the actions it cultivates is rooted in the interdependencies and interconnections of all living things and peoples. Mignolo and Walsh describe their project as one of reexistence—the struggle to live together with dignity by reassessing dominant definitions, meanings, and stories. They embed decoloniality in localized histories and bodies for “creating and illuminating pluriversal and interversal paths” that resist the colonial matrix of power’s universalizing and globalizing logics and actions.110 Accordingly, Mignolo and Walsh conceptualize decoloniality as a “way, option, standpoint, analytic, project, practice, and praxis” that values the communal, not competition, and multiplicities, not singularities.111 Rather than advancing zero-point onto-epistemologies, or ways of being and knowing, that celebrate and center dominant perspectives and practices, while disciplining and devaluing others, decoloniality imagines a decolonial horizon that works in the cracks and borders of coloniality.112 One needed intervention in this body of research is more praxis- and place-based contributions. Darrel Wanzer-Serrano calls for a “radical contex18
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tualization” to analyze deeply “countless acts of everyday resistance,” while also acknowledging that vernacular discourse sometimes supports harmful ideological commitments rather than challenging them.113 He finds that alternatives to coloniality might take place using various rhetorical strategies. In his study of the New York Young Lords, a Puerto Rican grassroots group in El Barrio (Spanish Harlem), he finds that disidentification (i.e., the refusal of binaries to repurpose dominant culture) was one of several ways the group reimagined a more dignified life in the 1960s and 1970s.114 He also studies how the group’s Garbage Offensive repurposed material waste that the city failed to collect and clean up by blocking street traffic with this same substance—literally taking up space to disrupt routine processes and systems that treated the neighborhood and its residents as devalued waste and dirty. This example points to how rhetorical materials can deconstruct and challenge, via creative place-based acts, entwined systems of racial capitalism and logics and practices constituting colonial domination. De/coloniality research shares some important overlaps with Indigenous and decolonial studies. In Latinx Environmentalisms, Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jacquette Ray note that Indigenous and Latin American studies do not always share the same approaches to generate and assess decolonial questions and possibilities. However, they observe several instructive interconnections, including challenging totalizing stories and universalizing abstractions. Additionally, scholars and practitioners share interests in “epistemological, ontological, and material workings of colonialism, especially the centrality of the process through which indigenous relationships to lands suffer a process of ongoing erasure by colonialist claims to land as property.”115 Aileen Moreton-Robinson exemplifies this concern in her research on white settler colonialism’s expressions of power in the form of different propertied relationships, as whiteness socially is (re) produced and hinges on ownership, Indigenous dispossession, and occupation. Through this violent process, the nation itself—as well as its colonial and imperial extensions—becomes marked as white property.116 In addition to these theoretical connections, “going South” also resonates with energy justice and its concerns with subterranean exploitation and reexisting in sustainable, equitable, and just forms. Detailed in chapter 1, as a social movement and discourse, energy justice works to build “broadbased political muscle from below” that simultaneously argues for a “none of the below” approach to resist fossil fuel extraction and dispossession.117 As Karma R. Chávez explains, political will and capacity building encourI n t roduc t ion
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ages engaged researchers to “think about the courses of action that people have available to them, on the ground, as the starting points for theoretical analysis.”118 Given that Puerto Rico and other island and archipelagic places exceed on-the-ground courses of action to include intertidal and other water environments of interaction, these noncontinental existences urge considering how geographic and other place differences configure knowledge creation and circulation, including efforts to survive and uproot systemic oppression when root systems form differently depending on their surroundings and growing conditions. Thus, thorough research requires carefully attending to how place and theory may inform and constitute each other. Fieldwork provides an approach for such study. Critical ethnographers employ qualitative methods, including interviews, participant observation or advocacy, and personal testimonios [testimonies].119 D. Soyini Madison writes that this approach is guided by “an ethical responsibility to address processes of unfairness or injustice within a particular lived domain.”120 Such a commitment also involves putting the needs of communities above academic agendas, which requires deep critical engagement and self-reflexivity before, during, and after leaving research areas.121 Ethnographic methods also create space for what Nina M. Lozano calls “co-constructed sites of resistance,” although it is important not to romanticize fieldwork.122 Elsewhere I have described ethnographic approaches as a coalition, in situations where researcher and community members align ideologically.123 For energy ethnographies, being co-present can be especially important, as witnessing particular places in sensorial ways may help to express and engage with localized environmental and energy exigencies.124 Furthermore, documenting, studying, participating in, and translating “live” rhetorics creates opportunities for and often requires interacting with multiple cultural artifacts, viewpoints, and environments that contribute to the field’s electricity, powered by a variety of rhetorical energies.125 As Paulami Banerjee and Stacey K. Sowards explain, translation is difficult work and is required of researchers, even when encountering the “untranslatable and the loss of voice that might and often does take place in the process.”126 In 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2018, I experienced four research trips, resulting in nearly four months of participant advocacy in Puerto Rico’s archipelago. I primarily studied the largest island, commonly referred to as “the Island,” given the presence of competing energy discourses there.127 Venturing to numerous municipalities and using a snowball approach, I informally conversed with and formally interviewed fishers, electricians, environmental 20
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activists, artists, engineers, professors, historians, filmmakers, Department of Natural and Environmental Resources employees, fossil fuel executives, and renewable energy experts. I asked interviewees about a range of topics, including nationality and ethnoracial self-identifications, sustainability concerns regarding the financial and environmental impacts of the archipelago’s energy and economic problems, and to what extent anticolonialism and environmentalism are co-constitutive in Puerto Rico. In addition to interviews, I attended numerous government-sponsored public hearings and community meetings; volunteered at an environmental justice youth camp; marched in a proindependence demonstration; composed written public comments against fossil fuel projects; and supported documentary film production by interviewing community members and serving as an equipment assistant, among many other interactions. Coupled with these activities, most of my coalitional contributions occurred when not physically in Puerto Rico. I call this research approach e-advocacy, a method that may be helpful for maintaining ties and coalitional solidarities across time and space that extends the field.128 In the archipelago, the texts I collected (e.g., flyers and periodicals), the conversations I transcribed (i.e., interviews and field notes), and the ways I culturally immersed myself (e.g., listening to debates on economic, energy, and political status anxieties, feeling the ocean brisa [breeze] and inhaling toxic smells, drinking local tap water, experiencing the effects of water rationing and the conversations it evoked, collecting trash strewn about mangrove forests with local youth) profoundly shaped my relationships with community members, environments, and the ways I understood different rhetorical energies circulating in, around, and about the archipelago. In daily field notes, I recorded and highlighted discursive patterns, key terms, and other communication observations from media and everyday personal exchanges. I also often described my liminal feelings and experiences as a white-passing Puerto Rican, Spanish and Irish American, who reads, writes, and speaks Spanish well, but with an accent, and as someone raised in Montana, with financial and many other privileges.129 These complexities also were contoured by physical surroundings, as while Puerto Rico’s mountains reminded me of home, the coastal geographical transitions of land to water in mangrove and other wetland settings marked just one of many ways the natural environment presented significant differences from the landlocked experiences of my youth. Moving between these ecosystems, interactions, and reflections in the Caribbean and the United States, I have learned I n t roduc t ion
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Figure 2. Local community members discuss an eco-interpreter youth initiative, as I record fieldnotes. Aguirre, Puerto Rico, May 16, 2015. Photo by Ernesto Olivares Gómez.
in embodied, evocative ways that my familial and nongenetic kinship ties run deep in this archipelago, moving me to feel that I am of Puerto Rico but not from Puerto Rico. Before embarking on this multiyear research project, most of my familial experiences had been in western and northern urban and suburban areas. As I became increasingly interested in energy issues and the complexities of studying unjust impacts in nuanced, place-specific ways, I directed my energies toward southern Puerto Rico, specifically Salinas, Guayama, and Peñuelas, given this coastal region’s use as an “energy sacrifice zone” for US racial capitalism and experimentation and its neglect and erasure in mainstream media.130 With increasing studies of civic action in urban areas, I join calls urging engagement with rural contexts in Latin America.131 The southeastern area of Puerto Rico is predominantly home to residents of majority African descent, some of whom trace their ancestry to plantation slavery and other exploited labor.132 As local people live with intergenerational traumas, pain, and individual and communal perseverance, corporate polluters and politicians continually designate their environments as sites for large-scale fossil fuel plants and other toxic operations.133 In step with longstanding efforts to reimagine the role of interlocutors in qualitative research, rather than refer to interviewees and others with whom I interacted during my fieldwork by the social science terms of subjects, informants, or even participants, I prefer colaboradores [collaborators].134 I use this 22
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term to challenge binaries (e.g., activist/scholar, insider/outsider, and expert/ lay person) that reduce the complexities and multiple belongings of social movement actors and to support the orientation of doing research with, rather than only about, particular communities. Similarly, the collaborator concept also seeks to diminish hierarchies that traditionally place researchers and subjects in relationships akin to colonizer and colonized, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues.135 Given my complex, multiple identities as family member, “Diaspo-Rican,” and activist-scholar, in these roles, I strive to enact what Megan Ybarra outlines as an ethnography of refusal that rejects knowledge production in the service of empire by locating systems of power to help contribute to their dismantlement.136 This responsibility shifts attention from studying Puerto Ricans as subjects to instead analyzing how different actors in Puerto Rico and in the continental United States communicate archipelagoes of power that contribute to, condone, confront, and challenge entwined injustices. Ethnographic work seeking to make sense of and record something or someone “there” to bring back “here” for different audiences has at least some component of extractivism and points to the ethical impurities of this project. Gayatri Spivak and Linda Martín Alcoff encourage being wary of Eurocentric researchers who argue for having avoided “speaking for” others, which erases the ideological underpinnings of recording practices in the name of transparency and authenticity. Nonetheless, as alternatives, “speaking with” or “speaking to” can create space for collaborations and encourages skepticism toward calls for “listening to” that reinscribe colonial power dynamics, privileges, and misrepresentations in the name of knowledge building.137 Consequently, I seek to enact self-reflexive scholarship that resists colonial logics in the selection, analysis, and critique of energy communication and rhetorical energies and to offer additional coalitional acts that are described in and that exceed the pages of this book.
Configuring Chapters Communicating energy exigencies and archipelagoes of power requires a complex study of place; local peoples; organizations, including corporations and different levels of government; the social, political, economic, and environmental conditions; discourses; narratives; tropes; energy and environmental policy; and energy extraction, production, distribution, consumpI n t roduc t ion
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tion, disposal, and storage, including infrastructure and the material circuits that connect one location and community to another. To understand and respond to dissonant rhetorical and material energies, an energy-related metaphor of exigence guides each chapter. These theoretical constructs and tropes for praxis-based engagement are dis/empowering, experimenting, generating, (re)wiring, and delinking. Together, these metaphors interrelate and work to communicate multiple archipelagoes of power within and across this book’s subsequent chapters, which are presented in two parts: “Forming Energies” and “Powering the Present and Future.” These sections signal the indispensable study of how historical experiences, practices, and rhetorical materials circulate throughout time and space to influence and create discourses, stories, and tropes shaping the present and future. Chapter 1 introduces and theorizes several dis/empowering terms to name different problems and alternatives that constitute an energy rhetorical matrix. The section begins by defining energy coloniality, which I contend describes the longtime colonial history and present of Puerto Rico—during the control of both the Spanish and US empires. I also introduce energy privilege to call attention to who benefits from exploitative, extractive relationships that impede possibilities for energy justice. The language of energy actors, drawn from an interview I conducted with engineer Efraín O’NeillCarrillo, offers one means for rethinking the nexus of energy, power, naming, and agency. I argue these terms provide a vocabulary for describing historical and present-day realities, as naming shapes understandings to define something as a problem or not, also potentially creating conditions for caring and acting or not.138 Chapter 2 highlights experimenting as a “transcolonial racial formation” that has deep historical and present ties to the archipelago and other areas grappling with US coloniality and empire.139 This metaphor also resonates with past and present energy projects, policies, and political discourses. I signal four areas to assist understandings of Puerto Rico as a laboratory for US empire building and capital, following the historical trajectory of defense zone, disease zone, development zone, and disaster zone. This most recent experimental iteration involves using Puerto Rico as a test site for utility-scale fossil fuels and renewables, constraining possibilities for local jobs and investments, as well as energy transition literacy and community self-determination. In particular, I critique social media exchanges between Tesla cofounder and CEO Elon Musk and former governor Ricardo Rosselló to illustrate how these approaches risk replicating and reifying oppressive maneuvers, made 24
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acceptable and even praiseworthy by green capitalism. Notably, these four zone discourses are composed of examples that overlap, are not exhaustive, and mark one of several ways to approach the discursive underpinnings of the experimentation trope and its entwined symbolic-material manifestations in Puerto Rico. Chapter 3 engages generating to study how different energy actors generate and repurpose metaphors constituting the materiality of methane gas buildout and pollution. Highlighting uses of different space-occupying tropes, I examine in what ways these rhetorical materials constitute energy coloniality and energy privilege. Fossil fuel industry and allied political discourses frame methane gas, including its liquefied form, as common sense and essential for an energy transition away from supposedly more harmful coal and oil.140 Yet ample evidence indicates that claiming this substance is a greener fuel is scientifically false, given that methane gas is entirely unsustainable, especially when considering import and export terminals, tankers, and pipelines. Situating methane gas controversies locally, this chapter examines two defeated projects—Vía Verde and the Aguirre Offshore GasPort—to center how grassroots resistance to these plans stands in strong contrast to the accelerating expansionist quest for molding Puerto Rico into a major methane hub. Analysis of communicative energies advocating for and resisting these projects, as well as new policies and proposals, points to how different people and groups interpret and translate these struggles for various audiences to generate master and marginalized discourses. Chapter 4 discusses (re)wiring coalitions to navigate pre-, post-, and prolonged disaster contexts. I draw on more than six years of collaboration, inspired by the tenacious efforts of Puerto Rican energy studies scholars and grassroots group members in the Salinas-Guayama region. After engaging scholarship that links the (re)wiring concept to coalitional politics, I provide specific examples of my own collaborations over the years—at different levels and locations. This chapter concludes by imagining coalitional transformations as what Alaí Reyes-Santos calls a “family of islands.”141 Nonheteronormative, transcolonial kinships connect these ecologies to provide archipelagic collaborative ways of reexisting and communicating that refuse the divide and conquer logics of empire and disaster, racial, and predatory capitalism. I argue this trope is vital for reimagining coalitional possibilities committed to energy justice. The conclusion presents delinking alternatives to describe prefigurative politics for a world that challenges energy coloniality and energy privilege, I n t roduc t ion
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as different individuals and groups strive to cocreate liberatory ways of being, knowing, and communicating. I offer the four d’s of energy justice, which I view as interrelated and ineffective, even harmful, without the others. These components are decarbonizing, decentralizing, democratizing, and decolonizing. While a shift from Puerto Rico’s current political status to independent nation may seem unlikely, many individuals made similar claims regarding the impossibility of mass political mobilizations across party lines prior to the 2019 summer uprisings. These energetic activities ultimately ousted former governor Ricardo Rosselló.142 Accordingly, despite the potency of ingrained dependency logics and discourses, many Puerto Ricans are imagining alternative presents and futures for themselves and their neighbors that seek to transform power dynamics, by refusing continued injustice, exploitation, and dispossession. Between several of this book’s chapters, I interweave sections called “Routes/Roots/Raíces.” These narratives offer (auto)ethnographic fragments to enact the importance of critical self-reflection and to illustrate more vivid, place-based engagement. As homophones, depending on one’s pronunciation, routes and roots carry multiple meanings.143 Like its English equivalent, raíces signifies tree roots, origins and ancestry, the cause of something, and the base for different parts of speech. I argue these routes/roots/raíces speak to this energy ethnography’s inherent navigating of inheritance—what others leave and pass down to younger generations, sometimes forcefully, and certainly energetically. Accordingly, I share relevant aspects of my fieldwork and family history, which I have collected often as “papelitos guardados,” or “kept papers/roles,” over the years, inspired by the Latina Feminist Group.144 These vignettes serve as reflective transitional points between chapters and provide depth and complexity to the archipelagoes of power contouring and flowing beyond Puerto Rico’s coastlines.
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Rou t es/Roots/R a íces I
Recuerdos familiares [Family Memories]
I come from island peoples with Puerto Rican, Spanish, and Irish roots. At various times and in various places, my ancestors have contributed to and suffered the cruelties of colonialism and empire. In this first “Routes/ Roots/Raíces” reflection, I piece together fragments of various memories, passed down in the form of intergenerational stories, and an “official” family history, contained in a self-published book written by one of my family members.1 Together, these materials constitute familial, migratory, technological, corporeal, and other energies shaped by powerful systems and relations that, while personal, also relate profoundly to the broader histories and conversations animating Energy Islands. I vividly recall the last time I saw my grandmother’s sister, Consuelo, or “Titi Consi,” as I called her. On the way up to my great aunt’s apartment, I shared the elevator with a couple who just had purchased two Coleman camping gas tanks to restock their cooking fuel supply. More than two months after Hurricane María, the large apartment complex still was running on generators. I read in Claridad that the local government did not prepare residents for the health consequences of using emergency generators for several hours at a time. Journalists reported house fires and cases of carbon monoxide poisoning across Puerto Rico. When I arrived at the eleventh floor, Confesora, Titi Consi’s Dominican care provider, opened the door to my great aunt’s apartment and warmly guided me to where my relative was lying immobile on her narrow twin bed. Well into her nineties and recently having survived Hurricane María, Titi Consi’s frail body and facial features signaled the end was near. Like many Puerto Ricans, she was born on Puerto Rico’s largest island and migrated to the United States in early adulthood. She later returned to the archipelago to spend her final years, passing 29
Figure 3. Titi Consi and me. Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, July 2014. Author photo.
shortly after my November 2017 visit. Across the years and miles, Titi Consi and I had been dedicated pen pals, writing regularly to each other during my youth. As a child and teenager, I loved receiving her letters and feeling the connection they created between us. Though Titi Consi’s experiences and my own in the United States and Puerto Rico were very different, they both were influenced by intergenerational relationships, stories, and their consequences. “La gran familia puertorriqueña” [The great Puerto Rican family] popular narrative uncritically features three raíces contributing to Puerto Rican heritage: Indigenous Taíno, African, and Spanish. Underlying the story of 30
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these supposedly pleasantly interwoven roots is hispanofilia, which prefers all things and people associated with the Iberian Peninsula via strong affective connections.2 Varied expressions of colorism, racism, anti-Indigeneity, and anti-Blackness denigrate and erase Indigenous and especially African cultural influences and ancestries. This hierarchy encourages blanqueamiento [whitening] by reproducing with lighter-skinned people.3 Encountering these logics and practices rooted in imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy, many of my relatives participated in and experienced the impacts of these oppressive relations. My great grandparents were born in the western coastal city of Mayagüez under the absolutist and antiautonomous Spanish colonial government of General Romualdo Palacios González in the 1880s. My grandmother, Esther María Irizarry Rubio, shared the same birthplace as her parents and was born in 1913. She benefited from her upper-middle class and light-skinned privileges. Her father served as an administrator for Pro Patria magazine and as a cofounder of El Diario del Oeste newspaper. He later developed Tipografía Comercial, one of two main printing presses in the western part of the largest island. When Esther was five years old, her mother died, shortly after giving birth to her eighth child. Her death represented just one of millions caused by the 1918 pandemic. Many years later, after graduating from high school, in 1932, my grandmother migrated to the United States. She took the four-day journey from San Juan to New York on the Borinquen ship, which symbolized extractivist power not only in the vessel’s oil boilers but also in the taking and respelling of the Indigenous Taíno people’s name for Puerto Rico to label the ship.4 Joining her oldest sister in New York City, Esther found employment as an IBM typist. The company liked to showcase her ability to translate quickly between English and Spanish. Later, she was hired for secretarial work at Columbia University, where she met a Spanish immigrant who became her spouse. Esther gave birth to my father, Carlos, in 1942, shortly before my grandfather went to war in Europe. My dad and I have many fond memories of my grandmother. According to my father, she was “una refranera,” a living, walking book of refranes [proverbs]. He also remembered her as having “a lot of affection and goodness.” In my recollections, I recall our singing songs in Spanish and watering her plants together. “Nana,” as I called her, taught me how to dance. When I visited her home, we would squeeze next to each other in her chair and excitedly say, in unison, “¡Uno, dos, tres!,” before using our collective strength to R ec u e r d os fa m i l i a r e s [Fa m i ly M e mor i e s]
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Figure 4. My grandparents began their six-decade relationship in New York. Late 1930s or early 1940s. Family photo.
push ourselves into a reclining position. I loved my time with her. Though these memories still fill me with joy and longing to be with Nana again, not all was good in her household in earlier years. Resulting in much suffering for my grandmother and her children, my grandfather developed boxing skills while at Fort Bragg and was a Central Intelligence Corps officer during World War II. Hence, he could pack a punch and was a trained interrogator. The entanglements of misogyny and colonialism deeply shaped the union of my Spanish-immigrant grandfather and my Puerto Rican grandmother. According to multiple sources, my grandfather snarled at her and said, “When the Spaniards came to Puerto Rico, your people still were hanging from trees.” These cutting words exemplified my grandfather’s colonial machista ways that stemmed from and contributed to a violent familial tutelage, passed down from Spanish fathers to their sons. Over the years, I have heard explosive tempers and cruel actions 32
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Figure 5.
My dad and his cousin race along a Puerto Rico shoreline. c. 1950. Family photo.
to discipline, dominate, and dehumanize women and girls in my family described and dismissed as expressions of “energy.” Many miles and an ocean away, my grandmother’s Puerto Rican brothers remained in the Caribbean. Guillermo served as Puerto Rico’s budget director under Puerto Rican Governor Luis Muñoz Marín and as secretary of state under Governor Roberto Sánchez-Vilella. In contrast, one of his older brothers, Humberto, was a journalist and an independentista [independence advocate]. On the day of the Ponce Massacre, Palm Sunday 1937, US colonial authorities responded to an unarmed nationalist protest by killing twenty people and wounding more than 150 others. Humberto had planned to attend, but my great grandfather forbade his participation, so he stayed home. My father also recalls Humberto’s story of being questioned by local police for his proindependence activities. He was very fortunate to avoid the persecution and violence that many other nationalists faced.5 My dad met and spent time with Guillermo and Humberto when he returned to his mother’s birthplace, which helped him to understand both her origins and his own. After the war, my father moved incrementally west with his parents, ultimately contributing to settler colonialism in Colorado. Around 1950, my R ec u e r d os fa m i l i a r e s [Fa m i ly M e mor i e s]
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grandfather purchased a small home. When a white neighbor, who also was a minister, discovered “Hispanics” would be joining the neighborhood, he unsuccessfully created and circulated a petition to bar their move. Meanwhile, my dad sensed his otherness from the white, English-speaking children with whom he grew up. Until kindergarten, he only spoke Spanish. In elementary and middle school, his primary language was English, given structural monolingual dictates, as well as his family’s efforts to assimilate him. However, my father recalled understanding and listening to his parents speak Spanish with each other at home and often in public. This language exposure enhanced his ability to relearn Spanish in high school. A few years later, during his college junior year abroad in Spain, my dad made the political decision not to speak Castilian Spanish, with the strong th sound. He explained that this act consciously sought to honor his mother and his Puerto Rican identity. Unlike my father, I have chosen, for the most part, to exist between cultures—an option he and so many others like him do not have. I cannot begin to equate my realities with the experiences of first-generation diasporic or Puerto Rico–born individuals. As a Diaspo-Rican, I feel both stranger to and sometimes at home in the archipelago, although I know the Antilles is not my home nor should I try to make it my place to occupy. To visit the Mayagüez cemetery, where numerous family members are buried, creates in me a sense of connection, while also a feeling of being apart. My privileged positionality allows me to visit and leave as I please by having the choice to deepen ties to my ancestral routes/roots, while benefiting from my ability usually to fit in when needed in the United States. These reflections are not intended to suggest my experiences always have been easy, as I often had different cultural perspectives and an ethnicized physical appearance compared to most of the people around me growing up in Montana. I also have struggled to reconnect with parts of my identity that were denied or lost. While this “Routes/Roots/Raíces” narrates my paternal family history, there is another story that merits acknowledging: my mother’s working-class, Irish-American family. As much as I grew up eating arroz con habichuelas [rice with beans] and pork chops seasoned with adobo, dancing to Gloria Estefan’s Latin American music with mi hermanita, Victoria, and reciting Spanish-language children’s songs and prayers, I also enjoyed learning Irish rebel tunes and danced basic jigs, supported by the unconditional love, sacrifice, and hard work of my mother, Ann. Notably, there are important connections linking Puerto Rican and Irish independence movements, as well as 34
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Figure 6. My dad and his late sister, María del Carmen, spent most of their youth and young adulthood in the Rocky Mountains of the United States. Boulder, Colorado, 1950s. Family photo.
individuals who forcibly and freely moved between these island contexts, but these entanglements are for another time. 6 This first “Routes/Roots/Raíces” narrative seeks to show how conquest and resistance exceed tidy binaries of colonizer and colonized. Furthermore, ethnicity, race, class, gender, language ability, and other identity and positionality considerations, intersectional oppressions, and perseverance in the most difficult of circumstances must be part of conversations about Puerto Rico’s energetic past, present, and future.
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On e
Dis/empowering Terms of an Energy Rhetorical Matrix
The previous “Routes/Roots/R aíces” section provided an account of one family’s experiences in Puerto Rico and in the US diaspora across several generations. This history expressed how different individuals used their energies and power to migrate, harm, care for, work, resist, and create. This chapter continues this historical, energetic interest by interweaving key events, policies, concepts, and interviews to tell one narrative of Puerto Rico, from the late fifteenth-century colonial invasion to the present. To do so, I study how different dis/empowering terms assist in making sense of this story with the hope that they may advance praxis beyond these pages. This chapter introduces several concepts that constitute an energy rhetorical matrix that seeks to add significance and gravity to archipelagoes of power. I introduce and examine different dominant and subordinate articulations, or linkages, that construct this powerful formation.1 Situated contextually, these connections signify different problems and disruptive possibilities that conceptualize power struggles with a focus on the role energy, islands, and archipelagoes have played and continue to play in intertwined material and cultural systems of power. These terms are energy coloniality, energy privilege, energy justice, and energy actors. Treating each of these concepts in turn, I define and apply these articulations to provide material for comprehending their significance. Given the decolonial commitment of this project, I situate these terms specifically within Puerto Rico, both to make a situated argument that rejects universals and to demonstrate how a placebased approach is central to constructing different ways of knowing, including naming elements in this energy rhetorical matrix. Facilitated by the dis/empowering metaphor guiding this chapter, I observe how the energy-related terms and practiced examples of their enact37
ment enhance and erode communal and individual well-being, agency, and self-determination—and for whom. To build this conceptual matrix, first, I begin by defining energy coloniality, which dictated and continues to direct Puerto Rico’s longtime colonial history and present under both Spain and the United States.2 Second, I present energy privilege, as a related term to energy coloniality, to shift an emphasis from who is disproportionately oppressed to who and what is responsible for and benefits from trauma and violence. Third, I delve into the concept of energy justice, drawing on environmental and climate justice movement scholarship and activism. Fourth, informed by an interview with an energy studies researcher and engineer in Puerto Rico, I explore the articulation of energy actors as a potentially empowering concept that rejects colonial logics of dependency. Finally, I conclude with a summary that understands energy coloniality as an inextricable feature of empire, while energy privilege encourages rethinking energy coloniality to consider energy justice and energy actors.
Energy Coloniality As this book’s introduction argues, coloniality takes shape in oppressive legacies of domination and dispossession beyond current direct rule to include a wider range of hierarchical power dynamics and experiences. I link energy with coloniality to illuminate how colonial desires to invade, exploit, import, and export function to control different energy forms (e.g., human labor, migrations, and fossil fuels) to normalize polluting and plundering. In the words of LeBrón, “colonialism is an inherently extractive enterprise; it steals the bodies and resources of the colonized.”3 Logics of domination, extractivism, disposability, and conquest persistently colonize ever deeper subterranean environments. Such universalizing energy “solutions” trivialize and ignore geographic, cultural, and other differences, as well as local community interventions, to imagine and implement alternatives to oppression, topdown dictates, and social and physical death.4 Energy coloniality finds many routes/roots in resource colonialism. Concurrently, this practice also may exceed the materials extraction and byproduct disposal (e.g., mining operations and nuclear waste storage) that US resource colonialism research tends to document and critique, especially as it relates to Indigenous sovereignty barriers caused by the refusal of governments and corporations to uphold land rights.5 Rather than contemplating 38
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and communicating “resources” generally, the signifier of energy draws specific and expansive attention to the symbolic and material roles this concept occupies in shaping and powering different relational dynamics, structures, and operations, including and extending beyond fossil fuel and other mineral extraction. Furthermore, given that coloniality often functions without a colonial power dictating local governance, energy coloniality carries a capacious capacity that includes areas throughout the globe that remain impacted by colonial logics, rhetorical materials, and practices. Accordingly, employing energy coloniality may be generative for making transcolonial connections among “territories” that draw on common colonized experiences for cross-mobilizations that place shared oppressions in the service of coalitional efforts toward liberation. Additionally, coloniality may be useful for nationand empire-states and First Nations still grappling with the presence of settler and administrative colonialism and historic and present-day imperialism. 6 Energy coloniality also makes space for studying the US–Puerto Rico relationship by approaching the Puerto Rican community as inclusive of Boricuas [Puerto Ricans] living in the US diaspora. An energy coloniality narrative permeates Puerto Rico’s history, since the time of supposed discovery with a plotline of taming and controlling environments, including murdering, enslaving, and exploiting Indigenous and African peoples. Longtime environmental determinist ideologies and discourses have othered nondominant, tropical archipelagic ways of knowing and being.7 Expressions of these predetermined, oppressive beliefs tend to invoke energy as a key metaphor for characterizing various bodies, lifeways, and climates as inferior and in need of disciplining. Dominant US discourses in the late 1800s and early 1900s described the archipelago as a sweltering hotbed that zapped energy, motivation, and productivity. 8 US government officials and researchers, among others, linked climate to types of weather, humidity, and temperature and the health of inhabitants and agricultural practices. Concurrently, alternative ways of understanding weather and climate events, such as the traditional tracking methods of hurricanes by the local Taíno people, were dismissed and penalized.9 Following this racist master ideology, “extreme” hotter climates hindered progress, as conditions hosted diseases and “tended to induce torpor and passivity, linking people to their environments.”10 Accordingly, rhetorical constructions of climate explicated which cultures measured up to prosperous expectations and which failed. This long-standing assumption of conquest constitutes the “disastrous tropics,” a trope that Lloréns claims Di s/e m p ow e r i ng T e r m s
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relies on imagery and other representations that emphasize the taming of unruly, uncontainable natural environments and the Indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples who inhabit them.11 This discourse of “energetic racism” often found persuasive force by reducing diverse peoples to the them pronoun.12 Accordingly, colonized groups were marked “as the infantile, the perverse, the other, the beastly, [and] the savage.”13 These designations compose what Anjali Vats and LeiLani Nishime and Lisa A. Flores and Mary Ann Villarreal, in their respective projects, name as “containment rhetorics.”14 Master narratives also associated exposures to tropical environments and climates with degenerated whiteness, to advance political and economic interests. Dominant storytellers tended to argue that the tropics threatened to degenerate visitors and settlers, who interacted with the lazy, anachronistic “alien people” of this (supposedly) inhospitable climate.15 “Tropicalization” carried a “scientific” conviction that the white body exhibited maladaptive qualities when exposed to tropical environments, resulting in an inevitable “tropicalized cultural whiteness,” caused by coexisting with nonwhite “natives.”16 Meanwhile, US governmental officials cast local Puerto Rican Creole elites as inferior and incapable of self-rule. In submitting to the Spanish government, these privileged “tropical whites” had participated in a society that supposedly fell far behind US “progress.”17 Officials cited these individuals’ inability to manage the surrounding landscape appropriately, among other critiques rooted in US exceptionalism to advance empire. Following the Spanish-American War, the primary metaphors constituting colonizer-colonized relationships between the United States and Puerto Rico took two forms. Faye Caronan describes these representations as (1) a heteronormative romance, with the colonizer man saving or wooing the colonized woman as feminized subject and (2) the needy, infantilized colonyas-child, raised by the all-knowing, disciplining parental figure representing the metropole.18 Colonial actors’ mobilizations of these representations exceeded Puerto Rico to include other US colonies, which points to the reach of empire and the expansive application of these rhetorical devices.19 Racist tropes undergirded plans to “correct” educational, infrastructural, and technological “backwardness.” Electricity marked a major facet of this intervention, as this fossil-fueled technology promised to bring artificial light generation to the dark tropics.20 Material extraction, distribution, combustion, and waste enabled this electrification, as well as rhetorical energies that spread and reified colonial myths that normalized dependency by articulating progress with imported fossil fuel energy consumption.21 Putatively 40
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Figure 7. Imperial Uncle Sam embodies white man’s burden to maintain a hierarchy that places “Porto Rico,” Hawai‘i, and Cuba above the Philippines and Guam, the other colonies possessed by the US hegemon, following the Spanish-American War and the 1898 Treaty of Paris, 1899, Philadelphia Inquirer. Image courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
neutral technological innovation obscured entrenched views regarding “the North’s superior scientific intelligence and the South’s inferiority.”22 During the industrial revolution, imperial thermodynamics science created a hierarchy of humans to advance expansionist practices and discourses that “understood [work] through energetic metaphors, as a site of energy transformation that requires the maximization of efficiency and productivism.”23 According Di s/e m p ow e r i ng T e r m s
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to Cara New Daggett, these requirements and their metaphoric constructions also mobilized waste, the counterpart to work, to advance Western capitalist domination. The entwinements of class, race, gender, and environmental contamination and cruelties mark this waste, which moves beyond containment in its leakiness to menace the boundaries imposed by industrial capitalist systems.24 Master ideologies and discourses of waste, work, and unboundedness relate to the disastrous tropics trope, which understands “backward” places and peoples as having a nature-linked fecundity requiring containment because of their leakiness and perceived polluted qualities and pollute-ability. The “Isla del encanto” slogan conveniently elides how energy coloniality shaped and continues to shape everyday stressors and not-so-exceptional shocks in Puerto Rico. In 1493, on his second invasion of what is today known as the Caribbean, Christopher Columbus and other conquistadores employed by the Spanish monarchy arrived at Borikén. The Indigenous Taíno people gave this name to the largest island, which was renamed as San Juan Bautista by Columbus and then as Puerto Rico by Juan Ponce de León, the first Spanish governor of Puerto Rico. An estimated thirty thousand Taínos experienced the genocidal impacts of European conquest through direct slaughter, overwork, and sickness. Conquistadores and other supporters of the Spanish Crown responded to rebellions in the early 1500s by mass murdering thousands of Indigenous peoples. These late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century violent clashes were only the beginning of Spain’s repressive rule.25 Coupled with Puerto Rico’s geographically advantageous position, another driving force for Spanish colonization involved profiting from local “resources.” During the 1500s, Indigenous labor powered the extraction of precious metals. Cargo flotas [fleets] relied on wind power and the whims of the sea to export “metallic wealth” back to Spain.26 An additional major economic draw involved the cultivation of export crops (e.g., coffee, bananas, and sugar).27 Enslaved African peoples supplied somatic energy to power these operations.28 By the 1800s, large sugarcane ingenios [estates] and centrales [mills] were the norm and developed after draining wetlands and deforesting to alter the wet and tree-filled “unproductive” terrain.29 The coast’s wide topography, arid qualities, and water supplied from extensive irrigation systems supported sugarcane production, which colonizers and the Spanish Crown believed Black and Afro-descendant peoples should power because of their supposed ability to manage the heat and brutal conditions better 42
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than other workers could. The enactment of “geographic blackness” segregated Black Puerto Ricans to the coasts and often to specific communities within these regions.30 The northern municipality of Loíza, for example, has the largest population of Afro-descendant Puerto Ricans, while the southeastern coastal towns of Arroyo, Guayama, and Salinas have similar demographics. Left to make do with areas difficult to inhabit, these individuals and communities shared cultures and values, while often resisting their abuse and marginalization.31 With growing pressures from the Haitian revolution, democracy movements in Spain, and other influences, Spanish officials granted Puerto Ricans Spanish citizenship in 1812. However, the Crown and local government leaders did not ban slavery until 1873. Just years before, in 1868, independence activists participated in the Grito de Lares to agitate for the end of Spanish rule. Resistive energies and progressive movements in Latin America further withered the vitality of the Spanish empire in the nineteenth century. Bending to these changes, the Crown agreed to grant Puerto Rico an autonomous government, run by local politicians; however, US military and government officials already had their sights on the archipelago.32 The 1898 US takeover shifted the Spanish colonial government’s energy mercantile associations into regional monopolies, owned by Puerto Rican, Canadian, and US companies. The construction of hydroelectric plants helped to power electrification and overwhelmingly served the sugarcane industry’s irrigation needs rather than the local community.33 This practice was the case particularly in Puerto Rico’s arid southern region, home to growing corporate sugarcane fields.34 US multinational companies managed sugarcane estates in Puerto Rico and consolidated land to grow this sweet substance as a monocrop. Industry operations grasped the economy, including in Santa Isabel, Arroyo, and Aguirre, along the largest island’s southern coast.35 These plants often heated sugarcane using charcoal from mangrove trees and other onceliving components of local water and land.36 Meanwhile, subsistence farming decreased, while job shortages were pervasive. The 1928 San Felipe hurricane, the Great Depression, and the 1935 San Ciprián hurricane exacerbated food deprivation and other extreme hardships.37 Throughout this period, groups and individuals, including some of those suffering the gravest injustices, organized for better conditions. From the creation of the Nationalist Party to labor union activities, which, in the 1930s mobilized sixty thousand striking workers, many Puerto Ricans actively struggled for change. Meanwhile, the federal government made plans to address these economic conditions.38 Di s/e m p ow e r i ng T e r m s
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The Puerto Rico Emergency Relief Administration oversaw US-backed and locally run New Deal programs. Beginning in 1933, this agency became the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration and ushered in various programs and departments, ranging from education to agriculture, to improve living conditions. These initiatives tended to be associated with modern progress and improved life for many people.39 To offer cheap electricity for residents and to reduce flood risks, while increasing irrigation and drinking water, workers constructed distribution lines and hydroelectric plants in the central mountainous region of Puerto Rico. 40 These technologies demonstrated increasing rural Puerto Rico and US government interactions that, while materially beneficial, also pointed to a lack of self-determination that would persist in subsequent years. Multinational US-based mining corporations actively sought to unearth Puerto Rico’s resources by the mid-twentieth century. Resisting extractivism advocacy from local elites and government programs, such as the Comisión de Minería y Fomento, organizational members of the Vanguardia Popular and the Movimiento Pro Independencia mounted a successful resistance movement in the 1960s, extending into the 1990s. 41 These groups infused nationalist concerns with an environmental consciousness by insisting that mining was “la colonización del subsuelo” [the colonization of the subsurface]. 42 Kennecott Copper Corporation and American Metal Climax “discovered” gold, copper, and silver on the largest island. The plan to extract these metals led some independence advocates to argue that such actions contradicted US governmental claims that the area lacked sufficient resources to sustain itself, given that the largest island’s dimensions are about one hundred miles long by thirty-five miles wide. The area was, in fact, resource rich and seemed to have plenty of land and water available for a grand-scale development idea that would change life in the archipelago. Puerto Rico’s energy sources and infrastructure transformed dramatically in response to Operación Manos a la Obra [Operation Bootstrap]. In the 1940s, Governor Luis Muñoz Marín and the architect of the initiative, José Teodoro Moscoso Mora, and former governor Rexford Tugwell framed their efforts as the “Battle of Production” to transform Puerto Rico from a “poorhouse” to a “showcase.”43 Exemplifying desarrollismo [developmentalism], the masterminds of this “industrialization by invitation” devised a multistage project that developed in three waves: manufacturing, industrialization, and pharmaceuticals.44 In many ways, Operation Bootstrap provided the laboratory for contemporary widespread neoliberal privatization, as local politi44
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cians and other opinion leaders worked with the US government to privatize previously state-owned firms. 45 Enacting this operation also involved moving people. Human displacements occurred as former major industries—such as sugar, coffee, and tobacco—gave way to massive industrialization efforts, coupled with the local government’s encouragement of Boricua migration to the United States for farm work. LeBrón writes that “the economic achievements of Operation Bootstrap and the commonwealth arrangement would have been much less impressive than they appeared without Puerto Rico’s ability to exile its surplus laborers and political dissidents.”46 The 1947 Farm Labor Program, run by the Puerto Rico Department of Labor, ushered in the movement of thousands of migrant farmworkers to the rural United States, to address unemployment and population concerns. About eight hundred fifty thousand people left Puerto Rico from 1940 to 1970, primarily bound for the northeastern United States.47 Workers’ precarious positions marked them as “both expendable and disposable,” based on their replaceability by undocumented and guest laborers and because their citizenship status did not protect them from exploitation, amid inhumane working and living conditions. 48 This vaivén [coming and going] between Puerto Rico and the continental United States has created a nation that exceeds geographic and territorially assigned borders.49 As these mass movements occurred, often on the relatively inexpensive guagua área [air bus], US companies flocked to the archipelago. Epitomizing energy coloniality, US federal and local territorial governments put Puerto Rico on the market free of charge, fueled by massive amounts of fossil-fueled electricity. Corporations benefited from natural resources, poor wages, duty-free trade, and tax loopholes. The Puerto Rico industrial tax exemption acts and US tax code section 936, which lasted from 1976 to 2006, further enabled this exploitation. These incentives resulted in a “corporate bonanza unlike any other in the world” and required the construction of numerous petrochemical sites, refineries, and power plants. Built in the 1950s to 1970s, these plants substantially increased reliance on imported oil.50 The electricity required to run these plants “was colossal” and increased industrial energy use to 74 percent of the archipelago’s total energy consumption.51 During this period, Puerto Rico supplied 20–30 percent of all US petrochemical demands, while only 1 percent of local jobs was in this industry.52 The municipalities of Guayama and Salinas, among other areas, experienced the direct environmental, economic, and other impacts of these comDi s/e m p ow e r i ng T e r m s
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plexes. The Guayama Phillips Puerto Rico Core Petroleum Plant opened in 1965 on former sugar industry land and produced petroleum and petrochemicals.53 About a decade later, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) developed the Aguirre Electric Power Complex in several stages, including the construction and operation of several generating units in the 1970s. The plant still runs on Bunker C fuel oil and diesel and occupies a full square mile of land that borders the abandoned Central Aguirre and a residential neighborhood, home to literally fence-line communities.54 Déborah Berman Santana reports that, over the years, workers at the facility mobilized strikes because of hazardous work conditions, resulting in the killing of one employee and paralyzing of another. The Puerto Rico National Guard and undercover agents violently repressed ongoing labor organizing efforts.55 This treatment resonates with Robert Bullard’s contention that “petrochemical colonialism” targets vulnerable communities that are in contemporary times exploited not by slave owners but “by the petrochemical industry executive as the new ‘master’ and ‘overseer.’”56 Misión Industrial Puerto Rico (MIPR), one of Puerto Rico’s earliest environmental groups, criticized the industry, citing concerns about water and air pollution, as well as worker and community member health. Members conducted a pulmonary research investigation with local scientists, finding atypically high rates of respiratory diseases in Guayanilla and Cataño, home to other major polluting plants. These exposures evince the reach of the fossil fuel industrial complex far beyond Aguirre.57 Fossil fuels were not the only operations of energy coloniality that came to Puerto Rico during Operation Bootstrap. Ever resilient, this form of coloniality adapted to imported technological ideas and projects. In the early 1970s, the local government advocated for creating a nuclear power plant in Jobos Bay in southeastern Puerto Rico.58 In response, MIPR coordinated a coalition, organizing the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and churches to create pressure against Westinghouse, the project’s corporate proposer. Ultimately, the US Atomic Energy Commission cancelled the project because of concerns with seismic hazards in the area—a crucial move, given the 2019 and 2020 coastal earthquakes that shook the southern region for months.59 Nuclear advocates soon targeted a different coastal area, however. In 1964, workers built the Boiling Nuclear Superheater (BONUS) plant near the northwest town of Rincón, as an experimental joint facility of the Puerto Rico Water Resources Authority (now PREPA) and the federal government. Officials decommissioned the power generator less than five years later. The 46
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utility did not want full ownership, given the cost of financing improvements and operations, including contending with the facility’s radioactive releases. 60 Elsewhere on the largest island, contamination from another source also posed pollution problems. Big Pharma profited greatly from Tax Code 936 and contaminated communities in both the north and south. Bootstrap architects established the first pharmaceutical plant in the late 1950s, with the industry maintaining its strength until the late 1990s. 61 During this period, corporate giants Pfizer, Baxter, Eli Lilly, and others thrived, especially in northern Puerto Rico, where the majority of these high-tech corporations set up shop—drawing on the energy of well-paid, highly skilled labor. 62 The short-term economic benefits carried large environmental costs. Local water required little treatment prior to industry use, and the territorial government permitted plant operators to drill their own wells, removing millions of gallons of “free” water daily. Other wells were used as depositories for hazardous liquid waste. Pretreatment of water went unregulated until the final years of the 1990s. Industry officials also disposed of toxic chemicals in landfills and various bodies of water. 63 Multinational companies were not alone in perpetuating this business of harm, as local enablers, including some Puerto Rican mayors, have advanced deceptive corporate social responsibility gestures that shroud environmental injustice and culpability. In response to this treatment, Alexis Dietrich documents how local residents sometimes referenced malos olores [bad smells] to signal chemical contamination, as fumes traveled to nearby communities. 64 Given their close proximity to plants, community members have experienced and continue to confront asthma, cancer, and numerous other health problems. One community member explained this toxic trespass as “El impacto es . . . nos matan [The impact is . . . they kill us]. . . . Oh, not today, not tomorrow, but little by little . . . it will kill us all.”65 This statement points to how the Puerto Rican individual body “becomes a slate onto which the actions of the state (or other power, such as a multinational corporation) may become inscribed in many forms.”66 By the 1970s, US economists, corporations, and local advocates of this operation judged the modernization overhaul to be a “success” and proof that private foreign capital investment could help the local economy, prompting some economists to claim “that foreign capital need not be of the obvious exploitative type which takes more from than it leaves to the country.”67 The growing middle class tended to support the modernization project and mass consumption, and education marked key areas of upward mobilDi s/e m p ow e r i ng T e r m s
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ity, as supermarkets, expressways, private schools, urbanizaciones (middleclass neighborhoods composed of one-story concrete homes), and US chain stores populated the landscape. 68 However, though the initiative increased the literacy rate, created some jobs, and improved life expectancy overall, the 1950s to 1970s demonstrated inconsistent economic impacts, with unemployment peaking, plummeting, and then peaking again. Even at Operation Bootstrap’s height, unemployment exceeded 10 percent, and the number of people employed in Puerto Rico never moved higher than about half of the working-age population. 69 In Salinas, the operation drove seven percent of residents to migrate to the United States in the first twenty or so years of the project.70 The once alluring tax code incentives underwent a decadelong phasing out, beginning in 1996. This major change coincided with the North American Free Trade Agreement and later, an economic recession, causing Puerto Rico to “lose its competitive advantage.”71 Thus, Operation Bootstrap’s legacy remains in the form of an import-dependent fossil fuel economy, displacements, high unemployment, and continued poverty. PREPA, locally known as La Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica de Puerto Rico (AEEPR), is the archipelago’s struggling public utility and is threatened by privatization. Prior to the 2017 hurricane season, PREPA carried $9 billion of debt, about one-eighth of Puerto Rico’s total financial burden, and other obligations, including worker pensions.72 The departure of one thousand industry businesses in the 1990s and 2000s, government and political party interference with decision making, irresponsible energy use to benefit for-profit business subsidies, such as transnational hotel chains, ineffective rate structure maintenance, and lack of commitment to public engagement all have led to PREPA’s teetering existence.73 Given historical and recent events, many individuals had good reason to be skeptical toward PREPA’s ability to meet the Energy Public Policy Act (Act 17-2019) mandate of 40 percent renewables by 2025.74 The utility’s high leadership turnover rate also does not boost confidence in achieving such a rapid transition, as PREPA has cycled through several executive directors since the 2017 hurricane season.75 Then came the much-anticipated $1.5 billion privatization deal announcement in June 2020. According to an agreement with PREPA, the Puerto Rico Public-Private Partnerships Authority, and LUMA Energy, LUMA will operate transmission, distribution, and billing services in Puerto Rico for the next fifteen years.76 The Puerto Rico Public-Private Partnerships Authority’s 2020 report reveals that LUMA’s oversight extends to include 48
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planning and decision making on power generation, among other key activities and powers.77 The agreement provides LUMA discretion to deviate from the required functions under the contract and evade responsibility for the agreed upon services during major disruptive events, such as a state-declared emergency that could include power outages, health crises, and civil disobedience. Furthermore, critics claim this contract carries the harmful effect of prolonging reliance on fossil fuel plants in southern Puerto Rico, while also allowing the company, which is co-owned by Quanta Services in Texas and ATCO Ltd. in Canada, to acquire easements in the public domain to carry out operations.78 The deal will increase electricity bills, and many opponents fear PREPA workers risk being harmed because of the contract, including by being overlooked and undercompensated in the employment process, although LUMA claimed current employees would receive hiring preference and benefit from the existing collective bargaining agreement.79 Additionally, many residents and organizations have criticized LUMA’s unjustified spending of millions of dollars for publicity and other questionable activities in just a few months of operation. 80 Policy analysts from the Center for a New Economy (CNE), a Puerto Rico think tank, strongly condemned the LUMA deal, emphasizing: we cannot advocate in favor of keeping this utterly utterly corrupt, environmentally harmful, and economically unsustainable government-owned enterprise in charge of our power system. . . . If that agreement cannot be corrected in a timely manner, then we can only recommend the parties return to the negotiating table. And try again. 81
Ultimately, the LUMA Energy agreement centers on using public funds to rebuild the existing grid, while increasing electricity costs to local people and privatizing profits. This monopolistic, neoliberal deal received strong support from a fiscal control board, which itself, like the PREPA privatization agreement, epitomizes a top-down, undemocratic form of engagement based on rule by the elite and technocratic few. In summer 2016, to address Puerto Rico’s unaudited $73 billion debt, the US Congress and former president Barack Obama responded by approving the non-elected Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico (FOMB), as part of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA). 82 This board, La Junta de Control Fiscal, has the power to “manage” the territory’s finances. 83 The language of control and oversight clearly situate la Junta as a manifestation of coloniality. As crediDi s/e m p ow e r i ng T e r m s
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Figure 8. Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño students painted messages on a wall to call attention to Puerto Rico’s economic crisis and takeover by equating PROMESA to poverty. December 2018, Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Author photo.
tors, hedge funds, and vulture capitalists exploited Puerto Rico’s debt with fervor, FOMB members, who are appointed by the US president for three years, slashed funding for vital public services, including financial support for medical care, the University of Puerto Rico system, and hundreds of schools, which have shuttered at alarming rates, with some purchased by US real estate investors. 84 Many Puerto Ricans vehemently have protested the act, as board members squeeze Puerto Rico’s financial and other futures in callous hands. Phrases such as “se acabaron las promesas” [promises are over] and “la gente antes que la deuda” [people before debt] are common slogans in the streets and elsewhere. 85 PROMESA allows fast-tracking energy and other top-down projects, caring little for even the guise of public engagement. The Infrastructure 50
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Revitalization (Title V) section of the act employs terms like “critical project,” “emergency,” and “expedited permitting process” to situate future energy proposals and controversies within a frame of urgency. La Junta’s “Critical Projects Process” limits public comments to people with online access and only for a thirty-day period. 86 This rushed approach seeks to serve the interests of industry to the detriment of public health and self-determination, as the board continues its top-down command, emboldened by a federal judge’s 2018 ruling that board members hold sufficient power to make financial decisions, regardless of the governor’s objection. 87 PROMESA’s critical project section carries implications for several energy projects, including the now defeated “waste-to-energy” trash incineration proposal. Since 2010, the US-based Energy Answers, Inc. has been advocating to build an $860 million incinerador [incinerator] in Arecibo. 88 Revealing the revolving door of energy corruption in Puerto Rico, former governor Luis Fortuño’s law office lists the corporation as a client. He has been a longtime project advocate and allegedly consulted with la Junta to urge the plant’s development. Presenting the incinerator as a “renewable energy” proposal exploited the posthurricane reality and sought to expedite the project’s review time. 89 According to environmental assessments of incinerator impacts, if built, the plant would have harmed vulnerable wetlands and wildlife, required more than 2 million gallons of water daily, and released toxic emissions and ashes.90 Members of Coalición de Organizaciones Anti Incineración and Ciudadanos en Defensa del Ambiente (CEDDA) have resisted the project for years. I first encountered this latter group in 2014, during one of their planning meetings in Arecibo. As I approached, I saw a tarped, shaded area that had a little building on one side with a bathroom and kitchen and a large truck on the other, announcing that visitors had arrived at La Poza del Obispo, a local beach area that the group successfully protected from privatization in 2009. On either side of the shaded area hung two signs, each reading “No al incinerador.” During a personal interview with CEDDA member Ismenia González, she emphasized, “This [incinerator] is not a community problem. This is an Island problem.” Other energy controversies also characterize power struggles in Puerto Rico, including poorly sited, overpriced, and utility-scale renewable energy and liquefied “natural” gas (LNG) projects. The EcoEléctrica plant is a locally run LNG receiver, formerly owned by Enron, that supplies the regasified fuel to PREPA. The 5.4 magnitude earthquake that rattled the southwest Di s/e m p ow e r i ng T e r m s
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Figure 9. These two signs link AES and the fiscal control board by simultaneously resisting the corporation’s coal ash pollution and calling for the demise of the undemocratically elected members of la Junta in the form of ashes. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, December 2018. Author photo.
coastal region in early May 2020 led to power outages for thousands of people because of damages to the facility.91 I delve further into this company and methane gas in chapter 3 and renewable energy complexities in chapter 2 and the conclusion. While not an exhaustive history, this narrative elucidates efforts to cultivate and challenge energy coloniality with dueling energies. After all, just as 52
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many Puerto Ricans are mobilizing against PROMESA in both the archipelago and in the US diaspora, many also have resisted centralized fossil fuels and the ways in which high-greenhouse-gas-emitting energy sources continue to pollute Puerto Rico’s possibilities for a sustainable and just present and future. Petroleum, coal, nuclear, trash incineration, and methane gas plants and proposals have energized communities to fight toxic energy development with varying degrees of success.92 Given this resistance, I contend that the colonial trope of the docile Puerto Rican is inaccurate, reifies the racialized disaster tropics trope, and elides the complex ways that some Boricuas mobilize to refuse energy coloniality, amid complex archipelagoes of power shaped by privilege and precarity. Despite Puerto Rico’s official legal status as an unincorporated territory, this energy coloniality narrative elucidates the archipelago’s treatment as a colonial subject of the United States and the multinational corporations that constitute this empire-state. Furthermore, this historical account evinces how coastal communities confront disproportionate fossil fuel industry harms, based on master assumptions of class and racial inferiority in these fluid water-land zones.93 This tendency makes clear why the homogenizing colonial narrative that treats Puerto Rico as one unified other ignores and erases place specificities and other relational dynamics that require differential understandings and nuances.
Energy Privilege One way to critique energy coloniality is to address not only which communities are harmed by these ideologies and discourses but also who benefits and how from these potentially lethal systems of organizing, dispossessing, and sickening. To do so, I theorize the concept of energy privilege, which draws from Lisa Sun-Hee Park’s and David Naguib Pellow’s related articulation of environmental privilege. This inequity arises from “the exercise of economic, political, and cultural power that some groups enjoy, which enables them exclusive access to coveted environmental amenities such as forests, parks, mountains, rivers, coastal property, open lands, and elite neighborhoods.”94 These individuals are shielded from ecological harms that other people must face daily, as they have access to nontoxic foods and clean air and water. Park and Pellow write of the pervasive nature of environmental racism and injustice throughout the globe and insist, “Surely the same can be said for environmental privilege. We cannot have one without the other; they are two sides of Di s/e m p ow e r i ng T e r m s
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the same coin.”95 This inequity calls attention to how white, affluent communities consistently and systemically avoid shouldering entwined environmental burdens that disproportionately target poor communities home to Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other marginalized groups. Given that energy privilege stems from logics of domination and exploitation, as some people and communities thrive at the expense of others, this injustice functions as a troubling counterpart to energy coloniality. While Park and Pellow engage several environmental and climate controversies related to immigration, population, and consumption in their Aspen, Colorado research, access to a “green lifestyle” is their primary concern, including “green” products and outdoor recreation. By emphasizing energy, in addition to environmental and climate concerns, I wish to consider the complexities of energy sources, infrastructures, labor, impacts, flows, and discourses. Though environmental privilege includes and exceeds consideration of power differentials and power generation sourced from both highand low-greenhouse-gas energy, energy privilege centers on this dual power dynamic and also calls attention to how certain individuals often do not have to expend the same amount of personal energy fighting energy and other interwoven injustices compared to communities whose lives are un(der)valued. With already difficult conditions and resource shortages for those facing energy access uncertainties, a lack of energy privilege requires additional exertions, such as attending public hearings—often in inaccessible places— protesting, contacting public and corporate officials, and translating and interpreting when proceedings and other forms of public engagement are not available in an understandable language.96 As Sara Ahmed writes, “Privilege is an energy-saving device.”97 Thus, energy privilege operates and is experienced at entwined institutional and individual levels. Energy privilege also involves disruptions to daily life and displacements in the aftermath of devastating storms, seismic shocks, and other hazards, as well as oppressive economic situations. In Puerto Rico’s case, different development policies and other measures throughout US colonial rule propelled diasporic migrations. These impositions often forced many people to urban centers for factory work both on and off the archipelago; workers frequently found horrific conditions and job shortages.98 These compelled movements constitute Puerto Rico as a “nation on the move.”99 Despite geographic divisions, the flow of people, imported and exported materials, and culture reveal constant fluctuations and interconnectivity across the Puerto Rico–US diaspora, embodied by my own family’s movements, in the preceding “Routes/ 54
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Roots/Raíces” reflection. This reality requires tremendous energy exertions on the part of those impacted, in addition to transportation energy and costs, and also points to how upward economic mobility has been very hard and often impossible to achieve under capitalist development regimes (e.g., Operation Bootstrap) that impede more just, equitable, and sustainable alternatives, especially for working-class Boricuas and Afro-Boricuas. Energy privilege can be challenging to mark, especially given that members of the same municipality, island, archipelago, and/or country may have different experiences, depending on the specific environments and places in which they live. When certain individuals and communities evade the negative externalities of fossil fuel extraction, production, distribution, consumption, disposal, and storage to the detriment of peoples with less material and other resources, that is energy privilege. When people can live without worrying that greenhouse-gas industry officials will site plants and other infrastructure near their home and workplace, that is environmental privilege. When high-energy-using individuals in industrialized nations have access to electric and transportation energy that exceeds the minimum power needed to meet basic needs (e.g., electricity not only for cooking but also for leisure activities), do not experience fuel poverty, and do not face regular power shortages, that is energy privilege.100 When individuals encounter electricity costs that are proportionate to other similarly established regions and are able to pay the electric bill without hesitation and financial burdens, that is energy privilege. However, alternatives to these inequities exist.
Energy Justice The extractivist and other oppressive logics and practices of energy coloniality and energy privilege “toxically assault” marginalized communities and make energy justice mobilizations imperative.101 As a movement and discourse, energy justice commits to advancing in-process liberatory worldmaking and relationalities, including considerations of how, where, and for/by whom energy is produced, installed, distributed, used, maintained, disposed of, and discussed.102 Just as environmental privilege and environmental injustice “are two sides of the same coin,” so too are energy privilege and energy injustice.103 Like environmental and climate justice, energy justice research is inspired by movement organizing that centers Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander, and other racialized peoples, as well as low-income Di s/e m p ow e r i ng T e r m s
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and low-wealth communities, whose members face disproportionate negative impacts from a fossil-fueled society. Accordingly, energy justice grapples with global and regional climate disruption, extractivist industries and economies, energy poverty, decarbonization (i.e., transitioning from high-carbon and high-methane energy sources, such as coal and LNG, to low-greenhouse-gas energies, such as wind and solar), decentralization (i.e., shifting from large, centralized infrastructure to small, distributed systems), democratization, and decolonization.104 In this book’s conclusion I argue these final four concepts—decarbonization, decentralization, democratization, and decolonization—are integral components of energy justice. They must be struggled for together to avoid reaffirming oppressive power dynamics that benefit from isolating and overlooking other entwined concepts and practices. Energy studies researchers express concerns with false assumptions that a renewables technofix automatically will evaporate problems with inequities and injustices. Marie-Odile P. Fortier, Lemir Teron, Tony G. Reames, Dynta Trishana Munardy, and Breck M. Sullivan write that this transition involves far more than shifting to different technologies. Advocating for energy justice, they maintain that impacted people must be involved in developing, siting, and using energy, which requires attending carefully to social processes and outcomes to avoid uneven costs and benefits.105 Low-carbon energy systems are not inherently more or less just and equitable, and vigilance must be practiced to refuse replicating the same relations that pervade today’s fossil fuel reliance.106 Given these cautions, energy justice becomes especially vital for ensuring that energy transitions prioritize economic and racial equity and other entwined concerns to center historically and contemporarily disproportionately harmed communities.107
Energy Actors Engineer Efraín O’Neill-Carrillo’s research includes the social and ethical implications of engineering and technology, which he studies and teaches at the University of Puerto Rico—Mayagüez (UPRM). He was the first to organize distributed generation and microgrid studies in Puerto Rico and frequently engaged in service learning with his undergraduate and graduate students to support technical aspects of community renewable energy projects.108 O’Neill-Carrillo also served as a former energy consultant at the municipal and territorial levels and is one of the authors of the 56
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study “Achievable Renewable Energy Targets for Puerto Rico’s Renewable Portfolio Standard,” presenting the potential of renewable energy in Puerto Rico (http://www.uprm.edu/aret). Additionally, he authored Una nueva AEE, a Spanish-language document that traces PREPA’s history and proposes utility transformations.109 In May 2015, I traveled to Mayagüez for three interviews with O’NeillCarrillo and two of his energy studies colleagues: Marla Pérez-Lugo and Cecilio Ortiz Garcia, who had served as steering committee organizers and members of the Instituto Tropical de Energía, Ambiente y Sociedad (ITEAS). This institute sparked inspiration for the then emergent Instituto Nacional de Energía y Sostenibilidad Isleña (INESI) [National Institute of Energy and Island Sustainability]. O’Neill-Carrillo directed the ITEAS group of 15 professors from a variety of disciplines, who dedicated their efforts to influencing energy policy and creating connections between energy research and Puerto Rican society (http://iteas.uprm.edu). This interdisciplinary collaboration featured the Mesa de Diálogo Energético [Energy Dialogue Roundtable] to bring community organization leaders, industry officials, labor union members, academics, state energy office representatives, and PREPA officials together in conversation.110 O’Neill-Carrillo cofounded and cofacilitated these roundtables from 2008 to 2010, which helped to inform a gubernatorial executive order that supported greater civil society engagement on energy issues. He also served as an advisor for the writing of Law 57, the Puerto Rico Energy Transformation and RELIEF Act.111 Law 57 made several mandates of the previously unregulated energy utility, including calls for significant changes to the company’s fossil fuel reliance; regular submissions of an Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) to the Puerto Rico Energy Commission (the then newly formed regulator, now called the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau [Negociado de Energía de Puerto Rico]); and revisiting its rate-making responsibilities to exhibit greater transparency and integrity.112 O’Neill-Carrillo is just one of many individuals who has worked hard for years to bring these issues to the forefront. Given these and many other contributions, I was eager to speak with O’Neill-Carrillo to learn more about his vision for Puerto Rico’s energy future—especially how he communicated these concerns. Our interview began the same way as with other research conversations. After asking a few demographic questions about self-identifications regarding nationality, race, and ethnicity, to better grasp the complex US–Puerto Rico relationship, I turned to the topic of energy and personal connections to the concept. Di s/e m p ow e r i ng T e r m s
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Catalina de Onís: . . . what gives you energy? Efr ain O’Neill-Carrillo: In the broader sense? Onís: Yes, in the broader sense. O’Neill-Carrillo: Not electric energy? Onís: Right. O’Neill-Carrillo: I’ve always had a desire, I’ve always had a goal of service. I think what drives me is a commitment to service. . . . I started thinking seriously about society and about my role in the world about service when I was in high school. And when I returned to Puerto Rico after I completed my PhD, I returned because I had a deep desire to serve, and I think that’s my driving force. That’s my energy. The desire to serve. I had so many opportunities here in Puerto Rico, and I felt that I had an obligation to give back a little bit of so much that I received in the Island.
In this reflection, O’Neill-Carrillo imagines and experiences energy as a “desire to serve” one’s community and as a duty motivated by a communal responsibility and appreciation. This commitment helps to explain his involvement with different engaged research projects that encourage reconceptualizing everyday connections to energy, agency, and responsibilities. Drawing on his coauthored studies, the teacher-scholar constitutes a shift in thinking and talking about Puerto Ricans and energy relationships. O’Neill-Carrillo: . . . usually people here, “clients,” are looked at as passive “customers,” “consumers.” That’s a word that I hate. I’d rather, if I have to make a term, use a term, I say “client” or “users,” but “consumer” itself, for me, it’s a terrible word. I rather use “energy users,” or “energy actors,” “energy stakeholders.” Onís: And again, that’s because you think “consumers” gives this idea of passivity? O’Neill-Carrillo: Yes, yes, and little responsibility other than paying the bill. . . . What are your rights and what are your responsibilities in terms of energy, especially in a place like Puerto Rico? We have no fossil fuels and our system depends on fossil fuels. While we make a transition to something else, we need to be very responsible in how we use the electric energy. Because every kilowatt hour that we spend represents an environmental impact somewhere, and that’s something that I usually make a very strong point of when I do presentations to various audiences.
O’Neill-Carrillo links this imperative to the problem of naming individuals as “customers” and argues this act curtails agency, proposing the alternatives
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of “energy users,” “energy actors,” or “energy stakeholders.” In this renaming act, he reconstitutes the agentic potential of Puerto Ricans and resists the colonial trope of the passive person who is acted on but who is never an actor, although “energy users” reads more passively than “energy actors” or “energy stakeholders.” This reframing emphasizes individual and community rights and responsibilities for a just energy future that hinges on not squandering energy, especially because Puerto Rico relies on imported fossil fuels. Furthermore, his mention of energy consumption having “an environmental impact somewhere” evinces the engineer’s systems thinking. This awareness assumes that all practices and places are interconnected, whether considering island, archipelagic, or continental geographies. In 2019, O’Neill-Carrillo and colleagues Emmanuel Mercado, Oscar Luhring, Isaac Jordán, and Agustín Irizarry-Rivera published their multidisciplinary research project, conducted with university students, to document ways in which “passive consumers” could become “energy actors” in Puerto Rico.113 The project collaborators organized two “Solar Colloquia” in northern and southern Puerto Rico to record solar assumptions mainly among community leaders to increase information sharing and build capacity, while acknowledging that residents are the experts of their own situation. One of the strategies used in this project involved creating a shared language and transdisciplinary perspective to address the convoluted nature of transforming the archipelago’s electric system. Energy actors encouraged the practices of communicating in supportive ways that expressed openness to critique, improving understandings of other disciplines in various exercises, attending regular gatherings, and using electronic correspondence.114 Having established these foundations, the team then was able to record and locate three key themes from their fieldwork. Community belonging, values and norms for coordinated mutual benefit, such as monitoring demand response to change usage behaviors, and empowerment (i.e., the power to respond to a situation and exercise agency) emerged as the three main components of transforming roles from passive to active positions. They also noted major limits if energy policies do not support individual and communal self-determination. This concern is especially relevant given that “extreme impacts often present the need for large scale functions that require resources normally beyond what individual communities can muster, creating severe challenges to the mutual aid model.”115 The authors of the paper acknowledge that these collaborations are not
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without controversy. One concern involves the community-derived insight that granting technological resources will not change underlying oppressive power dynamics. Thus, while O’Neill-Carrillo and colleagues note the benefits of distributed energy resources, such as microgrids that can shift from linking to the main grid to “island mode,” dramatic transitions involve the entanglement of sociotechnological factors. Furthermore, localism and vernacular discourse are not inherently laudatory, as energy actors may replicate oppressive power dynamics locally.116 For example, O’Neill-Carrillo and colleagues report that community nongovernmental organizations sometimes have implemented projects that advance specific agendas and reproduce economic and other structures that curtail community and individual agency. Accordingly, “long-term goals must be established through a participatory process that guides and ensures the community is best served. A key strategy is making people accountable for their decision-making and actions including rules about consumption.”117 To do so, O’Neill-Carrillo and colleagues argue for attending carefully to the context shaping an energy transformation. One-size-fits all energy “solutions” that elide geographic, cultural, epistemological, and other forms of difference risk re-inscribing oppressive practices rather than forging alternatives. This interview and related publication provide support for the language alternative of energy actors to create space for relational and rhetorical reimaginings among and across different individuals, communities, and material and figurative archipelagoes. For residents committed to empoderamiento [empowerment], compromiso comunitario [community commitment], and apoyo mutuo [mutual support] as their organizing guide “from below,” the concept of energy actors may offer possibilities for alternative ways of interacting in the world, compared to constrained and oppressive positions imposed by other energy actors who seek to reduce them to disempowered consumers or ratepayers.118
An Energy Rhetorical Matrix: More Than Merely Terms This chapter presents energy coloniality, energy privilege, energy justice, and energy actors as an energy rhetorical matrix that provides a vocabulary for studying and communicating different energy controversies in Puerto Rico and beyond. These terms name and constitute dominant and disruptive ener60
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gies and their oppressive and liberatory potentials. Energy coloniality functions as a core characteristic and practice of empire. Working in tandem, energy privilege is enabled by this force and enacts its power via disproportionate impacts and inequitable experiences, creating urgency toward seeking energy justice. The concept of energy actors provides a reworked understanding of relations and agential potential for individuals and groups confronting and challenging oppressive systems in entangled archipelagoes of power. Given the importance of how these articulations operate in everyday encounters, studies and practices of their enactments must be approached with attention to spatial and temporal specificities. For example, in Puerto Rico, political and corporate energy actors advanced the sugarcane and petrochemical development dreams of energy coloniality on the backs of enslaved peoples and other laborers, who also were energetic actors, who often resisted and existed otherwise, despite powerful constraints. Thus, the concepts composing this energy rhetorical matrix are not only theoretical constructs to conceptually intermix with archipelagoes of power to inform thinking. These articulations constitute empowering and disempowering experiences, actions, and outcomes that may inform praxis-based interventions committed to energy justice. One such disruption animates the next “Routes/Roots/ Raíces” story.
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Rou t es/Roots/R a íces I I
Hydrocarbon Hauntings
While tr aveling along the largest island’s southern coastline, one might expect to find a pastoral paradise, replete with sea, sand, and sun. Following the PR-2 highway (between Ponce and Mayagüez), however, reveals a far from bucolic vista. This industrial corridor is home to the detritus left from US empire building and its petrochemical complex, evidenced by the rusting, abandoned Commonwealth Oil Refining Company (CORCO). An interview with a fossil fuel company official led me to these ruins in 2014. One year later, in 2015, I again found myself at this site, this time on my way to interviews in Mayagüez that informed chapter 1. These encounters with CORCO’s remains continue to haunt me and many others, as I would learn. The existing CORCO structures decay as an icon of Operation Bootstrap, a major focus of the previous chapter. Once the largest refinery in Puerto Rico, the facility began operations in the mid-1950s and symbolized the dreams of petromodernity, as stated by the Economic Development Administration (FOMENTO) and other agencies.1 Academic and planning reports, backed by chemical industry support, argued that “master” industries, especially petrochemicals, were vital for spurring economic growth.2 Corporate ads associated the industry with progress and a booming economy. Media representations linked the plant to job creation, consumerism, and upward mobility, as textiles and technologies emerged from CORCO’s pipelines in promotional materials. However, these ads overlooked “any possible link between development and exploitation or between progress and pollution. Establishing a presence also meant creating an absence.”3 Aided by these images, local lawmakers and developers placed petrochemicals and oil refining at the center of one of Operation Bootstrap’s major stages, claiming that this “Puerto Rican 62
Figure 10. The severed smokestacks of the Commonwealth Oil Refining Company line the PR-2 highway. Peñuelas, Puerto Rico, May 14, 2015. Author photo.
experiment” would generate prosperity and jobs to “docile working-class” residents via the virtues and transformative possibilities of capitalism.4 The CORCO plant generated a substantial amount of petroleum and other petrochemical products. At its peak production, the facility produced between 130,000 and 160,000 barrels of oil per day.5 This figure represents more than half of the yield of all other refineries in Puerto Rico during that period. About one-third of this production went to exports. The plant also generated high levels of hydrocarbon aromatics, used for gasoline, to meet US demand. 6 Powering this production, the facility’s operations created thousands of direct and indirect jobs, but these positions fell far short of promised employment.7 Prodevelopment energy actors inflated the actual number of jobs created, and work tended to be short term. 8 Though the CORCO plant carried strong regional financial impacts that enabled many families to move from low-income to middle-class status, underemployment and unemployment created financial hardships that persist today for impacted community members.9 Favorable corporate and government reports and actual experiences associated with Operation Bootstrap are not equivalent. This industrial monument’s financial promise degraded with President Nixon’s elimination of oil import quotas and the 1970s oil embargo. Prior to 1974, Puerto H y dro c a r b on H au n t i ngs
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Rico imported crude oil cheaply because of US import quota exemptions. However, the oil crisis and policy changes shifted Puerto Rico’s oil cost advantage to a $5-per-barrel penalty. In 1978, CORCO officials requested help via the US Bankruptcy Act’s Chapter XI. This action led to a chain reaction of several petrochemical units closing by the late 1970s and hit the Puerto Rican economy very hard.10 In response to these stressors, CORCO officials ultimately closed the facility in 1982. The dream of petromodernity had deformed into a nightmare.11 For employees who relied on this plant to sustain their families, the closure was devastating. One historical account described the refinery’s fall as the end of a period of “decadencia” [decadence] that ushered in tremendous financial suffering, especially for those in Peñuelas and nearby Ponce. This closure contributed to migrations to the northeastern United States, as workers looked for alternatives. Documented in the previous chapter, these individuals often found employment in industries known for their dangerous and brutal workplace conditions.12 In addition to worker concerns and consequences, CORCO and other similar plants dramatically increased dependency on imported oil to run everything from cars to air conditioners. This reliance heightened access to petroleum products with serious environmental consequences. While industry energy actors framed the project as environmentally sustainable, “the petroleum factories left an enormous expanse of contaminated land, sick residents, exhausted agriculture and high unemployment. Today the installations are a rusting, industrial ghost town, symbolizing the myopia with which the development model was planned.”13 On the Peñuelas property, petroleum and petrochemical products have contaminated the groundwater, the Caribbean Sea and local biodiversity, agriculture, and private wells with carcinogens and other toxins.14 These outcomes resulted from the careless capitalistic pursuits of Operation Bootstrap’s architects. Their actions stand in stark contrast to today’s just transition movement and discourse, whose proponents advocate for wages that ensure employee wellbeing and quality workplace conditions in industries foundational to the shift toward creating more livable, sustainable environments, ecosystems, and economies—very much unlike CORCO.15 After the refinery’s closure, the seemingly benign decay of these industrial ruins persisted, until one October evening in 2008. Puerto Rican artist Rafael Trelles and a team of collaborators created a multimedia artistic event to reanimate CORCO’s detritus. During our interview, Trelles described 64
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Figure 11. The decaying refinery’s exterior plays host to uncanny lettering in a projection of the countermonument’s name. Peñuelas, Puerto Rico, October 19, 2008. Photo courtesy of Rafael Trelles.
the intervention as “un trabajo colectivo” [a collective work]. The artist collaborated with Tato Santiago, a Puerto Rican pianist and composer. He also worked with videographer Roberto Otero and photographer Johnny Betancourt to document the event. Additionally, economist Argeo Quiñones assisted Trelles with his speech script to ensure “precisión económica” [economic precision] with details of the site’s financial history, which the artist included in his public address during the performance. Trelles initially considered installing a sign near the plant’s remains to mark the destruction and to interrupt the industrial corridor’s banal existence. He told me, “Yo quería poner un gran rótulo, ‘Monumento al fracaso’” [“I wanted to place a big sign, ‘Monument to Failure’”] at the site. However, he concluded this signage would have looked insignificant in contrast to the substantial size of the ruins. He also encountered monetary barriers. Given these constraints, he contacted Henrique Benet, a luminotécnico [lighting specialist], who expressed interest in supporting a show where the lights were the protagonista [protagonist]. Overcoming size and financial challenges, Trelles, Benet, and other collaborators literally illuminated the CORCO refinery via amplification to rename the site, inscribing “MONUMENTO AL FRACASO” on the industrial mass, to display the spectrality of reality. H y dro c a r b on H au n t i ngs
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The event drew an audience of about 150 local community members, journalists, former plant employees, environmental activists, and other observers who witnessed this music and lights show, accompanied by Trelles’s speech. Since 2008, images and writings of this event have appeared in Puerto Rican news media and blog posts, as stage backdrops during dance performances, and in museums and art galleries throughout Puerto Rico. The timing of this intervention coincided with the Vía Verde [Green Way] methane gas pipeline struggle, a strategic move, claimed Trelles, intended to rally greater support against this economically and environmentally reckless energy project (discussed in chapter 3). While widespread civil society pressures helped to squash Vía Verde, CORCO’s very different demise still haunts the area’s current and former community members. Trelles explained that he witnessed CORCO’s construction, operation, and closure. Like other community members, he also encountered the air and water pollution caused by the plant’s operations. Trelles shared this reflection: Maybe it interests you to know how I had this idea. . . . My family is from the town of Yauco that’s close to the petrochemical plant . . . and when I was a child, well, that plant was operating. . . . The smoke arrived all the way to Yauco by the wind, and there was a bad odor in the town . . . and they [the plant operators] were taking water from the aquifer . . . and the wells were drying up. . . . That worried me. Later, when I was older, the plant started to close, and so [one] started to see the abandonment. It’s part of my experience. As a neighbor of the area, I saw all of that. It’s part of my personal experience.
The accumulated references to and impacts of wind-blown smoke and bad odors, corporate stealing and depleting of local community water, and industrial abandonment amplify this multipronged problem and its origins. Moreover, Trelles’s repeated utterance of “experience” to describe the negative relationship between CORCO and the environment helps to emphasize his firsthand knowledge of this toxic site and his rationale for co-inventing Monumento al fracaso. As our interview concluded in his colorful studio, Trelles described the transformative potential of artistic interventions for imagining and enacting a more just, livable world. Yo creo en la posibilidad de cambiar la realidad. De hecho, como artista, mi trabajo es crear. Y la creación . . . es un acto de transformación. . . . La acción que yo quiero transformar . . . es para que toda la actividad humana esté en 66
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Figure 12. Rafael Trelles stands beside one of his paintings in his studio. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, May 26, 2015. Author photo.
armonía con los procesos naturales para crear un mundo sostenible. Si no, vamos en rumbo de la destrucción. [I believe in the possibility of changing reality. In fact, as an artist, my work is to create. And creation . . . is an act of transformation. . . . The action that I want to transform . . . is so that all human activity is in harmony with natural processes to create a sustainable world. If not, we are on the road to destruction.]
For Trelles and many other Puerto Ricans, the road to destruction is monumentally clear in CORCO’s ruinous toxic legacy, entwining economic, ecological, and energy emergencies. In fact, many residents refer to this southern industrial corridor as “la antigua CORCO,” although other corporations also occupied and continue to occupy this terrain. Rather than read the prominence of CORCO’s refinery in the local collective memory as misinformed or overexaggerated, this place-based understanding marks the site, and the company and industry it represents, as a powerful synecdoche and monumental early example of energy coloniality in Puerto Rico.16 As the next chapter illustrates, these energetic efforts also are tied to experimentation.
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T wo
Experimenting Energies of Defense, Disease, Development, and Disaster
The Spanish infinitive verb for “to experience” is experimentar. This translation resonates in Puerto Rico’s archipelago and in many other island contexts. Thompson observes that, according to Western European colonial ideology and practice, “islands were understood as naturally bounded properties that could become the sites of experimentation and innovation; they were synchronous and Utopian, repeating and repeatable.”1 Economic “innovations” (e.g., the plantation), literature about islands, and the fields of biology, anthropology, and philosophy all find origins in these noncontinental places.2 Accordingly, island geographies have served as a paradoxically peripheral and central test site for exploiting humans and more than humans as resources. This chapter reads the Puerto Rico archipelago as a military, medical, political, and environmental laboratorio [laboratory] during and exceeding the “American Century.”3 Beginning with the US occupation in 1898 and persisting today, officials representing local, territorial, and federal governments, the US military industrial complex, and corporations have approached the archipelago as an experimental zone for capitalist, colonialist, and imperialist exploits, revealing (re)formulations of power over the years. Though Puerto Rican scholars and nonscholars alike frequently acknowledge the archipelago’s test-site mistreatment, this chapter’s focus on how this exploitation occurred and continues to transpire energetically, including in rhetorical energies, offers a divergent approach. 4 This emphasis also provides an additional means of thinking through the animating archipelagoes of power concept. As I maintain throughout Energy Islands, multiple local and outside actors contributed to this still unfolding narrative, challenging a neat story of colonial relations. This realization supports a more nuanced reading 68
of experiences and possibilities for studying and intervening in oppressive laboratorio schemes today. One way to approach these interconnected experimentation discourses is by attending to four discursive moves that mark Boricua human, land, and water bodies as a zone of defense, disease, development, and disaster in the service of empire and racial capitalism. Charting these shifting and enduring rhetorical energies, I analyze how (1) the archipelago’s physical location was flagged as strategically advantageous for US military bases, maneuvers, and other defense operations; (2) scientific racist arguments marked different tropical bodies—lands, waters, and humans—as inferior because of their associations with disease and, thus, simultaneously expendable and in need of “treatment”; (3) classed, gendered, and racialized overpopulation claims legitimized intense industrialization and reproductive injustice; and (4) presentday popular language conjoining disaster zone and blank slate communicates the latest iteration of a US prodevelopment, imported fossil fuel, technofix discourse. These experimental energies rely on and reify a long-held ideology that condones and even celebrates (ab)using the archipelago and its inhabitants in regular enactments of energy coloniality.5 Though an empty-canvas mindset and discourse is far from new in Puerto Rico, the exploitation of multiple entwined environmental, energy, and economic catastrophes, in close succession in the twenty-first century, reads as a key chapter in this ongoing narrative. At the same time, energy actors need not understand the laboratorio trope as inherently harmful. After all, imagining and implementing more livable, just futures requires testing different ways of being, knowing, and communicating. Hence, the enabling and constraining possibilities of this experimental trope encourage critical reflection and action in response to how different actors draw on this metaphor, when, and with what consequences. To review Puerto Rico’s past experiences as a test site and to disrupt present and future continuities of this treatment, I highlight several cases, though certainly not exhaustive, that demonstrate Puerto Rico’s positioning as a sacrifice zone. First, I trouble dominant assumptions about the benefits of legal US citizenship, while acknowledging this status yields particular mobility and other privileges, including a whitening effect, not experienced by many Antilleans and other Latin Americans. 6 Second, I present the discursive trajectory constituting Puerto Rico as a multisited archipelagic militarized base, diseaseridden place, showcase, and blank-slate space to illuminate the entanglements of experimentation, energy, power, islands, and archipelagoes. Also, in this section, I signal the rhetorical shift from the promise of oil and petromoderE x pe r i m e n t i ng E n e rg i e s
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nity to advocacy for methane gas and top-down, utility-scale solar infrastructure that denies more sustainable and community-organized alternatives. In doing so, I argue that an iterative understanding of empire’s impacts elucidates the frequency, repetition, and interrelationship of expansionist pursuits of predatory racial capitalism to use the archipelago as an ideal experimental playground. As Thompson explains, there is much potential value in thinking about islands as related rather than as places apart that merely repeat the same practices, philosophies, and tropes in different locales without noting interconnectivities.7 I argue an orientation that recognizes entwinements and linkages is instructive for examining and intervening in the wide-reaching material consequences and structures reifying the experimentation trope and its impacts in and beyond Puerto Rico to dismantle entrenched systems and structures and their local-global force. Third, I discuss the pitfalls and possibilities of the experimentation metaphor in situated contexts and how these uses by different energy actors inspire and impede more just world making. As Vincent N. Pham explains, racial logics, discourses, and scripts, which shape and are shaped by “cultural, social, and political practices,” often bar the enactment of full citizenship for Black, Asian American, Latinx, and other racialized groups. 8 This barring certainly occurs in Puerto Rico, as residents often have been targeted to fuel the pursuits of US empire.
Testing Citizenship Puerto Ricans encounter a legal limbo as “citizen-immigrants” of the United States from birth.9 In 1917—following two decades of judicial ambivalence— the Jones Act was signed into law, thereby “granting broader governing powers to a new Puerto Rican legislature and conferring US citizenship on all Puerto Ricans.”10 Part of the reason for the US legal system’s recalcitrance about granting citizenship emanated from overt judicial racism that considered Boricuas an inferior “mongrel” race.11 Some Puerto Ricans also opposed citizenship because they believed this enforcement would bind the archipelago to US control and violate the limited self-direction held by Puerto Rico. Post–World War II, these competing discourses and investments created what US political figures described as the “Puerto Rican problem.”12 Adding to these tensions, the Puerto Rican legislature passed the 1948 Ley de la Mordaza [Gag Law]. This legislation banned Puerto Rican cultural symbols to deter the independence movement. Policymakers opposed to Puerto Rico’s 70
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sovereignty led the effort. Anyone caught waving a Puerto Rican flag, singing Puerto Rican songs, and other similar acts faced up to ten years of imprisonment and severe fines. Though local politicians repealed this draconian legislation in 1957, proindependence, proenvironment, antimilitary, antidebt, anticorruption, and other activists often still confront heavy surveillance, persecution, and repression in Puerto Rico.13 Many of these injustices result from the practice of arbitrarily treating the archipelago as a territory or colony sometimes and a state on other occasions to create an undemocratic laboratory that uses these US citizens when needed.14 Popular narratives about experimentation in Puerto Rico tend to place culpability on US governmental officials, military and industry leaders, and medical practitioners. This framing creates a narrative too tidy for a complex colonial milieu, by not accounting for how some Puerto Ricans reentrenched master ideologies and discourses. LeBrón provides support for this caution when critiquing local law enforcement, which is worth considering more broadly. In the 1900s, local government officials and other elites used Puerto Rico as a US policy testing ground and fortified already existing societal stratifications in the archipelago, facilitated by the territorial political status.15 Policymakers created “‘innovative’ policies and practices regarding security, policing, and public housing . . . [to] demonstrate Puerto Rico’s usefulness to the United States in the post–Cold War period.”16 LeBrón finds that local elites often borrowed the punitive and repressive practices of the US government, while the latter entity adopted Puerto Rico’s approach to the War on Drugs and “mano dura” [iron fist] targeting of low-income, urban, public-housing communities for militarized policing with the National Guard. Given the actions of local elites and the applicability of these collaborations in other cases, this chapter highlights the ways in which diverse actors, at different levels, contributed to this test-site trope and its relationship to experimental citizenship. As violence and trauma constitute various borders—both embodied and geographical—legal citizenship designations and their nationalistic underpinnings frequently harm minoritized communities, especially in the face of widespread climate-associated migrations.17 In Puerto Rico, common calls to help Puerto Ricans because of their citizenship status—especially during recent disasters—should be troubled generally because of an exclusionary narrow, citizen-based framing. This limited perspective requires recognition by some governing or legal body and, thus, this thinking and communicating is detrimental to radical forms of belonging for reexistence beyond “the E x pe r i m e n t i ng E n e rg i e s
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nation.” In addition to this general concern, this chapter points to specific ways that US citizenship can be dangerous, even deadly.18
De/constructing a Laboratorio In my research following Hurricanes Irma and María, I located four dominant discursive patterns in need of revision. These problems were (1) describing the cruelties as “natural” disasters and framing the catastrophe as an event rather than as a longtime ordeal driven by human and governmental in/action at various levels; (2) calling for rebuilding rather than transforming Puerto Rico’s energy infrastructure and power relationships; (3) evoking calls for resiliency without considering who is harmed and helped by this discourse; and (4) using Puerto Rico as a laboratory for large-scale, topdown, and nonlocally owned renewable energy projects.19 These areas of critique resonate with this chapter’s experimentation focus and examination of four zone discourses constituting the laboratorio trope. Though discourses of defense, disease, development, and disaster are not exhaustive, they do provide one approach for telling this complex narrative. Following a historical test-site trajectory that examines current power dynamics and their ties to previous experimental iterations assists in demonstrating the central role of resilient and iterative experimental energies in Puerto Rico and beyond. While some aspects of the following cases unfold chronologically, these discourses and logics resist neat classifications and origin and termination points, given their fluid and tenacious qualities. The first three experimentation focus points (i.e., defense, disease, and development) are less detailed than the final section on disaster. I include these earlier test areas to historicize the exploitative practices that enable and legitimize related actions and the rhetorical materials that uphold them today, which carries implications for energy coloniality, privilege, justice, and actors. Accordingly, I seek to show, rather than only state, how archipelagoes of power exceed one specific instance and location, given how transcolonial racial projects are interrelated across time and space.
Defense-Zone Discourse Military and imperial powers long have coveted the Puerto Rico archipelago for its propitious positioning. In the late nineteenth century, the United 72
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States sought to defend the Panama Canal and other economic “opportunities” for expansionism in Latin America to spread its hegemonic global reach. Government and military actors viewed Puerto Rico as a potentially useful base.20 After the Spanish-American War, the US military commanded the “Rich Port” from 1898 to 1900. This militarized rule shifted to civilian government with the passing of the Foraker Act, which involved extensive debates about whether to grant US citizenship to Puerto Ricans.21 Following these turn-of-the-century transitional power moves, a series of Insular Cases decided the fate of various US possessions. These legal texts denied Puerto Rico and other island geographies self-determination with the arbitrary application and frequent denial of constitutional rights. These cases also enabled the systematic erosion of local cultures and languages, often through militarized actions. The US government and military collaborated to bring experimental operations to various islands, reaching globally from Vieques to Diego Garcia in the Chagos archipelago, to the Philippines, to Güahan, to the Marshall Islands, and to Hawai‘i.22 Invading archipelagoes and forcibly displacing communities, sometimes to locations more than one thousand miles away, typified “defense” actions during the “Great American Century.”23 Island histories are contoured profoundly by colonization and militarization, as these places serve(d) as key sites for geopolitical strategy. While these experiences are situated locally and are shaped by specific contexts, the systematic treatment of islands for the exploits of empire points to patterns of abuse rather than isolated cases.24 Hence, different examples of this experimentation merit study to examine the military power-grabbing “strategic-island concept” and approaches to dismantle this domination and dispossession throughout the globe, including in Puerto Rico.25 This section features the US Navy’s invasion and attempted full destruction of Vieques, given the brutalities that transpired and the transnational, coalitional outcry. Additional past and present military installations, such as Fort Buchanan in the Bayamón-Guaynabo region, Camp Santiago in Salinas, which occupies one-third of the municipality’s land, and lingering hazards in neighboring Culebra, also constitute this military occupation complex and exceed the scope of this book.26 From 1941 to 2003, Vieques and its surrounding waters became a militarized zone for US Navy and allied North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces. During World War II, NATO and Latin American naval ships targeted the island for combined exercises. Three-quarters of the fiftyE x pe r i m e n t i ng E n e rg i e s
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one-square-mile island was cleared for “live fire practices, air-to-ground bombing, shelling, artillery fire, ship-to-shore bombing, and maneuvers.”27 This clearing for militarized weapons testing evicted 4,600 residents—half of the population—from their homes and pushed them to the island’s interior, at times with barely a day’s notice. Another three thousand people left Vieques during the first two decades of operations. The forcible displacement of residents allowed the Navy to create its desired test zone, but soon this US colonizing force wanted more. In the 1960s, military and governmental officials devised Plan Dracula, which would have expropriated eight thousand Vieques residents, exhumed local cemeteries to deter community members from returning to visit deceased loved ones, and forced full evictions from nearby Culebra to facilitate missile practice.28 Given local resistance and US President John F. Kennedy’s denial of the proposal, the plan did not come to fruition. However, military experimentation remained in full force with additional hazards. From the 1970s until the end of the twentieth century, the Navy turned to many other assaulting activities. Military personnel bombed the island with live shells and dropped about three million pounds of explosives annually, with nearly half of the fired shells missing their targets. These fear-inducing operations occurred only nine miles from community members’ daily activities, many of whom already had been displaced.29 Parts of the island were deformed into “an environmental nightmare” with numerous health hazards, as “a windfall for the military became a disaster for Vieques residents— viequenses.”30 Bullet casings and thousands of unexploded ordnances remain littered around and in the island’s radioactive lands and waters to this day.31 While community members have frequently resisted the military presence over the years, 1999 marked a precipitating event for widespread, unprecedented mobilizations. A bomb drop went wrong in April of that year, killing security guard David Sanes Rodríguez. In response, peaceful defenders of Vieques established several encampments to protest the Navy’s brutal activities. On May 4, 2000, military personnel forcibly removed more than two hundred individuals as part of the military’s Operation Access to the East.32 This repression further unified and inspired additional coalition building among Puerto Ricans across the US diaspora, within the archipelago, and throughout Latin America to demand an end to this militarization. The Vieques struggle united Boricuas in a shared cultural identity and “changed the face of Puerto Rican politics,” both in Puerto Rico and in the United States.33 Resistance to militarized toxic assault in and around 74
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Vieques offers an important example for how coalitions may form at local levels and across geographic and other divides.34 Though the protest slogans of “Ni una bomba más” [Not one more bomb] and “Paz para Vieques” [Peace for Vieques] endure in the memories of many Puerto Ricans and coalitional partners, these social movement impacts are not the only lasting fragments of this cruel case.35 The island no longer faces the compulsory hosting of US Navy personnel; however, their presence has left an indelible mark. Buckling from political pressure, in 2003, President George W. Bush officially agreed to remove the military’s physical presence from Vieques, after more than six decades. Years since this departure, this military takeover obstinately remains in the form of a perpetual toxic stew of chemicals that continues to pollute human and other bodies in the area. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), napalm, depleted uranium, Agent Orange, and other hazardous materials contribute to this noxious concoction. The US military produced, used, and disposed of Agent Orange during its long invasion and brutalization of people in Vietnam and for other empirebuilding pursuits. In addition to Vieques, this dioxin-containing substance was tested and stored in other parts of the archipelago in the 1950s and 1960s and primarily involved the western and eastern coasts of the island, including for aerial spraying. Mayagüez, Joyuda, Loquillo, Las Marías, near the Río Grande, including El Yunque National Forest, and Guánica, in the southwest, all served as test sites.36 Toxically extending the US empire’s expansive poisonous militarization, Agent Orange was tested and/or stored throughout the globe, sometimes at military bases and installations, but often not. In addition to Puerto Rico, these sites include the southern United States, Canada, Laos, Thailand, India, Cambodia, Korea, the Hawaiian archipelago, and nearby Johnston Island, part of the Kalama Atoll, as well as in the ocean.37 The US military toxically assaulted most of these locations and various bodies with far more than Agent Orange. These widespread exposures and repeated military operations to test, contaminate, and eradicate constitute the relationalities inherent in archipelagoes of power and transcolonial racial formations. In isolation, scientists and others have studied some of the human health impacts of individual toxins, although this situation encourages actions to determine the combined effects of this reckless and untenable experiment. Katherine T. McCaffrey critiques the US military’s and government’s failure to remediate toxic sites and to return the full island to community members. E x pe r i m e n t i ng E n e rg i e s
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Figure 13. The Vieques ferry dock’s bilingual message to tourists obscures the everyday toxic legacies faced by residents, who are further harmed by unreliable maritime transportation. Vieques, Puerto Rico, June 2014. Author photo.
The US Department of the Interior, passing control to the US Department of Fish and Wildlife, converted the former bombing range into an unsuspecting wildlife refuge. Meanwhile gentrified land grabbing by tourism and other industries continues to grow—trading one form of occupation with another.38 A lack of adequate pollution cleanup by the US military and government contributes to the pervasive health problems in Vieques. The entire island lacks a hospital and relied on the Susana Centeno Clinic, until officials closed the facility because of damage from the 2017 hurricane season. Residents who can travel take a ferry to access the largest island’s already stressed and inadequate medical system for specialty care.39 This situation especially is alarming, given findings from various environmental and epidemiological studies. For example, human hair and drinking water samples indicate harmful amounts of metals.40 The cancer rate is 31 percent higher than on the largest island and continues to rise. 41 People report other illnesses at elevated levels, including hypertension (34 percent), asthma (16 percent), diabetes (28 percent), epilepsy (116 percent), and cardiovascular disease (130 percent). 42 Given the multifaceted forms of air, water, and noise pollution, less common health complications also exist, such as heart-related vibroacoustic disease, likely resulting from proximity to loud sounds. Just as the “Isla Nena” [Baby Island], as Vieques sometimes is called, has been greatly 76
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harmed, so too have infants, who die twice as often as their neighbors on the largest island. 43 Congenital anomalies also are common. While there are many injustices associated with treating Vieques as a defense zone, one obvious issue is the disregard for human well-being and the urgent need for adequate healthcare access. However, as the next case reveals, medical institutions and actors often have been complicit in applying their energies toward experimenting on Puerto Rican bodies.
Disease-Zone Discourse Disease management is inseparable from energy and power. Contested and other illnesses require substantial human energy to debate, test, and treat. These actions are influenced profoundly by uneven power dynamics that directly impact infection, healthcare access, and survivability and are tied to white supremacy and other hierarchical systems of expendability. Additionally, medical operations require energy to power machines; to produce and harvest food to feed staff, patients, and families; to manufacture personal protective equipment; and to power pharmaceutical operations, as detailed in this and the preceding chapter, along with many other activities. Industry products comprise nearly three-quarters of Puerto Rico’s exports, evincing an extractivist relationship that often bars residents from accessing vital medication and medical supplies. COVID-19 tests epitomize this injustice, as these materials were least available in Puerto Rico, compared to anywhere else in the United States, though the same multinational corporations that manufacture medical products make a fortune in the archipelago.44 While these dilemmas resonate most with the contemporary pandemic, such considerations also matter for addressing historical disease discourses rooted in efforts to control tropical(ized) health problems. Representations of Puerto Rico and the tropics more broadly as diseaseridden places saturated academic and popular rhetorical materials in the early years of US colonization, as detailed in chapter 1.45 US doctors and scholars were central to acquiring the possessions of the Philippines, Hawai‘i, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. “Civilizing” the “undeveloped” people in these regions and protecting colonizer health from feared infections and diseases, including malaria, yellow fever, and hookworm, were key components of the medical imperial enterprise.46 The prevalence of these illnesses helped to perpetuate white supremacist logics, equating poor health with racialized bodies and places. E x pe r i m e n t i ng E n e rg i e s
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The high rate of “tropical” diseases in Puerto Rico served to legitimate US medical interventions. Hookworm affected many individuals in the early 1900s. As medical commissions and facilities dedicated to treating this infection and disease increased, so too did the geographic reach of public health services, expanding from the United States to Africa and Latin America. In Puerto Rico, anemia linked to hookworm infection constituted nearly one-third of all mortalities. In response, the commissioner of public health of Puerto Rico invited the International Health Board to research hookworm infection rates, which exceeded 80 percent of the population. 47 The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research employed Dr. Cornelius Rhoads as part of its Caribbean medical team, which brought him to Puerto Rico in 1931. In this role, the physician increasingly began to treat local patients in dehumanizing ways. These behaviors were not unique to Rhoads. In one letter, he wrote: “The matter of consideration for patients’ welfare plays no role here—in fact, all physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.”48 Another report finds that he described Puerto Ricans as “experimental animals.”49 Rhoads not only evoked the laboratory metaphor in his writing; he also ultimately literalized this testing trope. On another occasion, one of the Puerto Rican medical professionals who worked with Rhoads stumbled upon a letter the doctor had left at his desk. The individual then shared the document with leaders of the nationalist movement, namely Pedro Albizu Campos, who circulated the text widely. In the document, Rhoads described residents as “beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. What the island needs is not public health work but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population. I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off 8.”50 He also acknowledged having transplanted cancer into several more individuals. Though local medical and legal professionals investigated this confessional text, ultimately, they exonerated the doctor, probably because one of his supervisors directed the case. At the time, Rhoads claimed his “fantastic and playful composition [was] written entirely for my own diversion and intended as a parody on supposed attitudes of some American minds in Porto Rico.”51 Rhoads returned to the United States to become one of the country’s most well-respected research physicians of the 1900s. He worked for the SloanKettering Institute and pushed for chemotherapy to treat cancer, as Army Medical Corps head of chemical warfare during World War II. During his tenure, he orchestrated many radiation experiments on US residents in 78
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his role with the Atomic Energy Commission.52 Although some people in Puerto Rico know of Rhoads and his genocidal ideology and likely actions, only recently has the US medical community begun to question this physician’s celebrated legacy, not unlike the highly praised terrorizing and murdering physician James Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology.”53 One outcome of this controversy involved the continued and reinvigorated concerns by members of the Puerto Rican nationalist party that the US government was plotting a eugenicist project against all Puerto Ricans. This preoccupation reified a nationhood-maternity focus that often served classist, conservative, and machista ideological ends. However, nationalist concerns regarding reproductive health harms certainly have some basis in fact. Take, for instance, the previous section about experimentation in and around Vieques, as well as numerous active superfund sites on the largest island. Researchers have linked these locations to disproportionately high preterm birth levels in Puerto Rico (almost 12 percent for live births).54 These effects result from treating the archipelago as an ideal test site for industrialization and development initiatives, which found discursive energy in overpopulation arguments to explain Puerto Rico’s supposed backwardness.
Development-Zone Discourse Popular understandings of development center on economic growth and production. In Puerto Rico, this concept also implicates a specific type of production—human reproduction—as population (control) discourses influenced and advanced developmentalist policy. As early as the 1920s, US corporate and government officials and local political elites blamed “the excessive birth rate . . . for the slowness and limitation of industrial ‘development’ on the island, and for contemporary Puerto Rican poverty on the mainland.”55 Many Operation Bootstrap advocates, featured in the previous “Routes/ Roots/Raíces” section, and other overpopulation believers claimed that “the intolerable population pressures on resources,” paired with the relatively small size of Puerto Rico, resulted in too many bodies and hindered Puerto Rico’s economic development.56 This overpopulation argument played into a “culture of poverty” and “native disorder” discourse, employed to ostracize Boricuas and associate them with bad families, illiteracy, sicknesses, and large gaps between poor and prosperous.57 Given the perceived entwinement of technological and social advancement, US medical procedures and resources provided “techno-scientific interventions” that exploited Puerto E x pe r i m e n t i ng E n e rg i e s
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Rico as a laboratory to address antipoverty, anticommunism, and prodevelopment campaigns that denied reproductive justice.58 Accordingly, overpopulation arguments provided rhetorical energies to help fuel, at least in part, advocacy for Operation Bootstrap. Various Puerto Rican elites and US actors articulated excess population numbers to birth control and sterilization, framing these concerns in a problem-solution relationship. Popular narratives expressed resistance to these “solutions” by focusing attention on the use of nonconsensual procedures. The local political left, as well as US feminists, tended to speak for Puerto Rican women using what Laura Briggs calls the “truco del ventrílocuo” [the ventriloquist trick].59 This rhetorical move mobilized a genocidal victimage frame in the name of defending supposed docile, inferior, and passive Boricua women. In particular, dominant discourses created a binary constituted by respectable married homemakers on one side and the pollution of working-class women and the vice of sex workers on the other, both of whom were scapegoated for Puerto Rico’s economic problems. 60 While church officials and nationalist movement members understood anti-concepción [birth control] as a US genocidal project, in many cases, other political movements, organizations, US feminists, and physicians supporting modernizing reforms advocated for this intervention in the language of “soft eugenics.”61 These efforts often muted local feminist organizing and disproportionately targeted and disciplined low-income and -wealth women, child bearers, and families. 62 Favoring the genocidal, patronizing frame, Puerto Rican newspapers influenced public opinion by communicating and circulating partisan perspectives presented as truth. Given this dissonance, as well as the importance of counternarratives, this section challenges a tidy narrative of oppressor and oppressed that has enabled appropriation of Puerto Rican women’s bodies and their experiences to serve various, sometimes competing, agendas. 63 Women, girls, and other potential child bearers in the archipelago have confronted reproductive injustices in manifold ways. Their bodies have and continue to be marked as menacing, given their perceived “demon” reproductive potential by xenophobic regimes. 64 This eugenicist thinking and communicating renders the “dark” female-presenting body as “always already reproductive” and thus a threat to the US state and white supremacy, requiring discipline and control. 65 As is often the case with discourses warning of overpopulation, the “problem” of hyperfertility ascribed to Boricuas was unfounded. In reality, “Puerto Rican women average only one-third of a 80
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child more than white women, and if socioeconomic status, education, and age at marriage were the same, Puerto Rican and white women would have the same fertility. Lower education and family income are factors associated with higher fertility among all US groups, not only for Puerto Ricans.”66 However, nuanced, intersectional rhetoric did not enter into dominant claims about overpopulation. Beginning in the 1930s and carried out over a period of four decades, Puerto Rican women’s sterilization garnered transnational attention, including extensive and ongoing academic research. 67 A large number of Boricuas experienced tubal ligation, with more than one-third of women ages fifteen to forty-five having undergone the procedure by 1968. 68 Sterilization rates in the archipelago are 5 percent higher than in other parts of the United States, though medical providers also practiced this method widely throughout the United States, often without consent. 69 In Puerto Rico, there were both voluntary and nonconsensual sterilizations, and it is important to note that some Puerto Rican women desired tubal ligation and birth control.70 Made infamous in the 1982 documentary La operación, the Puerto Rican sterilization program received financial support from the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.71 Meanwhile, well-intentioned US responses to Puerto Rican sterilization often constituted the white savior trope. Many continental US feminists centered Puerto Rican women in their communication but “inadvertently recapitulated the terms of a US colonialist narrative” by victimizing and seeking to save them.72 From disputes over the regulation of women’s bodies via sterilization emerged another controversy of a consumable kind. In addition to sterilization, Puerto Rico served as a “birth control laboratory” for the pill and other forms of contraception, including diaphragms and spermicide, prior to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval.73 In the 1950s, US doctors and other medical workers, including Dr. George Pincus and Margaret Sanger, set their sights on Puerto Rico to conduct trials they hoped would lead to widespread marketing of the world’s first contraceptive pill. Before coming to Puerto Rico, Pincus tested on mentally ill patients in the United States, using cutting procedures to monitor pill impacts, all without informed consent.74 He also unsuccessfully planned to include Puerto Rican prisoners in his trials, but instead his first subjects were coerced university students. With their grades and success in the program on the line, these women underwent invasive, time-consuming, and disruptive bodily examinations, with many ultimately leaving the trial. Searching E x pe r i m e n t i ng E n e rg i e s
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for a more readily available supply of test subjects, research activities shifted to targeting poor women with little formal education, especially in the areas of Río Piedras and Humacao.75 Some physicians referred to participants as a “cage of ovulating females.”76 The local government, US-based doctors, private industry, and missionary feminists collaborated to grow the market of “servicios contraceptivos experimentales,” which were administered and discussed in various clinics.77 Two Puerto Rican organizations headed these efforts: La Liga del Control de la Natalidad (1925) and La Liga del Control de la Natalidad de Puerto Rico (1932). Many people who could become pregnant experienced side effects and fell ill after taking the experimental drug and often withdrew their participation, requiring medical actors to repeat the trials several times. Side effects included dizziness, nausea, headaches, digestive problems, and blood clots.78 Some participants were hospitalized, and at least three women died. Pill hormone levels were many times higher than today’s equivalent, and elevated levels of estrogen, a known carcinogen, were especially harmful in the Enovid oral contraceptive. While women were encouraged to take the pill to avoid pregnancy, medical personnel did not warn participants of any risks.79 Once the FDA approved the drug, many of the same thousands of women who had made its access possible could not afford to purchase the contraceptive. 80 Exemplifying exploitation and expendability, their bodies were used as evidence for the need of population control and experimental trials to constitute and strengthen developmentalist discourse and policy at the frequent cost of reproductive justice. During the years of Operation Bootstrap, strategists of the Compañía de Fomento Industrial de Puerto Rico positioned Puerto Rico as a capitalist showcase and a “proof-text” for communicating a benevolent US government, starting in the 1940s. As decades wore on and amid rising communistcapitalist tensions, Puerto Rico emerged as a site for deterring other parts of Latin America “from experimenting with the Soviet model.”81 The US government and corporate cronies viewed Puerto Rico as an exploitable space for achieving this ambition and maximizing economic gain, via the “global assembly line” and for touting the democratic ideals of its “model colony.”82 Bonnie Uricuoli explains, “Labor, education, language, and health policies were instituted to fix what was ‘wrong’ with Puerto Rico, to take control of human matter out of place and relocate, contain, and reshape it.”83 Efforts to control and reshape Puerto Rico remain a tenacious energy in the archipelago today. 82
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Disaster-Zone Discourse Puerto Rico long has been targeted as a space for capitalist pursuits, but the 2017 hurricane season and the seismic frenzy a few years later turbulently crafted the rise of a blank-slate discourse that took the territorial government’s probusiness stance to new heights. While former president Donald Trump sought to shirk any responsibility to Puerto Rico in the hurricane aftermath by asking, “Can we sell the island? You know, or divest of that asset?” other actors were devising plans to profit from the archipelago’s misery. 84 Related to past development advocacy from local and federal government actors who drew on overpopulation arguments, recent discursive moves call for redevelopment in a postdisaster milieu amid thousands of deaths and mass out-migration. Government officials, real estate industry representatives, and other prodevelopment actors often frame these demographic displacements as a benefit for advancing predatory capitalism with “optimal conditions for accumulation” on this fantasy island. 85 Disaster capitalism involves the hasty reconfiguration of societies struggling with devastation and distress, caused by sudden disturbances to daily life. In these situations, politicians and corporate allies mobilize the shock doctrine as a neoliberal strategy. Free-market ideology drives this approach and functions to exploit the public’s emotional and psychological vulnerabilities. In so doing, this doctrine advances, and often fast tracks, controversial, corrupt, and undemocratic political agendas and policies. In the case of Puerto Rico, journalist Naomi Klein revised her thesis to argue that the “trauma doctrine” offers a more precise concept for describing the archipelago’s post-María reality. 86 A focus on the relationship between shock and trauma also warrants noting that, as Lloréns argues, capitalism always has been a disaster for Afro-descendant communities in Puerto Rico. Thus, part of naming this cruelty, to evaluate possible responses and responsibilities, requires challenging the assumption that this trauma is new for many racialized groups. 87 This disaster focus also necessitates acknowledging that far more than neoliberalism is at play, as many local governmental and corporate actors mobilize colonial logics, rhetorical materials, and relationships to supercharge this exploitation. This realization leads Danielle Z. Rivera to argue for disaster colonialism, which, as she makes clear by linking historical and contemporary hurricanes in Puerto Rico, is far from new. 88 The continued treatment of Puerto Rico as developable and rebuildable carries deadly implications related to and yet different from past and still
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lingering disease and development discourses. Prolonged power outages and unnavigable and dangerous infrastructure can produce life-threatening consequences, as observed in the aftermath of Hurricane María and the earthquakes, as people faced barriers to oxygen therapy, refrigerated medication, healthcare access, and other threats to well-being and survival. Experimenting with Puerto Rico’s energy future by replicating top-down, centralized, investor-owned fossil fuel projects is untenable and perilously replicates and reifies the outsider-knows-best mentality. Furthermore, approaching renewable projects with the same dominator logics, but with a different source, also is troubling, given the injustices and inequities maintained by green capitalism’s eco-friendly veneer. 89 To understand Puerto Rico’s treatment as a blank slate for fossil fuel and renewable projects, I engage governmental and corporate energy rhetoric during the months immediately following the 2017 hurricanes to argue that these hegemonic discourses enact experimentation, barring alternative-energy just futures. To challenge this problem, I contend that grassroots, decentralized solar discourses fueled by people power provide already proven alternative paths forward. However, the fossil fuel industrial complex and the energy actors who bolster this structure make such possibilities very difficult. In the wake of Hurricanes Irma and María, local government and energy utility officials signed contracts with US private contractors, Oklahomabased Cobra Acquisitions and Montana-based Whitefish Energy Holdings, to repair the decimated electric grid. These two “emergency contracts” were $900 million and $300 million agreements, respectively.90 Though the Whitefish Energy deal was canceled after one month of work, the company’s owner claimed PREPA still owed the firm $130 million. The energy company’s connections to the former secretary of the interior Ryan Zinke, a resident of Whitefish, led many to believe something was fishy and downright corrupt about the contract, especially given that the firm only had two employees at the time of the deal’s signing, no federal contract history, and disproportionately high rates for contractors and subcontractors. Additionally, Whitefish staff members profited with earnings of more than $200 for every hour worked per employee.91 Certainly, for an inexperienced firm, the massive project in Puerto Rico was very experimental, although the then PREPA director claimed the company’s past projects in Montana’s mountains made the energy company a fitting selection.92 Ultimately, utility officials’ decisions to sign these no-bid contracts contributed to months-long power outages that ranged from profound disruptions to daily life to death. These actions epito84
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mized their ineptitude and lack of ethics after the hurricanes, as these private contracts demonstrated a reliance on quick fixes and outside interventions that benefited US contractors. One journalist characterized the deals as a “colonial-style plunder,” as the agreements prohibited any kind of company auditing and other accountability measures.93 However, PREPA’s top energy actors are not the only individuals responsible for questionable dealings. Days after Hurricane María, Tesla emerged as a major player in addressing the archipelago’s energy crisis. On Twitter, CEO Elon Musk tweeted about the possibility of using powerpacks, with solar panels and batteries. Then governor Rosselló tweeted in reply: “Let’s talk. Do you want to show the world the power and scalability of your #Tesla-Technologies? PR could be that flagship project.”94 This exchange suggests making Puerto Rico financially and relationally dependent on an outside source. Together, Rosselló and Musk repeated a colonial discourse that assumes a model may be imported and scaled up or down, practicing energy coloniality’s propensity for a one-paradigm-fits-all approach. This discourse obscures geographic, political, economic, and cultural differences with the promises of green capitalism and a technofix brought by a white savior. Musk was not the only person or corporate player to view Puerto Rico as a lucrative site for solar. The chairman and CEO of US-based Sonnen, Blake Richetta, told Fast Company, “This [Puerto Rico] would become a laboratory. . . . All of the companies that are involved would be able to have significant returns simply because they would have proofs of concept vastly superior to what they have in the mainland US or the rest of the world. They would be able to say ‘yes, this works,’ and so there’s value there.”95 Similarly, a PV Magazine article characterizes the massive changes needed as dependent on “private capital to help transform the city and the territory into a solar laboratory.”96 While these proofs and investments might sound harmless or even helpful, this position overlooks histories of experimentation and impedes possibilities for challenging exploitative relationships caused by local and nonlocal governmental and industry actors. The conversations of Musk, Rosselló, and Richetta frame Puerto Rico as a test site for green capitalism, constituting another iteration of experimental injustices with renewable energy. Rosselló frequently exhibited this experimentation advocacy in his other public comments while governor. Like many of his gubernatorial predecessors, the former leader did not hesitate to welcome investors to Puerto Rico in the months and years following the 2017 hurricane season. In April 2018, Rosselló appeared on The Daily E x pe r i m e n t i ng E n e rg i e s
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Show, where he placed all responsibility for failed relief efforts on the federal government’s bureaucracy. He then described a developmentalist future for Puerto Rico, “As we go through this disaster. . . and it’s been a rough ride, you know, I see Puerto Rico as sort of a blank canvas to reinvent, to be innovative. . . . So I sort of want to start making the pivot from the recovery to the rebuilding and to being very innovative and inviting all of you to come to Puerto Rico. You know, we’re open for business. We’re open to receive everybody.”97 He then repeated at the interview’s conclusion, “And again, I see Puerto Rico as this blank canvas to start rebuilding as a destination for what we’re calling the human cloud, where, you know, many jobs in the future, as you know are going to be geographic independent. Come to Puerto Rico. . . . We can offer, uh, a better quality of life, and we can export those services later.”98 The former governor’s invitation for innovation encourages projects and processes that might sound new but that draw on previous logics that undergird and expand energy coloniality. Rosselló’s call for rebuilding repeats both an outsider-knows-best mentality and the belief that development and technology will save Puerto Rico. A double reference to the blank canvas invokes a universalizing discourse, suggesting that any idea could work in Puerto Rico, as the island will mold to the needs of wealthy investors and “the human cloud” that supports cryptocurrency.99 Furthermore, the idea of blank insinuates erasing not only Puerto Rican culture and history but also people themselves, as FEMA, local and federal governments, corporations, and investors have pushed hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to the United States through their failings. Capitalizing on this painful reality, Rosselló and his administration also worked to reach their primary audience of investors more directly, beyond popular media outlets. In February 2018, the former governor participated in an investor conference on the US east coast to attract big business to Puerto Rico. He and other presenters framed the disaster as an exciting opportunity, improved by the storm’s impacts, including the shrinking local population.100 The administration sought to attract new stakeholders under Act 20/22, a pivotal piece of legislation that allows wealthy transplants to use the territory as a tax haven. Passed in 2012, Act 20/22 was established to bring capital investment to the [largest] island amid fiscal crisis. The law originally carried certain restrictions requiring direct capital investment and job creation. Under the current administration, however, these rules have been lifted. Now, any individual who spends half the year on the island can receive exemptions from federal and local taxes, capital gains tax, and taxes 86
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on passive income until the year 2035, regardless of whether they generate employment or invest in the local economy.101
These incentives encouraging profits that take from Puerto Rico without any restrictions and accountability epitomize the extractivist and exploitative nature of an iterative developmentalist project. As everyday Puerto Ricans experience displacements with heightened urgency because of collisions with economic austerity, energy utility corruption and incompetency, and climate disruption, the local government continues to follow the footsteps of many previous administrators to court outside business at the expense of local residents.102 Puerto Ricans learned that their land was, again, for sale to the highest bidder in the spring and summer of 2019. The rezoning plans eerily coincided with the timing of Plan 2020—a proposal floated in the 1980s that aimed to convert the largest island into a massive extraction zone for strip-mining in the interior and for military bases and oil and gas extraction on the southern coast, including for then Exxon and Mobil, by 2020.103 Almost forty years later, the 2019 proposals by Rosselló and the ruling class, along with the Junta de Planificación (the Planning Board), unveiled top-down rezoning plans for Puerto Rico that would have forced displacements of local individuals and solidified an energy source and infrastructural future that heavily relied on imported methane gas.104 Though these proposals did not involve strip-mining, military bases, and local fossil fuel extraction, the same colonizing logics from the 1980s permeated the for-sale mentality held by Rosselló and other political elites. After the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico invalidated the 2019 plans, the government reissued and approved amendments in 2020 that fasttrack projects for rezoning and selling land to developers and other capitalists.105 Given these persistent schemes, the ongoing targeting of Puerto Rico as a development zone for capital merits scrutiny to understand and obstruct this resilient threat. Local government officials who presented the 2019 rezoning proposal employed the language of opportunity zones. This opportunity term functions as a euphemism of expansionist, capitalistic pursuits of wealthy US investors and their Puerto Rican cronies. Supplanting opportunity with sacrifice more precisely describes Puerto Rico’s longtime, and clearly ongoing, experience as an experimentation center for US capital and empire.106 The 2019 rezoning proposals would have impacted the majority of Puerto Rico and incentivized dispossession and exploitation, replicating past development efforts. E x pe r i m e n t i ng E n e rg i e s
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The plans called to reduce the federal tax rate from 37.5 percent to 20 percent if capitalists invested in low-income and low-wealth communities—home to most of the archipelago’s residents. Such an incentive risked intensifying gentrification and displacements. Furthermore, the proposal offered construction exemptions for excise taxes and would have reduced the city tax payment by half for fifteen years if investors were from the United States and Puerto Rico.107 This opportunistic language replicates the blank-slate trope to constitute the indifference and malice of local elites toward those who do not share their privileges, and whose communities are on the developmentalist “menu.” According to lawyer Manuel López-Zambrana, then financial advisor to the Rosselló administration: Puerto Rico, as an Opportunity Zone area, is competing with other states. . . . We have to be well aware that if we want to bring that capital here, they will be looking at a menu of other options. . . . They can choose from a well-done filet mignon, a lobster, and we have to come up with something that is better. . . . The fact that almost the entire island of Puerto Rico is an Opportunity Zone, is a blessing, but at the same time it’s a complication. Because they [the investors] come to Puerto Rico and they say ‘the whole island, ok. But do I look south, east, north?’ It’s a 100 page menu of a lot of good food, you could be looking at the menu for hours and at the end don’t know what to do.108
These statements at a 2019 University of Puerto Rico forum reaffirm and complicate the blank-slate ideology and discourse. López-Zambrana presents Puerto Rico as needing to provide an even more enticing offering, given the lengthy and “full menu” with “a lot of good food.” This framing suggests the importance of conversations with these investors’ local tablemates to help make the most satisfying selections for selling Puerto Rico. This gustatory trope is worth noting for several interrelated reasons. First, this description reenacts a colonial courting relationship, whereby the local territory must entertain and please the US hegemonic guest to ensure US investors choose the Puerto Rican restaurant for the most satiating and satisfying items. Second, this trope is ironic given that 85 percent of Puerto Rico’s food was imported in 2017—a number aggravated by Hurricanes Irma and María, which also strengthened commitments by some local groups and individuals to advance food sovereignty and justice.109 The archipelago also has been targeted by Monsanto and other corporations for transgenic (genetically modified organism) food testing, with numerous experimental labora-
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tories, including several in southern Puerto Rico.110 Thus, López-Zambrana’s invocation of food serves as a potent symbol for maintaining dependency and experimentation. Third, his remarks add urgency to the oft-repeated social justice organizing axiom, “If you don’t have a seat at the table then you’re on the menu,” as different bodies are for purchase and consumption. Of course, as ample studies and testimonials on public hearings and other deliberative spaces evince, having a “seat” and being ignored or patronizingly, procedurally listened to is far different from self-determined, equitable, and just public engagement discussions and outcomes.111 While speaking at this event, López-Zambrana also explained that gentrification concerns are unfounded, emphasizing that many planned areas already were abandoned and that everyone should embrace the proposal as a “gift from Congress” in the post-María milieu. His statements assumed no one lives in places already impacted by gentrification, such as Santurce in the northeast. This mindset completely ignores and erases how people try to survive in coloniality’s ruins and legitimizes the blank-slate, open-for-business menu metaphor by disregarding well-established, vibrant, and struggling communities. Like the Rezoning Plan, the 2019 Grid Modernization Plan for Puerto Rico also perpetuated oppressive relations rooted in energy coloniality and energy privilege. This now defunct proposal, written by Siemens, risked replicating a future energy system with the same problems as the current system. A portion of the plan included building several methane gas plants, including in San Juan, Mayagüez, Palo Seco, and Yabucoa. This reliance would have aggravated already existing US import dependency with LNG—possibly with fracked methane gas from the United States—and its requisite pipelines and ports. Given daily explosions and leaks throughout the globe and the common hazards of hurricanes and earthquakes in Puerto Rico, PREPA’s proposal clearly pushed forward a fossil fuel industry agenda uninterested in structural change.112 The Puerto Rico Energy Bureau rejected the plan in summer 2020, but efforts to place and control the archipelago’s energy future in the hands of a few persist. Public discourse about Puerto Rico’s electric grid often contributes to injustices against already disenfranchised communities. This problem is epitomized by the Grid Revitalization Forum (PR-GRID). A recent gathering was planned for San Juan in summer 2020, with initial registration fees as high as $1,495. Framed as an opportunity for everyday people to communi-
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cate their visions for Puerto Rico’s energy future to wealthy investors and developers, this forum partnered with the World Bank and other institutions of global neoliberal capitalism. Such events maintain oppressive energy politics under the guise of democratic deliberations and information sharing.113
Experimenting Pitfalls and Possibilities Studying the experimentation trope elucidates ways that different energy actors historically and contemporarily have (ab)used Puerto Rico as an environment for testing various ideologies, discourses, and projects. From defense advocacy to tropical disease discourses, to overpopulation development arguments, to calls for constructing and consuming Puerto Rico as a postdisaster blank slate, these rhetorical energies have positioned local bodies as exploitable, extractable, and experimental subject-objects. Recent rezoning and energy-source and infrastructural plans epitomize and (re)activate energy coloniality and energy privilege, implicating Puerto Rican and US governments, corporations, and residents, in ways that impede energy justice. The obstinate persistence of these efforts does not occur via reductionist colonizer-colonized binaries but via complex relationships shaped by competing energies, arguments, and interests that constitute archipelagoes of power. Acknowledging these networked formations also creates space for envisioning and testing forms of being, thinking, and communicating in the world that are within reach and already are being practiced. While experimentation can function in hegemonic ways, this trope, including its material manifestations, also can refuse domination by envisioning and living more liberatory alternatives. There exists a long tradition of experimental forms of dissent and radical belongings, extending back to maroon communities, composed of formerly enslaved peoples who mobilized fugitivity to make lives apart from brutal systems of oppression. Yannick Marshall argues that the state always will fail Black people. Thus, continuing to hope that structures built on white supremacy and coloniality will one day improve is futile and a waste of energy. Accordingly, the politics of marronage may offer a way of existing otherwise, beyond the state, with life-giving rather than life-taking relations.114 Another example of testing and breaking the boundaries of the possible involves the summer 2019 uprisings that successfully toppled Rosselló’s administration. According to José Atiles-Osoria, these mobilizations “experimented with a new set of political practices” that 90
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abandoned the legal apparatus, hierarchical organizing structures, and polarizing party politics.115 There also are many examples of this laboratory trope specific to electric energy that simultaneously tests power structures in multiple senses of the word. The ITEAS solar colloquia discussed in chapter 1, composed of energy actors, served “as a test case” for studying “weak electric power systems.”116 In another instance, INESI cofounders Pérez-Lugo and Ortiz Garcia have critiqued dominant usages of the blank-canvas discourse to challenge other energy actors to imagine a different creation for completely reimagining and reinventing Puerto Rico’s grid. They urge democratic deliberations that put everyday community interests and the most marginalized experiences at the center.117 Also drawing on experimenting energies, Casa Pueblo organizers have developed numerous solar alternative ideas and infrastructures with the goal of transforming their mountainside municipality of Adjuntas into the first solar-powered town in Puerto Rico. Ranging from the “posterriqueño”—an energy-efficient public lighting system with the “riqueño” ending to signal this Puerto Rican invention—to a public school that can serve as a solar oasis for rural families, Casa Pueblo members continue their homegrown renewable energy transition, reinvigorating efforts in the hurricane and earthquake aftermath.118 The group also offers a Cine Solar program and in January 2021 published the inaugural issue of Adjuntas Pueblo Solar, a no-cost publication that includes a focus on gender and women organizers.119 While Casa Pueblo deserves and receives significant attention for its early and prolonged solar advocacy and perseverance, another grassroots group near the southeast coast also is enacting its own solar experiment. Coquí Solar, a group I have volunteered with since 2014, has made significant solar community transformations over the years.120 Responding to the dire centralized grid system, project collaborators have persevered against the odds. Member Carmen De Jesús described this solar community initiative in terms that counter the blank-slate discourse and expose its harms and falsities: Considero que el rol de los colaboradores es uno muy importante en la creación y desarrollo del proyecto y como tal siempre estaremos ligados. El poder materializar este sueño y hablar sobre lo que se ha realizado, cómo continuar ayudando a más personas y/o comunidades . . . sería un sueño hecho realidad. En cuanto a la comunidad, diría que estamos encaminándonos a rescatar esos lazos sociales que fueron creados por nuestros antecesores: el ayudarnos, E x pe r i m e n t i ng E n e rg i e s
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compartir lo que tenemos, preocuparnos por los demás, demostrar amor y empatía. [I consider that the role of collaborators is one of the most important in the creation of the project’s development and as such we always will be linked. The ability to materialize this dream and to speak about what has been achieved, how to continue helping more people and/or communities . . . would be a dream come true. Regarding the community, I would say that we are aiming to rescue our social ties that were created by our ancestors: to help each other, to share what we have, to care about others, to demonstrate love and empathy.]
Unlike Rosselló’s and López-Zambrana’s arguments, De Jesús elucidates the importance of deeply established ties that communicate intergenerational linkages of mutual support and care. The dreams proposed by these disparate energy actors could not be more opposed. In spring 2018, after four years of struggle, one key Coquí Solar aspiration became a reality. Local collaborators installed twenty solar photovoltaic (PV) panels on the community center’s roof, supplied by Puerto Rico–based company Neo Era Energy Solutions, along with twenty energy-converting microinverters and two Tesla powerwalls (energy storage units) to power this central gathering place. The project was funded by Fundación Segarra Boerman, a local foundation that partners with Resilient Power Puerto Rico. An essential component of Coquí Solar’s initial success involved service-learning projects led by O’Neill-Carrillo, his engineering students, and members of a nearby technological institute. Collaborators also are working with local electricians and others knowledgeable about electricity, as Coquí Solar continues to evolve. These individuals offer mentorship and training to certify electrician apprentices. Part of this experience involves conducting energy use inventories and offering opportunities for registering in electric energy workshops with a focus on renewable systems. Thus, this initiative is far more than an infrastructural technology change to solar to power the community center and light poles. Enacting a just transition philosophy, which might be reconceptualized as a just transformation, opportunities also exist for empowering local youth to learn solar installation and maintenance fundamentals that could inspire a worker-owned cooperative that creates jobs for collaborators, strengthens community resource sharing, and offers hands-on experiences with solar kits for the area’s most financially struggling residents.121 Importantly, these efforts are not about seeking complete separation from PREPA but rather exerting pressure to transform the utility to better serve the public’s well92
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Figure 14. The Centro Comunitario’s rooftop solar panels are a source of pride and a symbol of hope for many Coquí Solar members, including local youth who decorated the center with the message: We are the hands of the present and of the future. El Coquí, Salinas, Puerto Rico, December 2018. Author photo.
being, using community-led and distributed, onsite rooftop solar as an exemplar of bottom-up changes toward more sustainable relations in terms of electricity generation and power sharing among people. At times, other collaborators and I thought Coquí Solar’s projects might not come to fruition, given numerous challenges, including limited initial financing and disagreements about the most impactful way to implement the group’s objectives and goals. As member Ismenia Figueroa insisted during a November 2017 group meeting: “Es ahora o nunca” [It’s now or never]. Though obstacles remain, which I outline in this book’s conclusion, collaborators persist with this solar community that they designed and are creating on their own terms for themselves and future generations.
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Three
Generating Methane Metaphors to Fuel and Fight Extractivism
EcoEléctrica staff members welcomed me politely when I arrived at the LNG plant in Peñuelas on a June morning in 2014. Based on my expressed interest via phone, they had organized a tour and an interview with a company director.1 As I surveyed my surroundings, I noted the clear contrast created by the white-painted facility with its green grounds and the surrounding rusting industrial ruins. EcoEléctrica clearly worked hard to present itself as a clean alternative to petroleum and coal fuel sources. During my three-and-a-half-hour visit at the plant, I frequently encountered the company’s greenwashed slogan: “Un mejor ambiente con gas natural.” [A better environment with natural gas.] While EcoEléctrica historically has received its gas from Caribbean neighbors Trinidad and Tobago, shifting power dynamics now position the United States as a growing supplier of fracked gas to Puerto Rico. One EcoEléctrica official expressed his hope to me that the largest island could serve as a site both for importing methane gas for use in Puerto Rico and as a hub for the entire Antilles. He said: I think we need to look at the future in terms of possibilities, and one of the possibilities for the whole Caribbean is for Puerto Rico to serve as the hub for the storage and sale of natural gas, so we can have these operations not only serving the island, we can have these operations looking at serving the rest of the Caribbean.
An examination of industry and political rhetoric both preceding and following recent shock events in the archipelago makes clear that this energy actor’s employment of this metaphor is far from exceptional, but it is noteworthy. 97
Fossil fuel industry officials and their political allies often communicate methane gas advocacy using space-occupying tropes to argue for the sustainability of this material and technology to advance human progress, while obscuring the destruction inherent in industry activities that limits possibilities for regenerative relationships. These metaphoric and other rhetorical expressions of imperial and colonial desires materialize in continued extraction, construction, distribution, and reliance on methane gas, whether it be hydraulically fractured, liquefied and regasified, or both. While bridge frequently is deployed to communicate the supposed need for methane gas in the United States as a transition fuel, I contend that shifting attention to the tropes of way, path, expansion, and hub offers an alternative focus for evaluating how different energy actors communicate and counter advocacy for this fuel beyond a continental US focus.2 Studying these rhetorical energies brings critical attention to dominant agendas and assumptions that require questioning rather than accepting. In some cases, these spatial tropes generate and are generated by energy coloniality and produce energy privilege, by deflecting and erasing underlying local and global injustices to advance a top-down, imported fossil-fuel energy system. However, these same and related rhetorical materials also can be mobilized to counter this methane frenzy, as energy actors opposed to expansionism in its many forms sometimes repurpose these terms and seek to impede the spread of another fossil fuel by interpreting and translating alternatives. Attending to these resistive energies illuminates the hardships of community members struggling for energy justice, who tend to be in a perpetual state of emergency, as they expend embodied emotional, mental, and physical labor to confront and challenge industry officials and their political cronies. Thus, as in part 1 of this book, this chapter documents the symbolic and material energies of colonized/racialized bodies in archipelagoes of power. This chapter centers the generating metaphor of exigence to analyze what tropes and other rhetorical materials are generated, by whom, and with what effects, both in terms of meaning-making and material implications.3 First, I outline the hazards of methane gas and the US policies enabling reliance on this fossil fuel, including in the form of LNG. This energy source and associated technologies merit scrutiny, as they fuel and are fueled by exploitative emergency discourses that carry grave consequences for Puerto Rico. Second, I analyze texts and experiences constituting Vía Verde and the Aguirre Offshore GasPort (AOGP), two proposed and defeated projects. 98
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While proponents framed these plans as common sense and essential for an urgent energy transition, energy actors opposed to the proposals troubled uses of way, path, and expansion, among many other energetic interventions, to construct interpretations and translations that rejected the plans. I argue that historicizing past projects provides important insights for contemporary and future methane gas controversies and the rhetorical materials that energize them. Third, I generate an archive of complementary and clashing uses of hub, based on language from diverse energy actors. In these rhetorical materials, methane gas advocates have regenerated their plans in the post– Hurricane María and earthquake milieu, backed by recent PREPA proposals. To conclude this chapter, I review the selected space-occupying tropes animating these controversies and discuss implications for actions committed to making visible the normalization of energy coloniality and energy privilege in LNG debates. This intervention contributes to comprehending and communicating the complexities of archipelagoes of power and the energy rhetorical matrix that fuels these relationalities.
Fueling Emergencies The Trump administration made “energy dominance” a foundation of its policymaking and breaking, which constitutes a form of energy coloniality. 4 An online White House brief, posted to the administration’s website in May 2019, boasts of the 2017–2020 “golden era” of rolling back policies that regulated fossil fuel extraction. The authors of the post use terms such as “incredible,” “abundant,” and “booming” to frame the supposed benefits of “energy dominance,” with this so-called “freedom gas,” a Department of Energy neologism.5 The website also expresses pride in having “streamlined permitting” for LNG terminals and claims that exports also have exceeded previous numbers, as part of efforts to spread US fossil fuels around the globe. Federal officials claim that oil production reached one billion barrels in 2019, a record that relied on easing and overturning regulations and extracting hydrocarbons offshore and onshore, including on Native American and Indigenous lands. 6 In the months preceding and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the fossil fuel fanatic administration and industry allies exploited the political situation to accelerate their agenda. Former president Trump approved the Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipelines, the latter of which was overG e n e r at i ng M e t h a n e M e ta phor s
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turned after President Joe Biden canceled the presidential permit in January 2021.7 In August 2019, the Trump administration submitted a proposal to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to eliminate federal control of methane leaks from pipelines, wells, and storage areas owned and managed by oil and gas companies. 8 In 2019 and 2020, the EPA continued to roll back and reverse alarming numbers of environmental protections, while regulators approved thousands of petitions to waive antipollution rules at the state level throughout the United States.9 These actions greatly benefited the same harm industry already receiving massive pandemic federal bailouts.10 In June 2020, then president Trump signed an executive order claiming an “economic crisis” to accelerate pipeline construction. Critics highlighted that the move threatened to aggravate existing environmental racism, all while Movement for Black Lives mobilizations continued to call out this manifestation of white supremacy.11 As political efforts to deregulate and power up oil and gas infrastructure and extraction continued under Trump, the unsustainability and recklessness of the industry grew ever clearer, as fossil fuel operations and jobs tanked during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fracked LNG: Superheating the Planet with a Chilling Effect A life-cycle assessment, from extraction to disposal, is paramount when calculating greenhouse gas emissions and environmental and human health risks. Gas is composed of 90 percent methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, which is many times more powerful than carbon dioxide, when calculating short-term heating potential.12 Researchers of recent studies find that the EPA, state governments, and other organizations significantly have underestimated the amount of methane emissions, including leaks from oil and gas infrastructure.13 When gas is flared to remove excess material, this practice emits sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic compounds, including carcinogens such as benzene.14 Gas also often escapes when pipelines leak and rupture and easily can become flammable and explode.15 Furthermore, compressor stations, to ensure gas movement, are noisy and spew toxins into the surrounding environment, while diesel from engines and the release of contaminants from open-air pits also contribute to extraction’s toxicity.16 According to the Fractracker Alliance’s study of the US gas industry’s self-reported data, there were 1,069 polluting and hazardous events relating to gas transmis-
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sion or collection between November 2018 and January 2020, resulting in twenty-four fatalities, nearly one hundred injuries, and more than $1 billion in damages.17 Additionally, several studies link fracking to increased seismic activity.18 Accompanying these hazards, the industry’s operations are toxic to human bodies. The Endocrine Disruptor Exchange finds that the hundreds of toxic chemicals in fracking fluid, which industry employees mix with millions of gallons of water per well, are associated with reproductive injustices, nervous system harms, and many other detrimental health consequences.19 The harmful footprint of methane gas grows with its LNG operations. To prepare for export, industry actors chill the gas to -260 degrees Fahrenheit to reach liquid form. This change enables the substance to occupy substantially less tanker space than as a gaseous substance. After this conversion, tankers transport the fuel hundreds, even thousands, of miles to an onshore or offshore terminal where then regasification occurs prior to distribution. Converting this gas from a liquid and back again requires the construction and conversion of numerous transport and (re)gasification centers. The global competition with LNG rivals Australia, Qatar, Russia, and the United States heated up in the years preceding COVID-19, but 2020 revealed the fragility of the industry.20 According to the US Energy Information Administration, the Gulf Coast’s web of extant pipeline infrastructure attracted export terminal development, as the LNG industry sought to convert previously used import terminals for exporting, given outside demand for the fuel.21 Capitalizing on these existing networks, prior to the pandemic, US multinational extractive corporations and the Trump administration continued to expand infrastructure to export fracked oil and gas, especially because of the financial struggles caused by oversupply and pressure from renewables in the United States and globally. During COVID-19, diminished demand for fuel further contributed to oversupply, lack of adequate storage, and decreased values per barrel.22 While LNG export shipments dropped by more than 50 percent in summer 2020 and many export terminal projects were cancelled or delayed, billions of dollars in federal bailout funds paid by taxpayers bolstered the industry.23 This corporate lifeline points to the entwinements of energy, power, and emergency contexts and discourses, which also have played a major role in shaping the US empire’s corporate expansionist agenda with methane gas in Puerto Rico.24
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Polluting Pipeline Politics Meet People Power Vía Verde In 2009, Luis Fortuño, the former governor of Puerto Rico, argued the archipelago existed in “a state of energy emergency.”25 His administration composed and circulated an executive order stating that, since 70 percent of Puerto Rico’s electric energy came from petroleum, “cheaper environmentally-friendly alternatives, preferably of a renewable nature” were necessary.26 While this call initially might sound promising, such a declaration implicates a host of potential consequences that merit scrutiny, including unilateral, undemocratic decision making about major policy decisions and their potential impacts on communities.27 Fortuño and his administration pushed forward several projects as part of this emergency discourse, including the incinerator in Arecibo, the highly contested and constructed wind turbines on fertile farmland in Santa Isabel, and the Vía Verde gasoducto [Green Way pipeline].28 The territorial government advocated for this latter project to transform petroleum-based plants to gas. Concurrently, the former governor’s emergency declaration also heightened criminalization of environmental and other advocates who opposed these projects by declaring construction blockages a felony.29 Despite this repression, strong challenges to the Vía Verde gasoducto project symbolized people power in response to polluted pipeline politics. This proposal signaled both the presence of energy coloniality and energy privilege, as well as the power of progressive, grassroots mobilizing.30 Defeated in 2012, the initially proposed ninety-two-mile-long gasoducto would have stretched across Puerto Rico’s largest island, threatening endangered species, heritage sites, and human health, as well as furthering dependency on imported fossil fuels.31 Journalists characterized the project and activist efforts against the pipeline as “el próximo Vieques” [the next Vieques].32 The financing estimate for the proposal ranged from $400 million to $1 billion and threatened to cost Puerto Ricans much more in terms of well-being and a self-determined energy future. Acknowledging this menace, land and water defenders disarticulated the gasoducto with life, “green,” and progress by renaming it “Vía de la muerte” [Death Route].”33 This antagonism broke the dominant framework espousing the benefits of the pipeline, by repurposing the concept of “vía” to expose the oppressive capitalistic system fueling project advocates’ ambitions. The 102
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related slogan, “Sí a la vida, no al gasoducto” [Yes to life, no to the pipeline], provided a similar shift in representing the project. Important ideological and movement building work occurred when Casa Pueblo and other grassroots groups and local residents coorganized a 2012 pipeline protest in Adjuntas, with thirty-thousand demonstrators.34 Casa Pueblo leaders were careful to avoid presenting their campaign as energized by political sovereignty and environmentalist agendas. Instead, members evoked a strong environmental nationalism that emphasized the preservation of Puerto Rican culture and environments.35 Additionally, organizers strategically timed the protest for May Day. According to Gustavo A. García López, Irina Velicu, and Giacomo D’Alisa, by communicating the entwinement of labor with environmental and energy concerns, organizers revealed how the project endangered laboring-class individuals and families.36 As knowledge of the gasoducto’s multiple threats increased, so too did membership in a broad-based coalition. In a June 2014 interview, Casa Pueblo founder Alexis Massol-González insisted to me that Puerto Rican survival hinged on Vía Verde’s defeat. He articulated pipeline resistance to “el derecho a la vida” [the right to life]. After our conversation, I encountered documentation of Massol-González’s efforts to trouble the lack of accessible communication during this struggle because of linguistic oppression. His written public comments to the US Army Corps of Engineers express this major inequity. You are aware that your refusal to translate into Spanish the complete EA [Environmental Assessment]-Draft constitutes yet another unilateral imposition of power by the US Army over the people of Puerto Rico, a blatant disregard of basic democratic participatory processes, another instance of environmental discrimination, and an act of contempt for the life and property of over 200,000 citizens.37
Massol-González expresses an example of institutionalized oppression that fosters energy privilege, as Spanish speakers faced added obstacles in an organizational system that favors industry while feigning public participation. Importantly, the Casa Pueblo leader and many other organizers had other resources available to them for refusing this project, beyond institutional channels. The multipronged tactics of marches, informational bulletins, and civil disobedience at the White House, among other interventions, built pressure against the project and contributed to its ultimate demise.38 Considering the devastation caused by the hurricanes and earthquakes in the stretch of 2017 to 2020, and given the known risks of fossil fuel extracG e n e r at i ng M e t h a n e M e ta phor s
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tion, infrastructure, distribution, consumption, and disposal/storage, Vía Verde’s construction would have had detrimental, even deadly, effects during these shock events. Though the project’s defeat generated hope for a more just energy future in Puerto Rico, additional threats of a burgeoning methane gas complex were in the pipeline.
Aguirre Offshore GasPort In June 2015, the local power authority released an energy recovery plan titled “PREPA’s Transformation: A Path to Sustainability.”39 The report positioned “natural” gas as a key pathway for Puerto Rico’s energy future and featured the AOGP, a project of Texas-based Excelerate Energy. 40 Though regulators with PREB ultimately did not approve the LNG plan, this case offers some instructive experiences for resisting current and future methane gas advocacy paths, proposals, and projects in Puerto Rico and beyond. The AOGP would have served as an offshore LNG floating regasification center near Puerto Rico’s southern coast to fuel the Central Aguirre Power Complex. PREPA officials sought to convert the utility’s plants from liquid fuel (petroleum based) to gas fuel—an ambition that has motivated many pro-fossil-fuel arguments for years, especially following the recent earthquakes.41 For this transition, the report claimed that, during the following fifteen years, PREPA needed to spend about $2.3 billion on new infrastructure, including $481 million on the AOGP. At the time, the plan received strong critiques from some energy actors in Puerto Rico and in the United States because of the report’s favorable discussion of LNG and its meager proposal to increase its renewable energy mix from 3 to 12 percent by 2030. In addition to reviewing the energy path that PREPA imagines for Puerto Rico, another way to investigate methane gas advocacy and the AOGP involves studying how corporate rhetoric constitutes energy coloniality. Excelerate Energy officials and those who run their marketing machine enact logics of speed, progress, and expansionism to present the company’s LNG projects as the common-sense way forward. Accompanying wordplay fusion with excel and accelerate in its name, Excelerate Energy’s slogan and promise of an “energy fast forward,” among other claims, marks a fast-forward ideology that values swift movement ahead.42 Phrasing such as “increase in size and global reach,” “pioneer and leader,” and “continuing to explore new frontiers and maintaining our position of leadership in floating LNG technology and development” communicate conquest and the corporate 104
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power of US empire. Furthermore, the language of “we are committed to delivering smart, reliable, and timely solutions,” “fast-track LNG import solution tailored to fit most any environment,” and “we keep energy moving” all bolster a problem-solving frame that ExcelerateEnergy actors can make “fit.” The corporation’s focus on movement, time, leadership, being first in its LNG development, and its innovative spirit constitutes a discourse rooted in energy coloniality. Visualizing its global reach, ExcelerateEnergy’s website features a map titled “ExcelerateEnergy around the World” and marks the location of its projects in the United States, Latin America, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, and southern Asia. Taken together, these pro-LNG discursive fragments find strength in long-standing colonial and imperialist arguments that read certain places as anachronistic and in need of development and oversight. Only with this intervention, or so the narrative goes, will “backward” peoples be expeditiously propelled toward the “right” path. To suggest generating possibilities that antagonize this “progress” trajectory not only challenges the promise of LNG but also simultaneously confronts entrenched Western onto-epistemologies of modernity, exploitation, and empire that derive power from keeping colonized communities and places dependent. However, a review of the failed AOGP project is incomplete without documenting vernacular responses from energy actors who challenged the proposal and who continue to resist ongoing corporate and political rule over their energy futures, including by interpreting and translating their concerns for various audiences. Such actions point to tremendous energy exertions, generated, in part, by a lack of energy privilege. While Excelerate Energy’s corporate rhetoric advances a speed-driven productivist discourse of conquest, local land and water defenders tell a spatial and temporal counternarrative of the ecosystem they call home. According to Santiago and other local residents I interviewed, the AOGP project would have detrimentally affected fishers’ livelihoods, coral reefs, and fish populations because of the heavy ocean traffic and horizontal deep-water drilling needed to transport the fossil fuel.43 Santiago explicates in her letter to the US Coast Guard (USCG) in January 2014: The establishment of restricted zones and limitation of access to Jobos Bay and the Caribbean Sea is a critical issue to residents of the Jobos Bay communities and fishers in particular. Even before its foundation in 1841, the residents of the Municipality of Salinas have depended heavily on the coastal resources of Jobos Bay and the Caribbean Sea. . . . For centuries, residents of G e n e r at i ng M e t h a n e M e ta phor s
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the coastal communities of Jobos Bay in Salinas and Guayama have practiced small scale fishing. Access to the Bay is an important means of subsisting. Even during the heyday of sugar cane cultivation, when the Aguirre Mill was the second largest industry of its kind in Puerto Rico, residents of the coastal communities of Jobos Bay fished in the Bay and the Caribbean Sea to the south to feed themselves and their families particularly during the “dead time” of the sugar cane cycle. The industrialization process known as Operation Bootstrap never created the number of jobs promised or expected and many local residents became migrant agricultural workers or worked in construction while alternating with fishing activities. On rainy nights, whole families with lanterns and sacks in hand search for crabs to supplement their diets. 44
Santiago emplaces her argument by constructing a story of community member ties to the surrounding environment and their quotidian activities. Her description narrates US–Puerto Rico industrial relations by tracing the rise and fall of industry and the associated consequences. Referencing before 1841 and moving to the present day, she notes that now, as in the past, her community’s survival hinges on the full use of this area and lively struggles to subsist in periods referred to as “dead.”45 These conditions dramatically have been shaped by energy coloniality and demonstrate an alternative to Excelerate Energy’s expansionist rhetoric by living in caring relation with the environment rather than seeking to master land and water with the latest technology. To study these divergent understandings of Jobos Bay and visions for its future, I traveled to a vista pública [public hearing] about the proposed AOGP in June 2014.46 The large room was full, with about fifty people—not a small number, given that residents received only five days’ notice before the meeting. In attendance were several USCG officials, a few police officers, fishers and other community members from near the proposed project site, at least two Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) representatives, and Excelerate Energy’s LNG tanker captain. The USCG was responsible for the project’s various safety zones, as well as issuing the project’s Water Suitability and Assessment Report and the letter of recommendation, according to responsibilities granted to the branch under the 1972 Ports and Waterways Safety Act and the 2002 Maritime Transportation Security Act.47 At 9:30 a.m. USCG officer José Pérez convened the meeting half an hour late. Donning a blue uniform complete with big black, shiny boots, he asked for approval to conduct the hearing in English because they had a few US
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visitors attending who were monolingual. He inquired in Spanish if that was a problem. Several local attendees responded by explaining that most of the audience was Spanish speaking, so the discussion should be conducted in their preferred language. Santiago also chimed in, expressing her frustration with the meeting’s lack of planning and the USCG’s irresponsibility with returning phone messages. She showed Pérez her cell phone, proving that she had called the USCG several times without any response. After this somewhat tense exchange, Pérez proceeded with the introduction in both English and Spanish to accommodate all audience members. USCG representative Efraín López followed his colleague and shared a brief presentation about the AOGP. He explained that people could make comments about the project in the FERC register in English only. Pérez suggested he could help with translations, but with the lack of instructions offered, clearly non-English speakers were on their own to navigate writing and posting their comments. These linguistic constraints and institutionalized oppression epitomize a fundamental injustice of the US–Puerto Rico relationship, also present in MassolGonzález’s comments regarding Vía Verde: the mandate that energy actors should express public commentary and receive key resources in English.48 Following the two-hour meeting, which was limited, due to USCG insistence, to a discussion of “safety zones,” rather than about the need for developing the project in the first place, Santiago conversed with USCG officials for an hour. Local fisher union head Miguel A. Ortiz, his partner, Carmen Justiniano, and I witnessed the exchange.49 In addition to promising to answer his phone when Santiago called him in the future, Pérez said he would consider adding an addendum to the letter that included the alternative AOGP site, which Santiago, Ortiz, and several other community members claimed would create a safer, though still undesired, pipeline route. Earlier, Ortiz had voiced his concerns with the public hearing’s location, given that the meeting in Ponce was inaccessible for many community members, especially with such little notice. In response, the USCG officials agreed to a future gathering that would be closer to impacted communities. About one year after witnessing the Ponce hearing, in May 2015, I attended another public forum, this time about Puerto Rico’s coastlines at the Departamento de Recursos Naturales y Ambientales (DRNA) [Department of Natural and Environmental Resources] headquarters. During a drive from Salinas to San Juan, Santiago and I discussed the practice of holding these public forums in English and with English-speaking US agency officials,
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Figure 15. Fishers Carmelo Ortiz, Miguel A. Ortiz, Luis S. Rodríguez, Miguel Santiago, and Julio Colón pause from their conversation at Villa Pesquera Punta Pozuelo, a restaurant and dock. Guayama, Puerto Rico, June 2014. Author photo.
who are rarely heritage Spanish speakers. She remarked, “We can’t function in our country because we have to use English. . . . We can never operate at 100 percent.” Once we arrived and the meeting commenced, event facilitators introduced participants to several National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) agency officials who wore headsets so they could listen to the English interpretations of testimonies offered in Spanish. Organizers also asked others present in the room to wear headsets if they did not speak both English and Spanish. Santiago shared her comments in English and asked the NOAA officials to extend the comment period for the coastal zone policy, given that residents had little time to read the document and prepare for the meeting. The officials told her that the hearing was not the place to talk about specific projects but that they would honor her extension request. After the meeting, one NOAA representative spoke individually with Santiago about prolonging the submission date. They also discussed the AOGP and whether FERC would be conducting a new environmental impact statement, given the project’s plans to use horizontal directional drilling to construct the pipeline from the GasPort to the thermoelectric complex. Later that night, Santiago conveyed the NOAA official likely would not have spoken with her after the meeting had she voiced her concerns in Spanish, based on her experiences at other forums. I asked her if she was satisfied with interpretations and related practices at these events. She replied:
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Absolutely not. Never, ever. . . . There are times when I know it’s not important. . . . I will speak in Spanish. . . . But when I’m really concerned that the people at the agency know exactly what I’m saying, I speak English because invariably when I listen to a translation I will notice many errors because we’re a bad imitation. We’re trying to imitate all US practices, let’s say, and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. I mean you know . . . maybe a couple of companies who are really good, or a couple of interpreters that are really good and accurate, but you never know who’s going to be doing the interpreting or the translating. . . . And as you saw in that last hearing . . . if I had not spoken English they wouldn’t have come and approached me and asked and given me contact information or whatever. It would have been like two worlds . . . as it is most of the time, with people here who are very knowledgeable, who know what they’re doing, who know what they’re saying, but they can’t communicate too well in English. And the other people don’t understand Spanish, and they think they just don’t know what’s going on, and sometimes it is that the people don’t know what’s going on because the rules are set in Washington, and they’re probably not too applicable here.
Documenting these linguistic and cultural misalignments and inequities, resulting in reinscribed marginalization, aims to highlight the ways that energy coloniality and energy privilege function to constrain energy justice. Despite these obstacles, energy actors who challenged the AOGP witnessed its successful defeat. PREB officials cited PREPA’s under prediction of the GasPort’s construction expenses as a major cause of the project’s demise, while a utility representative attributed the outcome to energy actors who tenaciously challenged the proposal.50 PREPA planning and research superintendent Gregory Rivera-Chico testified in June 2017 that the AOGP lost its viability due to a “death of a 1,000 cuts.”51 This interpretation suggests that the steady and varied opposition mounted by local grassroots groups and diasporic coalitional partners, composed of the Enlace Latino de Acción Climática and the Comité Diálogo Ambiental, progressively and successfully cut away at the proposal. However, preparations for the port still cost ratepayers a hefty sum.52 Counter efforts to the AOGP, much like in mobilizations against Vía Verde, configured an alternative archipelago of power and point to the importance of multiple interventions, including examining how the language of way, path, and expansion function in shaping energy controversies. While there is much to learn from these efforts in terms of relational dynamics, strategies, and tactics, these projects also demonstrate the iterative
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and regenerative capacity of energy coloniality, given that similar plans may emerge in different forms. As Arecibo public beach defender and anti-incinerator campaign member Ismenia González shared with me during a summer 2014 interview, when proposed projects meet defeat, these previous ideas often resurface, seeking the path and, in this case, hub of least resistance. This insight serves as an important warning to inform contemporary pipeline and methane gas struggles.
Creating and Challenging the Methane Gas Hub Hubs are material centers where energy carriers (e.g., wood chips, electricity, and gas) are “converted, conditioned, and stored”; examples of hubs include industrial plants, large buildings, and “island energy systems,” such as trains and ships.53 This chapter’s opening vignette with the EcoEléctrica official epitomizes the use of this concept to designate particular areas to serve as energy hubs for maintaining and growing greenhouse gas reliance. This ambition constitutes part of a larger promethane gas discourse in Puerto Rico and throughout the globe, held by extractive industry leaders and captured government officials. Conversations at the 2019 American LNG Summit epitomize rhetorical energies that situate Puerto Rico as a methane hub. Resident Commissioner (the representative of Puerto Rico in the US Congress) Jenniffer González Colón, who accepted thousands of dollars from LNG industry players Saltchuk Resources and Crowley Maritime, attended the event. Then governor Rosselló accompanied her. During the summit, the politician encouraged participants “to at some point see [Puerto Rico] as a connector of the Americas where we can not only use the LNG, but also become an important hub toward transporting it.”54 That statement connects to the assertion of former US House Natural Resources Committee Chair Rob Bishop. In 2018, he explained, “As I look at the future, I envision Puerto Rico as being kind of like the energy hub of the entire Caribbean area.” The politician also framed gas as a “brilliant” source for addressing energy realities in the archipelago and elsewhere.55 In response, Massol-González’s son and biologist, Arturo Massol-Deyá, critiqued this hub discourse for its interests in rebuilding Puerto Rico to suit fossil fuel officials and lobbyist goals and objectives. He expressed 110
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that this language subjected Puerto Rico to continued energy dependence, concluding that it is “wrong to think that the United States has lost geographic interest in our islands and would prefer that we become either a US state or an independent nation. The energy agenda and the privatization model clearly indicate US aims: to perpetuate Puerto Rico’s colonial status quo.”56 Massol-Deyá then argued for an alternative hub discourse and material transition to 100 percent renewables, achieving half of that goal by 2027 and making hundreds of sustainable jobs in the process. This alternative vision commits Puerto Rico to “creating a path to become a clean energy hub in the Caribbean. Finally, energy self-sufficiency could be our first step toward decolonization.”57 Massol-Deyá’s remarks named corruption between Washington and Puerto Rican politicians and repurposed the hub discourse to refuse continued oppression and dead-end relationships with another fossil fuel—methane gas. In doing so, he provided an alternative to energy coloniality and energy privilege, contained in methane gas advocacy, by repurposing the hegemonic language of hubs to imagine a community’s self-determined energy future. Furthermore, Massol-Deyá’s analysis brings to the fore why US government officials and their corporate partners have a stake in Puerto Rico. Before mass mobilizations created sufficient pressure to oust former governor Rosselló from office in the summer of 2019, he introduced the Puerto Rico Energy Public Policy Act. This law determines the archipelago’s energy future for at least the next twenty years. While some viewed this 2019 act as a success for a renewable energy transition, with complete fossil fuel independence proposed by 2050, and the AES coal plant closure by 2028, this plan is not the first time the government has expressed renewable ambitions, only to stay locked into imported fossil fuels. The plan is no Green New Deal, as engineering professor Marcel Castro-Sitiriche argued, and it focuses on generalized economic empowerment without a deep dive into the entwined inequities, including geographic exclusions and governmental abuses that uphold energy coloniality and energy privilege in Puerto Rico.58 Amid the earthquakes and aftershocks in January 2020 and in the following months, grassroots solar rooftop advocates and allies mobilized to trouble PREPA’s response to the Energy Public Policy Act. This policy paved the way for the proposed Energy System Modernization Plan. Driven by the local energy utility’s agenda, German conglomerate Siemens presented the plan’s goals and objectives in the contested 2019 IRP.59 An earlier iteration of the Energy System Modernization Plan was the Grid Modernization G e n e r at i ng M e t h a n e M e ta phor s
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Plan, discussed in the preceding chapter. This proposal called to lift the 1920 Merchant Marine Act, also known as the Jones Act, for the sole purposes of importing LNG. 60 This act largely was responsible for delaying the delivery of vital supplies in the María aftermath for weeks and months, as the policy states that all goods transported on vessels between US ports, including Puerto Rico, must arrive on US-crewed and US-flag-carrying ships. 61 This call for an exception epitomizes how corporate energy actors and their political allies are willing to waive one aspect of an arbitrary law only when advantageous for their agenda rather than addressing widespread calls from civil society to lift the act entirely to transform Puerto Rico’s dependence on US ships and imports. Various energy actors voiced their opinions on the Grid Modernization IRP in February 2020 at public hearings. At one gathering, several community and environmental organizations participated as intervenors who were fed up with extractive industry officials and their political cronies who threatened possibilities for decentralized renewables directed and managed by the same communities that are home to the distributed infrastructure. 62 This particular meeting primarily occurred in English to accommodate monolingual participants. Spanish speakers often would begin in English but then switched to their more familiar and comfortable language, as those in need of the English interpretations scrambled to put on their headsets. In addition to these interactions, PREB officials permitted local groups and energy sector members, including PREPA, AES, and other energy actors, to file briefs addressed to PREB board members. A March 2020 legal brief prepared by Earthjustice members and Puerto Rican lawyers on behalf of “local environmental organizations” troubled the IRP’s claims and assumptions on several counts. The brief described how PREPA and Siemens colluded to solicit hidden and illegal requests for proposals, favoring fossil fuel projects, especially methane gas infrastructure, and found that more than half of the proposal’s $20 billion price tag would go toward reconstructing existing infrastructure rather than transforming the system. The authors also maintain that the IRP overestimates distributed generation and utility-scale renewable infrastructure expenses; overlooks already available methane gas costs from EcoEléctrica to inform calculations; advocates for partially powering minigrids with fossil fuel facilities during power outages and other disruptions; obfuscates potential illegal air and water pollution, among other risks; bars public participation in accessible language (both in terms of Spanish and vernacular rather than technical); 112
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and dedicates funds to transmission technology for “hardening” the grid rather than reallocating finances to support solar communities. This final concern implicates the south-north energy dynamic that disproportionately harms rural southern coastal communities, perpetuating (a lack of) energy privilege, and carries unnecessary risks concerning plants, wildlife, extreme events, inadequate maintenance, and many other issues. 63 The criticisms outlined in this brief are not unique to the Earthjustice members and Puerto Rican lawyers who authored the document. Energy actors with the ten environmental organizations who were legally represented by Earthjustice and local lawyers compose the Alianza Energía Renovable Ahora (AERA) [Renewable Energy Now Alliance], which emerged to support a media and capacity-building strategy. 64 This alliance works to amplify the proposal of Queremos Sol, written by Puerto Rican nonprofits and environmental and community advocates, professors, and trade union workers. 65 Collaborators, including the Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y Riego (UTIER) [Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers Union], endorsed a supplemental twenty-eight page bilingual report, detailing alternatives to the IRP. The document explains the substantial cost-savings for distributed energy resources rather than the largescale, fossil-fuel dependent PREPA proposal. The report emphasizes energy efficiency, including appliances, solar water heaters, rooftop solar and storage, commercial demand response to incentivize businesses to reduce usage at peak times, and integrated volt-var control. 66 This final technology would require PREPA to control more effectively the voltage delivered to households to minimize overall consumption. In August 2020, PREB largely denied PREPA’s Energy System Modernization proposal. In contrast to the power utility, the ruling favors renewable energy and energy efficiency, although some elements of the utility’s plan remain in PREB’s decision. Many AERA and Queremos Sol supporters marked PREB’s ruling as remotivating, given that PREPA’s proposal to develop several methane gas projects faced regulatory obstacles. This outcome occurred in no small part because of grassroots mobilizations that successfully struggled to share and amplify an alternative position in public gatherings. 67 However, Queremos Sol advocates also have several criticisms of PREB’s decision. Though the modified plan backs solar, progressive calls for rooftop solar, which avoids occupying valuable land needed for cultivating crops, are not clearly supported. Energy actors who critique the decision also claim the plan supports privatization by involving multiple requests for G e n e r at i ng M e t h a n e M e ta phor s
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proposals and creates openings for possibly converting the AES plant from coal to methane gas, as the regulatory decision permits the facility’s continued operations until 2027. Additionally, they trouble PREB’s ruling for supporting reliance on methane gas at Palo Seco and continuing to contract with EcoEléctrica. The $2 billion dedicated to the transmission system leaves doubts for whether these funds will go to LUMA, in addition to focusing on improving the existing grid rather than reimagining the infrastructure from the ground up. Furthermore, questions remain about how this adapted proposal will be enforced and to what extent PREPA workers and everyday energy actors will be involved, and how, in the procurement process. Given these and other concerns, in January 2021, PREB condemned PREPA’s latest proposals for methane gas build out and demanded that the power authority prioritize renewables or face legal penalties. Accompanying the numerous problems presented in the Energy System Modernization Plan, the PREPA debt “Restructuring Support Agreement” also promises to be financially disastrous for residents. PREPA officials, with support from la Junta members, wrote this 2019 payment plan, which is pending as of early 2021. This agreement carries heavy economic penalties on the backs of ratepayers to pay bondholders and to keep the bankrupt authority afloat. London Economics International (LEI), an energy-focused financial advisory firm, reports that the next half century will result in residents paying a transition charge. In addition to payments from PREPA bill payers who rely on the grid, the agreement also requires payments from residents who generate their own electricity, unless they are fully disconnected from the grid. The average payment increase will be more than 4 cents per kilowatt-hour during the forty-year debt charge, with some estimates indicating that bills normally around $150 could increase to at least $180. Available data from the US Energy Information Administration shows that in the first ten months of 2020, electricity bills listed costs of about 20 cents per kilowatt hour. 68 LEI finds that ultimately this number might reach 30 cents per kilowatt hour, with worst case scenarios as high as 60 cents, given that those who rely on the utility will be disincentivized to continue with such steep and, for many, unaffordable prices and thus might break ties with PREPA. 69 To compare, residents in Hawai‘i, who face similar fuel importation realities, currently pay 29 cents per kilowatt hour, while the US national kilowatt-hour average lies in the low teens.70 In his 2019 debt restructuring report, Héctor Cordero-Guzmán finds that passing this debt deal will result in low-income individuals contribut114
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ing 42 percent of their total income to finance their energy needs.71 Such high numbers especially are unacceptable, given that, compared to US-based individuals, local residents consume “half the amount of electricity and pay 60 percent more for it. The new Restructuring Support Agreement will cause electricity rates for all Puerto Rican residents and businesses to go up steadily over the next forty years.”72 Meanwhile, many expect Puerto Rico’s population to continue diminishing, driving electricity demand down and prices even higher. With rising power bills, growing unemployment and underemployment, and decreasing ratepayers, the proposal would exacerbate existing inequities and hinder struggles for justice that are increasingly complicated by extreme climate and environmental realities linked to structural violence. Following the 2020 earthquakes, PREPA officials requested that PREB approve another agreement, financed by FEMA emergency funds, to lease five hundred megawatts of temporary power generation.73 They supposedly proposed this plan to address unfulfilled electricity needs resulting from the damaged Costa Sur plant and anticipated peak energy demand in summer 2020. However, many solar community energy actors found this petition unacceptable and suspicious for several reasons. Their mounting concerns increased after the power authority withdrew the proposal on June 1, 2020, only to have former PREPA executive director José Ortiz employ the equivocating language that abandoning temporary generation was “bien probable” [very probable], while simultaneously advocating to keep the plan “todavía vivo por si acaso” [still alive just in case].74 Critics of PREPA and the flip-flopping stance of the power authority’s top official garnered strong criticisms for multiple reasons. First, some PREPA officials contradicted earlier claims that the Costa Sur plant repairs would not be finished until February 2021, by asserting during an April 2020 conference call with PREB that the facility likely would be operating by summer’s end. Electrical engineer, professor, and INESI steering committee member Lionel E. Orama Exclusa opined that the initial longer repair timeline likely was motivated by Ortiz’s interest in offering private companies business, while disregarding adequate and already available local worker capacity.75 Second, repairs to the damaged plant were expected to cost at least $25 million, while the emergency generation proposal carried a price tag of $70 million per month.76 The PREPA director described the proposal as “the biggest deal in FEMA history,” with $1.26 billion in rental fees, to be financed by local Puerto Rican ratepayers and US taxpayers.77 In June 2020, local news media reported that the approved renting of three tempoG e n e r at i ng M e t h a n e M e ta phor s
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rary mobile office spaces for workers overseeing the plant restoration would cost nearly $226,000.78 Third, power authority officials’ claims that this temporary arrangement was warranted to address predicted megawatt shortages during the coming peak demand season quickly fell apart, as the utility’s data and the executive director’s public comments indicated ample megawatts, not to mention that the proposed generation equipment would not be operating until summer already was underway.79 Fourth, the proposal promised to perpetuate existing power differentials and dynamics via a collaborative scheme with LNG company New Fortress Energy. As a top contender for the plan, if selected, this US-based company would have made more than $1 billion, while tightening its hold on Puerto Rico’s energy future and fortifying imported methane gas reliance. 80 Ultimately, PREPA withdrew the request for temporary generation in 2020, which was a significant victory for energy actors supporting Queremos Sol, who demonstrated that there was no need for new peaking units. Despite this success, struggles against this US multinational corporation persist. New Fortress Energy’s expansive global reach materially constitutes a growing archipelago of power. The LNG infrastructure builder often converts other fossil fuel infrastructure to gas and conducts truck, rail, and ship transfer operations, in addition to overseeing plants and terminals. New Fortress Energy operates in México, Nicaragua, Ireland, the United States, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, and the company’s website evokes the language of conquest to glorify its efforts to “set sail with LNG” and boasts that “our ship has come in—to San Juan.”81 In a predictably nontransparent agreement with PREPA, in spring 2019, New Fortress Energy officials signed a five-year contract to provide methane gas, presumably from US east coast fracking operations, by converting two diesel-fired units in San Juan for $1.5 billion. 82 The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) reported that FERC officials were questioning why New Fortress Energy did not first seek required permissions to construct and manage an LNG terminal at the site. In January 2021, FERC commissioners rejected company officials’ request to have the commission cease its investigation. 83 IEEFA found numerous “irregularities” in the precontract negotiations between New Fortress Energy and PREPA, including covering up that the company had prepared and presented an unsolicited proposal; working with New Fortress officials to compose the request for project proposals; and selecting committee proposal reviewers who already had collaborated with the company previously. 84 This unscrupulous contracting process serves as a reminder of 116
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many other unethical deals the power utility has made with questionable energy actors over the years. 85 Stoking additional controversy, the power utility announced in June 2020 that it had contracted former New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s company to consult on reconstructing the electric grid at a price tag of nearly $30,000 per month. 86 A 2020 investigation found that New Fortress likely violated the Jones Act via transshipment activities that involved stopping in Jamaica, prior to delivering LNG from the United States to a Puerto Rico port. 87 In response to this methane energy advocacy, Queremos Sol members strongly critiqued the plan and petitioned PREB to reject the scheme and support conditions for heightened public engagement and transparent deliberations and decision making. They troubled the government’s and utility’s fast-tracking of this electric energy development agreement, much like in 2009, when Governor Fortuño employed an energy emergency policy discourse to constrain civil society objections. 88 In addition to concerns with the methane gas reliance advocated by PREPA, Queremos Sol energy actors also discouraged developing large-scale solar infrastructure on prime farmland and instead called for using rooftops for on-site solar distributed generation. Supporting the Queremos Sol proposal, in 2020, several environmental organizations sued New Fortress Energy, the Puerto Rico Ports Authority, and the Puerto Rico Management Office. As of March 2021, the case was pending in the Puerto Rico Supreme Court.
Fighting the Fossil Fuel Frontier The studied cases of Vía Verde, the AOGP, and contemporary, emergent methane gas controversies are shaped by space-occupying tropes of way, path, expansion, and hub to communicate and contest energy “solutions.” These different rhetorical materials and their uses constitute what Stephanie LeMenager describes as “expressions of the modern fossil fuel complex.”89 Communicating in terms of way, path, expansion, and hub carries significant potential impacts in Puerto Rico and beyond and are not depolitical or disinterested. Sze warns that technology and other “progress” infrastructure can “reinforce and reinscribe geographical and political hierarchies that have mainland cultures and economies increasing their control and power over islands.”90 This domination certainly has taken hold of Puerto Rico historically with petroleum and coal and now is doing so with methane gas. G e n e r at i ng M e t h a n e M e ta phor s
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Assembling these rhetorical materials generates a means for understanding how captured politicians and industry actors legitimize methane buildout by communicating LNG advocacy. This problem also calls attention to vernacular counterarguments by energy-justice actors who struggle to interrupt yet another instantiation of energy coloniality, as they labor emotionally, mentally, and physically against those who benefit from energy privilege in terms of time, financial resources, and English monolingualism. Although some groups and individuals can choose whether to invest their energies in these disputes, others, like Massol-González, Santiago, and Massol-Deyá, must interpret and translate—often literally from Spanish to English and back again—on behalf of their communities to address multiple audiences, while joining concerned community members at public hearings and organizing grassroots meetings and protests, among other actions. These challenges to master plans are constituted by “accented” rhetorical materials that generate dissonant ways of being, knowing, and communicating that deviate from hegemonic monolingual disciplining.91 Part of this accenting involves refusing to accept the continued muting of Puerto Rican energy justice perspectives, as efforts like Queremos Sol challenge corporate and political energy actors who favor LNG imports and other unsustainable relationalities. As with the experimentation trope, the generation of space-occupying rhetorical materials need not be inherently troubling. The noted repurposings of way and hub in this chapter point to this openness. Delving further into the hub trope, several foundations and nonprofit initiatives have facilitated installing PV systems with battery energy-storage systems in schools, community centers, hospitals, and other vital facilities “to serve as resiliency hubs during the frequent power outages.”92 A report by Resilient Power Puerto Rico (RPPR) members, who value decentralization and participatory practices to build solar infrastructure and social capacities in local communities, describe the archipelago’s substantial solar power generation potential on concrete, flat rooftops.93 They argue that these distributed systems, along with storage may “serve a wide population and can act as recovery hubs in the face of climate disasters.”94 The group also explains that a technological shift is insufficient, arguing for building communal capacity to evaluate and engage needs and to grow knowledge and resources to advance sustainable and fair community structures and relationalities. Similarly, a report by Grassroots International and Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project titled “Protesta y propuesta: Lessons from Just 118
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Transformation, Ecological Justice, and the Fight for Self-Determination in Puerto Rico” evokes a variation of the hub metaphor to describe Casa Pueblo’s laudable solar energy efforts in Adjuntas. [The microgrid] is no longer an “energy oasis” but has outfitted an additional 55 homes with solar energy, 89 full-size refrigerators in seven solar-powered homes, a barber shop, two hardware stores, an agricultural center, an elder home, the fire station, five mini-markets, a restaurant, a pizzeria, and two rooms of Bosque Escuela. But the point isn’t just solar. It’s about who produces, distributes, and controls energy. Even if FEMA had been able to get there the day after the hurricane, they wouldn’t have had the relationships, trust, or understanding of the community that Casa Pueblo does to decide who to prioritize for solar installation. The freedom and self-determination we support extends beyond energy to territorial and food sovereignty, and includes movements that are building a society rooted in grassroots feminisms, a solidarity economy, and ultimately a decolonized Puerto Rico. Just transformation and just recovery are about redistribution of resources and power down to frontline communities to build a visionary economy for life.95
This document describes how an “energy oasis” can transform into more permanent infrastructure and resources, while also offering far more than technological change. According to this perspective, energy system shifts also require major political power shifts. The energy actors supporting these two examples are dedicated to sustaining and strengthening community ties and cultivating movement-building for transformative alternatives up to the rooftops. For an archipelago that has substantial solar potential, including flat spaces on most building roofs for easy PV installation and maintenance, to position Puerto Rico as an energy hub for another imported fossil fuel is senseless, untenable, and an additional false promesa. In fact, imported LNG and pipeline infrastructure fulfills but one promise—to aggravate energy coloniality and energy privilege that regenerates archipelagoes of power dedicated to extractivism and domination. As I argue in “Routes/Roots/Raíces III,” the ways in which different energy actors in Puerto Rico narrate this story, as well as how I tell their stories, matter.
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Rou t es/Roots/R a íces I I I
Account-ability in un revolú In her discussion of postcolonial ethics for ethnography, [Sarah] De la Garza argues that conventional Western (colonial) thinking is only concerned with accountability because of possible repercussions. She encourages looking differently at the word: “Account-ability. The ability to account. To tell a story. . . . When we are accountable, we are able to tell a story” (Gonzalez, 2003, p. 83). For De la Garza, the telling is not just about the research tale, but how we came to know what we know in a sense that may put our whole life story on the table. Telling our life story in a research monograph is not realistic, but “it is an ability. An ethical ethnographic tale holds implicit that the teller is able at any point to tell the story of the story” (Gonzalez, 2003, p. 84). The same is true for an ethical rhetorical tale. K a r m a R . C h áv e z
I decided to conduct research in Puerto Rico’s fluid waters and landscapes because many of the vernacular discourses tied to energy, power, and different environments were not available in books and in Englishlanguage news articles, given their often emergent, embodied, ephemeral, and marginalized qualities. Furthermore, the activist and community networks that I encountered in the archipelago provided me with legal and policy texts that were not widely circulated or publicized, and also social media communication channels that only became known to me after having faceto-face conversations in Puerto Rico. These entry points were key for locating, witnessing, recording, gathering, and evaluating rhetorical materials, all while creating and cultivating relationships—dozens of which still endure and have deepened over the years. However, because I approached my fieldwork trying to interact with as many individuals and groups as possible, I soon realized I could not feasibly address all of these struggles and experiences and embody the type of committed collaborator I wanted to be. Thus, there are several individuals who informed the earliest seeds of this multi120
year project whom I have not included in this book. I also have not been able to support them in the direct, sustained ways that I have with IDEBAJO, Coquí Solar, and other groups that I detail in the next chapter, given energy and time limitations. Though no research project of this length and personal nature could include everything and everyone within the constraints of academic publishing, I still must be account-able—able to narrate ethically the everyday struggles and successes of collaborators and their communities and account for my own roles and connections in this telling. This process often has not been easy. Several years ago, I decided not to write a book about Puerto Rico. In the summer of 2017, I had just finished my doctorate and a bilingual plunge into energy politics and environmental communication in the archipelago. Still in full-power mode from recently having completed my dissertation, I prepared a book manuscript, under a different title, for a university press on the US east coast. At the time, I felt uneasy about the submission, given my nagging concerns about whether I, a woman from the US diaspora, should author a book about a place so simultaneously (and paradoxically) far from and near to me. I asked myself these questions: Should I write about Puerto Rico, as someone who had been in the archipelago for several weeks and months at a time, on various trips, but who was not raised there? Had I sufficiently overcome my US continental and other biases, or were my arguments perpetuating the very logics and discourses that I critiqued strongly in my dissertation? Would I do collaborators a disservice by not writing a book, or were they unlikely to garner any significant benefits anyway? After days of mulling over whether I should carry out this academic undertaking, I ultimately decided to withdraw the proposal, even after the editor expressed that she soon would email the document to the special series editors for their review. While some researchers might find this decision to be an unwise career move and misuse of hard work, given publication pressures weighing on tenure-track professors, for those who seriously wrestle with ethical questions, including about power and positionalities, I imagine I am not alone in my hesitations. However, as it turned out, I obviously decided to write a book about Puerto Rico. What changed? The disruptive blasts of the 2017 hurricane season pushed my critical attention back to the Antilles—both because of my grave concerns for family and friends and because of the coalitional research relationships I maintained. These connections motivated me to share my scholarship on energy coloniality with as many audiences as possible. In fall 2017, as I joined the Accou n t-a bi l i t y i n u n r e volú
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faculty of Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, I also joined the Puerto Rican US diasporic wave of support to address the multipronged catastrophe engulfing the archipelago. In the days and months after the storm, as communication gradually became possible, residents, friends, and family members described their experiences to me as harrowing. They recounted their pain, loss, and frustrations, while also narrating how they strengthened community ties, exemplified by sharing resources, such as offering meals in exchange for cleaning up debris. In response to listening to these testimonials and alternative news media reports, I began to realize that writing a book— this book—was central to my coalitional work, detailed in the next chapter. I also realized that to tell this story responsibly, I would need to return to Puerto Rico. Nearly two months after torrential rains and winds pummeled the Antilles, I boarded a red-eye flight from New York to San Juan, having begun my journey several hours earlier on the US West Coast. Once everyone was seated, the Delta pilot addressed the Puerto Rican passengers on board via the loudspeaker system: “You don’t have electricity, but you’re Americans, and you have much to be grateful for.” All around me, I could hear varied reactions. While there was applause, presumably from passengers who were not Puerto Ricans, a person murmured behind me, “What did he say?!” The pilot, like too many other US Americans, could not or chose not to comprehend past and present cruel sociopolitical realities. I mentally struggled with what had happened for a while, before falling asleep for the long flight. I woke up in time to view the post-María coastline from the plane window—a preview of what I would witness once on the ground. En route from the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport to Salinas, I saw a stamp on a concrete wall that read “FEMA es el problema” and a flyer mounted to a telephone pole describing a man who was desaparecido [missing]. I also observed the slogan “Puerto Rico se levanta” [Puerto Rico rises], which the territorial government co-opted from its grassroots origins to advance its developmentalist political agenda and to cover its botched response to colliding humanitarian crises. Passing various vehicles, I noticed Puerto Rican mini flags mounted on several cars and trucks. I learned later that local individuals displayed this symbol to distinguish themselves from US workers, who increasingly were being hired to haul supplies and do repair jobs. These hiring practices reduced employment options for local Puerto Ricans, who needed the hours and wanted to support their own communities. The drive took longer than expected because of pouring rain and 122
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flash-flood alerts, worsening the tapón [traffic jam]. The unseasonably heavy rainstorms were making recovery efforts and the ongoing trauma and uncertainties especially difficult. The term revolú often is used in vernacular exchanges in Puerto Rico to connote a big mess or disaster and when things are turned upside down, which aptly names the situation preceding and following the 2017 hurricane season.1 Reflecting on his experiences at a Coquí Solar meeting in Salinas, local electrician Daniel De Jesús expressed that Hurricane Hugo, which made landfall in 1989 and caused many fatalities and billions of dollars in damage, was a nene [baby] compared to Hurricane María. In addition to community elders like De Jesús, this revolú also weighed heavily on local youth. A few days after my arrival, I attended a Festival de la Palabra event in El Coquí with Santiago. Several Puerto Rican artists had created a mobile taller [workshop], developed to support the mental health of students by inspiring their creative energies to process the trauma associated with and exceeding the hurricanes. This intervention stemmed from the recognition that compounding crises carried harmful and deadly consequences, with suicide rates and other mental health exigencies distressingly high following the 2017 hurricane season, which only worsened with the earthquakes and pandemic.2 At this event, the young people were a little fidgety, as they had just resumed school for the first time in two months. To begin the taller, the visiting artist shared some of his poetry. He then asked for each participant to write their own phrase or sentence on one line of a provided paper, shared among those at each table. The prompt asked them to reflect on how they felt during the hurricanes. To keep the responses more anonymous, he had students fold the paper over to cover their answer, before passing it to the next person. The facilitator then read aloud the collectively composed poems from each table. Following the taller, Santiago and I searched for an internet connection to check emails on our phones, before heading to Guayama to speak with some residents who were resisting the AES coal plant and its toxic operations (described in this book’s introduction). Cruz Roja [Red Cross] workers had set up a Wi-Fi hub in a nearby town square. They also were offering nutrient-deficient boxed meals with no fresh vegetables or fruit. Given the lack of internet and phone service, which made online work and communication frustrating and, at times, seemingly futile, we visited a few anti-coal-ash activists’ homes to speak with them in person. Santiago shared with her Miramar neighbors that United Nations Human Rights Council members would be Accou n t-a bi l i t y i n u n r e volú
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Figure 16. Youth from El Coquí and the surrounding area experience a creative writing workshop. El Coquí, Salinas, Puerto Rico, November 21, 2017. Author photo.
visiting Puerto Rico in December to hear residents’ testimonies about illegal coal ash disposal practices. One individual explained he installed a video camera because he suspected people hired by AES had been monitoring his activities, presumably because of his public comments against the plant and its pollution. Extractivism can take many forms and exceeds fossil fuel industry activities. As many decolonial, postcolonial, and other researchers have cautioned, this practice can occur in scholarly endeavors.3 It would be a major oversight to write this book without acknowledging how my own research has engaged in taking observations from one location to share somewhere else. Looking back at the outset of this project, at when I began preparing for fieldwork in 2014, it is hard to interpret my decision to research Puerto Rico for my dissertation as anything other than an extractivist act. However, over the years, I have addressed this power dynamic by thinking about and enacting my responsibilities to collaborators, who made this book and many additional aspects of my work as a writer and teacher possible. These contributions often involve publicly narrating these relationships to critically co-create stories that document the ways in which this revolú is aggravated by oppressive rebuilding and ameliorated via creative transforming. Honestly navigating power differentials, admitting mistakes, and taking ethical actions to place communities at the center matter for more just world124
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making. I consistently have reminded myself of this important reflective work over the years, while interactions with others often have deepened my vigilance. For example, at a 2019 Resiliency through Innovation in Sustainable Energy (RISE) conference, headed by Peréz-Lugo and Ortiz Garcia, a Boricua student from the US diaspora expressed her hesitations with participating in recovery efforts to support Puerto Rico, given her positionality.4 She asked what I do to ensure my own work is not extractive. I replied that this query helpfully haunts my interactions every day and reminds me to remain ever critical in my collaborations with different energy actors. This self-reflexivity also has prompted me to realize that my grassroots and academic energy justice advocacy in Puerto Rico is, assuming ongoing collaborator agreement and interest, for the long term. Such coalitional engagement is urgent work, particularly given the importance of trans/local mobilizations to effect both regional and global change, while simultaneously accentuating the importance of place and cultural specificities.
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(Re)wiring Coalitions for Radical Transformations
After years of working with grassroots and academic energy actors in Puerto Rico and in the US diaspora, I have learned that researching and contributing to group member and movement goals and projects makes the process feel less isolating and overwhelming when approached collaboratively. Nonetheless, these collaborations often are challenging and carry uncertain outcomes, rendering them both risky and worthwhile. I express a fragment of these experiences in my November 2017 fieldnotes. Today we were at the Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico in San Juan from about 9:30am–7:30pm, before returning south to Salinas. Long day! I helped Tata Santiago organize responses to the PR Energy Commission [now PREB], which was soliciting expedited public comments about how to move forward with Puerto Rico’s electric energy struggles. We assembled responses from University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez and Arizona State University professors who are participating in the RISE-PR collaboration they have created together. The collaboration also has affiliations with the Enlace Latino de Acción Climática, which has operations in New York and Puerto Rico. The document resulted in 47 pages. I hope that regulators read the combined responses, take them seriously, and incorporate recommendations for distributed generation and solar communities into the policies moving forward.
These contributions felt particularly urgent given what I witnessed the previous day. The morning before writing these reflections, Santiago showed me around the Salinas-Guayama area. Countless downed powerlines dotted the post-María landscape, two months since the storm shook the archipelago. PREPA’s untenably slow and botched grid-repair response required navigating downed electric poles that obstructed quotidian movements and access to
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Figure 17. A formerly pole-mounted distribution transformer, a broken post, and a mess of cables litter a neighborhood street months after Hurricane María decimated Puerto Rico’s electric grid. Salinas, Puerto Rico, November 2017. Author photo.
basic resources and infrastructure. In the northwestern municipality of San Sebastián, local community members pooled their collective skills to restore electricity themselves, creating the “Pepino Power Authority.” In mid-January 2018, the government finally allowed some mayors to contract their own repair teams rather than relying on PREPA.1 However, famed local electrician Alberto de Jesús Mercado, better known as Tito Kayak, did not wait for this permission. He engaged in one of his high-profile transgressive acts— scaling electric poles to restore power throughout Puerto Rico.2 These communal and individual efforts point to the ways in which powerlines, whether downed or erect, exist as a material metaphor of powerful dis/connections. Concerns about the grid’s powerlines also relate to human relations and the energies that electrify them, inspiring this chapter’s guiding metaphor of (re)wiring. Carrillo Rowe writes: The power lines that connect us stand as conduits of the unevenness of colonial modernity. Who has power, and through which lines do they secure it? What do they use it for? How do we build power lines that connect us to others, in, through, and for justice? How do we conduct power that allows all of our lives to thrive—not just mine at the expense of yours? . . . How do we navigate these dangerous territories that power lines span?3
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These questions position power lines as a trope of relationality, struggle, and in/justice amid coloniality/modernity. Situating this power-filled metaphor within a dual focus on electric and people power may serve as generative theoretical and praxis material for thinking, being, and communicating coalitionally for more just worldmaking. As discussed in the previous “Routes/Roots/Raíces” section, ethical engagements urge critical reflections on various organizing configurations, communication channels, and contributions. This chapter approaches this challenge via (re)wiring to examine how different energy actors collaborate and struggle to reify alternatives to existing systems constrained by inflexible, hazardous, and fragile structures. Efforts to transmit and, ultimately, transform require sorting through wiring/relational elements that are frayed, irreparable, and in need of dismantling and discarding; ones that can be untangled and repaired; and others that must be constructed anew and apart from the existing and constraining singular grid. 4 Such energy exertions are committed to challenging stubborn, imagination-deficient, and potentially lethal logics and discourses, exemplified in calls to “harden” the grid and assumptions that accept, maintain, and rebuild circuits that inhibit transformative coalitional politics. (Re)wiring invites collaborations across time and space to encourage organizing coalitionally during both extreme shocks and everyday stressors, which themselves often constitute crises. Furthermore, this perspective and practice involves simultaneously looking inward and outward to cultivate an inner- and inter-archipelagic care for one’s immediate community and those who dwell in and across water-filled and continental expanses. To support this approach to collaborative reexistence, this chapter describes and evaluates past fieldwork experiences by emphasizing (re)wiring enactments, missed opportunities, and future possibilities to construct counterhegemonic archipelagoes of power dedicated to transformations from the intertidal ground up. By thinking through (re)wiring and its material metaphoric constructs, I argue this concept serves as both theory and praxis to offer different approaches to acting coalitionally, in conversation with extant studies on this topic. This chapter’s four remaining parts approach coalition in (re)wiring ways. First, I turn to theorizing about coalitional politics to find inspiration in infrastructural and relational materials that shape distributed power. This section begins by conceptualizing coalitions broadly, before narrowing to emphasize academic-grassroots collaborations and a discussion of e-advo128
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cacy, the act of contributing coalitional energies in distanced, electronic spaces. Second, I highlight extant scholarship and testimonials from Puerto Ricans—both in the archipelago and stateside—who illuminate the difficulties of conducting ethical research and engaging university actors in Puerto Rico and the United States following the 2017 hurricane season. Third, I reflect on my personal experiences during 2014–2021 with fellow Puerto Ricans and provide a still-in-construction living collection of collaborative actions, rooted in an ethic of care, account-ability, and interconnection. These reflections encourage ethical research practices amid colliding crises and growing scholarly interest in Puerto Rico from across the globe, while placing the well-being and wishes of the most impacted communities first. Finally, I revisit the archipelagoes of power concept in conjunction with (re) wiring to examine how island- and archipelagic-informed orientations might reenergize coalitions at various organizing levels and across temporal-spatial distances.
Conceptualizing Coalitions: A Willful Charge A charge can be energy you receive. Sar a Ahmed5
Coalitional organizing serves as an energetic site for theorizing collaborative interventions and much needed (re)charges and (re)wirings for ongoing struggles and solidarities against energy coloniality and energy privilege and for energy justice. 6 In conversation with María Lugones, Chávez theorizes that coalitions are “the horizon of possibility . . . the space where two seemingly different things [or people or groups] merge and remain separate. It is also the space where the distinction between entities blends and blurs.”7 This trope befits an energy-focused study, given the importance of facing toward the sky for renewable energy options and also for assessing the many cables and wires that exist above to constitute (re)wiring in material form. Horizons also speak to the Latin American social movement concept of horizontalidad [horizontality]. This way of organizing rejects hierarchies by sharing power across people to advance justice, equity, and autogestión. 8 In these interconnected formations, coalitions can vary in duration—some may be temporary, while others may endure for long periods.9 These collaborations may occur in a shared physical location, across large distances, and everywhere in between. (R e) w i r i ng Coa l i t ions
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Related to horizons and movement, the electric grid invites imagining coalitional organizing beyond “gridlock” in interconnected efforts to transform symbolic and material relationships, experiences, and infrastructures.10 This grid structure relies on the “universal system,” as technical actors call it, suggesting the importance of constructing horizontal relationalities in the form of many microgrids that value difference and are flexible and mobile instead of unwieldy and immovable.11 A lack of versatility and decentralization constrains possibilities for (re)distributing power over time and space, which locks movement actors into centralized systems that rigidify infrastructural and movement potentials and discourses rather than support protean networks, multiplicities, and capacities. These coalitional efforts might find theoretical inspiration in thinking about the “willful bumping” of both humans and electrons.12 According to Ahmed and Sowards, this willfulness can serve as a collaborative source of transformational energy, which finds vitality in sparks from others who value dissonance and difference in the struggle against domination.13 While fatigue, weariness, and depletion often result from this labor and from having identities that lead to weathering and regular experiences with moving in the “wrong” direction, so too can reenergizing, life-giving connections emerge, enabled by separating from harmful ties.14 Turning to more-thanhuman energies for conceptualizing willful bumping, electron desire is essential for making electricity, as these different particles long for and move toward electron-empty atoms; this “potentiality” is measured as “a unit of electrical tension” that involves differences and can be related to dissonant interactions.15 Chávez writes that “dissonance disturbs and creates energy around some issue so that it remains altered in our consciousness; dissonance produces the necessity for movement.”16 I extend this cacophonous metaphor beyond considerations of difference among social movement actors and activists to theorize dissent more generally, especially the dissonance created between publics and counterpublics, as those who resist oppression bump or push back. While not without challenges, these coalitional agitations and movements refuse continuing to work within the grid by (re)wiring to create decentralized, horizontal structures that find strength in shifting interconnections. Angela Aguayo writes of how kinetic energy powers and is powered by the relationship among collaborative agency, motion, and digital media production. This energetic potential functions as a performance that can organize “publics together through collaboration, and circulating discourse through 130
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multiple platforms to assert influence and change.”17 Aguayo also employs this theory to evince that while being physically present with others often matters for collaborative efforts, so too are there possibilities for exercising and receiving kinetic energies in digital spaces. I extend this media production interest to include other forms of digital and electronic engagement that support projects with collaborators.
From Co-presence to E-Advocacy Within and beyond the pages of Energy Islands, I have argued for fieldwork as a coalitional act that may occur when ideologically aligned individuals and groups collaborate.18 While co-presence need not always have political aims, if desired by collaborators, this interaction may serve as “a space of convening that points toward coalitional possibility.”19 Such collaborations often are hard work, interpersonally challenging, shaped by power differentials, and uncertain. However, these convergences also may lead to life-altering friendships and collaborative learning and activism that may provide a much-needed (re)charge by working with individuals who share similar goals. Ultimately, depending on the situation, conducting co-present advocacy work can create exchanges that enable or constrain more just worldmaking. In addition to being physically co-present in a specific place, there also are contexts in which working collaboratively in remote settings can be considered distance fieldwork that strives to support the efforts of grassroots and other actors from afar. Conjoining scholarship on participant advocacy, which shifts from observation to actively participating in the issue or struggle motivating the research interest, and e-participation, which involves participatory electronic communication, I offer e-advocacy as both a concept and a practice for working coalitionally in electronic spaces.20 Like in-person interactions, distanced digital and virtual contributions carry benefits and limitations in situated contexts. The e-advocacy approach may be generative and worthwhile for many reasons, including for supporting collaborators without occupying their space and reducing spending on travel expenses that may not only be costly financially but also environmentally for the planet and communities most impacted by climate disruption. However, while it is important to consider coalition building impacts and ways of relating and advocating that do not further fuel the climate crisis, for many, this mode of transportation may be the only way to realize desired in-person interactions. Though not (R e) w i r i ng Coa l i t ions
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all researchers travel far or must use a plane to reach their study sites and/ or return home to visit loved ones, for some collaborators, few to no other options exist. As often is the case with impure politics, to fight the system, simultaneously working within and against it becomes common practice.21 Thus, contemplating the benefits and limitations of striving for feeling and engaging in acts of presence, without being physically present, marks an area for continued reflection and action, for both researchers and other impacted individuals and groups.22 Working remotely might function well for someone with reliable digital technology access; however, many people, including some of the collaborators with whom I partner, regularly encounter power disruptions and slow or nonexistent Wi-Fi connections, which the preceding “Routes/ Roots/Raíces” narrative problematized. Of course, e-advocacy assumes at least some collaborators have access to necessary technologies, limiting the applicability of this concept and practice to certain people and situations. These interactions also can be shaped by time zone and temperature differences, as a cool morning for one person could signal the height of afternoon heat for another, requiring adaptations to ensure collaborators have sufficient material conditions for doing their work, such as a fan for room cooling, while also dealing with the resulting background noise. Such material and other constraints mark major factors impacting quotidian relational engagements and movement work and must be navigated carefully to avoid replicating oppressive power dynamics. Thus, synchronous collaborations in real time sometimes can cause more stress and added energy exertions than other forms of collaboration where asynchronous online work by only some collaborators and not others is conducted. Acknowledging these cautions and working toward equitable reciprocity requires consistently asking “for whom,” “with whom,” and “how.”23 As the next section evinces, these convergent energies in digital, distanced form especially hold potential in disaster and diasporic situations, when being elsewhere may provide muchneeded support to directly impacted collaborators via coalitional acts that rewire existing networks.
RISE-ing up Ethically in Disasters The 2017 hurricane season blew in far more than news media attention, as numerous scholars homed in on Puerto Rico as an object of study. The 2020 132
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earthquakes also ushered in another wave of heightened research interest. For those of us who identify as part of the Puerto Rican US diaspora, our dual roles as researchers and liminal community members posed numerous entwined personal and professional challenges, while many of us also benefited academically from critically engaging the everyday stressors and extreme shocks in Puerto Rico and the ripple effects in the United States.24 Adriana Garriga-López draws on personal experiences, as a diasporic scholar who was researching Puerto Rico before 2017, to describe the ethical complexities of post-María research. She critiques academia’s complicity with perpetuating coloniality by strengthening imperial power and Eurocentric and Orientalist ways of knowing. However, Garriga-López also notes that anticolonial and decolonial studies are incredibly urgent and tend to be conducted by Puerto Ricans in the archipelago and in the US diaspora. Given the financial and many other entwined crises that impact professors and universities throughout Puerto Rico, time and material resources often are scarce, making scholarship and maintenance of research agendas especially difficult. Given this reality, as Garriga-López observes and as I have experienced firsthand, Puerto Rican researchers in the US diaspora “are faced with an influx of (mostly white) US American scholars whose interest in Puerto Rico results primarily from an engagement with disaster studies and tends to be episodic and technocratic rather than deeply rooted, long-term, semiotic, and/or accountable to the communities under study.”25 This form of scholarship, as researchers cycle through communities, contributes to the already existing burdens experienced by people in directly impacted areas. After news broke of the destruction caused by the one-two punch of Hurricanes Irma and María, Puerto Ricans in the diaspora who had built trusted relationships over the years increasingly received requests from US-based academic colleagues to connect them or their students with Puerto Ricans in the archipelago. In many cases, as these well-intentioned individuals pursued what they thought would benefit their personal research or students’ projects, they neglected to acknowledge the added challenges their Boricua colleagues were facing as established researchers in the Caribbean, who also had family and friends in the impacted region.26 More importantly, these inquiring individuals often overlooked the ways in which their requests could negatively affect local residents on the ground, treating them as “babysitters,” to quote Pérez-Lugo, who, like her colleagues, already was stretched thin without sufficient resources and reeling from trauma. In an April 2018 group email, Pérez-Lugo shared her feelings of fatigue and the hard work that (R e) w i r i ng Coa l i t ions
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she and her partner, Ortiz Garcia, had exerted to arrange more than twenty university visits in just five months. She also mentioned a lack of institutional support necessary for engaging a steady stream of visitors, all while experiencing more teaching responsibilities, including direct engagement with students experiencing trauma. Nonetheless, the sociologist, even though exhausted, still expressed a generous willingness to share what she had witnessed with interested individuals. Given these conditions, Pérez-Lugo and Ortiz Garcia, their Puerto Rican academic colleagues, and countless other energy actors in Puerto Rico were confronted by a lack of energy privilege, in all senses of the concept—from blackouts and exposures to noxious generator fumes and noise, to not having enough hours in the day to complete basic and professional tasks, all while hosting visitors. Motivated by the many problems they experienced in the post-María reality and knowing the urgency of transforming power in all its forms in Puerto Rico, Pérez-Lugo and Ortiz Garcia created the Resiliency through Innovation in Sustainable Energy (RISE) Network. This initiative now is a nonprofit in collaboration with their fellow INESI steering member, Orama Exclusa, as well as other council members, of which I am one. The collaborative project aims to reimagine university-community interactions to create more just and culturally aware university preplanning and postdisaster responses. RISE engages in archipelagic thinking and communicating, as organizers value multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity rather than disciplinary siloing. This orientation encourages a variety of methodological approaches that seek to enact the goal that Ortiz Garcia shared with me during a May 2015 interview when he said, “We wish to be disruptive.” In the months following the 2017 hurricane season, as professors on the ground and key leaders of INESI’s programming and communication, PérezLugo and Ortiz Garcia found that their research-based arguments often were ignored and dismissed by the territorial government and university administrators, which I documented in a Latino Rebels article.27 Given these experiences, Pérez-Lugo and Ortiz Garcia felt compelled to create a resource for other communities and academic “first responders” struggling in the chaos. The RISE collaboration started with a few gatherings in Puerto Rico before growing to a large conference in Albany, New York.28 In November 2019, I joined hundreds of practitioners, professors, university administrators, students, and others from Puerto Rico and the United States at this event, mentioned in the previous “Routes/Roots/Raíces” reflection.29 This prescient conference forged vital collaborations and conversations that 134
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informed responses to the seismic shocks that rattled Puerto Rico just a few months later. Drawing on main areas of agreement, tension, and underexamined possibilities generated at the Albany gathering, in January 2020, Pérez-Lugo emailed members of the growing RISE Network about key discussion points at the event to help inform ethical earthquake disaster responses. She explained that most attendees agreed on five conclusions: the importance of (1) supporting community self-determination; (2) communicating clear research goals and objectives that center those most affected by disaster, including the importance of consent; (3) recognizing the existing knowledges of various practitioners and scholars whose lived experiences and research programs know place- and culturally-specific dynamics best; (4) advocating for financial, academic, and mental health and other forms of support for displaced students; and (5) conducting engaged research that exceeds observation to intervene in policy. These coalitional responsibilities often prove challenging in practice.
Enacting Coalitions My experiences with coalitions before, during, and after the hurricanes and earthquakes in Puerto Rico took multiple forms at different organizing levels and across time and space. The collision of extreme shocks with already ongoing everyday stressors motivated me to rewire my collaborative practices, which, prior to fall 2017, often left me feeling isolated and too far from the Antilles. Since 2014, I have been a collaborator with IDEBAJO, a local organization, first described in this book’s introductory chapter, that enacts its own archipelago of power by supporting several grassroots initiatives and coalitions throughout Jobos Bay. Concurrently, I have served as a Coquí Solar and RISE contributor, via co-presence and e-advocacy. Prior to Hurricane María, my contributions occurred in isolation from collaborators in the United States, although other stateside Puerto Ricans were supporting these groups. My advocacy role and approach constituted an island, rather than an interconnected archipelago of support composed of various US diasporic actors. However, this relational situation changed dramatically in September 2017. In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane María, many Boricua and other concerned individuals and groups mobilized their networks to intervene in Puerto Rico’s humanitarian crises.30 For example, retired professors Nitza (R e) w i r i ng Coa l i t ions
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Hernández López and Roberto Delgado Ramos cofounded the Oregon in Solidarity with Puerto Rico group, based in the state’s capital city of Salem. Advocacy efforts primarily focused on meeting with interested community members, creating and supporting legislative petitions for abolishing or at least lifting the Jones Act, fundraising for relief efforts, and visiting local media stations to educate and to motivate the public hopefully to care. I participated in all these efforts as a member.31 Additionally, Boricuas in surrounding Oregon cities began to make connections one email or social media message at a time. James Padilioni and Alaí Reyes-Santos, whose scholarship concludes this chapter, helped to organize collaborations, including for fundraising. Reflecting the short-term duration of some coalitions, these Oregon connectivities mostly dissolved by spring 2018, although I still maintain contact and hold close friendships with some of these individuals, which our organizing certainly wired more closely. Reaching beyond our specific states, when Hurricane María made landfall, Lloréns, Carlos G. García-Quijano, and I mobilized a previously discussed but not acted upon diasporic cross-country and multidisciplinary coalition from Rhode Island to Oregon. With the archipelago’s telecommunications system down for weeks, as activist-academics, we sought to tell a counternarrative that deviated from the mainstream US news stories that simplified or ignored energy coloniality, multiple layers of corruption, and Boricua mutual support networks. We also worked to address material needs, given widespread blackouts and mounting misery. Reflecting another possibility of coalitional work, collaborations with Lloréns and García-Quijano have persisted and deepened in between and following the hurricane and earthquake disasters. Inspired by other activist-scholars who have engaged in similar reflections, I describe several collaborative efforts.32 The examples listed below are not exhaustive and often unfolded with Lloréns, García-Quijano, and Santiago, among other energy actors. I share these experiences in the spirit of nourishing ethical coalitional practices and relationships in and beyond Puerto Rico. Our collaborations included: •
Providing clear communication with coalitional partners—both fellow academics and community members—to ensure all necessary collaborators were participating in discussions and decisions rather than working unilaterally or serving as assumed representatives.
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Transcribing community-member testimonials to inform writing for popular press pieces to tell a counternarrative grounded in community solidarities and sharing economies on the heels of Hurricane María.
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Fundraising for local grassroots groups, such as IDEBAJO, Comité Diálogo Ambiental, and the Coquí Community Board, including creating YouCaring websites in English and Spanish, in addition to organizing on-campus monetary collections.33
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Coordinating the sharing of vital supplies to Puerto Rico, despite the multiple barriers posed by the Jones Act, ultimately airmailing three Goal Zero Yeti Power Generators, which worked well, except for when people needed to use them to power mini-refrigerators, requiring additional batteries.
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Cultivating conditions where community members made the decision themselves to partake in a proposed collaboration or not; when best judgments indicated that hosting particular guests would likely be harmful, deciding not to refer the group or individuals and instead encouraging interested parties to consider supporting antiracist or environmental justice efforts in their own communities.
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Collecting and organizing a bibliography of social science and humanities research about the Jobos Bay and the Salinas-Guayama area, to decrease community-member labor with interested scholars and to increase the likelihood of acknowledging existing research (available at https://elpoderdelpueblo.com in the “Referencias/References” section).
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Composing an honorarium request letter for community members to share with journalists, academics, and others to ensure compensation for Puerto Rican collaborators in exchange for their time and energy, amid growing and overwhelming interest from visitors.
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Writing numerous grants to advance energy justice initiatives and community organizing, including for the 2020 Working Films Rural Cinema program and a $125,000 JustFund award for coal ash monitoring, solar kit workshops, and community film production to document these efforts.34 The former collaboration provides Guayama resident Mabette Colón Pérez and Aguirre resident Hery Colón Zayas (introduced in the next “Routes/Roots/Raíces” vignette) with workshop and transnational community-building opportunities by learning about and organizing film screenings and discussions in their southeastern Puerto Rico communities.35
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Coauthoring and circulating press releases to promote local organization community-building and -sustaining initiatives and achievements.
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Translating documents, such as budgets and memos of agreement, conducting research, interpreting conversations to facilitate collaborator professional development and other opportunities, and coordinating funds transfer for community projects between nonprofits.
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Offering donations to an environmental justice camp to reduce participation barriers for local youth and volunteering time during the weeklong experience.
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Hosting an environmental justice local radio show in Salem, Oregon for one year to reach publics otherwise unreachable in academic publishing venues to amplify Puerto Rico’s complex realities, among other related topics.36
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Providing public comments on critical energy and other projects.
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Presenting at conferences and other events when requested by collaborators, while considering the greenhouse gas emissions involved in air travel.
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Developing concepts that helped to name problems that some community members used in a variety of contexts; for example, Santiago drew on the concept of energy coloniality to frame her invited presentation at Scripps College in Claremont, California.
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Debriefing with collaborators, spending time together (e.g., traveling to attend ceremonies honoring collaborator contributions), and serving as counsel when community partners have had questions that fit within scholarly areas of expertise, including research and political and institutional knowledge (e.g., providing feedback on public testimony for the US House Committee on Natural Resources).
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Encouraging stateside academics, new to researching Puerto Rico, to credit previous scholarship by scholars with established research records in the archipelago and in the US diaspora, while also inviting community members to suggest that newly interested researchers consult extant studies.
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Purchasing and locating books and other documents to share with collaborators to help inform movement and community-building strategies and tactics.
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Directing and coproducing a Spanish-language film trailer and documentary, El poder del pueblo: Testimonios de una lucha colectiva por la
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vida y el medioambiente [The Power of the People: Testimonies of a Collective Struggle for Life and the Environment] (2021), in collaboration with Lloréns, Santiago, Colón Pérez, Colón Zayas, community organizer Alvarado Guzmán (whom I mentioned in the introduction), and local filmmaker José Luis “Chema” Baerga. A bilingual website accompanies this collaborative film project (available at https://elpoder delpueblo.com). •
Cowriting and publishing a children’s book, La justicia ambiental es para ti y para mi / Environmental Justice Is for You and Me, with Lloréns that includes images and autoethnographic content by Colón Pérez (available at https://elpoderdelpueblo.com).37
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Supporting local artists so their talents and labor were both centered and compensated, as indicated above by working with local filmmakers, rather than bringing in outside recording crews, and inviting a local student to contribute to the children’s book.
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Asking if collaborators have time and interest in reviewing and commenting on in-progress scholarship before publication to determine if any arguments or observations might hinder community efforts, assuming shared goals.
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Inviting collaborators to coauthor popular press articles and to copresent at events, while listing them as authors or presenters, even if the researcher does most of the preparations, given that the work would not have been possible without community-member experiences and insights.
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Coauthoring a book in Spanish with Lloréns and Santiago titled “¡Ustedes tienen que limpiar las cenizas e irse de Puerto Rico para siempre!:” La lucha por la justicia ambiental, climática y energética como trasfondo del verano de Revolución Boricua 2019, which led to presentations at a virtual event facilitated by Puerto Rican press Editora Educación Emergente.38
Though these activities and experiences are not exhaustive, they do demonstrate the breadth of possibilities that coalitional co-presence and e-advocacy may enable, often in very challenging circumstances that include experiencing diasporic feelings of weariness from being pulled between immediate physical surroundings and engaged remote work and care. While disasters yield trauma, wounding, and many other experiences, various actors also may create space for reenergizing relationships that cross
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Figur e 18. IDEBAJO members Daniel De Jesús, Litzy Alvarado, and Roberto José Thomas Ramírez inspect a newly arrived solar generator. El Coquí, Salinas, Puerto Rico, October 2017. Photo by Víctor Alvarado Guzmán.
water, land, and academic fields. From the most uncertain and difficult of situations, these relational efforts may help to synergize and amplify acts that would have been impossible or at least very difficult to achieve without coalitional support.39 The aforementioned experiences value collaboration not competition, association not alienation, horizontality not hierarchy, flexibility not fixity, and interconnectivity not individuality.40 Though it can be easy to romanticize coming together across traditionally siloed locations and academic and cultural backgrounds, alternative collaborations may hold fruitful potential. As extant scholarship reveals, wicked problems, such as climate disruption, drought, and fires, require intellectual energies from all fields and diverse actors from across civil society, revealing the importance of multiple methods and cross-disciplinary collaborations.41 While the aforementioned contributions over the years represent what I felt and continue to feel in terms of longing to engage in coalitional acts, these efforts are small compared to the everyday exertions of archipelago-based collaborators, who have made Energy Islands possible.
Organizing Coalitional Counterhegemonic Archipelagoes of Power This chapter highlights experiences that are committed to ethical coalitional practices amid disasters and their impacts. These collaborations are alwaysalready becoming and exhibit “a politics without guarantees,” as Rocío Zambrana explains in her analysis of Black feminist radical organizing in Puerto Rico, borrowing from Stuart Hall.42 The messiness of holding multiple roles and often competing responsibilities requires all involved project collaborators to reflect on and respond to energy exertions, positionalities, and other relevant issues constituting power. Conceptualizing coalitions in terms of horizons, grids, electrons, and kinetic energy offers one means for (re)wiring fieldwork and relationships. These metaphors also might inspire possible ways of reexisting that encourage a (re)charge to avoid or minimize burn out. Given present and future socioecological revolús and co-presence and e-advocacy work that commits to ethical, long-term collaborations, reenergizing metaphoric materials to inform mobilizations are vitally important. Notably, this endurance may or may not include working with the same collaborators or groups each time, as movements of people, ideas, and struggles
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shift, stay, and adapt, much like the plants and animals that dwell in between high and low tides. Accompanying the metaphors of horizons, grids, electrons, and kinetic energy, another trope for approaching coalitional acts and relationships is islands. This metaphor turns attention to the archipelagoes of power concept and co-creative counter formations seeking self-determined and liberatory futures. In Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles, Reyes-Santos theorizes the material metaphor of a family of islands to document the “decolonial affective matrix” that includes colonial (the United States and Spain), transcolonial, and national relationships committed to nonreproductive, nonheteronormative kinships.43 Acknowledging the importance of studying what these formations make possible and prevent in situated contexts, this high priestess and practitioner of Caribbean Regla de Osha, an Afro-descendant ceremonial tradition, argues that past mobilizations of Antillean “transcolonial solidarity” for both island and diasporic Caribbean peoples are sutured with the threads of common colonial histories of conquest and resistance.44 This perspective echoes independentista and abolitionist Ramón Emeterio Betances, who argued for a multilingual, crossisland confederation across the Caribbean, rooted in shared Antillean solidarities and geopolitical experiences that revision Puerto Rico’s nationalist belief system using a pan-Caribbean Afro-diasporic perspective. Reyes-Santos also notes the challenges of such coalitional enactments, as connectivity, nationality, geography, racism, xenophobia, and colorism enliven oppressive discourses, policies, and other actions. She describes how free-trade agreements and their often brutal consequences for low-wage workers—including in the tourism and manufacturing industries—exploit a transnational narrative of connection to further harm communities still in the grips of coloniality. Transcolonial struggles and synergies may stand as a counterpoint to this transnational neoliberal force. Even then, however, racist and xenophobic discourses in response to differences in national origin, especially among Haitians, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans, exist simultaneously in quotidian exchanges to signal (un)belongings that can advance and hinder liberation. 45 In conversation with Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel on the topic of intranational borders among people in the Caribbean and in the US diaspora, Reyes-Santos emphasizes the importance of examining rhetorical materials that shape and are shaped by cultural processes that create and reconfigure how different Antillean groups imagine themselves and their Caribbean neighbors. 46 Notably, many Puerto Ricans often 142
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devalue Dominicans by using the same racial script once used against them to cover up Boricuas whose lives do not fit within a myth of lighter skin and greater wealth. Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva conveys a similar research interest by studying island imperial formations using a mirror metaphor to describe power dynamics in and exceeding the Caribbean. She writes that the numerous permutations “of mirrors and their reflections, deflections, and distortions possible within the house of mirrors” help to explain what Antonio Benítez-Rojo described as “the repeating island.”47 According to Rodríguez-Silva, BenítezRojo conceptualizes the Antilles as a regional formation constituted by “synergetic forces, past and present, in and outside the specific nodal points we today recognize as the Caribbean archipelago; consequently, its cultural production reaches far beyond and back to the so-called Caribbean in unpredictable ways.”48 In one example, she documents how, in the early twentieth century, Puerto Rican newspapers framed Cuban leadership within antiBlack, pro-Spanish discourses, as white Creole elites feared Afro-Cuban and other Black organizing. These historical media and other discursive influences epitomize how Caribbean and other archipelagic spaces often rhetorically co-constitute each other, in the form of a complex mirroring effect, shaped by the multiplicities of transcolonial experiences, similarities, and differences. Rodríguez-Silva suggests this mirroring metaphor can exceed Caribbean islands to include other archipelagic geographies, while both enabling and constraining generative intra- and inter-island connectivities. Additional coalitional considerations also exist between Puerto Ricans within the archipelago and across Puerto Rico and the United States. Lloréns writes of the limits of cultural nationalism in the Puerto Rican US diaspora, which can carry exclusionary effects, especially for Afro-Boricuas, who frequently encounter being racialized as Dominican or Haitian. In response, Lloréns argues for approaching anti-Black racism as a “hemispheric social problem,” which must resist “nationalism’s divide and conquer tactics . . . to coalesce around post-national Black solidarity on a hemispheric scale to demand racial justice.”49 These tensions complicate easy calls for coalition building that elide oppressive hierarchies, necessitating the urgent work of both hemispheric and global (re)wirings for Black liberation and racial equity among people in continental, archipelagic, and island locales. Keeping these racialized, nationalistic dynamics in mind, the family of islands trope may be key for coalitional practices among Antillean peoples in the Caribbean, the US diaspora, and beyond, as the metaphor encourages (R e) w i r i ng Coa l i t ions
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cultivating south-south horizontal relations, including connectivities with/ in other geographic spaces. Considering and enacting these collaborations becomes more compelling given the iterative and expansive experimenting energies documented across time and space in chapter 2, which exceed the Caribbean. The area of Oceania spans millions of square miles and includes millions of people with deep and interconnected archipelagic ties.50 Conceptualizing this Asia-Pacific region, the Antilles, and other locales, such as the Zanzibar archipelago, Madagascar, and the Mascarene islands in the Indian Ocean, as a family of islands invites coalitional work across language, heritage, topographical, and other differences. Opportunities exist for ocean justice, which Ayana Elizabeth Johnson describes as a concept and movement that connects racial, gender, and climate justice to ocean conservation, including addressing the problem of government-sanctioned overfishing that jeopardizes the survival of local fishers and their communities, as well as pollution and sea-level rise impacts.51 This chapter points to the important role of energy and power in influencing these interlinked issues and how justice and equity concerns should not, to quote Johnson, “end at the shore.”52 These entwinements hold potential for sharing sociopolitical aspirations, strategies, and tactics committed to archipelagic and decolonial worldmaking, as documented in collaborative independence struggles in Puerto Rico and beyond.53 For example, Na’puti and Judy Rohrer critique the violences of colonization in Guåhan and Hawai‘i, pointing to coalitional possibilities for collaborative actions.54 Meanwhile, in another study, Na’puti describes traveling from Guåhan to Okinawa, Japan, for an antimilitarism and propeace gathering. This coalitional experience “led to a formal ‘Guåhan/ Okinawa Solidarity Exchange.’”55 These actions reveal how the coastal and marine materialities of island geographies and their archipelagic, transcolonial connections might help to envision and enact currents connected by shared struggles for energy justice rather than the chains of empire’s energy coloniality and its divide-and-conquer logics and discourses that contribute to energy privilege. Conceptualizing the interplay of these dynamics deepens the archipelagoes of power heuristic, noting the inherent entwinement of one’s existence and interests with the struggles and experiences of another. This interconnection often requires working in the tangles of energy coloniality and energy privilege to make coalitions of energy actors committed to movements and discourses that seek to shift power in all senses of the word. To experience the family of islands trope, as one way of responding to counterhegemonic archipelagoes of power, energy actors may organize as 144
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material and symbolic islands committed to constructing alternative formulations and futures. These configurations may occur within communities sharing the same geographical or state/empire-imposed borders, across islands constituting a physical archipelago, between islands and across continental space(s) in regional or global diasporas, and across different archipelagic regions and nations throughout the globe, exemplified by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and the Global Island Partnership.56 Energy actors can and do power these coalitional archipelagoes by understanding and acting on the inseparability of their struggles for justice, dignity, and, ultimately, survival. Such interventions are needed to counter necropolitics, in which certain communities and individuals are allowed to live while others are exposed to violence and death and left to deal with conditions that place them in the liminal space between living and dying.57 Accordingly, the specific forms of (re)wiring highlighted throughout this chapter urge formations that counter tenacious hegemonic archipelagoes of power. This energy points to practices and possibilities for not only working in response to events but also maintaining, extending, and reconfiguring connections to care about other places and peoples to tell many colonial and imperial histories that intersect with environmental, climate, and energy concerns.58 By crafting counterscripts, racialized groups may “form unexpected alliances on the basis of the recognition of similar experiences that transcend time and space.”59 For example, what if the Puerto Rican US diasporic coalitional groups mentioned in this chapter had mobilized existing networks from María to collaborate with individuals and groups affected by Typhoons Yutu/Rosita and Mangkhut/Ompong, the 2018 category five superstorms that hit the Mariana Islands, the Philippines, and other areas; by Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas in 2019; and by Cyclone Amphan in the Ganges Delta and Hurricane Iota’s destruction on the Colombian island of Providencia and in Central America in 2020? While responses to material sea changes to enact sea changes of another kind should not fall on specific energy actors or groups alone, given the deep structural transformations required, these coalitional horizons hold promise for amplifying urgent interventions and transcolonial interconnectivities, supported by (re)wiring from individual islands to allied archipelagoes that include and exceed particular locations. Concurrently, such relationalities may find power in turning to geographies in places where survival depends on socioecological knowledges that value interconnected reexistences and adaptions to ecosystems constituted by perpetual transitions between land and water. (R e) w i r i ng Coa l i t ions
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Rou t es/Roots/R a íces I V
“Las cosas del barrio”
Mangrove forests adapt to their intertidal environments. These wetland lifeforms work to absorb carbon, break the waves from different weather and climate events, minimize erosion, and provide critical habitat for numerous species. Dwelling in both land and water, mangroves encounter intense sunlight with little oxygen in their tropical, often salty environs. Versatile root systems are vital for the existence of each tree or shrub both above and beneath the water’s surface. Mangroves experience the effects of pollution and fossil-fueled global climate disruption and the impacts of exceeded limits, linked to rising seas, coastal development, erosion, deforestation, and other ecological exigencies at the energy-water nexus.1 Some studies predict that these complex, interconnected forests could disappear by the turn of this next century, which also threatens the wellbeing and survival of human communities that rely on this vegetation.2 According to García-Quijano and Lloréns, among other researchers, mangroves and surrounding environments often serve as sites for sustenance, livelihoods, local ecological knowledge, and survival.3 In many of Puerto Rico’s rural coastal communities, foraging lifestyles are rooted in interdependence, strong social relationships, and alternative economies that counter capitalist modes of production, consumption, and exploitation, while advancing ecosystem conservation and maintenance that assist with sediment and flood control, fisheries, and fish catches. 4 Historically, mangroves and wetlands served as a refuge for Afro-descendant maroon communities. These watery zones were deemed inferior in colonial logics and discourses, as were these groups of individuals.5 Today, while developers endeavor to destroy and privatize these coastal areas for profit, many southeastern community members work to honor and cultivate these ancestral, life-giving relationships. 146
Figure 19. Convivencia Ambiental youth participants and event organizers experience an early-morning bird-watching excursion, as ruins of the abandoned sugar mill occupy the background. Aguirre, Puerto Rico, July 2014. Author photo.
For example, IDEBAJO members partnered with several organizations to present the 2016 Festival del Manglar, a celebration of the surrounding mangrove forests. Connected to these efforts that express reverance for local ecologies, IDEBAJO’s partner organization Comité Diálogo Ambiental hosts the annual José “Cheo Blanco” Ortiz Agront environmental camp to support local youth in learning and teaching each other about their community. Known colloquially as Convivencia Ambiental, or just Convivencia for short, organizers have been providing no-cost educational and community-building opportunities for more than a dozen years. 6 Translated as communal living, living together, or coexistence, convivencia aptly describes the experience, as local youth spend a full week in each other’s company and are encouraged to engage in the long-term work of living well with surrounding environments and communities. Convivencia centers familial and community knowledges, as camp organizers celebrate surrounding ecologies and localized ways of being, knowing, and communicating, informed by fishers, elders, artists, and scientists, among others. This shared learning space marks a radical alternative to a dominant system and discourses that regularly devalue, erode, and erase Puerto Rican cultural practices and environments. In 2014, I volunteered at this annual event. Joining participants in various activities, we learned about the Jobos Bay ecosystem in formal presentations, “L a s cos a s de l b a r r io”
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cleaned up litter along a mangrove-lined road, and boated with local fishers who served as guides and shared stories about their coastal labor and placebased, embodied knowledges. Throughout these experiences, I met several inspiring young people. Hery Colón Zayas, mentioned in chapter 4, has been a key contributor to Convivencia over the years. I recall his presentation at the Jobos Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve visitors’ center about the environmental, climate, and energy injustices facing his hometown of Aguirre. Colón Zayas was raised in the literal shadows of an abandoned sugar complex, formerly run on the hard labor of local people, and the Aguirre Electrical Power Complex. This facility toxically assaults local residents with its relentless noxious fumes, loud hums, and bright lights, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Like the second “Routes/Roots/Raíces” narrative about the CORCO plant in Peñuelas, this hazardous reality in Aguirre manifests a material symbol of energy coloniality and highlights the absence of energy privilege in the area. Now in his twenties, Colón Zayas dedicates the bulk of his energies to supporting his neighbors. He cohosts a local radio show, now podcast, Desde el barrio [From the Neighborhood], which emerged after Hurricane María to communicate stories of pain and perseverance facing rural communities in the Guayama-Salinas region. This community-sustaining resource resonates with the introductory chapter’s focus on amplifying, as community members create a platform to voice and air their concerns and interests, which often are underheard or ignored in governmental and corporate spaces and more dominant structures of power. Colón Zayas also leads activities at the Casa Comunitaria de Medios, a grassroots digital media production and literacy center organized by Baerga, whom I mentioned in chapter 4 when discussing the documentary film El poder del pueblo. With his rapid, articulate speech, Colón Zayas frequently performs in spoken word and rap events using the stage name “Hery con H.” Colón Zayas’s ability to express his experiences and to amplify his community’s realities via multiple mediums demonstrates his versatility and creativity as an activist-artist. The following lyrics from one of his raps, “Las cosas del barrio” [The Things of the Neighborhood], depict the everyday struggles faced by Colón Zayas and his community. After mentioning the smell of “azufre” [sulfur] and “decibeles en exceso” [excessive decibels] from the Aguirre Complex just a few doors down from his home, he continues:
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Figure 20. Hery Colón Zayas leads community conversations and audiovisual media production workshops at the Casa Comunitaria de Medios. Salinas, Puerto Rico, January 2018. Photo by Victor Rodríguez Velázquez. Centro de Periodismo Investigativo.
[Los ricos] destruyeron familias y el recurso natural, pero la sociedad apática no quiere despertar . . . más que los drogadictos y puntos hay asmáticos. En mi barrio solo hay termoeléctricas; en conclusión, son peores que las drogas. Me toco soñar sin dormir; las noches son críticas, donde despertar frenético hace lentas horas. Triste como el acuífero se vuelve más salobre. Y los ricos nos pisotean y nos quieren ver más pobres, siguen siendo ricos y nos hacen más pobres. Estas son las cosas del barrio. Estas son las cosas del barrio. . . . Aprendí de la lucha, la historia y su legado. Me enseño de la vida, de la calle y los valores, una persona que no llegó ni a noveno grado. El sentido común no es como un grado asociado. Se obtiene asociado al grado de empatía.
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[The rich destroyed families and natural resources, but the apathetic society doesn’t want to wake up . . . more than drug addicts and drug spots, there are people who are asthmatic. In my neighborhood, there only are thermoelectric plants; in the end, they are worse than drugs. I have to dream without sleeping; the nights are critical, where waking up in a panic makes for long hours. Sad like the aquifer that becomes ever saltier. And the rich trample us, and they want to see us even more poor. These are the things of the neighborhood. These are the things of the neighborhood. . . . I learned of the struggle, the history and its legacy. A person who did not attend ninth grade, teaches oneself about life from the street and values. Common sense is not like an associate’s degree. One obtains it associated with the level of empathy.]7
Colón Zayas’s testimony adds urgency to uprooting energy coloniality, energy privilege, and other interlocking wounding systems to transform archipelagoes of power by centering Afro-Boricua energy justice actors on the coastal frontlines.
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Delinking for Energy Justice We have the means to change. We need to change what’s in our heads and in our hearts. It’s [life is] a creation. Let’s recreate it. Let’s start dreaming another one. J ua n Ros a r io
This excerpt expresses the concluding words that longtime environmental organizer Juan Rosario shared during our multi-hour interview on a June afternoon in 2014. The re-creative potential that he imagines is documented in a September 2018 NOVA PBS video about energy transitions in Puerto Rico in the post-María milieu. The recording describes Rosario’s collaborative work in the mountainous town of Jayuya, which involved installing small, emergency electricity-generation infrastructure and transitioning to microgrids.1 This collaboration is just one of many ways that Rosario dedicates his energies to supporting grassroots organizing as the Alliance for Sustainable Resources Management (AMANESER) director. Following its predecessor, MIPR (discussed in chapter 1), AMANESER is a collective of grassroots faith-based groups committed to an energy just transformation that is “prosperous, fair, democratic, sustainable and happy.”2 In particular, the collaboration seeks to provide communities with solar, refrigeration, rainwater harvesting, water filters, and communication devices. Rosario visits various locations throughout Puerto Rico to share his experiences both with the technological and organizational aspects needed for these transformations, while centering each community’s unique needs and the importance of developing their own plans. In addition to working at the grassroots level, Rosario also served as the first elected PREPA consumer advocate from 2012 to 2015. He often challenged other utility board members, including by requesting that PREPA be audited for alleged misuse of funds.3 During our interview, Rosario said that direct dealings with this bureaucratic regime made clear the very thorny
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issues shaping the transformation of an electric system and the imperative of bringing diverse energy actors together for change from the bottom up.4 The dreams of Rosario and many other energy actors struggling for a more livable Puerto Rico and Earth provide alternatives to the archipelago’s pesadilla [nightmare] of US energy coloniality and energy privilege. Given Puerto Rico’s socioecological colliding crises that have become quotidian in several cases, Rosario’s interview comments and engaged work encourage deep and difficult discussions about how energy actors might start and continue “dreaming another [life].”5 This final chapter provides possible directions for enacting reinventive energies and seeks to further support the claim that contemplating and communicating relationships shaping energy, power, archipelagoes, and islands provides an important offering to energy justice praxis. As this conclusion emphasizes, centering intersectional oppressions in de/coloniality and environmental, climate, and energy studies is not an optional area of research. It is essential. Acknowledging the disproportionate impacts facing Afrodescendant communities in Puerto Rico refuses and resists homogenizing all Boricuas and others in the archipelago as having a singular experience with white supremacy, empire, colonialism, capitalism, and other powerful systems that continue to fuel and normalize environmental racism, energy sacrifice zones, energy coloniality, and energy privilege. While people may argue that all of Puerto Rico is a site of energy injustice, such broad claims overlook specific degrees of and relationships to disparate toxic and other burdens, which, when left as uncomplicated generalizations, can further lead to marginalizing, devaluing, and expending of the same most-impacted communities. I respond to the energy realities facing the archipelago, especially particular communities, by proposing and describing the four d’s of energy justice— decarbonizing, decentralizing, democratizing, and decolonizing. These focal points offer one means for conceptualizing and practicing liberatory alternatives that understand energy justice as a form of delinking from the chaining effects of energy coloniality, which upholds energy privilege. Upon completing the remaining pages, I hope readers will be persuaded that, together, decarbonizing, decentralizing, democratizing, and decolonizing are essential, intermeshed components of energy justice and may be helpful for advancing other entwined movements and struggles. This conclusion proceeds in three sections. First, I review how the previous chapters relate to this book’s overarching argument that urges detailed 152
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historicized and place-based rhetorical accounts to study, critique, and participate in Puerto Rico’s everyday energy and power struggles. To do so, I revisit the energy rhetorical matrix, consisting of energy coloniality, energy privilege, energy justice, and energy actors, and address how these concepts are foundational to approaching archipelagoes of power with nuanced understandings necessary for challenging entangled oppressive systems and their rhetorical constructions. I also return to amplifying, dis/empowering, experimenting, generating, and (re)wiring as metaphors of exigence and praxis that provide depth and epistemological and communicative resources to inform energy justice advocacy. To conclude this section, I present delinking as the final trope in this archipelagic formation by engaging research on this “practice and perspective.”6 Second, I situate delinking energetically, with a turn to the four d’s of energy justice. These components configure interconnected areas of relational transformations to conceptualize energy justice as a form of delinking. Finally, I return to local grassroots solar organizing to demonstrate the limitations and possibilities of energy justice in practice, which urges a people power surge from below.
Constituting Archipelagoes of Power Energetically In isolation, as islands, and as a configuration of archipelagoes, the chapters of Energy Islands examine the rhetorical efforts of energy actors, particularly by drawing critical inspiration from individuals and groups communicating more sustainable existences. I approach energy as an encapsulating trope and a critical heuristic to study multifaceted, embodied forms of labor in the energy rhetorical matrix, which gives shape and urgency to Puerto Rico’s energy past, present, and future. That written, the complexities and characteristics of energy coloniality and energy privilege resist a linear past-presentfuture progression, despite their being shaped by imperial and colonial systems that often insist that moving away from the “primitive” past is the only way forward. Thus, while this book proceeded in two major parts—one more historically focused and the other oriented more toward present realities and futurities—much like tidal ebbs and flows, I regularly moved between historical texts, policies, and considerations of contemporary controversies and struggles. Fluid storytelling efforts are necessary for deep contextualization and (No) Conc lus ion
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to acknowledge the resiliency and entwinement of energy coloniality and energy privilege to demonstrate their iterative and obstinate qualities. Part of this narrative involves highlighting how dominant energies do not stem only from imperial, colonial, and multinational corporate actors, as local individuals also often perpetuate and worsen cruel practices and systems for use against their own people and against others they deem as devalued outsiders. Meanwhile, dissident voices have created their own tenacious, well-established, and emergent networks, powered by tremendous emotional, mental, and physical energies. De/constructing these archipelagoes of power offers insights into how various energy actors encounter and engage electric infrastructures, energy sources and life cycles, policies, and everyday practices and experiences. In doing this work, this book documents, interprets, and advocates for interactions that enable transformative, just, and equitable ways of being, knowing, and communicating from a specific location, while simultaneously attending to transcolonial connections. The articulated problems expressed in Energy Islands often feel insurmountable. Yet, the metaphors of exigence provide energetic potential for praxis to critically interrupt rhetorical materials constituting energy coloniality and energy privilege. The previous chapters illustrate how these energetic metaphors might offer strategic and tactical approaches and materials to support energy justice. Accordingly, the studies of amplifying, dis/empowering, experimenting, generating, and (re)wiring in the introduction and chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively, feature these tropes as not only animating perspectives but also practices that enable and constrain energy justice. The “Routes/Roots/Raíces” reflections also document and demonstrate many of these same powerful energies. The introduction’s focus on amplifying provides a strategy for increasing the volume and reach of different perspectives and can be practiced in many ways. These studied efforts include literally illuminating a problem to make it feel monumental to disrupt acceptance, channeling energies in radio programming, speaking at public hearings, and protesting in the streets. In these examples, these expressions may or may not literally be amplified with technologies. Chapter 1 called attention to the importance of naming different components of the energy rhetorical matrix, as problems cannot be addressed until they are known and analyzed. To assist this process, the terms of energy coloniality, energy privilege, energy actors, and energy justice provide a vocabulary for present and future conversations and interventions. Though experimentation, as studied in brutal mistreatments of Puerto Rico as a defense, 154
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disease, development, and disaster zone in chapter 2, exemplifies oppressive uses of the laboratory trope, testing different ways of being, surviving, and living well, in conjunction with renewable technologies, is integral to imagining and implementing alternative worlds. Similarly, in chapter 3, generating different metaphors to constitute energy emergencies, including hubs and their relationships to methane gas advocacy and opposition, suggests the importance of considering how these tropes enliven and deaden goals and objectives for different energy actors. For many local activists and community members, translation labor and barriers to accessible communication marks a major concern for critiquing what rhetorical materials are generated and circulated and for and by whom. In chapter 4, (re)wiring includes and exceeds sorting through material infrastructures and the mess of long-distance transmission systems and unworkable equipment. This metaphor’s association with dis/ connections and entwinements offers physical material for critically thinking about and acting on collaborative transcolonial and other coalitional possibilities. Joining these energy metaphors of exigence, this conclusion adds delinking as one final concept active in archipelagoes of power.
Delinking Energies In response to the tenacity of colonial power dynamics, decoloniality attempts “to delink from modernity/coloniality in theory and practice.”7 This “epistemic disobedience” challenges dominant ways of knowing by focusing on difference rooted in various geopolitical bodies that struggle for pluriversality to resist one-size-fits-all approaches; in doing so, this action encourages hybrid and heterogeneous onto-epistemologies and practices. 8 WanzerSerrano writes that “delinking can be any practice, discursive or otherwise, that facilitates a divestment from modernity/coloniality and invents openings through which decolonial epistemic shifts can emerge.”9 Though there are no singular approaches to delinking, this perspective and practice “will always re-accent with a decolonial tone.”10 Delinking joins the other metaphors of exigence guiding Energy Islands to grapple with different ways of communicating energetic futures. Drawing on these theoretical and praxis-based insights, I seek to document, in situated contexts, how different energy actors mobilize delinking to resist oppressive energy and other entangled systems by dreaming of and devising alternatives to exploitative master ideologies, rhetorical materials, and relational configurations. Importantly, the articulations of energy colonial(No) Conc lus ion
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ity and energy privilege are not predetermined associations, as energy actors may invest and divest from them in specific situations. The same is true of energy justice, which encourages careful examination of how energy actors impede or advance this movement and discourse. The re-creative vision advocated by Rosario and many other energy actors in this counterarchipelago of power requires the convergence of individual and collective ánimo in everyday expressions of energy that inspire radical possibilities.
The Four D’s of Energy Justice As much as Energy Islands has outlined destructive dilemmas, this research also is committed to documenting resistance and alternatives to extractivism and expansionism and the rhetorical materials that fuel these forces by studying how diverse energy actors create counterways of being, knowing, and communicating. I situate together and detail the four d’s of energy justice— decarbonizing, decentralizing, democratizing, and decolonizing—to attend to a variety of systems, processes, and outcomes that aim to make sense of where, how, and with and for whom shifts toward an energy-just Puerto Rico might take shape. I offer these areas with a generative rather than a prescriptivist or exhaustive intention. Though I separate the four d’s for argument clarity, in practice, these concepts and their potential interactions should be approached simultaneously together. After all, when addressed in isolation, these concepts risk reifying existing oppressive dynamics, in shifted forms. Thus, working with the interactive energies of these four d’s is essential for creating conditions for uprooting entangled systems that constrain liberatory possibilities.
Decarbonizing One way of conceptualizing barriers to decarbonization is in terms of polluted party politics and how to expose and fight against corruption and impunity relating to energy controversies. One such case involves Carlos Rodríguez Mateo, a member of the Partido Nuevo Progresista (pro-statehood) party and the former mayor of Salinas. During his tenure, he supported the use of coal ash waste as fill material in Aguirre and near the medical clinic in Salinas. This facility is by a school and the south coast aquifer, which provides potable water to thousands of people, including Salinas, 156
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Santa Isabel, Guayama, Ponce, and Juana Díaz, among other areas. This illegal ash distribution is especially egregious given that Rodríguez Mateo formerly was a medical doctor and presumably knows well the environmental and human health impacts associated with heavy metals. Following his mayorship, Rodríguez Mateo was elected to the Puerto Rican Senate and served on the Environmental and Natural Resources Commission and chaired the Energy Committee.11 This case epitomizes the problem of carbon-captured politics that perpetuate toxic relationships that impede material shifts away from fossil fuel reliance. Popular and technical conceptualizations of decarbonization understand this process as transitioning from petroleum, gas, and coal to solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and other renewable energy sources. Divesting from fossil fuel plants and investing in renewable infrastructure will not be possible without attending to and resisting discourses, narratives, and tropes that bind Puerto Ricans and their energy future to high carbon- and methaneemitting sources. This reality requires calling out how the actions of corporate polluters and their political cronies result in proven heavy financial costs, pollution, environmental racism, human and more-than-human health harms, and countless other consequences. Numerous obstacles exist to decarbonization in Puerto Rico, despite abundant solar potential. Rooftop PV infrastructure costs about $0.11 per kWh, about $0.02 less than in the rest of the United States, making these residential systems practical from a financial perspective. This price is significantly cheaper than the recorded 2020 average electricity bill charge of around $0.20 per kWh for residential energy actors in Puerto Rico. The archipelago’s competitive PV market for rooftop installation costs less than $3 per watt. Puerto Rico’s solar companies work to provide more affordable prices for the residential market, driven by local competition and labor and permit costs that also are less in the archipelago than in the United States.12 No doubt aware of the financial attractiveness of residential rooftop solar, PREPA’s 2019 debt restructuring deal included an impuesto al sol [sun tax] for individuals and households that generate their own power. If approved, energy actors who install and rely on their own solar technology would pay a penalty for their PV systems, making them as much as fifty percent more costly.13 Given these and other barriers to solar, many renewable advocates argue for decoupling the sales and earnings of utilities to disincentivize imposing these additional charges to those who transition to solar and other alternative energy. (No) Conc lus ion
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Though nonfossil sources and technologies constituting this first d of energy justice can serve as one key element, in isolation, these low-carbon and -methane sources can risk replicating some of the extractivist logics and practices associated with fossil fuels with a green capitalist veneer. For example, consider the outsider-knows-best, white-savior frame that shaped Twitter conversations between Rosselló and Musk, described in chapter 2, and risked squeezing local Puerto Rico–based companies out of the market. Additionally, utility-scale solar installations and other means for producing electricity for other countries can epitomize oppressive relations of extracting, importing, and consuming. This problem exists in México, which supplies solar energy to California, while North Africa does the same for Europe.14 Another manifestation of this problem occurred in Burkina Faso. The government installed a large-scale solar system that has not benefited local residents who live closest to the installation.15 These power dynamics can be advanced in seemingly beneficial and much-needed proposals like the Green New Deal, if regional or national energy justice is sought only for some individuals, groups, and places, at the expense of others. Furthermore, this imbalance also suggests the potential pitfall of shifting to solar reliance only to enable continued hyperconsumption by those with the most resources. This recognition is important because solar technology impacts the natural environment and local communities, which requires examining the life cycle of necessary minerals and metals from a social justice perspective. For example, lithium extraction in South America uses large amounts of water and sometimes involves destroying wetlands to develop solar technology.16 As another troubling example of insular decarbonization, the Prison Ecology Project critiques solar panel manufacturing that relies on prison slave labor to produce energy infrastructure that perpetuates the prison industrial complex.17 Given these concerns, while it is true that solar and other renewable energy sources and technologies reflect an alternative to fossil fuel dependency, they also can continue untenable systems, especially by keeping power in the hands of the few and relying on utility-scale infrastructure. Thus, changing the energy source is not enough, as O’Neill-Carrillo shared with me during a 2015 interview. He insisted, “Just because it’s renewable doesn’t mean it’s sustainable.” At the time, O’Neill-Carrillo was concerned with outside contractors extracting money from Puerto Rico, which was a well-founded concern, given that, according to the Center for a New Economy, a mere 10 percent
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of post-María recovery contracts were granted to firms in Puerto Rico.18 This dilemma urges decentralizing power in multiple forms.
Decentralizing Divesting from centralized infrastructure and political power dynamics marks another key component for moving toward energy justice and centers on creative approaches to sharing. Though many energy actors frequently associate decentralization with renewable technology and infrastructure, this concept and action includes dispersing and pooling people-power for sparking, sustaining, and strengthening movements committed to an energy-just present and future. To counter energy coloniality’s expansionism and disregard for geographic and other limits, degrowth serves as a complement to decentralization.19 This entwined approach seeks “to re-localize a significant amount of production based on bio-regionalism, shortening supply chains and increasing their resilience through transparency and decentralization.”20 In a context of heavy import dependency and continued out-migration to the continental United States, degrowth, not as depopulation but as decentralized structural forms and relations rooted in mutual care, might serve as a radical collective form of being in the world that counters developmentalist and extractivist trajectories that welcome the departure of Puerto Ricans from the archipelago. Informed by his previous Mesa de Diálogo facilitations, O’Neill-Carrillo partnered with a research team from Iowa State University after Hurricane María to measure perceptions of what went wrong with response efforts and electric-system future possibilities. In six focus groups, researchers gathered perspectives from technical actors (e.g., lawyers and engineers, several of whom were trade organization members) and individuals who did not have formal electric system training but who were impacted by the power outages. Throughout multiple rounds, adapted based on initial participant feedback, researchers found the longer a participant had been involved in the energy sector, the more resistive they were to change concerning the centralized grid. Drawing on this and other findings, they concluded that building capacity for electric system transformations requires job opportunities and other educational experiences rooted in sharing information; recognizing and valuing already existing local community and utility employee knowledges; and encouraging collaborations with students of all grade levels, city,
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territorial, and legislative-staff members, and current and retired electric system workers.21 This collaborative intermingling of technical and public sphere actors also implicates infrastructural and technological shifts to support an alternative to centralized logics and arrangements that require long-distance transmission and distribution systems. As previously noted, in Puerto Rico, those who live in the northern part of the largest island rely on power that mostly is generated in the south; home to less-populated communities in rural areas, these residents are burdened with the environmental and human health impacts and often are among the last to receive power restoration after outages.22 Given this configuration, there exists an urgent need to cease reliance on this vulnerable and inequitable infrastructural set up. Two key interventions to address this problem are closing the AES coal plant in Guayama and the thermoelectric complex in Aguirre, the largest island’s two most polluting plants, to stop exploiting rural and south-coast communities and to urge alternatives to concentrated political and electric power. From a technical perspective, supporting renewable energy for on-site generation and use is at the core of decentralization; this infrastructure avoids perpetuating an expansionist model of utility-scale renewables that swallow limited land.23 On-site distributed generation (DG) produces power where energy actors consume electricity, thus avoiding transmission and distribution across long distances, which reduces energy use and the likelihood of power disruptions. In terms of renewable technologies, PV microgrids can separate from the grid via “island mode” to operate independently and hold up much better during extreme climactic and weather events than centralized systems do, as evidenced by the 2017 hurricane season.24 Notably, the term on-site generation does not translate easily into Spanish. The most direct translation offered by some energy actors in Puerto Rico is generación en el punto de consumo; however, energía solar en los techos is another way community members in Puerto Rico navigate translating this concept. Also significant for on-site generation is net metering. In 2007, the Puerto Rican legislature passed a net metering law, advocated by energy actors composed of academics, civil society, and industry. Importantly, this legislation has been integral to transitioning toward renewable options.25 In addition to on-site installations, shared renewables operate like net metering, with credits for the electricity fed back into the grid, but instead of offering payment to one household, these earnings are divided among multiple parties. Regardless of income and infrastructural capacity (e.g., single-family houses, 160
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apartments), a variety of energy actors and organizations can benefit from producing energy, typically at offsite locations.26 Solar gardens are one such infrastructural formation of this communal sharing.27 While these examples featured solar, on-site distributed generation does not necessarily involve renewables, as noted in the LEI brief responding to PREPA’s proposal. Thus, decentralization can occur without decarbonization.28 As some Puerto Rico–based collaborators have expressed, many stateside renewable energy advocates and other actors have a hard time grasping that, in an island and archipelagic context, multiple possible uses often exist for available lands—making rooftop solar the ideal form of energy infrastructure and generation. Puerto Rico’s geographic topological constraints, with narrow coastal plains and the middle mountain range, require careful use of space. This reality grows even more urgent as the 2017 hurricanes and other worsening realities of climate chaos shrink coastlines. Thus, many locals often view utility-scale renewables as an irresponsible use of land that could be used for other purposes, unless an area already carries a brownfield or superfund site designation or is a shopping complex or closed landfill. Space constraints, pollution risks, and cost concerns have sparked clashes over how to best apportion land. For example, Pattern Wind Farm’s installation of sixty-five turbines in Santa Isabel in 2012 spun controversy, including acts of civil disobedience, in opposition to the placement of numerous fortythree-foot-tall windmills on prime farmland in an archipelago that imports the majority of its food.29 In 2020, PREPA proposed CIRO One Salinas, a very large utility-scale solar project. According to the environmental impact statement for the Salinas-based installation, the proposal posed risks for the south coast aquifer, including runoff contamination and associated impacts on the quality and quantity of ground water. Disturbances to fauna, flora, and habitats at the project site also concerned those opposed to the project. CIRO One Salinas was just one of many proposed poorly sited and overpriced renewable energy projects, in contrast to the availability and affordability of distributed, on-site rooftop solar. However, decentralization is not a panacea for much-needed power redistribution. Solar technology use for individual households may risk replicating existing power dynamics without attending to how relationships unfold and how people enter into and find themselves bound by particular agreements. In Puerto Rico, third parties tend to own and sell many rooftop PV systems to residents. Often individuals entering into these agreements are enticed by a lack of initial and other payments, aside from monthly bills for using the (No) Conc lus ion
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equipment. Without adequate explanation of agreement terms and conditions, third-party actors sometimes amend people’s home title deeds to ensure payments, which tends to make properties harder to sell. Meanwhile, residents’ financial savings remain small. These experiences and outcomes constitute continued relational dependencies and inequities, as long-time problems persist, despite the introduction of small, renewable infrastructure.30 Given these realities, decentralization requires situatedness in specific contexts to assess its benefits and limitations.31 Castro-Sitiriche urges a “radical decentralization,” informed by his research of about two hundred thousand low-income families in rural, mainly mountainous areas of Puerto Rico. These individuals are particularly vulnerable to landslides and other ripple effects of hurricanes and earthquakes, among other disasters.32 They compose about 13 percent of the households that PREPA services.33 Castro-Sitiriche found that if those last connected homes had rooftop solar and batteries, the blackout duration would have been reduced by half. In December 2020, I attended a virtual panel organized by the RISE Network about how to justly transition to distributed solar in Puerto Rico. Castro-Sitiriche, Yiamar Rivera-Matos, Angel Echevarria, Clark Miller, Meghan Mooney, and Katy Waechter shared their research, while PérezLugo and Ortiz Garcia facilitated. Castro-Sitiriche recalled how, in 2009, a team of Puerto Rican engineers found that local electric energy needs could be met by using about 65 percent of Puerto Rico’s residential roofs.34 National Renewable Energy Laboratory panelists reported their 2020 study found that rooftop solar capacity is at least four times more than needed, and lowto moderate-income households could offer more than adequate electricity generation on multifamily and renter-occupied buildings.35 As an additional benefit, decentralized generation makes it easier for local companies to be suppliers; however, risks still exist for big solar capture and attention must be paid to how larger Puerto Rico companies can drown out smaller businesses. Thus, to achieve sustainable forms of decarbonization and decentralization, different energy actors must strive toward more horizontal relationships that disperse rather than centralize power.
Democratizing Energy democracy addresses deliberation and decision-making and encourages energy literacy sharing. Andrea M. Feldpausch-Parker, Leah Sprain, Danielle Endres, and Tarla Rai Peterson present energy democracy as a heu162
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ristic and area of inquiry, inspired by movement organizing.36 Drawing on theoretical and applied scholarship, their research program aims to critically approach “energy system transition from a lens of democratic engagement”; mix transdisciplinary research and its application to create needed change; and encourage “models and practices that contribute to making energy transitions and decisions as democratic as possible within a nexus of global patterns of energy extraction, production, and consumption.”37 Feldpausch-Parker and colleagues encourage studying energy democracy at the intersection of three interconnected prongs—justice, participation, and power—which they argue are not exhaustive and are open to multiple configurations in the service of equity and dialogue.38 Situating this concept, movement, and research area in specific contexts urges thinking about energy democracy in the plural—from democracy to democracies—as Jason Chilvers and Helen Pallett urge.39 Reflecting on their experiences in an urban US context, Teron and Susan S. Ekoh maintain that, to practice energy democracy, energy actors must focus on energy justice and just sustainabilities, including economic justice.40 This call stems from their observation that much of the extant energy democracy scholarship too easily overlooks the challenges posed by energy systems, especially with infrastructure, operating factors, and place-specific sociopolitical and economic realities that shape communication and decisions affecting marginalized communities.41 These insights suggest that energy actors must pay careful attention to how energy democracy may be practiced and prevented in different contexts, particularly when individuals and groups marked as expendable and disposable by different entwined systems speak truth to power. I wish to extend critiques regarding some of the pitfalls of dominant energy democracy assumptions. The lack of explicit focus on marginalization and exploitation rooted in empire, coloniality, white supremacy, racial capitalism, and other interlocking systems of oppression amid many supposedly democratic engagements needs to be addressed, in addition to considering what energy democracy means at different levels and for whom. It is important to note that calls for democracy have been wielded by the US government and military to legitimize colonization and imperialism throughout history, and these expansionist campaigns always have implicated energy and power struggles in multiple and interactive forms. Furthermore, dominant conceptions of deliberative democracy are based on inclusion into a white supremacist state, as Lisa Cacho and Pellow trouble.42 In many instances, trying to work with and seek recognition from the state can be a waste of (No) Conc lus ion
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energy for communities already marked as criminal, expendable, and devalued. Wanzer-Serrano poses the question of what other goals social movements should strive for beyond liberal democracy, encouraging heterogeneity and alignment with “coalition liberation politics,” rooted in community control.43 He writes, “We need not always try to fit our analyses and activisms into the rhetoric of ‘democracy’ and its attendant cluster of terms, like ‘citizenship,’ ‘recognition,’ and others.”44 “Delinking democracy” means valuing and enacting alternatives that are “not dependent on a modern/colonial ethic of nonbeing” and that support “democratic heterogeneities.”45 In Puerto Rico, widespread continental US assumptions about democratic practices often are incongruous in the archipelago. The limits of liberal democracy in terms of proceduralism (e.g., voting in elections), individuality, inclusion, citizenship, and recognition clearly present problems, given that Puerto Ricans living in the archipelago are barred from voting in US national elections and have a long and violent history of not being considered fully US citizens, in addition to exploitation by political elites, detailed throughout this book. 46 Accordingly, energy democracy might be better suited for localized grassroots efforts based in direct democracy and with conversations facilitated by INESI and the former ITEAS dialogue table, in contrast to when these energy actors interact with agency and high-ranking governmental officials. As grassroots organizer Ismenia González shared with me during an interview about her experiences with CEDDA (discussed in chapter 1), “Aquí, no hay ningún liderazgo” [Here, there is no leadership]. González added that anyone in the organization could have done the interview with me because of the lack of hierarchy. She expressed that “todos tenemos voz y voto” [everyone has voice and vote]. To clarify, I am not calling for avoiding or abandoning energy democracy as a concept, discourse, and practice, but the articulation can carry significant drawbacks, like the other d’s, when used in isolation, applied without an adequate power analysis, or uncritically assumed to be the most fitting term. In some contexts, energy justice rather than energy democracy may be better equipped to address difference and intersectional oppressions, including toxic assault and environmental racism fueled by energy coloniality and energy privilege. Relatedly, the linkage of energy with justice closely associates this movement and discourse with environmental and climate justice. Thus, energy justice may hold possibilities for creating larger coalitions that are more inclined to mobilize around justice than democracy, as energy actors protest corporate polluters and refuse stubborn logics and practices of divide and conquer. 164
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Given the prevalence of energy democracy discourses in the United States, it is perhaps unsurprising that some Puerto Ricans who work frequently in US and English-speaking contexts employ this concept to rearticulate the importance of more horizontal forms of decision making and deliberation, as it relates to power struggles in the archipelago. Island-based energy studies scholars, community lawyers, and other energy actors must navigate cultural differences in too-often compulsory English-only or -dominant settings, further complicated by the ethical need for them to engage both technical and vernacular public spheres. References to democracy are present in the Queremos Sol proposal and many grassroots advocates discuss the importance of collective, democratic processes as they relate to solar comunitario, emphasizing communal care. This reference is not to be confused with community solar in English, which describes programs based on a shared group investment to gain access to solar technologies. 47 Such an approach tends to shift electric power with material equipment changes, but without shifting capacity building and community power, by seeking to benefit communities that cannot own rooftop PV systems. A very different dynamic exists with Coquí Solar’s community-based effort that builds on the long-time collaborations of community board members and organizers that include and exceed energy concerns. This group’s enactment of solar comunitario is rooted in well-established networks of mutual support and care, which long preceded incorporating solar PVs into their community. To complicate differentiating between these two approaches in multilingual spaces, solar community translates from English to Spanish as comunidad solar, which could be understood as community solar.48 These naming differences point to the imperative of delinking from English monolingualism and incremental mindsets—a ubiquitous challenge shaping this archipelago’s history and present that certainly marks a major barrier to radical forms of democratic relations. Considering the imperative of difference, place, and power struggles, as is the case with decentralization, this third d of energy justice also must attend to how democratizing acts can occur without shifting from heavy greenhouse gas reliance. To illustrate, across energy co-ops, which rely on shared member ownership that intervenes in the capitalistic, top-down investor model, support for and use of renewables varies.49 Additionally, as some energy ethnographies reveal, achieving democratic modes of engagement and self-determination can take shape without decarbonization.50 For example, in México, debates over wind power exist alongside advocacy for “carbon democracy,” (No) Conc lus ion
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given that “subsoil sovereignty” in the country has relied on extracted fossil fuels to promote nationalism.51 As with decentralization, energy actors should not assume that renewable energy advocacy exists when energy and democracy are conjoined conceptually; the same is true in struggles for decolonial liberation.
Decolonizing I contend that energy justice must explicitly center anticolonial and decolonial struggles, including prefigurative politics of what could be. This focus is not only about pushing back at existing structures and epistemologies, as “decolonial thinkers [and actors] seek to subvert a colonial way of being by setting aside inherited assumptions to envision new social, political, and environmental possibilities.”52 Without this active delinking effort, the histories and presences of dispossession and domination risk being further normalized, ignored, or sidelined by other topics assumed as more important, by those who benefit from energy coloniality and energy privilege. Thus, while energy justice is not possible without decarbonizing, decentralizing, and democratizing power in all its forms, at least one additional component exists in this energetic mix: decolonizing as an alternative to expansionist and exploitative ideology, communication, and material practices. Massol-Deyá’s call for an energy uprising in Puerto Rico might be the first wave toward decolonization.53 Such a perspective involves thinking about the ways in which domination—ranging from imposing imported fossil fuel dependency to exploiting generations of Puerto Ricans and persecuting those who have advocated for independence from the United States—is all part of the same system. As evinced by grassroots community efforts, delinking implicates learning to work with energy rather than to act as a master who harnesses this force to meet particular needs.54 This claim counters longentrenched colonizing efforts to control, capture, and command this “greatest servant to man.”55 Alternative energies all have their own agency beyond human dictates, creating collaborative possibilities where energy actors work alongside, not against, renewables.56 This contention stands in strong contrast to geoengineering and other technological ploys to innovate humanity’s way out of dead-end systems that weigh heavily on the archipelago and urge finding breaking points in structures and practices that constrain liberation. Black feminist organizing in Puerto Rico compellingly illuminates the vibrant potential of decolonial intersectional ways of being, knowing, and 166
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Figur e 21. Shariana Ferrer-Núñez, Vanesa Contreras Capó, and other Colectiva Feminista members prepare to march in the proindependence demonstration. San Juan, Puerto Rico, June 22, 2014. Author photo.
communicating to counter all forms of domination. The Colectiva Feminista en Construcción [Feminist Collective in Construction] has been practicing radical mobilizations for years. I first witnessed their Black-feministinformed advocacy in the summer of 2014 during a proindependence demonstration in San Juan. This organization exemplifies delinking with its intersectional approach and refusal of single-issue politics.57 In particular, they work in solidarity with “economically and racially marginalized women, queer, and gender non-conforming people.”58 The group’s Facebook page conveys the message “construyamos otra vida” [let’s build another life]. Members describe their work as creating “un proyecto político que agrupa a feministas desde las intersecciones de género, raza, clase y sexualidad en lucha contra el capitalismo y el patriarcado” [a political project that groups together feminists from the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality against capitalism and patriarchy]. They constitute this commitment in social media posts and protest signage, including statements such as “Mujeres por la descolonización: mi cuerpo, tierra, lucha” [Women for decolonization: My body, land, struggle]. They also frequently wear T-shirts displaying their various identities and solidarities that read “inmigrante” and “antipatriarcal, feminista, lesbiana, trans, caribeña, latinoamericana” [antipatriarchal, feminist, lesbian, trans, Caribbean, and Latin American].59 These rhetorical mate(No) Conc lus ion
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rials point to just a few ways that Colectiva Feminista members resist a narrow form of decolonization rooted in cis-heteropatriarchy and nationalism. Collaborators also link these intersectional struggles to environmental concerns. Following María, the Colectiva raised funds to create an oasis and a central organizing hub for feminist brigades to distribute resources. According to the group’s bilingual crowdfunding page, which has since been removed, The incompetence of our government, local as well as federal, in serving its people only goes to show what we’ve been saying for years: this disaster is not a natural one. The acts of violence of the political-economic system are the ones that have left our country in abject poverty, well before the hurricane hit. We refuse to obey the curfews and the false calls for peace that only seek to depoliticize the causes of this emergency. From La Colectiva we reaffirm our commitment to de-naturalize the acts of violence generated by a capitalist, racist and heteropatriarchal system that keeps us colonized. Let’s shine a light on what’s most pressing, this is NOT A “NATURAL” DISASTER. 60
This argument places responsibility back on the systems that caused the aggravation of existing crises, instead of on residents left to clean up the mess. The Colectiva’s intervention resists obscuring ineffective and oppressive federal and local political and corporate acts and actors, thus illuminating the root causes of violence and encouraging others to join their resistance. 61 Following María, the group’s multiyear dogged struggles received a wider stage. Puerto Rico’s 2019 popular uprisings against then governor Rosselló erupted in response to the “RickyLeaks” scandal, based on leaked transcripts of communication between the former leader and several administrative officials. Their Telegram chat messages contained misogynistic, homophobic, sizeist, classist, and other cruel and callous exchanges, including about the number of deceased individuals from Hurricane María, and an insulting reference to the Colectiva. 62 The former governor’s bungling of hurricane recovery efforts and his role in facilitating brutal austerity measures served as the backdrop for igniting the record-breaking mobilizations. García-Quijano and Lloréns argue that these bigoted and unfeeling chats were irreparable and unforgivable because Rosselló disregarded the cultural values of humility, respect, and compassion. 63 In the early days of organizing against the administration, Colectiva members called for protests to demand the governor’s resignation and continued to play a vital role in energizing demonstrations. For example, the group sparked the first cacerolazos (demonstrations
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with pots and pans) and continued to agitate long after the mass mobilizations of the Revolución Boricua—as many called the rebellion—subsided. 64 In December 2019, members constituted their own state of emergency, condemning the government’s condoning of gendered violence through inaction and a “colonia machista” [macho colony]. Group members employed combative in various public naming acts, such as “navideña combativa” and “caravana combativa,” to mark the high stakes and substantial energies motivating their struggles. 65 In addition to focusing on gender and debt exigencies, their spring 2020 drive-through caravan and other tactics demanded the provision of sufficient COVID-19 testing materials, food access, rent and mortgage payment moratoria, and transparent information campaigns from the governor. 66 Also during the pandemic, Colectiva organizer Shariana Ferrer-Núñez and other Black women members amplified, often literally with megaphones, the concerns and demands of the Movement for Black Lives. Building on their years of antiracist work, they drew connections between police brutality in the United States and attention to the localized forms of anti-Blackness and white supremacy in Puerto Rico. To present and circulate their agenda for transforming the racial state, in June 2020, members published “The Anti-Racist Manifesto of Colectiva Feminista en Construcción.”67 Echoing the Combahee River Collective Statement, the authors argue that when Black women are liberated, all forms of oppression and the systems that uphold them will be extinguished. Among their six demands, Colectiva members state the imperative of stopping “the war against Black people,” including policing sex work, trans and gender-nonconforming people, and sexual dissidents. 68 They also call for entwined decolonizing and decriminalizing efforts, including reparations to address slavery, mass incarceration, and many other injustices. On several occasions, the authors mention environmental violence and racism as part of the apparatus that must be unmade to build something entirely different from the racial state’s naturalization of hierarchies, national borders, and other forms of division and exclusion. Colectiva members insist the future is not predetermined and that radical change is possible, as current systems and situations are not atemporal or ahistorical. Rather, these conditions are shaped by specific times and contexts that can and must be reworked and undone. Ultimately, Colectiva members evince the need to organize for decolonization using a broad intersectional analysis, not a narrow sovereignty goal.
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Their rhetoric, based in material struggle, advances the thesis that “decolonization is not a metaphor.”69 In this and other cases, decolonial worldmaking offers possibilities for both material and epistemological alternatives to colonialism and coloniality. Additionally, collaborator energies point to how “vernacular discourse is also always in process, pursuing the aims of creating a community and interrogating the ongoing and also never finished expressions of power and asymmetrical relations between the dominant and the dominated.”70 Colectiva communication is instructive for advancing energy justice, as members demonstrate the importance of uprooting domination in all of its forms. Such efforts provide a clear rationale for interconnecting decolonizing with decarbonizing, decentralizing, and democratizing toward more energy-just futures. Many individuals claim political independence is an unrealistic aspiration for Puerto Rico, but this perspective oversimplifies shifting ideologies, previous status plebiscite results, and unnecessarily narrows alternative political futures. Ongoing and more recent efforts in Guåhan that include all US territories point to the many energies that agitate for self-determination not only in an island or archipelagic context but also across oceans and shared and disparate histories, enacting possibilities for the transcolonial solidarities described in chapter 4.71 As complicated as a transition to self-rule would be in Puerto Rico, the capacity for local people to work through their realities on their own terms—an ability constrained since 1493—seems more likely after the summer 2019 revolts. In August 2020, US Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nydia Velázquez announced a US Congressional bill that called for holding a convention on the status dilemma for Puerto Ricans to decide their own political position. In the 2020 general election, Boricua voters in the archipelago elected Ana Irma Rivera Lassén and Rafael Bernabe, both of the Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana, and María de Lourdes Santiago, of the Puerto Rican Independence Party, to the Puerto Rican legislature. Rivera Lassén’s new position especially is significant, given that she is the first openly lesbian Afro–Puerto Rican feminist to be elected to the local senate. This progressive push speaks to the changing politics in Puerto Rico, as the election results showed a notable decrease in support for the statehood and commonwealth parties, pointing to some hopeful possibilities for the archipelago’s future.72 While heated disagreements over how to proceed from this colonial revolú will and must persist to determine a more livable future, these political efforts and outcomes offer openings for breaking from the oppressive sta170
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tus quo. Exploitation rooted in environmental racism, experimentation, austerity measures and the ongoing illegal debt crisis, and cutting and denying public education and pensions, to name just a few areas of abuse, violence, and trauma, demand urgent attention. Rather than call for US-imposed aid for Puerto Rico, a problem made abundantly clear by the failings of FEMA, determining alternatives to colonial limbo and auditing and abolishing the debt to dissolve this colonial “obligation” are foundational steps toward delinking. For three years following Hurricane María, the US government denied sufficient funds to transform Puerto Rico’s power grid. Then, in September 2020, the Trump administration announced plans to provide $9.6 billion to harden the grid, in addition to $2 billion for restoring schools. Sierra Club president and Puerto Rican Ramón Cruz responded by calling the announcement’s timing, just weeks before the US federal election, a political game, while members of the Comité Dialógo Ambiental prepared an open letter to FEMA condemning plans to “fix” the existing grid and its transmission and distribution infrastructure, powered by imported fossil fuels.73 The letter emphasized that energy politics carry grave implications for life and death, as ongoing disasters continue to shake the archipelago.
Enacting Energy Justice The four d’s of energy justice aim to provide a radical trajectory that unsettles entrenched colonizing logics and discourses of expansion, exploitation, dispossession, and isolation that disparage and disregard ecological limits and archipelagic relations. While, for years, US and Puerto Rican government and corporate officials marked the colony’s relatively small geographic characteristics as both inferior and lucrative, compared to the continental landmass to the north, these spatial constraints form possibilities for an energyjust, geo-body politics of finitude and interconnection. This claim does not intend to idealize smallness or island life by invoking a utopic or fantasy trope.74 Certainly, from a governmental level, Puerto Rico epitomizes what not to do and the problems associated with geographic scale and other constraints, especially if considering imported food and fossil fuel dependency, car culture and urban sprawl, and other indicators of racial and neoliberal capitalism’s experimental “progress” gone disastrously wrong. Nonetheless, thinking and acting within an island and archipelagic understanding, and (No) Conc lus ion
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turning to specific ways in which some local groups are engaging in pre-figurative politics, urges interrupting a hegemonic ideology that celebrates bigger as superior in large-scale infrastructure and progrowth logics and rhetoric. Drawing from the book’s title, the energy islands concept and associated infrastructure in the form of renewable DG exemplifies how thinking and communicating in island-scaled ways can repower communities toward energy justice. These efforts are not easy, however, and can be particularly messy because of interpersonal and group organizing tensions. Despite these realities, multifaceted, place-based understandings of decarbonizing, decentralizing, democratizing, and decolonizing offer inventive possibilities for communal care in the face of cruelty that has existed in Puerto Rico for centuries.
En pie de lucha [In the Struggle] Energy Islands began with a description of ongoing anticoal pollution struggles amid the backdrop of the biggest political mobilizations since resistance against the US Navy and its presence in Vieques in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In August 2019, energized by the Revolución Boricua, hundreds of people gathered and marched in Old San Juan to protest the cenizas tóxicas [toxic ashes] generated at the Guayama plant and the lengthy “coal death route” to which AES contributes.75 The public refusals of ongoing governmental corruption and neglect also include the strengthening of years of struggle against the AES coal plant and crony governmental behaviors, facilitated by coal capitalist Pedro Pierluisi, who became Puerto Rico’s governor in January 2021. One year before, former governor Wanda Vázquez Garced signed Act 5-2020, which requires AES to eliminate coal combustion collections that exceed 180 days since the byproduct’s generation, unless employees transfer the substance to enclosed containers.76 The DRNA held public hearings for the rule in November 2020, and agency officials claimed they would implement the act in the following weeks, but they did not. While electric energy struggles embedded in the Revolución Boricua did not receive as much attention as more generalized outrage at governmental corruption and disregard for the well-being and survival of civil society, the urgent “energy uprising” called for by Massol-Deyá is part and parcel of business-as-usual rejections. Some of the community members who participated in the August demonstration in Old San Juan, as well as those who joined in
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Figure 22. Numerous energy actors protest against AES, several holding containers of coal ash as evidence of pollution. Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, August 2019. Photo by Víctor Alvarado Guzmán.
solidarity from afar, also are members of groups that have been organizing for energy-just alternatives for years. Coquí Solar exemplifies a local, grassroots enactment of energy justice in practice, with the obstacles and strains expected of prefigurative politics unfolding amid everyday stressors and shock events. In the wake of Hurricane María, project collaborators prepared proposals for the Sierra Club and other foundations and potential donors to support installing solar panels in the residences of community members that experience the greatest impacts of power outages and blackouts, namely the elderly and those needing additional medical attention and resources. Initial funding arrived by mid-2018, enabling collaborators to purchase equipment. The first PV solar installation on a family home occurred in December 2018. Coquí Solar’s principal commitment to spread PV solar energy literacy and rooftop infrastructure has encountered several problems. One major point of disagreement centers on how best to distribute residential solar technology and create educational opportunities for collaborative learning about energy consumption, infrastructure, and community responsibility. As discussions continued about the project’s next steps, some collaborators suggested they receive solar kits first to install in their own homes as practice to inform how the process could work in other households. Other points of discussion have centered on solar system sizes. Several collaborators also expressed concerns that offering solar resources
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Figur e 23. Solar installation work begins on the Adneris Hernández and José Cordero family home rooftop. Mosquito, Guayama, Puerto Rico, December 2018. Author photo.
in the form of a give-away might make some recipients more dependent. This potential outcome stands in tension with Coquí Solar’s mutual support philosophy of individual and communal empowerment. Some members suggested following the already existing approach used by Construyendo solidaridad desde el amor y la entrega [Building Solidarity through Love and Commitment], a project of IDEBAJO.77 This initiative repairs damaged homes and has been active since before María, mostly in Salinas and Guayama. Avoiding a handout mentality, Construyendo members provide construction services, while recipients offer meals for those doing the work.78 After more than a year of deliberations, Coquí Solar collaborators concluded
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that, in addition to having recipients prepare a meal for installers, these individuals also will be required to attend group meetings and to offer their homes as charging stations for neighbors during outages and other power disruptions. For Coquí Solar, horizontal interactions create both solidarities and stumbling blocks. Dissensus and dissonance can be generative, as argued previously, but energy actors should not romanticize these realities.79 Reflecting on this long deliberative and often divisive process, Santiago expressed: What do we get from this? You can have the technological knowledge but the really hard part is about how to divide the benefits of all of this work from the community and the donations that have been received. When you get these things, how do you determine how to distribute them, and how do you feel about dependency, and how do you avoid the pitfalls of dependency?
IDEBAJO project coordinator Roberto José Thomas Ramírez, who also contributes to Coquí Solar, echoed these same organizing realities. During a February 2021 conversation, he shared that collaborators are in a reflective, analysis stage, as members coordinate their political power, while also struggling to survive. He expressed that feeling pressure from outside forces and being rushed can hinder mutual principles committed to economic, social, and political power, adding that transformation is a process, not a product, which must be guided by a collective commitment that exceeds the individual. Building on the work of Coquí Solar, in 2020 and 2021, Comíte Diálogo Ambiental members began purchasing solar kits and conducting installations with local residents, supported by a coauthored grant mentioned in chapter 4. In times of crisis and during both motivating and lagging energies, grassroots solar community group members do not wait for the state or hope that existing top-down structures will eventually work out in their favor. Instead, these collaborators continue to power the resistive forces constituting archipelagoes of power and the potential of the four d’s of energy justice to subvert relations of subjugation in this energy rhetorical matrix. These community organizers, along with other coalitional members of the IDEBAJO network, constitute an archipelago of alternative organizing spaces of reexistence to reject dead-end and deadly policies, practices, and structures. In doing so, they are collectively engaging on their own terms, refusing to accept and participate in systems of domination, while generating various surges of people power from below.
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As one of the world’s oldest, still existing colonies, Puerto Rico’s future— as always—remains uncertain. Coupled with the archipelago’s ongoing entwined energy and economic crises is Puerto Rico’s coastal and climate precarity. The archipelago loses parts of its shoreline to erosion each year, and by the end of the century, seas could rise more than a meter, with about sixty percent of residents living in coastal areas. 80 The recent tropical storms and earthquakes also point to additional socioecological emergencies that exacerbate a multitude of injustices, including the energy coloniality, energy privilege, and economic turmoil detailed throughout this book. Despite the odds and obstacles, progressive and radical energy actors persist in organizing to delink from this suffocating present and future. Together, many community members and their coalitional partners are imagining and implementing their own archipelagoes of power, like those experienced during the summer of 2019, when hundreds of thousands of people in Puerto Rico, cheered on by many in the US diaspora and beyond, rose to recreate and to dream another life.
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A ppen di x
Puerto Rico and US Diasporic Organizations and Initiatives
Barrio Eléctrico: A Puerto Rico nonprofit that trains local community collaborators to contribute to the solar energy economy: https://www .barrioelectrico.com. Casa Comunitaria de Medios: A community house that focuses on the creation of audiovisual media to advance popular education. The space also advocates for different mutual support initiatives to empower residents by offering workshops and other events in Salinas: https://www.facebook.com/pg /CasaComunitariadeMedios. Casa Pueblo: An Adjuntas community organization that has been struggling for environmental justice, renewable energy, and self-governed local projects for decades: https://casapueblo.org. Coquí Solar: A grassroots initiative that advocates for rooftop solar communities, a just transition, and energy justice in the community of Coquí and surrounding areas: https://www.facebook.com/Junta-Comunitaria-PobladoCoqu%C3%AD-1720924697923908. Iniciativa de Ecodesarrollo de Bahía de Jobos (IDEBAJO): An environmental grassroots network that supports various community groups in the Jobos Bay area of southeastern Puerto Rico, including El Comité Diálogo Ambiental. Salinas and Guayama organizers are committed to environmental, climate, and energy justice in the form of rooftop solar communities, supporting youth leaders, communicating local experiences on radio program, now podcast, Desde el barrio, and other capacity-building and antipollution efforts, such as water and air monitoring: https://www.facebook.com/idebajo.idebajo and https://idebajo.wordpress.com. Instituto Nacional de Energía y Sostenibilidad Isleña (INESI): A multidisciplinary energy studies institute that involves different University of Puerto Rico campuses to integrate academic per-
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spectives into energy public policy discussions in Puerto Rico: https:// inesi.upr.edu/language/en/home-page. JunteGente: A multi-organizational effort dedicated to fighting capitalism and neoliberalism and creating just alternatives: https://www.facebook.com /JunteGente and http://juntegente.org. Puerto Rican Solar Business Acceler ator (PRSBA): A project of the Solar Foundation that seeks to advance sustainable solar employment opportunities for Puerto Ricans, while supporting financing for microgrid development in the archipelago: https://comunidadsolarpr.org. Resiliency through Innovation in Sustainable Energy (RISE): A nonprofit network of professors and graduate students in Puerto Rico and the United States dedicated to positioning university actors as collaborative change makers preceding, during, and following disasters and other events: https://therisenetwork.org. Resilient Power Puerto Rico: A group that supports the development and spread of local solar community power: https://resilientpowerpr.org. Queremos Sol: A proposal composed by Puerto Rico–based groups, part of the Alianza Energía Renovable Ahora (AERA) [Renewable Energy Now Alliance], dedicated to distributed rooftop solar infrastructure and energy justice: https://www.queremossolpr.com.
Other Groups and Resources Alliance for Sustainable Resources Management (AMANESER) 2025 Amig@s de la Poza, Inc. [Friends of the Pool, Inc.] Ayuda Legal PR [Legal Help PR] Bosque Modelo Nacional de Puerto Rico [National Forest Model of Puerto Rico] CAMBIO PR Caño Martín Peña ENLACE Project Center for a New Economy (CNE) Centro de Periodismo Investigativo [Center of Investigative Journalism] Ciudadanos en Defensa del Ambiente [Citizens in Defense of the Environment] Coalición de Organizaciones Anti-Incineración [Coalition of Organizations against Incineration] La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción [The Feminist Collective in Construction] Comité Yabucoeño Pro-Calidad de Vida [Yabucoeño Pro-Quality of Life Committee]
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Comunidad Guayamesa Unidos por tu Salud [United Guayama Community for your Health] CORALations (Culebra) Corporación Comunitaria Caño Tiburones [Caño Tiburones Community Corporation] Corredor Ecológico del Noreste [Ecological Corridor of the Northeast] Defend Puerto Rico Earthjustice Frente Ciudadano por la Auditaría de la Deuda [Citizen Front for Debt Auditing] Mayagüezanos por la Salud y el Ambiente [Mayagüezanos for Health and the Environment] Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana (MVC) [Citizens Victory Movement] Organización Boricuá de Agricultura Ecológica [Boricuá Organization of Agriculture] El Puente: Enlace Latino de Acción Climática [Latino Climate Action Network] Puerto Rican Studies Association: https://www.ricanstudies.com Puerto Rico Syllabus: https://puertoricosyllabus.com Radio Vieques Reserva Marina de Isla Verde [Marine Reserve of Isla Verde] La Resistencia contra la quema de Carbón y sus Cenizas tóxicas (La Resistencia RCC) Sea Grant Sierra Club Puerto Rico Sociedad Ornitológica Puertorriqueña [Puerto Rican Ornithological Society] Toabajeños en Defensa del Ambiente [Toabajeños in Defense of the Environment]
¡Protejamos el ambiente, por el bien de nuestra gente! [Let’s protect the environment, for the good of our people!]
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Not es
Introduction 1. Throughout this book, I use brackets to provide Spanish and English translations of terms. 2. Sometimes apoyo mutuo is translated as “mutual aid,” which conveys a more unidimensional perspective that often limits attention to funds and material goods rather than broader expressions of solidarity and nonmaterial forms of collaboration, which “mutual support” better encapsulates. Thank you to Hilda Lloréns for conversations on this topic. 3. Alleen Brown, “Energy Insurrection,” The Intercept, February 9, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/02/09/puerto-rico-energy-electricity-solar-natural -gas/. 4. Lionel E. Orama Exclusa, “Hay que abandonar las plantas grandes y el sistema centralizado,” Noticel, January 17, 2020, https://www.noticel.com/english /inteligencia-social/opiniones/top-stories/20200118/hay-que-abandonar-las -plantas-grandes-y-el-sistema-centralizado. 5. US Energy Information Administration, “Puerto Rico Territory Profile and Energy Estimates,” April 16, 2020, https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=RQ. 6. Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency, Grid Modernization Plan for Puerto Rico, 2019, https://media.noticel.com/o2com-noti-media -us-east-1/document_dev/2019/12/05/Grid%20Modernization%20Plan_2019-%20 Nov%2022_1575587729667_39699520_ver1.0.pdf. 7. Thank you to Alaí Reyes-Santos for helping me to clarify this book’s study of energy as multifaceted embodied labor. 8. José Castro-Sotomayor, “Emplacing Climate Change: Civic Action at the Margins,” Frontiers in Communication 4 (2019): 1–33, https://doi.org/10.3389 /fcomm.2019.00033. 9. Faye Caronan shares a similar metaphoric interest in her study of Filipino American and Puerto Rican history and contemporary experiences, within US
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imperialism. Faye Caronan, Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015). 10. For example, a massive blackout occurred in September 2016, after a lightning bolt impacted a transmission line connected to the Aguirre power station, setting the facility ablaze and shutting down the entire system. Orama Exclusa, “Hay que abandonar las plantas grandes y el sistema centralizado.” 11. I discuss disaster capitalism in chapter 2. Racial capitalism names the intersection of race and class when addressing exploitation and wealth accumulation to center differential experiences with racialization. White bodies do not experience the same intensity of trauma and tragedy under capitalism as individuals who lack this racial privilege. Laura Pulido, “Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 27, no. 3, 1–16, https:// doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2016.1213013; and Hilda Lloréns and Maritza Stanchich, “Water Is Life, but the Colony Is a Necropolis: Environmental Terrains of Struggle in Puerto Rico,” Cultural Dynamics 31, no. 1–2 (2019): 81-101, https://doi.org /10.1177/0921374019826200. 12. John Cook, Naomi Oreskes, Peter T. Doran, William R. L. Anderegg, Bart Verheggen, Ed W. Maibach, J. Stuart Carlton, Stephanie Lewandowsky, Andrew G. Skuce, and Sarah A. Green, “Consensus on Consensus: A Synthesis of Consensus Estimates on Human-Caused Global Warming,” Environmental Research Letters 11 (2016): 1–7, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002; J. S. Carlton, Rebecca Perry-Hill, Matthew Huber, and Linda S. Prokopy, “The Climate Change Consensus Extends Beyond Climate Scientists,” Environmental Research Letters 10 (2015): 1–12; and Kristina Douglass and Jago Cooper, “Archaeology, Environmental Justice, and Climate Change on Islands of the Caribbean and Southwestern Indian Ocean,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 15 (2020): 8254–62, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1914211117. 13. April Karen Baptiste and Hubert Devonish, “The Manifestation of Climate Injustices: The Post-Hurricane Irma Conflicts Surrounding Barbuda’s Communal Land Tenure,” Journal of Extreme Events 6, no. 1 (2019): 1–17, https://doi .org/10.1142/S2345737619400025. 14. Efraín O’Neill-Carrillo, Emmanuel Mercado, Oscar Luhring, Isaac Jordán, and Agustín Irizarry-Rivera, “Community Energy Projects in the Caribbean: Advancing Socio-Economic Development and Energy Transitions,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 38, no. 3 (2019): 44–55, https://doi.org/10.1109 /MTS.2019.2930269. 15. Marcel J. Castro-Sitiriche, Jonathan Gomez, and Yonathan Cintrón, “The Longest Power Blackout in History and Energy Poverty” (International Conference on Appropriate Technology 2018, Porto-Novo, Benin, November 2018, http:// bit.ly/CHoLESpaper). 16. Castro-Sitiriche, Gomez, and Cintrón, “Longest Power Blackout”; Arturo Massol-Deyá, “The Energy Uprising: A Community-Driven Search for Sustainability and Sovereignty in Puerto Rico,” in Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico before and after the Storm, ed. Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón (Chicago: 182
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Haymarket Books, 2019), 298–308; and Ruth Santiago, Catalina M. de Onís, and Hilda Lloréns, “Powering Life in Puerto Rico,” NACLA Report 52, no. 2 (2020): 178–85, https://doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2020.1768741. 17. Nishant Kishore et al., “Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane María,” New England Journal of Medicine 379, no. 2 (2018): 162–70, https://doi.org/10.1056 /NEJMsa1803972. 18. Catalina M. de Onís, Hilda Lloréns, and Ruth Santiago, “Puerto Rico’s Seismic Shocks,” North American Congress on Latin America, January 15, 2020, https://nacla.org/news/2020/01/14/puerto-rico-earthquakes-renewable-energy. 19. Joanisabel González, “Los daños a Costa Sur complicarán el restablecimiento del servicio eléctrico,” El Nuevo Día, January 9, 2020, https://www .elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/notas/los-danos-a-costa-sur-complicaran-el -restablecimiento-del-servicio-electrico; and Joanisabel González, “Costa Sur puede repararse con recursos propios, según Figueroa Jaramillo,” El Nuevo Día, February 7, 2010, https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/nota/costasurpue derepararseconrecursospropiossegunfigueroajaramillo-2545619/#cxrecs_s. 20. Gerardo E. Alvarado León, “Negociado de Energía aprueba $25.2 millones para reparación de Costa Sur,” El Nuevo Día, May 23, 2020, https:// www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/notas/negociado-de-energia-aprueba-252 -millones-para-reparacion-de-costa-sur; and Yaritza Rivera Clemente, “Costa Sur entraría en operación en agosto,” El Vocero, May 22, 2020, https://www.elvocero .com/gobierno/costa-sur-entrar-a-en-operaci-n-en-agosto/article_6d2d1606-9bcb -11ea-a905-7f5e60b94d7d.html. 21. Lloréns and Stanchich, “Water Is Life”; and El Nuevo Día, “Los boricuas del sur que se van a Estados Unidos luego de los terremotos,” February 2, 2020, https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/videos/los-boricuas-del-sur-que-se -van-a-estados-unidos-luego-de-los-terremotos-261684. 22. José Alvarado Vega, “Census Bureau: Puerto Rico Outmigration Slows Down,” Caribbean Business, September 19, 2020, https://caribbeanbusiness.com /census-bureau-puerto-rico-outmigration-slows-down; and Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Enduring Disasters: Puerto Rico: Three Years after Hurricane María (New York: Hunter College, CUNY, September 2020), 1–16, https://centropr .hunter.cuny.edu/research/data-center/research-briefs/enduring-disasters-puerto -rico-three-years-after-hurricane. 23. Adriana M. Garriga-López, “Compounded Disasters: Puerto Rico Confronts COVID-19 under US Colonialism,” Social Anthropology 28, no. 2 (2020): 269–70, https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12821. 24. Javier Colón Dávila, “Sobre 7,000 personas permanecen refugiadas en el sur por los sismos,” El Nuevo Día, January 17, 2020, https://www.elnuevodia .com/noticias/locales/notas/sobre-7000-personas-permanecen-refugiadas-en-el -sur-por-los-sismos. 25. Karrieann Soto Vega, “Colonial Causes and Consequences: Climate Change and Climate Chaos in Puerto Rico,” Enculturation, November 10, 2020, https://enculturation.net/colonial_causes_consequences. No t e s t o I n t roduc t ion
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26. Hilda Lloréns, Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family: Framing Nation, Race, and Gender during the American Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014); Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social Text 24, no. 4 (2006): 1–24; and J. David Cisneros, “Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of ‘Immigrant as Pollutant’ in Media Representations of Immigration,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 4 (2008): 569–601. https://doi.org/10.1353/rap.0.0068. 27. Víctor Alvarado Guzmán, “Más letal el coronavirus en residentes expuestos a la contaminación de la planta de carbón en Guayama,” El Patriota del Sur (blog), April 22, 2020, https://elpatriotadelsur.blogspot.com/2020/04/mas-letal-el -coronavirus-en-residentes.html?m=1. 28. Omar Alfonso, “Something Happened in Arroyo Barril,” Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, March 2, 2016, http://periodismoinvestigativo.com/2016/03 /something-happened-in-arroyo-barril/; Omar Alfonso, “Irremediable el daño de las cenizas al acuífero del sur,” Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, March 20, 2019, http://periodismoinvestigativo.com/2019/03/irremediable-el-dano-de-las -cenizas-al-acuifero-del-sur; and Omar Alfonso, “Viven y juegan entre el arsénico de las cenizas de AES,” Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, August 20, 2019, http://periodismoinvestigativo.com/2019/08/viven-y-juegan-entre-el-arsenico-de -las-cenizas-de-aes. 29. Winston R. Esteves, CCR 2019 Inspection Report AES Puerto Rico (Guayama, PR: AES Puerto Rico, July 2019). 30. Hilda Lloréns, “In Puerto Rico, Environmental Injustice and Racism Inflame Protests over Coal Ash,” The Conversation, December 8, 2016, http:// theconversation.com/in-puerto-rico-environmental-injustice-and-racism-inflame -protests-over-coal-ash-69763; Hilda Lloréns, “Puerto Rico’s Coal-Ash Material Publics and the Summer 2019 Boricua Uprising,” in “Puerto Rico, Protests and Politics,” special issue, Society and Space (February 25, 2020); and Hilda Lloréns and Ruth Santiago, “Traveling on Coal’s Death Route: From Puerto Rico’s Jobos Bay to La Guajira, Colombia,” Latino Rebels, August 14, 2018, https://www .latinorebels.com/2018/08/14/coaldeathroute. 31. A 2020 report found that between April and September 2019, arsenic levels in several water monitoring wells increased. Alberto Meléndez, 2019 CCR Annual Groundwater Monitoring and Corrective Action Report: Project No. DNA-190173 (Guaynabo, PR: DNA-Environment, January 31, 2020). 32. Catalina M. de Onís, Hilda Lloréns, and Ruth Santiago, “¡Ustedes tienen que limpiar las cenizas e irse de Puerto Rico para siempre!:” La lucha por la justicia ambiental, climática y energética como trasfondo del verano de Revolución Boricua 2019 (Cabo Rojo, PR: Editora Educación Emergente, 2020); and Ruth Santiago, “Imminent and Substantial Endangerment to Human Health and the Environment from Use of Coal Ash as Fill Material at Construction Sites in Puerto Rico: A Case Study,” Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences 37 (2012): 389–96, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.03.304.
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33. Marisol LeBrón, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 234. 34. Lloréns and Santiago, “Traveling on Coal’s Death Route.” This controversy was the subject of a February 2020 CBS News investigative story: https://www .cbsnews.com/video/tons-of-toxic-coal-ash-are-being-shipped-to-mainland-u-s. 35. Kathleen M. de Onís, “‘Pa’ que tú lo sepas’: Experiences with Co-presence in Puerto Rico,” in Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method, ed. Sara McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 101–16. 36. Benjamin K. Sovacool and Michael H. Dworkin, Global Energy Justice: Problems, Principles, and Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 6. 37. Sovacool and Dworkin, Global Energy Justice, 6. 38. Sovacool and Dworkin, 6. 39. Catalina M. de Onís, “For Many in Puerto Rico, ‘Energy Dominance’ Is Just a New Name for US Colonialism,” August 21, 2017, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/for-many-in-puerto-rico-energy-dominance-is-just -a-new-name-for-us-colonialism-80243; Andrea Feldpausch-Parker, Leah Sprain, Danielle Endres, and Tarla Rai Peterson, Energy Democracy: A Research Agenda (Lausanne, Switzerland: Frontiers Media, 2019), 7, https://doi.org/10.3389/9782-88963-197-1; and Jen Schneider and Jennifer Peeples, “The Energy Covenant: Energy Dominance and the Rhetoric of the Aggrieved,” Frontiers in Communication, February 6, 2018, https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00005. 40. Sovacool and Dworkin, Global Energy Justice, 7. 41. SpanishDict, s.v. “ánimo,” December 9, 2016, http://www.spanishdict.com /translate/animo. 42. These descriptions are derived from several personal interviews in 2015. 43. George A. Kennedy laid critical foundations for thinking of rhetoric in energetic terms. George A. Kennedy, “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 25, no. 1 (1992): 2–3, www.jstor.org /stable/40238276. Both Brian Cozen and I studied energy rhetorics and rhetoric’s energetic entwinements in our respective dissertations. Brian Cozen, “Mediating Energy: Rhetoric and the Future of Energy Resources” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 2015); Catalina M. de Onís, “Energy Remix: Decolonial Discourses of Decarbonization” (PhD diss., University of Indiana, 2017). Cozen examines the de/stabilizing components of rhetoric and energy, using the “rhetoric-as-energy” trope and focuses on the rhetoric of ExxonMobil’s “Energy Lives Here” campaign. Brian Cozen, “Stabilizing Energies: Intersections between Energy Promotion Texts and Rhetorical Theory,” in Tracing Rhetorical and Material Life: Ecological Approaches, ed. Bridie McGreavy, Justine Wells George F. McHendry, Jr., and Samantha Senda-Cook (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave McMillan, 2017), 315– 42. Cozen and several other scholars also have examined energy communication, calling for greater study of everyday energy and, citing my research, colonial con-
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texts: Danielle E. Endres, Brian Cozen, Joshua Trey Barnett, Megan O’Byrne, and Tarla Rai Peterson, “Communicating Energy in a Climate (of) Crisis,” in Communication Yearbook 40, ed. Elisa L. Cohen (London: Routledge, 2016), 419– 47; and Brian Cozen, Danielle Endres, Tarla Rai Peterson, Cristi Horton, and Joshua Trey Barnett, “Energy Communication: Theory and Praxis towards a Sustainable Energy Future,” Environmental Communication 12, no. 3 (2018): 289–94, https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2017.1398176. For a partial literature review of rhetorical studies scholarship on this topic, consult Chris Ingraham, “Energy: Rhetoric’s Vitality,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2018): 260–68, https:// doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2018.1454188. 44. Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 3 (2009), 409–27, https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79 .3.n0016675661t3n15. 45. Italics in original. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 9. 46. Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Catalina M. de Onís, “Rethinking Rhetorical Field Methods on a Precarious Planet,” Communication Monographs 85, no. 1 (2018): 103–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2017.1336780; and Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Between Crisis and Care: Projection Mapping as Creative Climate Advocacy,” Journal of Environmental Media 1, no. 1 (2020): 59–77, https://doi.org /10.1386/jem_00006_1. 47. Eric King Watts, “Coda: Food, Future, Zombies,” in Voice and Environmental Communication, ed. Jennifer Peeples and Stephen Depoe (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 259. 48. Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, “The Anti-Racist Manifesto of Colectiva Feminista en Construcción,” Latino Rebels, June 7, 2020, https://www .latinorebels.com/2020/06/07/antiracistmanifesto. 49. Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, “Anti-Racist Manifesto,” 262. 50. Quoting Benjamin Chavis, David Naguib Pellow explains environmental racism as “racial discrimination in environmental policymaking, the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and the history of excluding people of color from leadership of the ecology movements.” Pellow insists on the intersection and inseparability of struggles against environmental racism and the Movement for Black Lives. David Naguib Pellow, What Is Critical Environmental Justice? (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 5. 51. Latinx commonly is used to resist gender binaries and conformity, androcentrism, and the policing of “proper” Spanish. However, the term carries implications for far more than these concerns to create space for many potentialities. Karrieann Soto Vega and Karma R. Chávez explain that “Latinx is an inherently interlocking category, overtly signaling attentiveness to coloniality, ethnicity and gender, and implicitly pointing to race and sexuality.” This signifier 186
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must be considered in relationship to different positionalities, identities, oppressions and privileges, languages, and social movements. In 2017, I facilitated an electronic forum with scholars throughout the United States and Puerto Rico to collect their thoughts on what Latinx enables and constrains, for whom, and in what contexts. As Roy Pérez argues in his response, Latinx offers “a supplement, not a substitute” for Latino, Latina, or Latin@. Drawing on this discussion, José Ángel Maldonado argues that the x signifier is filled with potentiality and Indigeneity-centered possibilities. Given the strength of anti-Indigeneity and, as Soto Vega and Chávez emphasize, anti-Blackness, resulting in erasure and exclusions, among many other problems, attending carefully to specific uses of Latinx is important. Catalina M. de Onís, “What’s in an ‘x’?: The Language (and Other) Politics of ‘Latinx,’” Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures 1, no. 2 (2017): 78–91, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/chiricu.1.2.07; José Ángel Maldonado, “Manifestx: Toward a Rhetoric Loaded with Future,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2020): 104–10, https://doi.org/10 .1080/14791420.2020.1723799; and Karrieann Soto Vega and Karma R. Chávez, “Latinx Rhetoric and Intersectionality in Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 320, https://doi.org/10.1080 /14791420.2018.1533642. 52. Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Robert Cox, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2018). 53. An extractivist economy relies heavily on production, distribution, and exchange of “resources” that have been extracted from the Earth and often involves displacing people and communities for capital. One of countless negative consequences of this system is the seizing of East African land for Western European nations’ carbon offsets, resulting in human displacements and food shortages. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, “How a Green New Deal Could Exploit Developing Countries,” The Conversation, February 25, 2019, https://theconversation.com /how-a-green-new-deal-could-exploit-developing-countries-111726. 54. Doreen E. Martinez, “The Right to Be Free of Fear: Indigeneity and the United Nations,” Wicazo Sa Review 29, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 79, https://doi.org/10 .5749/wicazosareview.29.2.0063. 55. Laura Pulido, “A Critical Review of the Methodology of Environmental Racism Research,” Antipode 28, no. 2 (1996): 142–59; and Pulido, “Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism.” 56. Emily Plec and Mary Pettenger, “Greenwashing Consumption: The Didactic Framing of ExxonMobil’s Energy Solutions,” Environmental Communication 6, no. 4 (2012): 459–76, https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2012.720 270; and Jen Schneider, Steve Schwarze, Pete K. Bsumek, and Jennifer Peeples, Under Pressure: Coal Industry Rhetoric and Neoliberalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Consult endnotes 39 and 43 for more energy rhetorical studies scholarship. 57. Castro-Sotomayor, “Emplacing Climate Change”; Stacey K. Sowards, Sí, ella puede!: The Rhetorical Legacy of Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers No t e s t o I n t roduc t ion
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(Austin: University of Texas, 2019); Carlos A. Tarin, “Fronteras tóxicas: Toward a Borderland Ecological Consciousness,” in This Bridge We Call Communication: Anzaldúan Approaches to Theory, Method, and Praxis, ed. Leandra H. Hernandez and R. Gutierrez-Perez (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2019); and Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jacquette Ray, eds., Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019), 7. 58. Darrel Enck-Wanzer, “Decolonizing Imaginaries: Rethinking “the People” in the Young Lords’ Church Offensive,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (2012):1–23, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.638656; and Darrel WanzerSerrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015). 59. José Atiles-Osoria, “Environmental Colonialism, Criminalization and Resistance: Puerto Rican Mobilizations for Environmental Justice in the 21st Century,” RCCS Annual Review 6, (2014): 3–21, https://doi.org/10.4000/rccsar .524; Déborah Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps: Environment, Development, and Community Power in Puerto Rico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Carmen Concepción, “El conflicto ambiental y su potencial hacia un desarrollo alternativo: El caso de Puerto Rico,” Ambiente y Desarrollo 4, no. 1–2 (1988): 125–35; Carmen Concepción, “The Origins of Modern Environmental Activism in Puerto Rico in the 1960s,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 19, no.1 (1995): 112–28, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.1995 .tb00493.x; Carmen Concepción, “Justicia, ambiente y movilización social en Puerto Rico,” in Puerto Rico y los derechos humanos: Una intersección plural, ed. Javier J. Colon Morera and Idsa Alegria (Viejo San Juan, PR: Ediciones Callejón, 2012), 193–220; Jorge Colón Rivera, Félix Córdova Iturregui, and José Córdova Iturregui, El proyecto de explotación minera en Puerto Rico (19621968): Nacimiento de la conciencia ambiental moderna (San Juan, PR: Ediciones Huracán, 2014); Efraín O’Neill- Carrillo, William J. Frey, Cecilio Ortiz García, Agustín Irizarry-Rivera, Marla Pérez-Lugo, and José A. Colucci-Rios, “Advancing a Sustainable Energy Ethics through Stakeholder Engagement,” in Energía sostenible: Antologia de lectura del Instituto Tropical de Energía, Ambiente y Sociedad, ed. Marla Pérez-Lugo (Mayagüez, PR: University of Puerto Rico, 2008) 121–34; and Efraín O’Neill-Carrillo, Armando L. Figueroa-Acevedo, and Agustín Irizarry-Rivera, Improved Permitting and Interconnection Processes for Rooftop PV Systems in Puerto Rico (Mayagüez: University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez, 2013). 60. Tiara R. Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric: Remapping the Marianas and Challenging Militarization from ‘A Stirring Place,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 4–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2019 .1572905; and Lanny Thompson, “Heuristic Geographies: Territories and Areas, Islands and Archipelagoes,” in Archipelagic American Studies, ed. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 57–73. 188
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61. Michelle A. Holling and Bernadette M. Calafell, eds., Latina/o Discourse in Vernacular Spaces: Somos de una voz? (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2011). 62. Dominic Boyer, Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Cymene Howe, Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Dylan McDermott Hughes, Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); and Dana E. Powell, Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 63. In thermodynamics, “energy is the force multiplied by the distance,” while power is “the rate of energy conversion” (emphasis in original). Mark Diesendorf, Sustainable Energy Solutions for Climate Change (London: Routledge, 2014), 7–8. 64. For discussions of power and energy democracy, consult FeldpauschParker, Sprain, Endres, and Peterson, Energy Democracy; Boyer also notes the meaning of poder in his energy ethnography. My reading of energy as it relates to power includes a Foucauldian interpretation, as power can function to discipline and regulate bodies and populations. For Puerto Rican scholars who engage biopower in a Puerto Rican context, consult Atiles-Osoria, “Environmental Colonialism, Criminalization and Resistance: Puerto Rican Mobilizations for Environmental Justice in the 21st Century,” 16; and Lourdes Lugo-Ortiz, Tropiezos con la memoria: La esterilización femenina en la prensa puertorriqueña (1940-1977) (San Juan, PR: Editorial Plaza Mayor, 2011). 65. Martinez, “The Right to Be Free of Fear,” 80. 66. Environmental communication on crisis and care informs this first dialectic. Pezzullo and Cox, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere. 67. This concept finds inspiration in Powell’s Landscapes of Power energy ethnography. 68. Carlos R. Venator Santiago, Puerto Rico and the Origins of US Global Empire: The Disembodied Shade (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015). 69. Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 68. 70. Helen Barthelemy, “#hacktivism,” Columbia Political Review, October 23, 2011, http://www.cpreview.org/blog/2011/10/hacktivism; Black Hawk Hancock, “Michel Foucault and the Problematics of Power: Theorizing DTCA and Medicalized Subjectivity,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine 43, no. 4 (2018): 439–68, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp /jhy010; and Nico Staring, Huw Twiston Davies, and Lara Weiss, Perspectives on Lived Religion: Practices—Transmission—Landscape (Leiden, Netherlands: Sidestone Press, 2019). Civic educator Eric Liu calls for an “archipelago of power” that takes shape in interconnected local and small networked efforts that enable different places and peoples to learn from each other’s experiences with navigating power structures to resist and reroute beyond top-down governmental and No t e s t o I n t roduc t ion
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monopolistic constraints. Eric Liu, You’re More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen (New York: Public Affairs, 2017). 71. Beate M. W. Ratter, Geography of Small Islands: Outposts of Globalization (Berlin, Germany: Springer, 2018); and Godfrey Baldacchino, “Islands, Island Studies, Island Studies Journal,” Island Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (2006): 3–18. 72. Island studies could benefit from more anticolonial and decolonial theories and approaches, as well as center scholarship by researchers with close ties to different island geographies. Adam Grydehøj, “A Future of Island Studies,” Island Studies Journal 12, no. 1 (2017): 3–16, https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.1. 73. Alison Mountz, “Political Geography II: Islands and Archipelagoes,” Progress in Human Geography 39, no. 5 (October 2015): 638, https://doi.org/10.1177 /0309132514560958. 74. Julie Sze, Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 75. Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” 68. 76. Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London: Routledge, 2003). Mining, oil refining, and other industrial activities converted parts of Japan into a “toxic archipelago,” most negatively affecting workers and community members in neighboring areas. Brett L. Walker, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010). 77. My point here is not to attempt the impossible task of exhaustively referencing all uses of islands but rather to elucidate how this signifier shapes language, embodied experiences, and other types of exchanges in profound and often overlooked ways. Sze, Fantasy Islands; Alison Mountz, “The Enforcement Archipelago: Detention, Haunting, and Asylum on Islands,” Political Geography 30 (2011): 118–28, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.01.005; and Mountz, “Political Geography II.” 78. Sze, Fantasy Islands. 79. Douglass and Cooper, “Archaeology, Environmental Justice, and Climate Change on Islands of the Caribbean and Southwestern Indian Ocean.” 80. Colin Drury, “‘Our Existence Is at Stake’: Students on Islands Being Swallowed by Rising Seas Join Global Climate Strike,” Independent, September 20, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/climate-strike -change-protests-solomon-islands-global-warming-demonstrations-south-pacific -kiribati-a9113386.html; and United Nations, “Small Island Nations Urge UN General Assembly to Act to Save Their Very Existence,” UN News, September 22, 2016, https://news.un.org/en/story/2016/09/540272-small-island-nations-urge -un-general-assembly-act-save-their-very-existence. 81. Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric,” 5. 82. Na’puti, 6. 83. Na’puti, 6. 84. Tiara R. Na’puti, “From Guahån and Back: Navigating a ‘Both/Neither’ Analytic for Rhetorical Field Methods,” in Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetori190
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cal Method, ed. Sara McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma. R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 56–71. 85. Na’puti, “From Guahån and Back,” 58. 86. Lisa A. Flores, “Creating Discursive Space through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 2, 142–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639609384147. 87. Thompson, “Heuristic Geographies,” 66. 88. Thompson, 70. 89. Lanny Thompson, Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 2010). 90. Yaejoon Kwon, “Transcolonial Racial Formation: Constructing the ‘Irish of the Orient’ in U.S.-Occupied Korea,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 3, no. 2 (2017): 268–81, https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649216643840; and Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 91. Sovacool and Dworkin, Global Energy Justice; and Malcolm Eames and Miriam Hunt, “Energy Justice in Sustainability Transitions Research,” in Energy Justice in a Changing Climate: Social Equity and Low-Carbon Energy, ed. Karen Bickerstaff, Gordon Walker, and Harriet Bulkeley (London: Zed Books, 2013), 46–60. 92. Readers interested in scholarship centering archipelagoes may wish to consult the multidisciplinary edited collection Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking: Toward New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations, edited by Michelle Stephens and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel. This collaborative work was published after Energy Islands was in production and thus does not inform this book. 93. Tiara R. Na’puti, “Oceanic Possibilities for Communication Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2020): 95–103, https:// doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1723802. In addition to this unsettling interest, Christa Olson cautions against unreflexively “importing” theories and methods to different places, which carries resonance for Puerto Rico and other places violently shaped by imperial and colonial practices of transferal. Christa Olson, “Places to Stand: The Practices and Politics of Writing Histories,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 15 (2012): 83, https://doi.org/10.1080/15362426.2012.657056. 94. Subaltern refers to those who lack social mobility access. Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 95. Raka Shome, “Going South: Thinking Culture and Cultural Studies— from/of the Global South,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 3 (2019):196–218, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2019.1648841. 96. McDermott Hughes, Energy without Conscience, 122. 97. Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón, Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico before and after the Storm (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019). No t e s t o I n t roduc t ion
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98. Lloréns and Stanchich, “Water Is Life.” 99. US Census Bureau, “Puerto Rico: Quick Facts,” 2019, https://www.census .gov/quickfacts/PR. 100. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps; and Katherine T. McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest: The U.S. Navy in Vieques Puerto Rico (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 101. Raka Shome, “Postcolonial Interventions in the Rhetorical Canon: An ‘Other’ View,” Communication Theory 6, no. 1 (1996): 42, https://doi.org/10.1111 /j.1468-2885.1996.tb00119.x. 102. Danielle Endres, “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2009): 44, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420802632103. 103. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism. 104. María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25, no. 4 (2010): 742–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01137.x. 105. Derek T. Buescher and Kent A. Ono, “Civilized Colonialism: Pocahontas as Neocolonial Rhetoric,” Women’s Studies in Communication 19, no. 2 (1996): 127–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.1996.11089810; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 240–70, https://doi.org/10.1080 /09502380601162548; and Josue David Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014). 106. Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Eve Tuck, “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies: Ongoing Settlement, Cultural Production, and Resistance,” Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies 17, no. 1 (2017): 3–13, https://doi.org/10.1177 /1532708616653693. 107. US statecraft exceeds the nation-state, leading some scholars to suggest empire-state as a more fitting description. Moon-Kie Jung and Yaejoon Kwon, “Theorizing the US Racial State: Sociology since Racial Formation,” Sociology Compass 7, no. 11 (2013): 927–40, https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12078. Na’puti and I critique this militarized empire-building project in Guahån and Puerto Rico, respectively. Na’puti, “From Guahån and Back”; and Onís, “Pa’ que tú lo sepas.” 108. Jorge Duany, Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 4; and Bonilla and LeBrón, Aftershocks of Disaster. Extractivist industries and military operations exemplify external colonialism, which “includes expropriation and extraction of Indigenous worlds for transport to the colonizers. . . . Internal colonialism involves biopolitical control and geopolitical management within the imperial nation’s borders. Its modes and strategies of control are both interpersonal and structural.” Tiara R. Na’puti and Judy Rohrer, “Pacific Moves beyond Colonialism: A Conversation from Hawai‘i and Guåhan,” Feminist Studies 43, no. 3 (2017): 539, https://doi.org/10.15767/feministstudies.43.3.0537. 192
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109. Stephen Palmié and Francisco Scarano, The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its People (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), 480. 110. Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 2. 111. Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality, 5. 112. Mignolo and Walsh, 5. 113. Wanzer-Serrano, New York Young Lords, 15, 182; and Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse,” Communication Monographs 62, no. 1 (1995): 19–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/03637759509376346. 114. Wanzer-Serrano, 15, 182; and Ono and Sloop, “Critique of Vernacular Discourse.” 115. Wald, Vázquez, Ybarra, and Ray, Latinx Environmentalisms, 7. 116. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 117. David Ciplet, J. Timmons Roberts, and Mizan R. Khan, Power in a Warming World: The New Global Politics of Climate Change and the Remaking of Environmental Inequality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 249; and Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Planet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 305. Gustavo García López also discusses the importance of people power “from below,” especially in relation to Puerto Rico grassroots group Casa Pueblo and environmental justice struggles in Puerto Rico. Gustavo García López, “Environmental Justice Movements in Puerto Rico: Life and Death Struggles and Decolonizing Horizons,” special issue, Society and Space, February 25, 2020, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/environmental-justice -movements-in-puerto-rico-life-and-death-struggles-and-decolonizing-horizons. 118. Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 150. 119. D. Soyini Madison, Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2012); and Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism. 120. Madison, Critical Ethnography, 5. 121. Nina M. Lozano, Not One More! Feminicidio on the Border (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019); Madison, Critical Ethnography; and Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism. 122. Lozano, Not One More!, 15. 123. Onís, “Pa’ que tú lo sepas.” 124. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism. 125. Michael K. Middleton, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Danielle Endres, “Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods: Challenges and Tensions,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 394, https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314 .2011.586969. 126. Paulami Banerjee and Stacey K. Sowards, “Working across Languages/ Cultures in International and Environmental Communication Fieldwork,” Jour-
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nal of International and Intercultural Communication, 2020, 13, https://doi.org/10 .1080/17513057.2020.1850844. 127. Naming practices in the Puerto Rico archipelago differ based on positionality. Popular discourses in the largest island tend to use Puerto Rico as an overarching signifier for the archipelago. This reference can include the humaninhabited islands of Vieques and Culebra, although this naming usually marginalizes and sometimes erases these smaller islands, as Puerto Rico becomes a stand-in for the largest island. Other naming practices employ Island to signify specifically the largest island. Meanwhile, in Vieques, local residents frequently refer to the largest island as the Isla Grande [Big Island] and Vieques as the Isla Nena [Baby Island]. As former nurse, cancer survivor, and Vieques resident Zaida Torres Rodríguez told me in a 2014 interview, Puerto Rico is more than the largest island’s dimensions of “100 by 35 miles,” a popularly cited reference (Onís, “Pa’ que tú lo sepas”). Accordingly, to avoid marginalizing or erasing Vieques and Culebra, I reference Puerto Rico’s main island as the largest island and use archipelago or Puerto Rico when referring to all three formations. Thank you to Lloréns and Santiago for conversations on this topic. 128. Pezzullo and Onís, “Rethinking Rhetorical Field Methods.” 129. For a study on the importance of self-identification practices, including the distancing language of descent and extraction to describe ethnicity, consult Lisa A. Flores and Mary Ann Villarreal, “Mobilizing for National Inclusion: The Discursivity of Whiteness among Texas Mexicans’ Arguments for Desegregation,” in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 86–100. 130. Lloréns, “In Puerto Rico, Environmental Injustice and Racism Inflame Protests over Coal Ash”; Diana Hernández, “Sacrifice along the Energy Continuum: A Call for Energy Justice,” Environmental Justice 8, no. 4 (2015): 152, https:// doi.org/10.1089/env.2015.0015; and Marie-Odile P. Fortier et al., “Introduction to Evaluating Energy Justice across the Life Cycle: A Social Life Cycle Assessment Approach,” Applied Energy 236 (2019): 211–19, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy .2018.11.022. 131. Castro-Sotomayor, “Emplacing Climate Change.” 132. Lloréns points out that not all Afro-descendant people in Puerto Rico were enslaved at the time of abolition in 1873. Lloréns, Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family. 133. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps. 134. Previously I studied the language of compañerxs, which in Spanish means “partners,” “companions,” and “colleagues.” However, as my fieldwork evolved over the years, the term I and others have used most is colaboradores [collaborators], although compañerxs still resonates. Onís, “Pa’ que tú lo sepas.” 135. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 136. Duany, Puerto Rican Nation on the Move, 28; and Megan Ybarra, Green
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Wars: Conservation and Decolonization in the Maya Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018). 137. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Marxism and Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313; and Linda Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique 20 (1991): 5–32, https://doi.org/10.2307/1354221. 138. Pezzullo and Cox, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere. 139. Kwon, “Transcolonial Racial Formation.” 140. In this book, the use of industry speaks to “a diverse affiliation of corporate interests and organizations that work together to coordinate messages and to influence policymakers in the US” and beyond. Schneider, Schwarze, Bsumek, and Peeples, Under Pressure, 6. 141. Alaí Reyes-Santos, Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015). 142. Carlos García-Quijano and Hilda Lloréns, “The #RickyLeaks ‘Chat Bros’ Group Shows Clear Disdain towards Puerto Rico’s Cultural Values,” Latino Rebels, July 23, 2019, https://www.latinorebels.com/2019/07/23/prculturalvalues; and Ruth Santiago, “Adiós, Rosselló, Hello . . . ? Puerto Rico’s Transformation Still Work-in-Progress,” New York Daily News, July 25, 2019, https://www.nydailynews .com/opinion/ny-future-of-puerto-rico-20190726-nbywjodnzjenzc7xcmlc3k4dsq -story.html. 143. Ilene Whitney Crawford, “Growing Routes: Rhetoric as the Study and Practice of Movement,” in Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies, ed. Eileen E. Schell and K. J. Rawson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 71–85. 144. The Latina Feminist Group, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 1.
Routes/Roots/R aíces I 1. Guillermo Irizarry Rubio, Homenaje a Don José Irizarry Cruz y Doña Cándida Rubio Hernández (Puerto Rico: published by the author, 1999). 2. Reyes-Santos, Our Caribbean Kin, 152. 3. Lloréns, Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family; and Yeidy M. Rivero, Tuning Out Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 4. Pacific American Steamship Association / Shipowners’ Association of the Pacific Coast, “New York—Caribbean Vessel Completed,” Pacific Marine Review, March 1931, https://archive.org/stream/pacificmarinerev2831paci#page/n168/mode/1up. 5. In Puerto Rico, local police generated and archived files on independence activists and residents with leftist inclinations since around the US takeover from Spain. During the 1960s, the Puerto Rico Police Department increased its surveillance and persecution of dissenting individuals by partnering with the FBI’s
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counterintelligence program. Agents directing this hidden and often illegal operation sought to hinder and extinguish leftist US political and social movements. They employed various strategies and tactics, including using “paid informants to incite conflict or facilitate wrongdoing with the goal of undermining activists.” Marisol LeBrón, “Puerto Rico and the Colonial Circuits of Policing,” NACLA Report on the Americas 49, no. 3 (2017): 311, http://doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2017 .1373960. 6. Jorge L. Chinea, “Irish Indentured Servants, Papists and Colonists in Spanish Colonial Puerto Rico,” Irish Migration Studies in Latin America 5, no. 3 (2007): 171–81; Timothy Dougherty, “Lost in TransNation: The Limits to Constitutive Nationalism in the Fenian Movement,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 45, no. 4 (2015): 346–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2015.1065159; and Gerald J. Meyer, “Pedro Albizu Campos, Gilberto Concepción de Gracia, and Vito Marcantonio’s Collaboration in the Cause of Puerto Rico’s Independence,” Centro Journal 23, no. 1: 87–123.
Chapter One. Dis/empowering Terms of an Energy Rhetorical Matrix 1. Articulation signifies the state of being conjoined and exists in naming practices that link, via association, different concepts and practices. Articulation theory involves studying “the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time.” Quoted in Larry Grossberg, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986), 53, https://doi.org/10.1177 /019685998601000204, italics in original; and Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 2008). 2. I have written about energy coloniality and energy colonialism previously. Catalina M. de Onís, “Fueling and Delinking from Energy Coloniality in Puerto Rico,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 46, no. 5 (2018): 535–60, https:// doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2018.1529418; and Catalina M. de Onís, “Energy Colonialism Powers the Ongoing Unnatural Disaster in Puerto Rico,” Frontiers in Communication 3 (2018): 1–5, https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00002. 3. LeBrón, Policing Life and Death, 236. 4. Lisa Marie Cacho, “‘You Just Don’t Know How Much He Meant to Me’: Deviancy, Death, and Devaluation,” Latino Studies 5 (2007): 182–208, https://doi .org/10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600246. 5. Endres, “Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism”; Danielle Endres, “From Wasteland to Waste Site: The Role of Discourse in Nuclear Power’s Environmental Injustices,” Local Environment 14, no. 10 (2009): 917–37, https://doi.org/10.1080
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/13549830903244409; and Al Gedicks, The New Resource Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles against Multinational Corporations (Boston: South End Press, 1993). 6. Julian Go, “Introduction: Global Perspectives on the U.S. Colonial State in the Philippines,” in The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives, ed. Julian Go and Anne L. Foster (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 1–42; and Kwon, “Transcolonial Racial Formation.” 7. Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric.” 8. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps; Duany, Puerto Rican Nation on the Move. 9. Danielle Z. Rivera, “Disaster Colonialism: A Commentary on Disasters beyond Singular Events to Structural Violence,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12950. 10. Cara New Daggett, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, & the Politics of Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 157. 11. Hilda Lloréns, “US Media Depictions of Climate Migrants: The Recent Case of the Puerto Rican ‘Exodus,’” in Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico before and after the Storm, ed. Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019), 124–37. 12. Daggett, Birth of Energy, 145; and Thompson, Imperial Archipelago, 27. 13. Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, “Anti-Racist Manifesto.” 14. Anjali Vats and LeiLani Nishime, “Containment as Neocolonial Visual Rhetoric: Fashion, Yellowface, and Karl Lagerfeld’s ‘Idea of China,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 4 (2013): 423–47, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2013 .833668; and Lisa A. Flores and Mary Ann Villarreal, “Unmasking ‘Ignorance,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 106, no. 3: 310–15, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630 .2020.1785641. 15. Thompson, Imperial Archipelago, 27, 146. 16. Lloréns, Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family, 99. 17. Lloréns, 98; and Thompson, Imperial Archipelago, 8. 18. Caronan, Legitimizing Empire. 19. Caronan, Legitimizing Empire; and Thompson, Imperial Archipelago. 20. Lloréns, “US Media Depictions of Climate Migrants.” 21. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps. 22. Lloréns, “US Media Depictions of Climate Migrants,” 128. 23. Daggett, Birth of Energy, 5. 24. Daggett, 5. 25. Wanzer-Serrano, New York Young Lords. 26. Sidney W. Mintz, “The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area,” in Peoples and Cultures of the Caribbean, ed. Michael M. Horowitz (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 24; Juan Giusti-Cordero, “Beyond Sugar Revolutions: Rethinking the Spanish Caribbean in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Empirical Futures: Anthropologists and Historians Engage the Work of Sidney W. Mintz, ed. George Baca, Aisha Khan, and Stephen Palmié (Chapel Hill: University of No t e s t o C h a p t e r On e
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North Carolina Press, 2009); and Verene Shepherd and Hilary Beckles, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2000). In addition to mining, cattle also played a significant role in agricultural practices linked to expansionist agendas in the Hispanophone colonies. Imported livestock did well by consuming Indigenous plants and other vegetation, which in turn led to the death of some Indigenous peoples who relied on these resources. Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean. 27. Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean; Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 257–74; and Giusti-Cordero, “Beyond Sugar Revolutions.” 28. McDermott Hughes, Energy without Conscience; Shepherd and Beckles, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World; and Luis Martínez-Fernández, “The Sweet and the Bitter: Cuban and Puerto Rican Responses to the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Sugar Challenge,” NWIG: New West Indian Guide 67, no. 1/2 (1993): 47–67, www.jstor.org/stable/41849495. 29. Manuel Valdés-Pizzini, “Historical Contentions and Future Trends in the Coastal Zones,” in Beyond Sun and Sand: Caribbean Environmentalisms, ed. Sherrie L. Baver and Barbara Lynch (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 47; Martínez-Fernández, “The Sweet and the Bitter,” 51; and Stuart B. Schwartz, Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450– 1680 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 30. Lloréns, Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family, 16. 31. Lloréns, 16. 32. Wanzer-Serrano, New York Young Lords. 33. Geoff Burrows, “Rural Hydro-Electrification and the Colonial New Deal: Modernization, Experts, and Rural Life in Puerto Rico, 1935–1942,” Agricultural History 91, no. 3 (2017): 293–319, https://doi.org/10.3098/ah.2017.091.3.293; and Efraín O’Neill-Carrillo and Miguel A. Rivera-Quiñones, “Energy Policies in Puerto Rico and Their Impact on the Likelihood of a Resilient and Sustainable Electric Power Infrastructure,” Centro Journal 30, no. 3 (Fall 2018):147–71. 34. Burrows, “Rural Hydro-Electrification.” 35. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps; and Hilda Lloréns and Carlos G. García-Quijano, “From Extractive Agriculture to Industrial Waste Periphery: Life in a Black-Puerto Rican Ecology,” African American Intellectual History Society, June 22, 2020, https://www.aaihs.org/from-extractive-agriculture-to-industrial -waste-periphery-life-in-a-black-puerto-rican-ecology/?utm_source=rss. 36. Lloréns and García-Quijano, “From Extractive Agriculture.” 37. Lloréns, Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family. 38. Burrows, “Rural Hydro-Electrification”; and O’Neill-Carrillo and RiveraQuiñones, “Energy Policies in Puerto Rico.” 39. Lloréns, Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family. 40. Burrows, “Rural Hydro-Electrification”; and O’Neill-Carrillo and RiveraQuiñones, “Energy Policies in Puerto Rico.”
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41. Colón Rivera, Córdova Iturregui, and Córdova Iturregui, El proyecto de explotación minera. 42. Colón Rivera, Córdova Iturregui, and Córdova Iturregui, 21. 43. Lloréns, Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family, 110–11. 44. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps. 45. This large-scale privatizing shift in the 1940s would not occur elsewhere until the late 1950s, beginning in Germany. Germà Bel, “The First Privatization Policy in a Democracy: Selling State-Owned Enterprises in 1948–1950 Puerto Rico,” Research Institute of Applied Economics 15 (2009): 1–36, https://doi.org/10 .1017/S0212610911000115. 46. LeBrón, Policing Life and Death, 8. 47. Ismael García-Colón, Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire: Puerto Rican Workers on U.S. Farms (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020); and Lloréns and Stanchich, “Water Is Life,” 85. 48. García-Colón, Colonial Migrants, 21. 49. Duany, Puerto Rican Nation on the Move. 50. Juan González, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 284. 51. Marianne Meyn, “Puerto Rico’s Energy Fix,” in Green Guerrillas: Environmental Conflicts and Initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Helen Collinson (London: Russell Press, 1996), 171. 52. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps. 53. The Environmental Protection Agency found that the water and soil in the area is polluted: https://www.epa.gov/hwcorrectiveactionsites/hazardous-waste -cleanup-chevron-phillips-chemical-puerto-rico-core-guayama. 54. When the Central Aguirre closed in 1990, 62 percent of thousands of mill workers lived in Salinas. The closure cost the municipality 13 percent of its operating budget and yielded extreme financial and other hardships, especially because many sugarcane cutters had trouble finding employment elsewhere. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps; and Lloréns and García-Quijano, “From Extractive Agriculture.” 55. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps. 56. Robert Bullard, Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 13; and Onís, “Energy Colonialism,” 2. 57. Concepción, “Origins of Modern Environmental Activism.” 58. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps. 59. Despite substantial risks, the US Department of Energy funded a study to investigate nuclear energy possibilities in Puerto Rico. In June 2020, I attended a webinar organized by the Nuclear Alternative Project, in which five local spokespeople explained that using microreactors would be far safer than larger, conventional systems and also mentioned the misleading claim that widespread implementation of solar and other renewables would require a steady power source, in this case nuclear, to avoid power disruptions. The independence party and many other groups strongly have denounced this recent nuclear advocacy. No t e s t o C h a p t e r On e
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60. A fact sheet by the US Department of Energy presents the project in the following terms: “The decommissioned Boiling Nuclear Superheater (BONUS) reactor, located northwest of Rincón, Puerto Rico, was developed as a prototype nuclear power plant to investigate the technical and economic feasibility of the integral boiling superheating concept. This small-scale nuclear reactor produced saturated steam in the central portion of the reactor core, superheated it in four surrounding ‘superheater’ sections of the same core, and then used the superheated steam in a direct loop to drive a turbine generator.” Concepción, “Origins of Modern Environmental Activism,” 1. 61. Alexis S. Dietrich, The Drug Company Next Door: Pollution, Jobs, and Community Health in Puerto Rico (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 62. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps, 62; and Lloréns and Stanchich, “Water Is Life.” 63. Dietrich, Drug Company Next Door. 64. Dietrich, 31. 65. Dietrich, 4. 66. Dietrich, 10. 67. Werner Baer, “Puerto Rico: An Evaluation of a Successful Development Program,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 73, no. 4 (1955): 649, 670, https://doi .org/10.2307/1884309. 68. Luz del Alba Acevedo, “Daughter of Bootstrap,” in Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001): 139–47. 69. LeBrón, Policing Life and Death. 70. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps. 71. Ed Morales, Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico (New York: Bold Type Books, 2019), 68; and Jennifer Hinojosa and Edwin Meléndez, The Housing Crisis in Puerto Rico and the Impact of Hurricane Maria (New York: Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, 2018), https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/research/data-center/research-briefs/housing -crisis-puerto-rico-and-impact-hurricane-maria. 72. Morales, Fantasy Island; Tom Sanzillo, “The Hidden Boogeyman in Puerto Rico’s Debt Crisis: Its Power Utility,” The Hill, July 6, 2016, http://thehill .com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-environment/286589-the-hidden-boogeyman -in-puerto-ricos-debt-crisis-its; and Rosario Fajardo, “Confidential Report Slams Proposed Prepa Transition Charge,” Weekly Journal, February 5, 2020, https:// www.theweeklyjournal.com/business/confidential-report-slams-proposed-prepa -transition-charge/article_2810a5a4-478b-11ea-bba1-bbbc0fb919a8.html?fbclid= IwAR1TqJKC5o8-Nnp5EYiwqxDiJIoAsgZkMjHS44eqgypvACBY0gjlC85E-Hg. 73. Eva Lloréns Vélez, “Senate Panel Downplays Political Involvement in Prepa,” Caribbean Business, March 9, 2016, https://caribbeanbusiness.com/senate -panel-downplays-political-involvement-in-prepa; O’Neill-Carrillo and Quiñones, “Energy Policies in Puerto Rico”; and El Nuevo Día, “La Utier denuncia ‘proceso secreto’ para privatizar la AEE,” June 16, 2020, https://www.elnuevodia.com /noticias/locales/notas/la-utier-denuncia-proceso-secreto-para-privatizar-la-aee. 200
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74. US Energy Information Administration, “Puerto Rico Territory Energy Profile,” updated 2019, https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=RQ. 75. Gerardo E. Alvarado León and Alex Figueroa Cancel, “Rosselló nombrará a Elí Díaz Atienza a la Junta de Gobierno de la AEE,” El Nuevo Día, July 12, 2018, https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/notas/rossello-nombrara-a-eli-diaz -atienza-a-la-junta-de-gobierno-de-la-aee; and David Begnaud, “Turmoil Slows Rebuilding of Puerto Rico’s Power Grid,” CBS News, July 21, 2018, https://www .cbsnews.com/news/turmoil-slows-rebuilding-of-puerto-ricos-power-grid. 76. Joanisabel González, “El gobierno selecciona al consorcio LUMA para operar la red eléctrica de Puerto Rico,” El Nuevo Día,” June 22, 2020, https:// www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/notas/el-gobierno-selecciona-al-consorcio -luma-para-operar-la-red-electrica-de-puerto-rico. 77. Puerto Rico Public-Private Partnerships Authority, “Puerto Rico PublicPrivate Partnership for the Electric Power Transmission and Distribution System,” Partnership Committee Report, May 15, 2020. 78. Rhetorically constituting energy coloniality and empire, Quanta Services boasts on its website that the company’s approach is “repeatable,” “sustainable,” and “better” than competitors, as its “geographic footprint spans North America, Latin America and Australia.” Quanta Services, “About Quanta,” 2020, https:// www.quantaservices.com/about. 79. Caribbean Business, “Luma Energy to Operate Puerto Rico Electric T&D System,” June 22, 2020, https://caribbeanbusiness.com/luma-energy-to -operate-puerto-rico-electric-power-td-system. 80. Metro Puerto Rico, “Contrato con Luma no garantiza puestos de trabajadores de la AEE,” July 6, 2020, https://www.metro.pr/pr/noticias/2020/07/06 /contrato-luma-no-garantiza-puestos-trabajadores-la-aee.html; and Metro Puerto Rico, “Organizaciones cuestionan $26 millones en facturas de LUMA Energy en menos de tres meses,” October 7, 2020, https://www.metro.pr/pr/noticias/2020 /10/07/organizaciones-cuestionan-26-millones-en-facturas-de-luma-energy-en -menos-de-tres-meses.html. 81. Center for a New Economy, “Executive Summary: ‘Analysis of a LongTerm Agreement for the Operation and Management for Puerto Rico’s Transmission and Distribution System,’” August 2020, 8, https://grupocne.org/wp-content /uploads/2020/08/FINAL-Executive-Summary-Analysis-Agreement-PREPA-P3 -LUMA.pdf. 82. Sarah Molinari, “The Public Debt Reckoning: Anti-Debt Futures after #RickyRenuncia,” special issue, Society and Space, February 25, 2020, https:// www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-public-reckoning-anti-debt-futures-after -rickyrenuncia. 83. Mary Williams Walsh, “How Free Electricity Helped Dig $9 Billion Hole in Puerto Rico,” New York Times, February 1, 2016, https://nyti.ms/1So68j2. 84. Since 2006, about half of Puerto Rico’s schools have closed. Jennifer Hinojosa, Edwin Meléndez, and Kathya Severino Pietri, Population Decline and School Closure in Puerto Rico, Centro Center for Puerto Rican Studies (New York: Hunter No t e s t o C h a p t e r On e
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College, CUNY, May 2019), https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/sites/default/files /PDF_Publications/centro_rb2019-01_cor.pdf; Molinari, “Public Debt Reckoning”; and Tatiana Díaz Ramos, “Se aceleró la compra de escuelas cerradas en 2019, y fue un buen negocio para algunos inversionistas,” Centro Periodismo Investigativo, December 10, 2020, https://periodismoinvestigativo.com/2020/12 /se-acelero-la-compra-de-escuelas-cerradas-en-2019-y-fue-un-buen-negocio-para -algunos-inversionistas. 85. Onís, “Fueling and Delinking,” 8. 86. Financial Oversight Management Board, “Critical Projects Process,” 2020, https://cpp.juntasupervision.pr.gov/en/projects. The act is available on the US Congress website: https://www.congress.gov/114/plaws/publ187/PLAW -114publ187.htm. 87. US Department of Labor, “PROMESA,” 2016, https://www.dol.gov /agencies/whd/flsa/puerto-rico/faq. In February 2020, a settlement reduced $24 billion of Puerto Rico’s debt but ultimately benefited vulture capitalists by requiring the territorial government to make an unaffordable $3.8 billion upfront payment. 88. Nick Brown, “Puerto Rico Board May Fast-Track Four Power Projects,” Reuters, January 8, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-puertorico-debt -power/puerto-rico-board-may-fast-track-four-power-projects-idUSKBN1EX2CJ. 89. Brown, “Puerto Rico Board.” 90. Prohibidoincinerar.org, “Sobre nosotros,” https://prohibidoincinerar.org /about; and Hannah Chang, “How a Polluter Is Capitalizing on Disaster in Puerto Rico,” Earthjustice, December 15, 2017, https://earthjustice.org/blog/2017 -december/how-a-polluter-is-capitalizing-on-disaster-in-puerto-rico. 91. Metro Puerto Rico, “Salida de Ecoeléctrica por temblor provocó apagón,” May 2, 2020, https://www.metro.pr/pr/noticias/2020/05/02/salida-ecoelectrica -temblor-provoco-apagon.html; and Jason Burton, “Magnitude 5.4 Earthquake Felt in Puerto Rico,” USGS, May 2, 2020, https://www.usgs.gov/news/magnitude -54-earthquake-felt-puerto-rico. 92. After a successful project defeat in Mayagüez, AES ultimately received approval to build the coal plant in Guayama, as discussed in the introduction of this book. As for nuclear power, a US- and local-government backed plan proposed building seventeen nuclear power plants in the span of twenty years on the largest island, beginning in 1980. The project was abandoned after one of the construction areas, Jobos Bay, was found to be on a fault line. Meyn, “Puerto Rico’s Energy Fix.” 93. Reyes-Santos, Our Caribbean Kin. 94. Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David Naguib Pellow, The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden (New York: New York University, 2011), 4. 95. Park and Pellow, Slums of Aspen, 4. 96. Joanisabel González. “Cuatro cargos en la factura de luz para pagar la deuda y las pensiones en la AEE,” El Nuevo Día, January 31, 2020, https://www 202
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.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/notas/cuatro-cargos-en-la-factura-de-luz-para -pagar-la-deuda-y-las-pensiones-en-la-aee/. 97. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 125. 98. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps. 99. Duany, Puerto Rican Nation on the Move, 283. 100. Eames and Hunt, “Energy Justice.” 101. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Articulating ‘Sexy’ Anti-toxic Activism on Screen: The Cultural Politics of A Civil Action and Erin Brockovich,” Environmental Communication Yearbook, 3 (2006): 31. 102. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Performing Critical Interruptions: Rhetorical Invention and Narratives of the Environmental Justice Movement,” Western Journal of Communication 64, no. 1 (2001): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1080 /10570310109374689; Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 4 (2003): 345– 65, https://doi.org/10.1080/0033563032000160981; Steve Schwarze, “Environmental Melodrama,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 3 (2006): 239–61, https://doi .org/10.1080/00335630600938609; and J. Timmons Roberts, “Globalizing Environmental Justice,” in Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement, ed. Ronald Sandler and Phaedra C. Pezzullo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 285–307. 103. Park and Pellow, Slums of Aspen, 4. 104. I have written about climate justice in detail elsewhere: Kathleen M. de Onís. “‘Looking Both Ways’: Metaphor and the Rhetorical Alignment of Intersectional Climate Justice and Reproductive Justice Concerns,” Environmental Communication 6, no. 3 (2012): 308–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2012 .690092. Endres mentions energy justice in her study of nuclear power impacts on Diné (Navajo), Western Shoshone, and Southern Paiute peoples. Endres, “From Wasteland to Waste Site.” 105. Fortier et al., “Introduction to Evaluating Energy Justice.” 106. Eames and Hunt, “Energy Justice.” 107. Readers interested in energy justice may wish to visit the Energy Justice Initiative: iejusa.org. 108. O’Neill-Carrillo and Rivera-Quiñones, “Energy Policies in Puerto Rico.” 109. Efraín O’Neill-Carrillo, Una nueva AEE: Energía eléctrica para la sociedad Puertorriqueña para el siglo XXI (Mayagüez, PR: ITEAS, 2012), http://iteas .uprm.edu/docs/Nueva_AEE_2012.pdf. 110. Instituto Tropical de Energia, Ambiente y Sociedad. “Mesa de Diálogo del Sistema Eléctrico de Puerto Rico,” December 7, 2009, http://iteas.uprm.edu /docs/Comunicado_de_Prensa-Mesa.pdf. 111. Act 57-2014, known as the Puerto Rico Energy Transformation and RELIEF Act, May 27, 2014, https://energia.pr.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites /7/2015/10/AN-ACT-57-20141.pdf. 112. “Act for the Transformation and Energy Relief of Puerto Rico Signed into No t e s t o C h a p t e r On e
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Law,” McConnell Valdés, LLC, May 30, 2014, http://www.mcvpr.com/media /publication/273_Act%2057.pdf. 113. O’Neill-Carrillo et al., “Community Energy Projects,” 45. 114. O’Neill-Carrillo et al., 45. 115. Adriana Garriga-López, “Puerto Rico: The Future in Question,” Shima 13, no. 2: 181, https://doi.org/10.21463/shima.13.2.13. 116. Ono and Sloop, “Critique of Vernacular Discourse.” 117. O’Neill-Carrillo et al., “Community Energy Projects,” 52–53. 118. García López, “Environmental Justice Movements in Puerto Rico.”
Routes/Roots/R aíces II 1. Keith Chapman, “Petrochemicals and Economic Development: The Implications of the Puerto Rican Experience,” Professional Geographer 34, no. 4 (1982): 405–16, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0033-0124.1982.00405.x. 2. Chapman, “Petrochemicals and Economic Development,” 406. 3. Paul Rutherford, Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 77. 4. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps; and Gordon K. Lewis, “Puerto Rico: A Case-Study of Change in an Underdeveloped Area,” Journal of Politics 17 no. 4 (1995): 627, https://doi.org/10.2307/2126617. 5. Sarah Dávila-Ruhaak, “Making a Case for the Right to a Healthy Environment for the Protection of Vulnerable Communities: A Case of Coal-Ash Disaster in Puerto Rico,” Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law 9, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 379–432. 6. National Research Council (US), Energy in Puerto Rico’s Future: Final Report (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1980), https://doi.org/10 .17226/19778. 7. The late former director of the State Energy Office for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Lewis Smith, discussed job figures in an interview with Efraín O’Neill-Carrillo for his publication, Una nueva AEE. 8. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps; and Chapman, “Petrochemicals and Economic Development.” 9. Chapman, “Petrochemicals and Economic Development.” 10. Chapman, “Petrochemicals and Economic Development,” 408. 11. Neftalí García-Martínez, Tania García-Ramos, and Ana Rivera-Rivera, “Puerto Rico: Economic and Environmental Overview,” in Beyond Sun and Sand: Caribbean Environmentalisms, ed. Sherrie L. Baver and Barbara Lynch (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006). 12. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps. 13. García-Martínez, García-Ramos, and Rivera-Rivera, “Puerto Rico,” 173. 14. Environmental Protection Agency, RCRA Corrective Action: Environ-
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mental Indicator (EI) RCRAInfo code (CA725): Current Human Exposures Under Control, 2005, https://www3.epa.gov/region02/waste/corco725.pdf. 15. Pezzullo and Cox, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere. 16. Thank you to O’Neill-Carrillo for his insights and research to provide a nuanced historical account of the petrochemical industry in Puerto Rico. Javier Almeyda Loucil, “Un Balance Vital (CORCO 1976),” Biblioteca Virtual de Puerto Rico, August 30, 2016, https://bibliotecavirtualpr.wordpress.com/2016/08 /30/un-balance-vital-corco-1976.
Chapter Two. Experimenting Energies of Defense, Disease, Development, and Disaster 1. The “repeating island” concept draws from Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s literary work, which Thompson and Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva engage in their respective projects on island imperial formations. Thompson, “Heuristic Geographies,” 60; and Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva, “The Caribbean House of Mirrors: Constructing Regions in Area Studies,” Positions: Asia Critique, no. 1 (2021, forthcoming). 2. Thompson, “Heuristic Geographies.” 3. Lloréns and Stanchich, “Water Is Life,” 85. 4. Lloréns and Stanchich, 85. 5. Onís, “Fueling and Delinking.” 6. Reyes-Santos, Our Caribbean Kin. 7. Thompson, “Heuristic Geographies”; and Thompson, Imperial Archipelagoes. 8. My thanks to Vincent N. Pham for suggesting I engage the relationships shaping racial formations, experimentation, and coloniality, as well as for his other insightful comments on this chapter. Vincent N. Pham, “Our Foreign President Barack Obama: The Racial Logics of Birther Discourses,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 8, no. 2 (2015): 88, https:// doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2015.1025327. Pham draws on Molina’s How Race Is Made in America. 9. Thompson, Imperial Archipelago, 3. 10. Thompson, 2. 11. Thompson, 6. 12. Thompson, 135. Conceptualizing colonized places and peoples as a “problem” for empire is not unique to Puerto Rico. For example, US military officials confronted the “Korean problem,” a reference to the assumed inferiority of Korean people and culture that included a zeal for independence. Kwon, “Transcolonial Racial Formation,” 269. 13. Ivonne Acosta Lespier, La mordaza: Puerto Rico 1948–1957 (Rio Piedras, PR: Editorial Edil, Inc., 2008); Atiles-Osoria, “Environmental Colonialism, Criminalization and Resistance”; and Omar Marrero, “Radican recurso y exigen liberación de Giovanni Roberto, activista arrestado en Hato Rey,” Noticel, April
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30, 2020, https://www.noticel.com/ahora/la-calle/20200430/radican-recurso -y-exigen-liberacion-de-giovanni-roberto-activista-arrestado-en-hato-rey. 14. Morales, Fantasy Island. 15. LeBrón, “Puerto Rico and the Colonial Circuits of Policing,” 334. 16. LeBrón, 334. 17. Kent A. Ono, “Borders That Travel: Matters of the Figural Border,” in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexico Frontier, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 19–32. 18. This legal designation also creates both unification and division among Caribbean-based Puerto Ricans, Diaspo-Ricans living in the United States, and Haitian and Dominican migrants. Rivero, Tuning Out Blackness. 19. Onís, “Fueling and Delinking.” 20. Jorge Rodríguez Beruff, Strategy and Politics, Puerto Rico on the Eve of the Second World War (San Juan: La Editorial Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2007). 21. Venator Santiago, Puerto Rico and the Origins. 22. Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric”; Na’puti, “Oceanic Possibilities for Communication Studies”; and David Vine, “War and Forced Migration in the Indian Ocean: The US Military Base at Diego Garcia,” International Migration 42, no. 3 (September 2004): 111–143, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0020 -7985.2004.00291.x. 23. Vine, “War and Forced Migration.” 24. Mountz, “Political Geography II.” 25. David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 41. 26. Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps; and Richard D. Copaken, Target Culebra (San Juan: La Editorial Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2008). 27. Katherine T. McCaffrey, “The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Vieques, Puerto Rico,” in Environmental Justice in Latin America: Problems, Promise, and Practice, ed. David V. Carruthers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 264. 28. McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest. 29. Katherine T. McCaffrey and Sherrie Baver, “‘Ni una bomba mas’: Reframing the Vieques Struggle,” in Beyond Sun and Sand: Caribbean Environmentalisms, ed. Sherrie L. Baver and Barbara Lynch (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 109–30; and Almicar Antonio Barreto, Vieques, the Navy, and Puerto Rican Politics (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002). 30. Barreto, Vieques, the Navy, and Puerto Rican Politics, 1. 31. Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California, 2002). 32. Duany, Puerto Rican Nation on the Move, 3. 33. Barreto, Vieques, the Navy, and Puerto Rican Politics, xiii. 34. Portions of this narrative are derived from Onís, “‘Pa’ que tú lo sepas.’” 35. McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest, 160–161.
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36. Chisolm, Chisholm, & Kilpatrick, “Beyond Vietnam: Other Military Areas Where Agent Orange Was Used,” May 9, 2017, https://cck-law.com/blog /beyond-vietnam-other-military-areas-where-agent-orange-was-used. 37. Chisolm, Chisholm, & Kilpatrick, “Beyond Vietnam”; and Patricia Kime, “New List of Agent Orange Test and Storage Sites Omits More Than 40 Previously Identified Locations,” Military Times, January 30, 2020, https://www .militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/01/30/new-list-of-agent-orange -test-and-storage-sites-omits-more-than-40-previously-identified-locations. This website archives Agent Orange-contaminated sites: https://www.vetshq.com /herbicide-tests-usage-storage-outside-vietnam. 38. McCaffrey, “Struggle for Environmental Justice.” 39. Marie Cruz Soto, “In Vieques, Life amid Devastation,” NACLA Report on the Americas 50, no. 2 (June 2018): 160–62, https://doi.org/10.1080/10714839 .2018.1479472. 40. McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest. 41. McCaffrey, “Struggle for Environmental Justice.” 42. John Wargo, Green Intelligence: Creating Environments That Protect Human Health (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 43. McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest. 44. Dennis Abner, “Pain and Profit: COVID-19 Profiteers in Puerto Rico,” Hedge Clippers, July 30, 2020, http://hedgeclippers.org/pain-and-profit-covid-19 -profiteers-in-puerto-rico/?fbclid=IwAR2UJiUC0GXB8ver8I1b6AkEeTq_miwW nnCRIjWuVrEFTUfFB4Bn3suMnmE. 45. Thompson, Imperial Archipelago. 46. Susan E. Lederer, “‘Porto Ricochet’: Joking about Germs, Cancer, and Race Extermination in the 1930s,” American Literary History 14, no. 4 (2002): 720–46, www.jstor.org/stable/3568022, 721. 47. Lederer, “Porto Ricochet.” 48. Lederer, 733. 49. Douglas Starr, “Revisiting a 1930s Scandal, AACR to Rename a Prize,” Science 300 (April 25, 2003), 574. 50. Lederer, “Porto Ricochet,” 720. 51. Lederer, 720. 52. Starr, “Revisiting a 1930s Scandal,” 574. 53. A prestigious medical award, granted by the American Association of Cancer Research, no longer bears Rhoads’s name, after Puerto Rican biology professor Edwin Vázquez began circulating the doctor’s letter and petitioned the association to rename the award. Amid mounting public pressure, the association acquiesced. Starr, “Revisiting a 1930s Scandal,” 574; and Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York : Doubleday, 2006). 54. PROTECT, “About PROTECT,” Northeastern University, 2013, https:// web.northeastern.edu/protect/about-protect.
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55. Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 3, 6; Elena Gutiérrez, Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women’s Reproduction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 3; and Lugo-Ortiz, Tropiezos con la memoria. 56. Colón Rivera, Córdova Iturregui, and Córdova Iturregui, El proyecto de explotación minera; Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps, 62; Frank Bonilla and Ricardo Campos, “A Wealth of Poor: Puerto Ricans in the New Economic Order,” Daedalus 110, no. 2 (1981): 133, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024727; and Emilio Pantojas-García, Development Strategies as Ideology: Puerto Rico’s Export-Led Industrialization Experience (Río Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1990). 57. Lugo-Ortiz, Tropiezos con la memoria, 11. 58. Lloréns, Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family, xxiii; Onís, “Looking Both Ways”; and Kathleen M. de Onís, “Lost in Translation: Challenging (White, Monolingual Feminism’s) with Justicia Reproductiva,” Women’s Studies in Communication 38, no. 1 (2015): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409 .2014.989462. 59. Briggs, Reproducing Empire; and Lugo-Ortiz, Tropiezos con la memoria, 191. 60. Lugo-Ortiz, Tropiezos con la memoria; and Briggs, Reproducing Empire. 61. Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 90, and Lloréns, Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family, 35. 62. Edna Acosta-Belen, The Puerto Rican Woman: Perspectives on Culture, History, and Society (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1986). 63. Briggs, Reproducing Empire; and Lugo Ortiz, Tropiezos con la memoria. 64. Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 110. 65. Eithne Luibhéid, Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); and Acosta-Belen, Puerto Rican Woman. 66. Acosta-Belen, Puerto Rican Woman, 163. 67. Florita Z. Louis de Malave, “Sterilization of Puerto Rican Women: A Selected, Partially Annotated Bibliography,” Bibliographies in Gender and Women’s Studies 80 (Madison: University of Wisconsin System Office of the Gender and Women’s Studies Librarian, 1999) https://www.library.wisc.edu/gwslibrarian /bibliographies/sterilization. 68. Bonnie Uricuoli, Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2013), 42; and Lugo Ortiz, Tropiezos con la memoria. 69. Acosta-Belen, Puerto Rican Woman. State-directed eugenicist sterilization campaigns in the US have targeted Native American, Latina, African American, poor, and incarcerated women and other people who have posed a reproductive “threat” to making a “better” society, including individuals with disabilities. Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Matter, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 70. Lugo-Ortiz, Tropiezos con la memoria. 208
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71. Malave, “Sterilization of Puerto Rican Women.” 72. Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 144. 73. Iris López, Matters of Choice: Puerto Rican Women’s Struggle for Reproductive Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 16; and Morales, Fantasy Island. 74. Briggs, Reproducing Empire. 75. Briggs, Reproducing Empire; and Drew C. Pendergrass and Michelle Y. Raji, “The Bitter Pill: Harvard and the Dark History of Birth Control,” The Harvard Crimson, September 28, 2017, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/9/28 /the-bitter-pill. 76. Briggs, Reproducing Empire. 77. Lugo-Ortiz, Tropiezos con la memoria, 12, 13. 78. Briggs, Reproducing Empire; and Pendergrass and Raji, “Bitter Pill. 79. Briggs, Reproducing Empire. 80. Pendergrass and Raji, “Bitter Pill.” 81. Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 2. 82. Briggs, 110. 83. Uricuoli, Exposing Prejudice, 42. 84. Julia Conley, “Adding Insult to the ‘Injury of Colonialism,’ Trump Suggested Selling Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, Former Advisor Says,” Common Dreams, July 12, 2020, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07 /12/adding-insult-injury-colonialism-trump-suggested-selling-puerto-rico-after -hurricane. 85. Joaquín Villanueva and Marisol LeBrón, “Making Space for Decolonial Futures: An Editor’s Introduction,” special issue, Society and Space, February 25, 2020, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/making-space-for-decolonialfutures-an-editors-introduction. 86. Naomi Klein, The Battle for Paradise (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018); and Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Planet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). 87. Hilda Lloréns, “The Race of Disaster: Black Communities and the Crisis in Puerto Rico,” African American Intellectual History Society, April 17, 2019, https://www.aaihs.org/the-race-of-disaster-black-communities-and-the-crisis-in -puerto-rico; and Lloréns and Stanchich, “Water Is Life.” 88. Rivera, “Disaster Colonialism.” 89. Park and Pellow, Slums of Aspen. 90. Kate Aronoff, “Armed Federal Agents Enter Warehouse in Puerto Rico to Seize Hoarded Electric Equipment,” The Intercept, January 10, 2018, https:// theintercept.com/2018/01/10/puerto-rico-electricity-prepa-hurricane-maria. 91. Evan Wilt, “Something’s Fishy in Puerto Rico,” World, November 2, 2017, https://world.wng.org/content/something_s_fishy_in_puerto_rico. 92. Morales, Fantasy Island. 93. Jake Johnson, “Warnings of ‘Disaster Capitalism’ and Privatization Emerge in Puerto Rico,” Common Dreams, October 27, 2017, https:// No t e s t o C h a p t e r T wo
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www.commondreams.org/news/2017/10/27/warnings-disaster-capitalism-and -privatization-emerge-puerto-rico. 94. Andrew J. Hawkins, “Elon Musk Offers to Rebuild Puerto Rico’s Power Grid Using Solar,” The Verge, October 6, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017 /10/6/16438054/elon-musk-puerto-ricosolar-power-tesla. 95. Adele Peters, “Can Puerto Rico be the Model for a Renewables-Powered Energy System?” Fast Company, November 7, 2017, https://www.fastcompany .com/40490241/can-puertorico-be-the-model-for-a-renewables-powered-energy -system. 96. Daniella Cheslow, “Puerto Rico Welcomes Solar: An Interview with San Juan Mayor Yulín Cruz,” PV Magazine, December 20, 2017, https://pv-magazine -usa.com/2017/12/20/puerto-rico-welcomes-solar-an-interview-with-san-juan -mayor-yulin-cruz. 97. Daily Show, “Ricardo Rosselló: Building a Stronger and Better Puerto Rico Post-Maria,” April 25, 2018, http://www.cc.com/video-clips/1aymgr/the -daily-show-with-trevornoah-ricardo-rossello---building-a-stronger-and-better -puerto-rico-post-maria---extendedinterview. 98. Daily Show, “Ricardo Rosselló.” 99. Puerto Rico became a hotbed for this virtual currency, as ultra rich advocates, such as Brock Pierce, flocked to their Caribbean “Puertopia” to evade taxes and to maximize their blockchain profits. This form of decentralized monetary exchange relies on digital mining that requires an enormous amount of electricity to power computers, pointing both to the energy-crypto nexus and the need to critique uncritical calls for decentralized relations. Jingming Li et al., “Energy Consumption of Cryptocurrency Mining: A Study of Electricity Consumption in Mining Cryptocurrencies,” Energy 168, no. 1 (2019): 161, https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2018.11.046; Nellie Bowles, “Making a Crypto Utopia in Puerto Rico,” New York Times, February 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes .com/2018/02/02/technology/cryptocurrency-puerto-rico.html; and Blythe Sheldon, “Crypto-Bros Beware: These Artists Aren’t Buying Your Version of Utopia,” KQED, January 28, 2019, https://www.kqed.org/arts/13849586/crypto-bros -eternal-boy-playground-anxious-to-make. 100. Yarimar Bonilla, “For Investors, Puerto Rico Is a Fantasy Blank Slate,” The Nation, February 28, 2018, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/for -investors-puerto-rico-is-a-fantasy-blank-slate. 101. Bonilla, “For Investors.” Rosselló made similar comments at other events, including at the Skift Forum in September 2018. This think tank is dedicated to advancing the global travel deals of wealthy investors. Villanueva and LeBrón, “Making Space for Decolonial Futures.” 102. José Atiles finds three forms of corruption and anticorruption in Puerto Rico: “1) colonial corruption and anticorruption policies implemented by the US government in PR; 2) corruption as a form of governmentality, and the Puerto Rican government’s anticorruption policies that focus on petty corruption, while ignoring the corruption of the powerful; 3) and decolonial approaches to corrup210
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tion and/or the Puerto Rican Summer of 2019 as forms of decolonial justice.” This second point delves into “anticorruption corruption,” whereby the territorial government cracked down on particular actions while maintaining its corrupt dealings, which helps to explain proposed resource giveaways. For fraud and other actions, five members of Rosselló’s administration were arrested for alleged federal offenses. José Atiles, “One of the Most Corrupt Places on Earth: Colonialism, (Anti)Corruption, and the Puerto Rican Summer of 2019,” special issue, Society and Space, February 25, 2020, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles /one-of-the-most-corrupt-places-on-earth-colonialism-anti-corruption-and-the -puerto-rican-summer-of-2019. 103. Andrew Cockburn, “Puerto Rico,” National Geographic, March 2003, para. 35, http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0303/feature2/fulltext.html; and Pedro Garcia, “Multinationals Plan Massive Mining Operations,” Multinational Monitor 4, no. 3 (March 1983), https://www.multinationalmonitor.org /hyper/issues/1983/03/garcia.html. 104. Onís, Lloréns, and Santiago, “¡Ustedes tienen que limpiar las cenizas e irse de Puerto Rico para siempre!” 105. Ayeza Díaz Rolón, “Voz de alerta por cambio en uso de suelo,” El Vocero, September 25, 2020, https://www.elvocero.com/gobierno/voz-de-alerta-porcambio-en-uso-de-suelos/article_abfc5600-fed9-11ea-9381-5314bcaa1150.html?fb clid=IwAR3ssdpyFlxl6Kv2sFRr_aXtEw8dSyNjIAbinLl-_ki58-5fSLumnf Vl1jA; and Ayuda Legal Puerto Rico, “Luz verde a Zonas de Oportunidad,” October 27, 2020, https://www.ayudalegalpuertorico.org/2020/10/27/luz-verde-a-zonas-de -oportunidad. 106. According to Bullard, these zones “share two common characteristics: they already have more than their share of environmental problems and polluting industries, and they are still attracting new polluters.” Bullard, Confronting Environmental Racism, 12. 107. Joel Cintrón Arbasetti, “Puerto Rico with a Big ‘Menu’ for Opportunity Zones,” Caribbean Business, March 8, 2019, https://caribbeanbusiness.com/puerto -rico-with-a-big-menu-for-opportunity-zones. 108. Arbasetti, “Puerto Rico.” 109. This figure of how much food people produce and consume in Puerto Rico does not include food cultivation on “rescued lands, public areas, or the liminal spaces between dwellings. . . . This is because these food items never enter the market as commodities. Rather, they circulate within informal or extended kin networks.” Garriga-López, “Puerto Rico,” 184. By the time of the US takeover, Puerto Rico was almost food independent, which quickly changed after the shift in colonial powers. For more on food, see Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps; Lloréns and Stanchich, “Water Is Life”; and scholarship by Carlos G. García-Quijano. 110. Though this industry does provide some jobs, the positions tend to be seasonal and have schedules that prevent many employees from seeking other forms of employment because of contractual constraints. Berman Santana, KickNo t e s t o C h a p t e r T wo
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ing Off the Bootstraps; and Carmelo Ruiz Marrero, Balada transgénica: Biotechnología, globalización y el choque de paradigmas (Colombia: Proyecto de Bioseguridad, Impreso por Panamericana Formas e Impresos S.A., 2005). 111. Onís, “Pa’ que tú lo sepas”; Endres, “Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism”; and Na’puti, “From Guahån and Back.” 112. Sociedad Geológica de Puerto Rico, “Significant Earthquakes in the Puerto Rico Zone,” http://redsismica.uprm.edu/english/Info/sisnotas_sig.php; and Onís, Lloréns, and Santiago, “Puerto Rico’s Seismic Shocks.” 113. Pérez-Lugo revealed this problem in an email to INESI collaborators. New Energy, “3rd Puerto Rico Grid Revitalization Forum,” Events. http:// newenergyevents.com/pr-grid. 114. Yannick Marshall, “An Appeal—Bring the Maroon to the Foreground in Black Intellectual History,” African American Intellectual History Society, June 19, 2020, https://www.aaihs.org/an-appeal-bring-the-maroon-to-the-foreground -in-black-intellectual-history. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten also discuss fugitivity via the undercommons. 115. Atiles-Osoria, “One of the Most Corrupt Places.” 116. O’Neill-Carrillo et al., “Community Energy Projects,” 45. 117. Peter Crimmins, “Princeton University Hosts Artists, Scholars from Puerto Rico,” WHYY, August 2, 2018, https://whyy.org/segments/princeton -university-hosts-artists-scholars-from-puerto-rico; and Erin Bourque, “During ‘Rebuilding in Puerto Rico’ Webinar, Experts Explore Role of Universities in Advancing Community Resilience,” Global Resilience Institute, May 24, 2018, https://globalresilience.northeastern.edu/2018/05/during-rebuilding-in-puerto-rico -webinar-experts-explore-role-of-universities-in-advancing-community-resilience. 118. Glorimar Muñoz Berly, “La Escuela Domingo Massol: el nuevo coloso solar de Adjuntas,” Periodico Perla del Sur, February 19, 2020, https://www .periodicolaperla.com/la-escuela-domingo-massol-el-nuevo-coloso-solar-de -adjuntas; and Casa Pueblo, https://casapueblo.org. 119. The publication is accessible at Casa Pueblo, https://casapueblo.org/index .php/adjuntas-pueblo-solar-ano1-num1. 120. Efraín O’Neill-Carrillo, Ruth Santiago, Zuleyka Méndez, Hugo Vega, Joshua Mussa, and Javier Rentas, “Capstone Design Projects as Foundation for a Solar Community,” Proceedings of the 47th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (Indianapolis: IEEE, 2017), 1–9. 121. Onís, “Fueling and Delinking.”
Chapter Three. Gener ating Methane Metaphors to Fuel and Fight Extr activism 1. Enron once owned EcoEléctrica, before the company transitioned to Edison’s ownership and now is a subsidiary of Gas Natural Fenosa (Spain). 212
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2. Some argue the well-worn bridge-fuel trope may be losing its force. Certain industry energy actors increasingly position fracked gas as a foundation for powering humanity’s energy needs. This rhetorical move shifts understandings from a transitional frame to one that constitutes this methane powerhouse as the entire energy system’s indispensable support for the foreseeable future. Jessica Lutz, “Don’t Call Natural Gas a Bridge Fuel,” Energy of Tomorrow Blog, American Petroleum Institute, June 27, 2018, https://www.api.org/news-policy-andissues/blog/2018/06/27/dont-call-natural-gas-a-bridge-fuel. 3. This generating focus finds inspiration in the following essays: Peter Simonson, “Reinventing Invention, Again,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 4 (2014): 299–322, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2014.938862; Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Afterword: Decentralizing and Regenerating the Field,” in Text+Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method, ed. Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 177–88; and Constance Gordon, Phaedra C. Pezzullo, and Michelle Gabrielloff-Parish, “Food Justice Advocacy Tours: Remapping Rooted, Regenerative Relationships through Denver’s ‘Planting Just Seeds,’” in The Rhetoric of Social Movements: Networks, Power, and New Media, ed. Nathan Crick (New York: Routledge, 2021), 299–316. 4. Onís, “For Many in Puerto Rico”; and Schneider and Peeples, “Energy Covenant.” 5. The White House, “President Donald J. Trump Is Unleashing Energy Dominance,” May 14, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements /president-donald-j-trump-unleashing-american-energy-dominance; and Danielle Garrand, “Energy Department Refers to Natural Gas as ‘Freedom Gas’ in Press Release,” CBS News, May 29, 2019, https://www.cbsnews.com/news /freedom-gas-us-energy-department-refers-to-natural-gas-as-freedom-gas-in-new -press-release. 6. Matthew Brown, “Oil from Federal Lands Tops 1B Barrels as Trump Eases Rules,” Pittsburgh Post Gazette, February 11, 2020, https://www.post-gazette.com /news/2020/02/11/Oil-from-federal-lands-tops-1B-barrels-as-Trump-eases-rules /stories/202002110171. 7. Jeff Brady, “Biden Order Blocks Keystone XL Pipeline,” NPR, January 20, 2021, https://www.npr.org/sections/inauguration-day-live-updates/2021/01 /20/958823085/biden-order-blocks-keystone-xl-pipeline. 8. Marianne Lavelle, “Trump EPA Tries Again to Roll Back Methane Rules for Oil and Gas Industry,” Inside Climate News, August 30, 2019, https:// insideclimatenews.org/news/29082019/methane-regulation-oil-gas-storage-pipe lines-epa-rollback-trump-wheeler. 9. Prior to these deregulation efforts, the fracking industry already benefited from several corporate loopholes, including exemptions from the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Superfund Act. Sandra Steingraber, Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2011). No t e s t o C h a p t e r T h r e e
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10. Emily Holden, “Trump Dismantles Environmental Regulations under Coronavirus Cover,” The Guardian, May 11, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com /us-news/2020/may/10/trump-environmental-blitzkrieg-coronavirus; and Nadja Popovich, Livia Albeck-Ripka, and Kendra Pierre-Louis, “The Trump Administration Is Reversing 100 Environmental Rules. Here’s the Full List,” New York Times, May 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump -environment-rollbacks.html. 11. Marianne Lavelle, “Besieged by Protestors Demanding Racial Justice, Trump Signs Order Waiving Environmental Safeguards,” Inside Climate News, June 5, 2020, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05062020/trump-pipeline-sign -amid-racial-justice-coronavirus. 12. Madelon L. Finkel and Adam Law, “The Rush to Drill for Natural Gas: A Public Health Cautionary Tale,” American Journal of Public Health 101, no. 5 (2011): 784, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2010.300089; Stefan Schwietzke et al., “Upward Revision of Global Fossil Fuel Methane Emissions Based on Isotope Database,” Nature 538, no. 7623 (October 6, 2016): 88–91; Environmental Defense Fund, “Permian Map,” https://www.permianmap.org; and Anthony R. Ingraffea, Paul A. Wawrzynek, Renee Santoro, and Martin Wells, “Reported Methane Emissions from Active Oil and Gas Wells in Pennsylvania, 2014–2018,” Environmental Science & Technology, April 9, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.0c00863. 13. Ramón A. Alvarez et al., “Assessment of Methane Emissions from the U.S. Oil and Gas Supply Chain,” Science 361, no. 6398 (July 13, 2018):186–88, https:// doi.org/10.1126/science.aar7204; Ingraffea, Wawrzynek, Santoro, and Wells, “Reported Methane Emissions from Active Oil and Gas Wells in Pennsylvania”; and Bruce Robertson, Is the Gas Industry Facing Its Volkswagen Moment?: Gas Is More Emissions Intensive Than the Gas Industry’s Marketing Arm Suggests, IEEFA, March 2020, https://ieefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Is-the-Gas-Industry -Facing-its-Volkswagen-Moment_March-2020.pdf. 14. Jessica Smartt Gullion, Fracking the Neighborhood: Reluctant Activists and Natural Gas Drilling (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 15. Gullion, Fracking the Neighborhood, 44. 16. Ryan Cooper, “America Needs to Stop Its Natural Gas Pipeline Mania,” The Week, February 10, 2020, https://theweek.com/articles/882813/america-needs -stop-natural-gas-pipeline-mania. 17. Matt Kelso, “Pipeline Incidents Continue to Impact Residents,” FrackTracker Alliance, December 7, 2018, https://www.fractracker.org/2018/12/pipeline -incidents-impact-residents. 18. Onís, Lloréns, and Santiago, “Puerto Rico’s Seismic Shocks.” 19. Finkel and Law, “Rush to Drill”; and Steingraber, Raising Elijah. 20. Oleg Vukmanovic and Edward McAllister, “Exclusive: World Buyers Line Up to Buy U.S. Natural Gas,” Reuters, January 24, 2014, para. 5, https:// www.reuters.com/article/us-lng-sales/exclusive-world-buyers-line-up-to-buy-u-s -natural-gas-idUSBREA0N0XS20140124. 21. US Energy Information Administration, “Growth in Domestic Natural 214
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Gas Production Leads to Development of LNG Export Terminals,” March 4, 2016, http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=25232. 22. Jillian Ambrose, “America’s Fracking Boom Flounders as Global Prices and Demand Collapse,” The Guardian, April 25, 2020, https://www.theguardian .com/business/2020/apr/25/fracking-america-boom-founders-prices-demand -collapse-covid-19. 23. Clifford Krauss, “Natural Gas Exports Slow as Pandemic Reduces Global Demand,” New York Times, May 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05 /11/business/energy-environment/natural-gas-exports-coronavirus.html; Jamison Cocklin, “U.S. LNG Projects Driving Long-Term Global Supply Contracts,” Natural Gas Intel, November 20, 2019, https://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles /120264-us-lng-projects-driving-long-term-global-supply-contracts; and Stephen Stapczynski and Anna Shiryaevskaya, “U.S. LNG Cancellations Swell with Storage Space Vanishing,” Bloomberg, May 21, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com /news/articles/2020-05-21/u-s-lng-export-cancellations-swell-with-storage-space -vanishing. 24. During the pandemic, the EPA extended and expanded previous determinations to waive enforcement of clean air protections, prompting several energy actors in Puerto Rico to raise concerns. In a May 2020 letter, addressed to a coalition of petitioners, an EPA official explained the decision not to hold PREPA accountable for reporting requirements related to Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, fuel consumption and analysis, and combustion engines for fossil fuel burning plants in the earthquake aftermath. Despite requests from petitioners, the letter explained that no public hearings were possible, given that the state of exception required to address these energy issues advanced the “public interest.” 25. Atiles-Osoria, “Environmental Colonialism,” 16. 26. This executive order created the Energy Affairs Administration. 27. Atiles-Osoria, “Environmental Colonialism.” 28. Atiles-Osoria. 29. Atiles-Osoria. In spring 2017, the local legislature approved several penal code amendments that severely curtailed protestor rights, coinciding with increased mobilizations against the fiscal control board. These changes particularly disciplined resistance actions at the University of Puerto Rico. The amendments make it “a crime to impede services or access at educational institutions, create protest art on public spaces, or hide one’s face during ‘the commission of a crime,’ such as an unsanctioned protest.” LeBrón, “Puerto Rico,” 334. A 2020 study documents the criminalization of environmental activists globally, via imprisonment, physical violence, and murder, revealing these experiences are far from unique to Puerto Rico. E360 Digest, “Environmental Activists Worldwide Face High Risk of Criminalization and Violence, Report Finds,” Yale Environment 360, June 11, 2020, https//e360.yale.edu/digest/environmental-activists -worldwide-face-high-risk-of-criminalization-and-violence-report-finds. 30. I describe this controversy in Catalina M. de Onís, “‘Es una lucha doble’: Articulating Environmental Nationalism in Puerto Rico,” in Racial Ecologies, ed. No t e s t o C h a p t e r T h r e e
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LeiLani Nishime and Kim D. Hester-Williams (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), 185–204. 31. The precautionary principle states that if some action (or inaction) carries a potential risk of harm, actors should exercise prudence and caution with proceeding and perhaps abandon that option or approach all together. Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (New York: Random House, 2010). 32. G. Delgado Esquilín, “Consideran el gasoducto Vía Verde el próximo Vieques,” Mi Puerto Rico Verde, May 2, 2011, www.miprv.com/sera-el-gasoducto -via-verde-el-proximo-vieques. 33. Onís, “Pa’ que tú lo sepas.” 34. Atiles-Osoria, “Environmental Colonialism.” 35. In Puerto Rico, the environmental movement stems from and is influenced by proindependence histories and ideology, resulting in co-constitutive struggles. Political nationalism is “based on the doctrine that every people should have its own sovereign government,” while cultural nationalism is “based on the assertion of the moral and spiritual autonomy of each people.” Cultural nationalism includes celebrating cultural heritage sites, language, food, and historical heroes. Duany, Puerto Rican Nation on the Move, 5. 36. Gustavo A. García López, Irina Velicu, and Giacomo D’Alisa, “Performing Counter-Hegemonic Common(s) Senses: Rearticulating Democracy, Community and Forests in Puerto Rico,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 3 (2017): 88–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2017.1321026. 37. Alexis Massol-González, “Ten Commentaries from Casa Pueblo, Puerto Rico,” letter to Colonel Alfred Pantano of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, January 30, 2012, http://www.miprv.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/CASAPUEBLO -ComentariosUSACE-30-enero-2012.pdf. 38. In addition to intentional confrontations with police in civil disobedient acts, Casa Pueblo members’ decades-long struggles have brought substantial risks to their personal well-being and safety, with heavy surveillance, including some arrests, over the years. Onís, “Es una lucha doble”; and Brown, “Energy Insurrection.” 39. Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, PREPA’s Transformation: A Path to Sustainability, June 1, 2015, http://www.gdb-pur.com/documents/PREPA RecoveryPlan6-1-15.pdf. 40. Excelerate Energy is owned by George B. Kaiser, one of the hundred wealthiest people in the world. Forbes, “#61 George Kaiser,” November 18, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/profile/george-kaiser; and Excelerate Energy, “Aguirre Offshore GasPort,” http://excelerateenergy.com/project/aguirre-offshore -gas port-2. 41. Onís, Lloréns, and Santiago, “Puerto Rico’s Seismic Shocks.” 42. Excelerate Energy’s website is http://excelerateenergy.com. I contend that this corporation contributes to and is shaped by the same discourse employed by
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other fossil fuel companies, namely Shell, ExxonMobil, and EcoEléctrica, which I have studied elsewhere. 43. A US Coast Guard study finds that about 30 percent of family income in the area comes from fishing. However, other studies report that all community members rely on these harvests in one form or another. 44. Ruth Santiago, letter to José Pérez, January 2, 2014. 45. García Quijano has published extensively on fishers and local ecological knowledge in southeastern Puerto Rico: Carlos G. García-Quijano, “Fishers’ Knowledge of Marine Species Assemblages: Bridging between Local and Scientific Knowledge in Southeastern Puerto Rico,” American Anthropologist 109, no. 3 (2007): 529–36, www.jstor.org/stable/4496726; Carlos G. Garcia-Quijano, John Poggie, Ana Pitchon, and Miguel Del Pozo, “Investigating Coastal Resource Use, Quality of Life, and Well-Being in Southeastern Puerto Rico,” Anthropology News (March 2012) 6–7; and Carlos G. García-Quijano, “Managing Complexity: Ecological Knowledge and Success in Puerto Rican Small-Scale Fisheries,” Human Organization 68, no. 1 (2009): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.17730/humo .68.1.y360v537406k6311. 46. I document this experience in a previously published essay: Onís, “Pa’ que tú lo sepas.” 47. Duane Morris LLP, “Re: Aguirre Offshore GasPort, LLC, Docket No. CP13-193-000 Updated Response to Question G-3 of June 5, 2013 Environmental Information Request,” letter to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, September 29, 2014. 48. Onís, “Pa’ que tú lo sepas”; and Onís, “Lost in Translation.” 49. Prior to this conversation, I informally chatted with two FERC representatives. We spoke about the role of the commission in translating the environmental impact statement into Spanish, as well as how many copies would be needed, to make the text accessible to local community members. (FERC officials ultimately translated the document into Spanish and disseminated it to local residents in August 2014.) The FERC representatives also reflected on potentially missing interested Spanish speakers at past community meetings because their sign-up sheets were in English. They concluded that this information presentation likely caused few attendees to check the box to receive a Spanish version of the environmental impact statement for the AOGP. 50. Puerto Rico Energy Commission, Final Resolution and Order on the First Integrated Plan of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, case no. CEPRAP-2015-0002, San Juan, PR, September 23, 2016, https://energia.pr.gov/wp -content/uploads/sites/7/2016/09/23-sept-2016-Final-Resolution-and-Order-IRP -CEPR-AP-2015-0002.pdf. 51. Puerto Rico Energy Commission, Reply Testimony of Gregory Rivera-Chico, on behalf of PREPA in response to Aguirre Site Economic Analysis, case no. CEPRAP-2017-0001, June 21, 2017, 5. 52. Puerto Rico Energy Bureau, Local Environmental Organizations’ Legal
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Brief, in response to Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority Integrated Resource Plan, case no. CEPR-AP-2018-0001, March 6, 2020. 53. Martin Geidl, Gaudenz Koeppel, Patrick Favre-Perrod, Bernd Klöckl, Göran Andersson, and Klaus Fröhlich, “The Energy Hub—A Powerful Concept for Future Energy Systems,” in proceedings of the Third Annual Carnegie Mellon Conference on the Electricity Industry (Pittsburgh: March 13–14, 2007), 2–3. 54. Brown, “Energy Insurrection.” 55. Kate Aronoff, “Top Republican Plans to Use Fossil Fuels to Make Puerto Rico ‘the Energy Hub of the Entire Caribbean,’” The Intercept, May 5, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/05/05/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-natural-gas/; and Onís, “Fueling and Delinking.” 56. Massol-Deyá, “Energy Uprising,” 304. 57. Massol-Deyá, 307. 58. Brentin Mock, “No, Puerto Rico’s New Climate-Change Law Is Not a ‘Green New Deal,’” City Lab, April 22, 2019, https://www.citylab.com/environ ment/2019/04/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-renewable-energy-green-new-deal /587311. 59. Frank Rusco, “Puerto Rico Electricity Grid Recovery: Better Information and Enhanced Coordination Is Needed to Address Challenges,” Government Accountability Office, October 8, 2019, https://www.gao.gov/reports/GAO -20-141/#fnref45. 60. Brown, “Energy Insurrection.” 61. Santiago, Onís, and Lloréns, “Powering Life in Puerto Rico.” 62. Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, “Governor Rosselló Signs Public Energy Policy Law,” April 11, 2019, http://www.aafaf.pr.gov/assets/pr-gov -rossello-signs-public-energy-policy-law.pdf; Puerto Rico Energy Bureau, “Integrated Resource Plan,” http://energia.pr.gov/en/integrated-resource-plan/; and Santiago, Onís, and Lloréns, “Powering Life in Puerto Rico.” 63. Puerto Rico Energy Bureau, Local Environmental Organizations’ Legal Brief, in response to Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority Integrated Resource Plan, case no. CEPR-AP-2018-0001, March 6, 2020. 64. Alianza Energía Renovable Ahora, https://aerapr.com. This collective is composed of numerous grassroots and other groups, including the Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y Riego, IDEBAJO, Comité Diálogo Ambiental, El Puente: Enlace Latino de Acción Climática, CAMBIO PR, Sierra Club Puerto Rico, Campamento Contra las Cenizas de Carbón en Peñuelas, Amigos del Río Guaynabo, Coalición de Organizaciones Anti-Incineración, Comité Yabucoeño Pro-Calidad de Vida, Alianza Comunitaria Ambientalista del Sureste, Mayagüezanos por la Salud y el Ambiente, and Earthjustice. 65. Queremos Sol, https://www.queremossolpr.com. 66. IEEFA, “Puerto Rico Update: Queremos Sol Coalition Calls for Adopting Decentralized and Renewables-Based Energy Plan,” November 20, 2019,
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https://ieefa.org/puerto-rico-update-queremos-sol-coalition-calls-for-adopting -decentralized-and-renewables-based-energy-plan. 67. Weekly Journal, “Natural Gas Plans in PREPA’s Integrated Resources Plan Lambasted,” September 1, 2020, https://www.theweeklyjournal.com /politics/natural-gas-plans-in-prepas-integrated-resources-plan-lambasted/article _900d147a-ec82-11ea-9cff-63a992372fad.html?fbclid=IwAR1FRXqrPnN2l7JbtIyh g1w OB7Ip3fUJFiC9J-HYtD2J40OjeObO7jZ5kjY. 68. US Energy Information Administration, “Puerto Rico.” 69. Fajardo, “Confidential Report.” 70. Megan Fernandez, “Study: Hawaii Has the Highest Electricity Prices in the Country,” Pacific Business News, July 3, 2019, https://www.bizjournals.com /pacific/news/2019/07/03/study-hawaii-has-the-highest-elec.html. 71. Tom Sanzillo, “IEEFA Puerto Rico: PREPA Debt Deal Hurts Consumers, Dodges Underlying Crisis,” Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, December 19, 2019, https://ieefa.org/ieefa-puerto-rico-prepa-debt-deal -hurts-consumers-dodges-underlying-crisis. 72. Sanzillo, “IEEFA Puerto Rico: PREPA.” 73. Kate Aronoff, “Is Puerto Rico about to Give Another Terrible Energy Contract to an American Company?” New Republic, June 2, 2020, https://newrepublic .com/article/157880/puerto-rico-give-another-terrible-energy-contract-american -company; and Ruth Santiago, Catalina M. de Onís, Kenji Cataldo, and Hilda Lloréns, “A Disastrous Methane Gas Scheme Threatens Puerto Rico’s Energy Future,” NACLA, June 4, 2020, https://nacla.org/news/2020/06/04/methane-gas -scheme-puerto-rico-energy. 74. Gerardo E. Alvarado León, “AEE mantiene viva la contratación de generadores temporales ‘por si acaso,’” El Nuevo Día, June 2, 2020, https://www .elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/nota/aeemantienevivalacontrataciondegenerad orestemporalesporsiacaso-2573026. 75. Lionel E. Orama Exclusa, “Generación sin Costa Sur,” Noticel, January 30, 2020, https://www.noticel.com/gobierno/ahora/english/inteligencia-social /opiniones/top-stories/20200131/generacion-sin-costa-sur. 76. Adalberto Torres Gonzalez, “AEE gastará $70 millones mensuales en alquiler de generadores para Costa Sur,” Radio Isla, March 6, 2020, https://radioisla.tv/aeeopta-por-gastar-70-millones-en-alquiler-de-generadores-para-costa-sur. 77. Yaritza Rivera Clemente, “Cerca acuerdo entre AEE y FEMA,” El Vocero, May 22, 2020, https://www.elvocero.com/gobierno/cerca-acuerdo-entre-aee -y-fema/article_a02d6908-9bca-11ea-990a-4bf219feb164.amp.html#referrer=https %3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s. 78. Geraldo E. Alvarado León, “AEE paga $225,975 por alquiler de vagones en Costa Sur,” El Nuevo Día, June 5, 2020, https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias /locales/notas/aee-paga-225975-por-alquiler-de-vagones-en-costa-sur. 79. Alvarado León, “AEE mantiene viva la contratación de generadores temporales ‘por si acaso.’” 80. Michelle Kantrow-Vázquez, “New Fortress Energy Shortlisted for PREPA No t e s t o C h a p t e r T h r e e
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Temporary Power-Generation Bid,” News Is My Business, May 7, 2020, https:// newsismybusiness.com/new-fortress-energy-short-listed-for-prepa-temporary -power-generation-bid. 81. These New Fortress Energy webpages frame their mission and projects: “LNG 101: introduction to liquefied natural gas,” https://www.newfortressenergy .com/stories/lng-101-introduction-liquefied-natural-gas; and “Our ship has come in—to San Juan,” https://www.newfortressenergy.com/stories/our-ship-has-come -san-juan. New Fortress Energy and Excelerate Energy are not alone in their enactments of energy coloniality. El Coquí and Taíno are two LNG tankers that have navigated the route between Jacksonville, Florida and Puerto Rico. Respectively, these ships are named after an endangered tree frog and the Indigenous peoples of Borikén. This appropriated naming connects a violent past with present exploitation in this latest iteration of energy coloniality, providing material forms of macabre relationalities, as the tanker names link multiple species’ extermination with dead fossils and remains. The grave consequences of changing energy sources without transforming underlying, root power dynamics promises to expand past iterations of energy coloniality and energy privilege. I described these concerns in a spring 2019 news media interview: Steve Horn, “Push to Reverse Obscure Shipping Law Could Flood Puerto Rico with Fracked Gas,” Real News Network, March 29, 2019, https://therealnews.com/columns/push-to -reverse-obscure-shipping-law-could-flood-puerto-rico-with-fracked-gas. 82. LNG World News, “New Fortress Energy to Convert San Juan Plant to Natural Gas,” Offshore Energy Biz, March 7, 2019, https://www.offshore-energy .biz/new-fortress-energy-to-convert-san-juan-plant-to-natural-gas. 83. Eric Wolff, “FERC Cites Environmental Justice, Jurisdictional Issues in Nixing Natural Gas Projects,” Politico Pro, January 19, 2021, https://subscriber .politicopro.com/sustainability/whiteboard/2021/01/ferc-cites-environmental -justice-jurisdictional-issues-in-nixing-natural-gas-projects-3986425. 84. Tom Sanzillo, “IEEFA Puerto Rico: FERC Orders New Fortress Energy to Explain Lack of Permission for San Juan LNG Facility,” Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, June 22, 2020, https://ieefa.org/ieefa-puerto -rico-ferc-orders-new-fortress-energy-to-explain-lack-of-permission-for-san-juan -lng-facility. 85. Ann Henson Feltgen and Dan Christensen, “Fortress Forgave Huge Trump Loan, Got Federal Permits to Transport LNG by Rail,” Florida Bull Dog, September 17, 2020, https://www.floridabulldog.org/2020/09/fortress-forgave -huge-trump-loan-got-us-permits-transport-lng-rail. 86. Gerardo E. Alvarado León, “AEE contrata como consultor a exgobernador de Nueva Jersey por $28,750 mensuales,” El Nuevo Día, June 11, 2020, https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/notas/aee-contrata-como-consultor -a-exgobernador-de-nueva-jersey-por-28750-mensuales. 87. Capitol Forum, “New Fortress Energy: Company Appears to Be Running Afoul of Jones Act, Experts Say; and Compliance Will Increase Shipping Costs,” Capitol Forum 8, no. 336 (September 25, 2020), 1–5. 220
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88. Rivera Clemente, “Cerca acuerdo entre AEE y FEMA”; and Metro Puerto Rico, “Denuncian que fincas solares serán más caras,” May 25, 2020, https:// www.metro.pr/pr/noticias/2020/05/25/denuncian-que-fincas-solares-seran-mas -caras.html. 89. LeMenager, Living Oil, 66. 90. Sze, Fantasy Islands, 71. 91. Wanzer-Serrano, New York Young Lords, 21; Castro-Sotomayor, “Emplacing Climate Change,” Onís, “Lost in Translation”; Stacey K. Sowards, “#RhetoricSoEnglishOnly: Decolonizing Rhetorical Studies through Multilingualism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 477–83, https://doi.org/10.1080 /00335630.2019.1669891; and Ana Celia Zentella, “Latina/o Languages and Identities,” in Latinos: Remaking America, ed. Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and Mariela Páez (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 321–28. 92. Santiago, Onís, and Lloréns, “Powering Life in Puerto Rico.” 93. Resilient Power PR, “One Year Later,” Blog, September 20, 2018, https:// resilientpowerpr.org/blog/2018/9/20/one-year-later. 94. José Juan Terrasa-Soler and Daniela Lloveras-Marxuach, “Community Power as Provocation: Local Control for Resilience and Equity,” Scenario Journal 07: Power, December 2019, https://scenariojournal.com/article/community-power. 95. Brooke Anderson, and Jovanna García Soto, “Protesta y propuesta: Lessons from Just Transformation, Ecological Justice, and the Fight for Self-Determination in Puerto Rico,” Grassroots International, 31, https://grassrootsonline.org/wp -content/uploads/2020/01/grassroots-mg-puerto-rico-report-web-feb2020.pdf.
Routes/Roots/R aíces III Epigraph is from Sara McKinnon et al., “Rhetoric and Ethics Revisited: What Happens When Rhetorical Scholars Go into the Field,” Cultural Studies ←→ Critical Methodologies (2016): 3, https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616659080. 1. SpanishDict, s.v., “revolú,” June 28, 2020, http://www.spanishdict.com /translate/revolu. 2. AJ Vicens, “After the Hurricane, Puerto Rico’s Suicide Rates Spike,” Mother Jones, February 12, 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/02 /after-the-hurricane-puerto-ricos-suicide-rates-spike; and Dean Russell and Jamie Smith Hopkins, “Disasters Are Driving a Mental Health Crisis,” Center for Public Integrity, August 25, 2020, https://publicintegrity.org/environment/hidden -epidemics/disasters-mental-health-crisis-wildfire-hurricane-flood-climate-covid. 3. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”; and Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies. 4. RISE Conference 2019. National Council for Science and the Environment. University of Albany, Albany, NY, November 18–20, 2019, https://www .albany.edu/rise2019/home.html.
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Chapter Four. (Re)wiring Coalitions for R adical Tr ansformations 1. Adrian Florido, “After Months without Power, A Puerto Rico Town Strings Its Own Lines,” NPR, January 19, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/01/19/579196353 /after-four-months-without-power-a-puerto-rico-town-strings-its-own-lines. 2. David Ferris, “Puerto Rico’s Crusader Electrician,” E&E News, March 22, 2018, https://www.eenews.net/special_reports/in_the_dark/stories/1060077137. 3. Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines, 2–3. 4. Carrillo Rowe, 1. 5. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 81. 6. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies. 7. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics, 8; and María Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 8. Marina Sitrin, “Ruptures in Imagination: Horizontalism, Autogestión, and Affective Politics in Argentina,” Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review 5 (Autumn 2017), 43–53, https://www.developmenteducationreview .com/issue/issue-5/ruptures-imagination-horizontalism-autogestion-and-affective -politics-argentina. 9. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics. 10. Carrillo Rowe and Chávez also take up this grid metaphor in their respective studies and cite Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 11. Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: The Fraying Wires between Americans and Our Energy Future (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 54. 12. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 166. 13. Ahmed, 166; and Stacey K. Sowards, “Bordering through Place/s, Difference/s, and Language/s: Intersections of Border and Feminist Theories,” Women’s Studies in Communication 42, no. 2 (2019): 120–24, https://doi.org/10 .1080/07491409.2019.1605131. 14. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 162. Ahmed focuses on queer experiences with this feminist practice. 15. Bakke, The Grid, 39; and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 16. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics, 131. 17. Angela Aguayo, “The Bodies That Push the Buttons Matter,” Enculturation, 23 (2016), http://enculturation.net/the-bodies-that-push-the-buttons-matter. 18. Onís, “Pa’ que tu lo sepas.” 19. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics, 8. 20. This e-advocacy concept first appeared in Pezzullo and Onís, “Rethinking Rhetorical Field Methods on a Precarious Planet.” I developed this concept and practice by conjoining Chávez’s “e-participation” with Aaron Hess’s “participant
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advocacy.” Chávez, Queer Migration Politics, 116; and Aaron Hess, “Critical-Rhetorical Ethnography: Rethinking the Place and Process of Rhetoric,” Communication Studies 62, no. 2 (2011): 142. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2011.529750. 21. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Contextualizing Boycotts and Buycotts: The Impure Politics of Consumer-Based Advocacy in an Age of Global Ecological Crises,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (2011): 124–45, https://doi .org/10.1080/14791420.2011.566276. 22. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism. 23. Shannon Speed, “At the Crossroads of Human Rights and Anthropology: Toward a Critically Engaged Activist Research,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (2006): 66–76, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2006.108.1.66. 24. Garriga-López, “Puerto Rico.” 25. Garriga-López, 176–77. 26. Garriga-López makes a similar claim. 27. Catalina de Onís, “Puerto Rican Energy Researchers Excluded from Island’s Energy Transition Deliberations,” Latino Rebels, October 16, 2017, https:// www.latinorebels.com/2017/10/16/puerto-rican-energy-researchers-excluded-from -islands-energy-transition-deliberations. 28. Integral network partners have been individuals affiliated with Arizona State University, University of Minnesota, University at Buffalo, Tufts University, Northeastern University, Northwestern University, and Harvard University, among others. INESI, “RISE 2019 Conference: Transforming University Engagement in Pre- and Post-Disaster Environments: Lessons from Puerto Rico,” https:// inesi.upr.edu/event/rise-2019-conference-transforming-university-engagement-in -pre-and-post-disaster-environments-lessons-from-puerto-rico. 29. National Council for Science and the Environment, “RISE 2019,” November 2019, https://www.albany.edu/rise2019/home.html. 30. Less than a year after María made landfall, about forty diasporic- and archipelago-based organizations contributed thousands of dollars to IDEBAJO, including several foundations and university- and school-affiliated contributions. 31. Facebook visitors can access the Oregon in Solidarity with Puerto Rico page: https://www.facebook.com/solidaritywithpuertorico. 32. The university system tends to devalue advocacy work that exceeds “traditional” research, evident in publication expectations and in the absence of tangible support. McKinnon et al., “Rhetoric and Ethics Revisited”; and Megan Ybarra, “On Becoming a Latinx Geographies Killjoy,” Society and Space, January 23, 2019, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/on-becoming-a-latinx -geographies-killjoy. 33. When YouCaring shifted platforms to GoFundMe, the company removed IDEBAJO-specific fundraiser pages. YouCaring + GoFundMe, https://www .youcaring.com/comitedialogoambientalycoquisolar-739871. Scholars for Puerto Rico, including Marisol Negrón, prepared and posted this fundraising resource: https://www.facebook.com/ASAStuComm/posts/please-share-and-repostdear -colleagues-going-to-the-american-studies-association/1671136919603074. No t e s t o C h a p t e r Fou r
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34. Víctor Alvarado Guzmán, “Comité Diálogo Ambiental recibe $125,000 para apoyar campaña por la justicia ambiental en la Bahía de Jobos,” El Patriota del Sur (blog), April 7, 2020, https://elpatriotadelsur.blogspot.com/2020/04/comitedialogo-ambiental-recibe-125000.html?f bclid=IwAR3dq7bPLm_Od9iYGui R6jd1yy87K1kXvoDdDCsuvUbTp-qCCQgksKqW8Kc. 35. Andy Myers, “Announcing the 2020 Rural Cinema Cohort,” Working Films, April 2020, https://www.workingfilms.org/announcing-the-2020-rural -cinema-cohort. 36. KMUZ radio shows include “Willamette Wake Up 11/01/2017— Linking Oregon and Puerto Rico in Hurricane Maria Aftermath,” https:// kmuz.org/willamette-wake-up-11012017-linking-oregon-and-puerto-rico-in-hurri cane-maria-aftermath, and “Willamette Wake Up 12/6/2017—Supporting Recovery Efforts in the Caribbean with Local Group Oregon in Solidarity with Puerto Rico,” https://kmuz.org/willamette-wake-up-12-6-2017-supporting-recovery -efforts-in-the-caribbean-with-local-group-oregon-in-solidarity-with-puerto-rico. 37. In addition to https://elpoderdelpueblo.com, many of these collaborative efforts are documented on my personal website: https://catalinadeonis.com. 38. The Spanish-language presentation is available on YouTube: https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=Y8Qkg6JSIjI&feature=youtu.be. 39. Lloréns and Santiago, “Women Lead Puerto Rico’s Recovery.” 40. Ilan Zvi Baron et al., “Flipping the Academic Conference, or How We Wrote a Peer-Reviewed Journal Article in a Day,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 45, no. 1 (2020): 3–19, https://doi.org/10.1177/0304375419898577; and Richa Nagar et al., “Feminisms, Collaborations, Friendships: A Conversation,” Feminist Studies 42, no. 2 (2016): 502–19, https://doi.org/10.15767/feministstudies .42.2.0502. 41. O’Neill-Carrillo et al., “Advancing a Sustainable Energy Ethics.” 42. Rocío Zambrana, “Black Feminist Tactics: On the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción’s Politics without Guarantees,” special issue, Society and Space, February 25, 2020, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/black-feminist-tactics -on-la-colectiva-feminista-en-construccions-politics-without-guarantees. 43. Reyes-Santos, Our Caribbean Kin, 9. 44. Reyes-Santos engaged in several advocacy efforts, including writing an op-ed in her local newspaper to evince connections between Oregon and Puerto Rico. Alaí Reyes-Santos, “Why Oregon Should Care about Puerto Rico,” Register-Guard, September 28, 2017, https://www.registerguard.com/article/20170928 /OPINION/309289944. Reyes-Santos also created an oral history project with her ethnic studies students at the University of Oregon, based on class interviews in Puerto Rico following Hurricane María. Notably, in this archive, she included student research in the form of a timeline consisting of typhoons in the Pacific and US governmental responses, which points to possibilities for drawing connections between diverse islands and archipelagoes. UO Puerto Rico Project, Hurricane María and Its Aftermath (blog), https://blogs.uoregon.edu /theuopuertoricoproject; and Alaí Reyes-Santos, “Natural Disasters in U.S. Ter224
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ritories in the Pacific: A Timeline,” Hurricane María and Its Aftermath (blog), UO Puerto Rico Project, February 2, 2018, https://blogs.uoregon.edu/theuopuertorico project/2018/02/02/natural-disasters-in-u-s-territories-in-the-pacific-a-timeline. 45. Reyes-Santos, Our Caribbean Kin. 46. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Caribe Two Ways: Cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico (San Juan, PR: Callejón, 2003); and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, “A Caribbean Confederation? Cultural Representations of Cuban and Dominican Migrations to Puerto Rico,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 3, no. 1 (2001): 93–110, www.jstor.org/stable/40986116. 47. Rodríguez-Silva, “Caribbean House of Mirrors,” 6–7. 48. Rodríguez-Silva, 7. 49. Hilda Lloréns, “Racialization Works Differently Here in Puerto Rico, Do Not Bring Your U.S.-Centric Ideas about Race Here,” African American Intellectual History Society, March 3, 2020, https://www.aaihs.org/racialization -works-differently-here-in-puerto-rico-do-not-bring-your-u-s-centric-ideas-about -race-here. 50. Na’puti, “Oceanic Possibilities for Communication Studies.” 51. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, “What I Know about the Ocean: We Need Ocean Justice,” Sierra Magazine, December 12, 2020, https://www.sierraclub .org/sierra/future-oceans-environmental-justice-climate-change. Excerpted content for Johnson’s article is derived from her contribution to the anthology Black Futures, edited by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham. 52. Johnson, “What I Know about the Ocean.” 53. Caronan, Legitimizing Empire; Thompson, Imperial Archipelago; and Morales, Fantasy Island. 54. Tiara R. Na’puti and Judy Rohrer, “Pacific Moves beyond Colonialism: A Conversation from Hawai‘i and Guåhan,” Feminist Studies, 43, no. 3 (2017): 537– 47, https://doi.org/10.15767/feminist studies.43.3.0537. 55. Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric,” 14. 56. Forty-four member states compose AOSIS. Puerto Rico is an observer, given its liminal status. AOSIS, “About Us,” 2019, https://www.aosis.org/about; and Global Island Partnership, 2019, https://www.glispa.org. 57. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. 58. Kwon, “Transcolonial Racial Formation.” 59. Kwon, 274. Kwon cites Molina, How Race Is Made in America.
Routes/Roots/R aíces IV 1. Peter J. Mumby et al., “Mangroves Enhance the Biomass of Coral Reef Fish Communities in the Caribbean,” Nature 427, no. 6974 (2004): 533–36, https:// doi.org/10.1038/nature02286; and Manuel Valdés-Pizzini, Carlos G. García-Quijano, and Michelle T. Schärer-Umpierre, “Connecting Humans and Ecosystems
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in Tropical Fisheries: Social Sciences and the Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean,” Caribbean Studies 40, no. 2 (2012): 95–128, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41917605. 2. Beth A. Polidoro et al., “The Loss of Species: Mangrove Extinction Risk and Geographic Areas of Global Concern,” PLoS ONE 5, no. 4 (2010): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010095. 3. Lloréns and García-Quijano, “From Extractive Agriculture”; and GarcíaQuijano et al., “Investigating Coastal Resource Use.” 4. Carlos G. García-Quijano and John J. Poggie, “Coastal Resource Foraging, the Culture of Coastal Livelihoods, and Human Well-Being in Southeastern Puerto Rico: Consensus, Consonance, and Some Implications for Coastal Policy,” Maritime Studies 19 (2020): 53–65, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40152-019-00144 -3; and Polidoro et al., “Loss of Species.” 5. Lloréns and García-Quijano, “From Extractive Agriculture.” 6. Hilda Lloréns and Ruth Santiago, “Women Lead Puerto Rico’s Recovery,” NACLA Report on the Americas 50, no. 4 (2018): 398–403, https://doi.org/10.1080 /10714839.2018.1550985; and Voces del Sur, “Jóvenes de Salinas toman talleres de sobrevivencia a eventos naturales,” July 29, 2018, https://vocesdelsurpr.com/2018 /07/jovenes-de-salinas-toman-talleres-de-sobrevivencia-a-eventos-naturales. 7. Colón Zayas shared the transcribed Spanish lyrics with me, which are a remix of his live performance.
(No) Conclusion. Delinking for Energy Justice Epigraph is from an interview conducted by Onís with Juan Rosario on June 13, 2014, in Puerto Rico. 1. NOVA, “Puerto Rico Moves Forward: Innovative Energy Solutions after Hurricane Maria,” produced by Mike Rivera, featuring Juan Rosario, Efraín O’Neill-Carrillo, and Arturo Massol-Deyá, aired in 2018 on PBS, https://youtu .be/-1hPfmCbeGA. 2. Global Ministries, “AMANASER 2025,” https://www.globalministries.org /lac_partners_amaneser_2025?fbclid=IwAR3l6ufSenke-D0iXBPQj94ISP_uBx -UbJMZAjhC2N79c-6usk3Xl7gcJ2k. 3. Lloréns Vélez, “Senate Panel Downplays.” 4. Dimitri Lascaris, “Puerto Rico’s Government Was Warned Climate Catastrophe Was Coming, But Didn’t Listen,” Real News, March 20, 2019, https:// the realnews.com/stories/puerto-ricos-government-was-warned-climate -cata strophe-was-coming-but-didnt-listen. 5. Plutocrats who fund and benefit lucratively from an extractive economy also are aware of the importance of dreams and what is in people’s heads and hearts. For example, in a twisted echo of Rosario’s excerpt, one of the spokespeople for the Koch brothers’ now-defunct Fueling US Forward claimed the group 226
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needed to ask “How do we start winning hearts and minds?” On its website, the organization explained that it sought to tell everyday stories about how oil and gas fuel the good life. Hiroko Tabuchi, “Sensing Gains Ahead under Trump, the Kochs Court Minorities,” New York Times, January 5, 2017, https://www .nytimes.com/2017/01/05/business/energy-environment/koch-brothers-fossil-fuels -minorities.html. 6. Wanzer-Serrano, New York Young Lords, 27. 7. Wanzer-Serrano, 11; and Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2007): 449–514, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162647. 8. Wanzer-Serrano, 11. 9. Wanzer-Serrano, 25. 10. Wanzer-Serrano, 25 11. Ayeza Díaz Rolón, “Se distancia de estudio sobre cenizas,” El Vocero, January 1, 2019, https://www.elvocero.com/gobierno/se-distancia-de-estudio-sobre -cenizas/article_0aa79bae-2120-11e9-a551-ff064f68d26d.html; Alfonso, “Viven y juegan entre el arsénico de las cenizas de AES”; Jason Rodríguez Grafal, “Acuífero del Sur: Retrocede la única fuente de agua potable de 30 mil sureños,” Periódico la Perla, May 29, 2019, https://www.periodicolaperla.com/acuifero-del -sur-retrocede-la-unica-fuente-de-agua-potable-de-30-mil-surenos1; and Víctor Alvarado Guzmán, “La historia detrás del sueldazo de la alcaldesa de Salinas,” El Patriota del Sur (blog), November 19, 2018, http://elpatriotadelsur.blogspot .com/2018/11/la-historia-detras-del-sueldazo-de-la.html?q=La+historia+detrás+del +sueldazo+de+la+alcaldesa+de+Salinas. 12. O’Neill-Carrillo et al., “Community Energy Projects in the Caribbean.” 13. Primera Hora, “Critican impuesto al sol que entraría en vigor el año próximo,” Primera Hora, October 29. 2019, https://www.primerahora.com/noticias /gobierno-politica/notas/critican-impuesto-al-sol-que-entraria-en-vigor-el-ano -proximo. 14. Táíwò, “How a Green New Deal.” 15. Roberto Cantoni, “Unattainable Proximity. A Case Study of Solar Power in Central Burkina Faso,” Center for Development Research, University of Bonn, January 15, 2020, https://www.zef.de/media-center/events/details.html?contact= &tx_news_pi1%5Bnews%5D=4034&cHash=cb195005a4c27e3ee29a4302b414b518. 16. Tom Perreault, “Bolivia’s High Stakes Lithium Gamble,” NACLA Report on the Americas 52, no. 2 (2020): 165–172, https://doi.org/10.1080/10714839 .2020.1768739. 17. Panagioti Tsolkas, “One of the Largest Solar Power Companies in the U.S. Has Ties to Prison Slave Labor,” Prison Legal News, December 30, 2015, https:// www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2015/dec/30/one-largest-solar-power-companies -us-has-ties-prison-slave-labor; and Pellow, What Is Critical Environmental Justice? 18. Mock, “Puerto Rico’s New Climate-Change Law.” 19. This reference to limits draws on Pezzullo’s foregrounding of ecological finitude and its relationship to communication and culture. Phaedra C. Pezzullo,
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“‘There Is No Planet B’: Questions during a Power Shift,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (2013): 4, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2013.806161. 20. Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria, and Giorgos Kallis, eds., Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era (New York: Routledge, 2015); and Degrowth.info, “A Degrowth Perspective on the Coronavirus,” March 19, 2020, https://www .degrowth.info/en/2020/03/a-degrowth-perspective-on-the-coronavirus-crisis. 21. Efraín O’Neill-Carrillo et al., “Stakeholder Perspectives on Increasing Electric Power Infrastructure Integrity” (paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Tampa, FL, June 2019), https://www.jee.org/33280. 22. Mock, “Puerto Rico’s New Climate-Change Law.” 23. This discourse of utility-scale installations also shapes the energy present and future of the Bahamas. Before Hurricane Dorian, the Bahamas already was receiving utility-scale installations as part of a progress narrative. Chester Robards, “The Bahamas’ First Utility-Scale Photovoltaic Plant Officially Opens,” Nassau Guardian, March 19, 2019, https://thenassauguardian.com/2019/03/19/the -bahamas-first-utility-scale-photovoltaic-plant-officially-opens. 24. For microgrid research in Puerto Rico, consult Sergio Alzate-Drada, Karen Montano-Martinez, and Fabio Andrade, “Energy Management System for a Residential Microgrid in a Power Hardware-in-the-Loop Platform,” in 2019 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (Atlanta, GA: IEEE, 2019), 1–5. 25. A full review of Puerto Rico’s energy policy history is beyond the scope of this conclusion. For an excellent discussion, consult O’Neill-Carrillo and RiveraQuiñones, “Energy Policies.” 26. State Innovation Exchange, “Shared Renewables,” January 14, 2017, https://stateinnovation.org/issue/climate-change. 27. O’Neill-Carrillo et al., “Community Energy Projects.” 47. 28. Environmental Protection Agency, “Distributed Generation of Electricity and Its Environmental Impacts,” March 13, 2018, https://www.epa.gov/energy /distributed-generation-electricity-and-its-environmental-impacts. 29. Atiles Osoria, “Environmental Colonialism.” 30. Thank you to O’Neill-Carrillo for outlining this problem in one of our conversations. 31. Consider the problems with the decentralized virtual cryptocurrency, described in chapter 2. Also, for several decades, China had decentralized coal plant permitting based on state incentivizing. This arrangement led many provincial governments to build unneeded coal plants in the hope of achieving economic growth, until the federal government overturned the rule in 2016. Daniel Oberhaus, “China Is Still Building an Insane Number of New Coal Plants,” Wired, November 27, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-still-building -an-insane-number-of-new-coal-plants. 32. Mock, “Puerto Rico’s New Climate-Change Law.” 33. Marcel J. Castro-Sitiriche, Household Emergency Preparedness: Decentralized Community Power for Puerto Rico, Native Power Research Group, http://bit .ly/CHoLES; Castro-Sitiriche, Gomez, and Cintrón, “Longest Power Blackout”; 228
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and Alexis Kwasinski et al., “Hurricane Maria Effects on Puerto Rico Electric Power Infrastructure,” IEEE Power and Energy Technology Systems Journal 6, no. 1 (March 2019): 85–94, http://bit.ly/mariaPOWER. 34. RISE Network, “Can Distributed Solar Advance a Just and Sustainable Energy Transition for Communities in Puerto Rico?” Virtual panel, December 17, 2020, cohemis.uprm.edu/solar2020/index.html; and Agustín A. IrizarryRivera, José A. Colucci-Ríos, and Efraín O’Neill-Carrillo, Achievable Renewable Energy Targets for Puerto Rico’s Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard (Mayagüez: University of Puerto Rico, 2009). https:// bibliotecalegalambiental.files.wordpress .com/2013/12/achievable-renewable-energy-targets-fo-p-r.pdf. 35. Meghan Mooney, Katy Waechter, and Clark Miller, “Puerto Rico Solar-forAll: LMI PV Rooftop Technical Potential and Solar Savings Potential,” National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 2020, https://data.nrel.gov/submissions/144. 36. Feldpausch-Parker et al., Energy Democracy. 37. Feldpausch-Parker et al., 4. 38. Feldpausch-Parker et al., 6. 39. Jason Chilvers and Helen Pallett, “Energy Democracies and Publics in the Making: A Relational Agenda for Research and Practice,” Frontiers in Communication 3 (2018): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00014; reprinted in Feldpausch-Parker et al., Energy Democracy. 40. Julian Agyeman, Robert D. Bullard, and Bob Evans, Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 41. Lemir Teron and Susan S. Ekoh, “Energy Democracy and the City: Evaluating the Practice and Potential of Municipal Sustainability Planning,” Frontiers in Communication, February 27, 2018, https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00008. 42. Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012); and Pellow, What Is Critical Environmental Justice. 43. Wanzer-Serrano, New York Young Lords, 182. 44. Wanzer-Serrano, 179. 45. Wanzer-Serrano, 177. 46. The Puerto Rican legislature’s undemocratic creation and passage of the May 2020 revised Civil Code epitomizes these obstacles. Though these civil laws, first crafted in the 1930s, required a major update, the secrecy surrounding their development illuminates power abuses. On June 1, 2020, former governor Wanda Vázquez Garced signed the Civil Code, which carries wide-ranging consequences for property owners’ installation of wind and solar systems; transgender individuals, who would have to have an annotation added to their birth certificates for any changes; and many other topics, all without public input. Javier Colón Dávila, “30 puntos claves del Código Civil aprobado por el Senado,” El Nuevo Día, May 12, 2020, https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/politica/notas/30-puntos-claves -del-codigo-civil-aprobado-por-el-senado. 47. US Department of Energy, “Community and Shared Solar,” Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, 2020, https://www.energy.gov/eere No t e s t o (No) Conc lus ion
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/solar/community-and-shared-solar. Several Puerto Rican engineers focus their research on experimenting with microgrid energy management systems to advance solar communities. Alzate-Drada, Montano-Martinez, and Andrade, “Energy Management System,” 1–5. 48. Thank you to Santiago and O’Neill-Carrillo for sharing their perspectives to inform this argument. 49. Old Dominion Electric Cooperative is one such case. This northeastern US collaboration relies on coal and methane gas, while also drawing some power from renewables in what it calls “environmentally balanced electricity.” In 2018 the cooperative built and now co-operates a gas plant. Old Dominion Electric Cooperative, “Generation and Transmission,” 2020, https://www.odec .com/generation-transmission-overview. 50. Boyer, Energopolitics; and Powell, Landscapes of Power. 51. Boyer, Energopolitics, 16, 130. 52. Paula M. L. Moya, “‘Against the Sorrowful and Infinite Solitude’: Environmental Consciousness and Streetwalker Theorizing in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them,” in Latinx Environmentalisms, ed. Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jacquette Ray (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019), 254. 53. Massol-Deyá, “Energy Uprising”; and Brown, “Energy Insurrection.” 54. Bakke, The Grid. 55. Frederik Nebeker, Dawn of the Electronic Age: Electrical Technologies in the Shaping of the Modern World, 1914 to 1945 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009), 8; and Bakke, The Grid. 56. Bakke, The Grid. 57. Onís, “Fueling and Delinking.” 58. Marisol LeBrón, “Where Were You When We Were Being Killed: How Puerto Rican Feminists Help Us Understand Policing and State Violence,” Society and Space, October 1, 2020, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles /where-were-you-when-we-were-being-killed-how-puerto-rican-feminists-help -us-understand-policing-and-state-violence?fbclid=IwAR2dBPpxPnX9lOApY3z VyiyhnfQlBalFX7aLwoRnJa_5xwukahoIYiwTdv0. 59. Zambrana, “Black Feminist Tactics.” As Colectiva members reported on their Facebook page, between March and May 2020, attackers murdered at least five people who were transgender in Puerto Rico. 60. Quoted in Onís, “Fueling and Delinking.” 61. Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, Facebook, https://www.facebook .com/Colectiva.Feminista.PR/posts/2169118313179888. 62. LeBrón, “Where Were You When We Were Being Killed.” 63. García-Quijano and Lloréns, “#RickyLeaks.” 64. Zambrana, “Black Feminist Tactics.” 65. Julio Ricardo Varela, “A Drive-Through Protest Demanding for More COVID-19 Tests Happened Wednesday Morning in Puerto Rico,” Latino Rebels, April 16, 2020, https://www.latinorebels.com/2020/04/15/drivethroughprotest. 230
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66. Varela, “Drive-Through Protest.” 67. Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, “Anti-Racist Manifesto.” 68. Colectiva Feminista en Construcción. 69. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization 1 (2012): 1–40, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article /view/18630. 70. Bernadette Marie Calafell and Fernando P. Delgado, “Reading Latina/o Images: Interrogating Americanos,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, no. 1 (2004): 7, https://doi.org/10.1080/0739318042000184370. 71. Daniel Nina, “Guam promueve la independencia en foro de territorios de EE.UU.,” El Post Antillano, March 7, 2020, https://www.elpostantillano .net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=24534:daniel-nina-sp -740575686&catid=294&Itemid=1003. 72. Amy Goodman, “A Tremendous Jump for Progressive Forces”: Puerto Rico Election Signals End of Two-Party Dominance, Democracy Now!, November 11, 2020, https://www.democracynow.org/2020/11/11/puerto_rico_election; Luis Fernando Coss, “Puerto Rico 2021: A Shift in Perspective, A New Opposition,” NACLA, December 1, 2020 https://nacla.org/news/2020/12/01/puerto-ricoelections-new-opposition?fbclid=IwAR2yH0p8Q6-S3M1RcfmIMpy2CeLPCgkc cZd995x00JngGQlBpbG-nHMO3UM; and Pedro Cabán, “Puerto Rico’s Statehood Movement Is on the Verge of Collapsing (OPINION),” December 15, 2020, https://www.latinorebels.com/2020/12/15/statehoodmovementcollapsing/?fbclid =IwAR0UmdcvgX1faM3DkqeQOCpSa7qAdxTqf9Fwb48VemEX8fg8kO8W4M ijGxE. 73. El Nuevo Día, “Presidente del Sierra Club acusa a Trump de ‘jugar a la política’ con los fondos de María, El Nuevo Día, September 19, 2020, https:// www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/notas/presidente-del-sierra-club-acusa -a-trump-de-jugar-a-la-politica-con-los-fondos-de-maria; The White House, “Statement from the Press Secretary on the Largest FEMA Infrastructure Grants Being Awarded to Puerto Rico,” Whitehouse.gov, September 18, 2020, https:// www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-largestfema-infrastructure-grants-awarded-puerto-rico/; and Víctor Alvarado Guzmán and Ruth Santiago, open letter to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Comité Diálogo Ambiental, September 23, 2020: 1–4. 74. Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean. 75. Lloréns and Santiago, “Traveling on Coal’s Death Route.” 76. Ricardo Cortés-Chico, “Wanda Vázquez firma la ley que prohíbe el depósito de cenizas de carbón,” El Nuevo Día, January 2, 2020, https://www .elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/nota/wandavazquezfirmaleyqueprohibeeldepos itodecenizasdecarbon-2538437. 77. Iniciativa de Ecodesarrollo de Bahía de Jobos, Facebook, https:// www.facebook.com/idebajo.idebajo/posts/desde-el-2016-al-2019-seguimos-con struyendo-solidaridad-desde-el-amor-y-la-entre/2624066274346096. 78. Gabriela Ortiz Diaz, “Coquí Solar camina conscientemente hacia la indeNo t e s t o (No) Conc lus ion
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abolition, 142, 194n132 accent, 21, 118, 155 Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 91, 103, 119, 177 AES Corporation, ix, x, 2, 7, 8, 52, 111, 112, 114, 123, 124, 160, 172, 173, 202n92. See also coal ash; coal disposal African-/Afro-descendant peoples, 4, 8, 11, 22, 30, 31, 39, 40, 42, 43, 55, 83, 142, 143, 146, 150, 152, 170, 187n53, 194n132, 208n69. See also Black/Blackness; slavery agency (human), 13, 24, 38, 58–60, 130, 166 agency (organization), xvi, 44, 100, 107–9, 164, 172, 199n53 Aguirre, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 22, 43, 46, 106, 137, 147, 148, 156, 199n54. See also Aguirre Electric Power Complex; Central Aguirre Aguirre Electric Power Complex, 46, 104, 148, 160, 182n10. See also Aguirre, Puerto Rico Aguirre Offshore GasPort (AOGP), xvi, 25, 98, 104–9, 117, 217n49. See also liquefied “natural” gas; methane gas Ahmed, Sara, 54, 129, 130, 203n97, 222n5, 222n12, 222n13, 222n14 Alba Acevedo, Luz del, 200n68 Albizu Campos, Pedro, 78 Alcoff, Linda Martín, 23, 195n137 Alfonso, Omar, 7, 184n28, 227n11
Alliance for Sustainable Resources Management (AMANESER), xvi, 151, 178 Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), xvi, 145 Alvarado Guzmán, Víctor, 2, 8, 139, 140, 173, 184n27, 224n34, 227n11, 231n73 Alvarado León, Geraldo E., 183n20, 201n75, 219n74, 219n78, 219n79, 220n86 amplifying, vii, 1, 4, 5, 10, 65, 66, 113, 138, 141, 145, 148, 153, 154, 169 Andrade, Fabio, 228n24, 230n47 ánimo, 9, 156, 185 Antilles/Antillean(s), xviii (map), 5, 34, 69, 97, 121, 122, 135, 142–44. See also Caribbean archipelago(es), xviii (map), 3, 4, 6, 8, 12–18, 20–26, 29, 34, 37, 39, 43–45, 48, 53–55, 59–61, 68–75, 77, 79–83, 85, 88–90, 97–99, 102, 109–11, 116, 118–22, 126, 128, 129, 133–36, 138, 141, 143–45, 150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 159, 161, 164–66, 170, 171, 175, 176, 178, 189n70, 190n76, 190n77, 191n92, 194n127, 223n30, 224n44. See also archipelago(es) of power; Island archipelago(es) of power, 4, 12–14, 23, 24, 26, 37, 53, 61, 68, 72, 75, 90, 98, 99, 109, 116, 119, 128, 129, 135, 141, 142, 144, 145, 150, 153–55, 156, 175, 176, 189n70 Arecibo, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 51, 102, 110 Aronoff, Kate, 209n90, 218n55, 219n73
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Bsumek, Pete K., 187n56, 195n140 Buescher, Derek T., 192n105 Bullard, Robert, 1, 46, 199n56, 211n106, 229n40
Arroyo, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 7, 43 Asen, Robert, 185n35, 190–91n84, 213n3 Atiles-Osoria, José, 90, 188n59, 189n64, 205n13, 210–11n102, 212n115, 215n25, 215n27, 215n28, 215n29, 216n34, 228n29 austerity, 5, 7, 87, 168, 171. See also debt autogestión [autonomous organizing], 1, 129. See also mutual support
Cacho, Lisa Marie, 163, 196n4, 229n42 Calafell, Bernadette Marie, 12, 189n61, 231n70 capitalism: disaster, 83, 182n11; green, 25, 84, 85; predatory, 25, 70, 83; racial, 5, 7, 19, 22, 69, 70, 163, 182n11; vulture, 50, 202n87 capitalist production, 42, 44, 55, 146 Caribbean, 21, 33, 42, 64, 78, 97, 105, 106, 110, 111, 133, 142–44, 167, 190n76, 198n26, 206n18, 210n99. See also Antilles/Antillean(s) Caronan, Faye, 40, 181–82n9, 197n18, 197n19, 225n53 Carrillo Rowe, Aimee, 18, 127, 191n94, 192n106, 222n3, 222n4, 222n10 Casa Comunitaria de Medios, 148, 149, 177. See also media/film production Casa Pueblo, 91, 103, 119, 177, 193n117, 212n119, 216n38. See also Adjuntas, Puerto Rico Castro-Sitiriche, Marcel J., 111, 162, 182n15, 182n16, 228n33 Castro-Sotomayor, José, 4, 181n8, 187n57, 194n131, 221n91 Cataño, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 46 Center for a New Economy, 49, 158, 178 Central Aguirre, 46, 104, 199n54. See also Aguirre, Puerto Rico; sugar(cane) Centro de Periodismo Investigativo [Center for Investigative Journalism], 149, 178 Chávez, Karma R., 19, 120, 129, 130, 185n35, 186–87n51, 190–91n84, 193n118, 213n3, 222n7, 222n9, 222n10, 222n16, 222n19, 222–23n20, 232n79 Cisneros, Josue David, 184n26, 192n105 citizen(ship), xvi, 43, 45, 69–73, 103, 164, 178, 179 Ciudadanos en Defensa del Ambiente (CEDDA), xvi, 51, 164, 178 climate change/chaos/disruption, 5, 7, 11, 14, 39, 54, 56, 71, 87, 115, 118, 131, 141,
Baerga, José Luís “Chema,” 139, 148 Bakke, Gretchen, 222n11, 222n15, 230n54, 230n55, 230n56 Barnett, Joshua Trey, 186n43 Barrio Eléctrico, 177 Battery Energy Storage Systems, 118 Baver, Sherrie, 198n29, 204n11, 206n29 Beckles, Hilary, 198n26, 198n28 Berman Santana, Déborah, 46, 188n59, 192n100, 194n133, 197n8, 197n21, 198n35, 199n44, 199n52, 199n54, 199n55, 199n58, 200n62, 200n70, 203n98, 204n4, 204n8, 204n12, 206n26, 208n56, 211n109, 211n110 Betances, Ramón Emeterio, 142 birth control, 80, 81. See also reproductive in/justice Black/Blackness: anti-, 3, 11, 31, 42, 43, 55, 70, 90, 100, 141, 143, 166, 167, 169, 186n50, 187n51. See also African-/ Afro-descendant peoples Black feminism, 141, 166, 167. See also feminism blackout (electricity), 6, 162, 182n10 blank canvas/slate, 69, 83, 84, 86, 88–91 Boiling Nuclear Superheater (BONUS), 46, 200n60. See also nuclear Bonilla, Yarimar, 182n16, 191n97, 192n108, 197n11, 210n100, 210n101 border(s), 16, 18, 45, 46, 71, 142, 145, 169, 192n108 Boyer, Dominic, 189n64, 230n50, 230n51 Briggs, Laura, 80, 206n31, 208n55, 208n59, 208n60, 208n61, 208n63, 208n64, 209n72, 209n74, 209n75, 209n76, 209n78, 209n79, 209n81, 209n82 Brown, Alleen, 181n3, 216n38, 218n54, 218n60, 230n53 268
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I n de x
145, 146, 148, 152, 161, 179. See also greenhouse gas emissions climate in/justice, 11, 17, 38, 55, 144, 148, 164, 177, 203n104 coal ash, 7, 8, 51, 52, 123, 124, 137, 156, 157, 172, 173. See also AES Corporation coal disposal, 7, 124. See also AES Corporation coalition(s), viii, 4, 9, 12, 20, 21, 23, 25, 39, 46, 73–75, 103, 109, 121, 122, 125, 126, 128–32, 135, 136, 139, 141–45, 155, 164, 175, 176, 178, 215n24 Cobra Acquisitions, LLC, 84 Colectiva Feminista en Construcción [Feminist Collective in Construction], x, xiv, 167–70, 178. See also Black feminism collaborator(s) [colaborador(es)], 5, 10, 22, 23, 59, 64, 65, 91–93, 113, 120, 121, 124, 125, 131, 132, 135–39, 141, 161, 168, 170, 173–75, 177, 194n134, 212n113 Colón Pérez, Mabette, 7, 137, 139 Colón Rivera, Jorge, 188n59, 208n56 Colón Zayas, Hery, 137, 139, 148–50, 226n7 colonialism: climate, 11, 39–40; internal and external, 18, 192n108; resource, 38; settler, 18, 19, 33 coloniality, 11, 18, 19, 24, 38, 39, 46, 49, 89, 90, 128, 133, 142, 152, 155, 163, 170, 186n51, 205n8. See also de/coloniality; energy: coloniality Colucci-Rios, José A., 188n59, 229n34 Comisión de Minería y Fomento, 44 Comité Diálogo Ambiental, 1, 109, 137, 147, 171, 175, 177, 218n64, 223n33, 224n34 Commonwealth Oil Refining Company, Inc. (CORCO), xvi, 62–67, 148, 205n16 Concepción, Carmen, 188n59, 199n57, 200n60 Containment rhetoric(s), 40, 42 Contreras Capó, Vanesa, 167 Coquí Solar, 91–93, 121, 123, 135, 140, 165, 173–75, 177 Cordero, José, 174 Córdova Iturregui, Félix, 188n59, 199n41, 199n42, 208n56 I n de x
Córdova Iturregui, José, 188n59, 199n41, 199n42, 208n56 corporate polluters, 4, 11, 22, 157, 164. See also AES Corporation; New Fortress Energy corruption, 5, 16, 49, 51, 71, 83, 84, 87, 111, 136, 156, 172, 210–11n102 Costa Sur Power Plant, 6, 115 COVID-19, 7, 77, 99, 100, 101, 169. See also pandemic Cox, Robert, 11, 187n52, 189n66, 195n138, 205n15 Cozen, Brian, 185–86n43 Crawford, Ilene Whitney, 195n143 Creole, 40, 143 cryptocurrency, 86, 210, 228 Cuba(n), 16, 41, 77, 143 Culebra, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 17, 73, 74, 179, 194n127 Daggett, Cara New, 42, 197n10, 197n12, 197n23, 197n24 D’Alisa, Giacomo, 103, 216n36, 228n20 De Jesús, Carmen, 91, 92 De Jesús, Daniel, 123, 140 death/dead(ly), 8, 31, 38, 72, 83, 84, 102, 104, 106, 109, 123, 145, 171, 172, 175, 198n26, 220n81. See also necropolitics debt, 5, 48–50, 71, 114, 157, 169, 171, 179, 202n87. See also austerity decarbonization, 26, 56, 152, 156–58, 161, 162, 165, 166, 170, 172 decentralization, 26, 56, 84, 112, 118, 130, 152, 156, 159–62, 165, 166, 170, 172, 210n99, 218n31 de/coloniality, 11, 17, 19, 152. See also coloniality decolonization, 15, 17–19, 26, 37, 56, 111, 119, 124, 133, 142, 144, 152, 155, 156, 166– 70, 172, 185, 188, 190, 192–95, 209, 210, 221, 222, 231, 242, 244, 250, 252, 255, 261–65 de/generation, viii, 10, 12, 14, 15, 19, 24, 25, 39, 40, 63, 78, 87, 97–99, 105, 110, 118, 119, 128, 131, 143, 153–55, 156, 168, 175, 195n5. See also generation of energy/ power Delgado, Fernando, 231n70
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Enck-Wanzer, Darrel, 188n58. See also Wanzer-Serrano, Darrel Endres, Danielle, 17, 162, 185n39, 186n43, 189n64, 192n102, 193n125, 196n5, 203n104, 212n111 energy: actor(s), x, 24, 25, 37, 38, 56, 58–61, 63, 64, 69, 70, 84, 85, 90–92, 97–99, 104, 105, 107, 109, 112–19, 125, 126, 128, 134, 136, 144, 145, 152–57, 159–66, 173, 175, 176, 213n2, 215n24; coloniality, 24, 25, 37–39, 42, 45, 46, 52–55, 60, 61, 67, 69, 72, 85, 86, 89, 90, 98, 99, 102, 104–6, 109–11, 118, 119, 121, 129, 136, 138, 144, 148, 150, 152–54, 159, 164, 166, 176, 196n2, 201n78, 220n81; democracy, 9, 162–65, 189n64; dominance, 9, 99; emergency, 67, 102, 117, 155; hub(s), 110, 111, 119; independence, 9, 166 (see also energy: sovereignty; self-determination); in/justice, viii, 4, 9, 11, 15, 19, 24–26, 37, 38, 55, 56, 60, 61, 90, 98, 109, 118, 125, 129, 137, 144, 148, 150–54, 156, 158, 159, 163–66, 170–73, 175, 177, 178, 203n104, 203n107; islands (as book title), 3, 12, 17, 29, 68, 131, 141, 153–56, 172, 191n92; island(s) (as technology), 15, 172; mix, 3, 104; poverty, 9, 56; privilege, 24, 25, 37, 38, 53–55, 60, 61, 89, 90, 98, 99, 102, 103, 105, 109, 111, 113, 118, 119, 129, 134, 144, 148, 150, 152–54, 156, 164, 166, 176, 220n81; Public Policy Act, 48, 111; rhetorical matrix, vii, 24, 37, 60, 61, 99, 153, 154, 175; rhetoric(s), 84, 185–86n43; rhetorical studies, 11, 187n56; security, 9; sovereignty, 9 (see also energy: independence; selfdetermination); stakeholder(s), 58, 59; studies, 12, 16, 25, 38, 56, 57, 152, 165, 177; transformation(s), 4, 41, 57, 60; transition(s), 24, 25, 56, 91, 99, 111, 151, 163 Energy System Modernization Plan, 111, 113, 114. See also Grid Modernization Plan Enlace Latino de Acción Climática, 109, 126, 179, 218n64 environmental in/justice, 1, 21, 47, 55, 137– 39, 177, 186n50, 193n117
Delgado Esquilin, G., 216n32 Delgado Ramos, Roberto, 136 delinking, viii, 24, 25, 151–53, 155, 164–67, 171, 176 democracy, 43, 163–66. See also energy: democracy; un/democratic democratization, 26, 56, 152, 156, 162, 165, 166, 170, 172 Department of Natural and Environmental Resources [Departamento de Recursos Naturales y Ambientales] (DRNA), xvi, 21, 107, 172 developmentalism [desarrollismo], 44 diaspora, 9, 13, 14, 37, 39, 53, 54, 74, 121, 125, 126, 133, 138, 142, 143, 145, 176 Dietrich, Alexis, 47, 200n61, 200n63, 200n64, 200n65, 200n66 disastrous tropics, 39, 42 dis/empowering, vii, 24, 37, 38, 59–61, 92, 111, 153, 154, 174, 177 disidentification, 19 dispossession, 6, 15, 17–19, 26, 38, 53, 73, 87, 166, 171 disproportionate impacts, 3, 11, 38, 53, 54, 56, 61, 79, 80, 84, 113, 152 dissonance, 24, 80, 118, 130, 175 distributed generation (DG), 56, 112, 117, 126, 160–62. See also microgrid(s); solar Dominican/Dominican Republic, 5, 8, 29, 142, 143, 206n18 Duany, Jorge, 192n108, 194n136, 197n8, 199n49, 203n99, 206n32, 216n35 Dworkin, Michael H., 185n36, 185n37, 185n38, 191n91 e-advocacy, 21, 128–29, 131, 132, 135, 139, 141, 222n20. See also ethnography; methods and methodologies; presence earthquake(s), 5, 6, 11, 17, 46, 51, 84, 89, 91, 99, 103, 104, 111, 115, 123, 133, 135, 136, 215n24 Echevarria, Angel, 162 EcoEléctrica, 51, 97, 110, 112, 114, 212n1, 217n42 ecosystem(s), 21, 64, 105, 145–47 Ekoh, Susan S., 163, 229n41 270
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Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), xvi, 100, 199n53 environmental racism, 11, 53, 100, 152, 157, 164, 171, 182n11, 186n50 ethnography, 7, 12, 14, 16, 20, 23, 26, 120, 139, 165, 189n64, 189n67. See also e-advocacy; methods and methodologies; presence eugenics, 79, 80, 208n69 expansionism, 15, 16, 25, 41, 70, 73, 87, 98, 99, 101, 104, 106, 109, 117, 156, 159, 160, 163, 166, 171, 198n26 experimentation, vii, 5, 22, 24, 25, 46, 63, 67–75, 77–79, 82, 84, 85, 87–91, 118, 144, 153, 154, 171, 205n8, 207n53, 230n47 export(s), 25, 38, 42, 54, 63, 77, 86, 99, 101 extractivism, viii, 3, 5, 11, 19, 23, 24, 31, 38–40, 42, 44, 55, 56, 77, 87, 90, 97–101, 110, 112, 119, 124, 125, 156, 158, 159, 163, 166, 187n53, 192n108, 194n129, 199n54. See also fossil fuels; mining family of islands, 25, 142–44. See also archipelago(es); island farmwork/farmland, 43, 45, 102, 117, 161 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 86, 115, 119, 122, 171 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), xvi, 106–8, 116, 217n49 Feldpausch-Parker, Andrea, 162, 163, 185n39, 189n64, 229n36, 229n37, 229n38, 229n39 feminism, x, 26, 80–82, 119, 141, 166–70, 178. See also Black feminism Ferrer-Núñez, Shariana, 167, 169 Figueroa, Ismenia, 93 Figueroa-Acevedo, Armando L., 188n59 Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB)/Fiscal Control Board [la Junta], ix, xvii, 49–53, 114. See also Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act Flores, Lisa A., 40, 191n86, 194n129, 197n14 Florida, 8 Food and Drug Administration (FDA), xvi, 81 I n de x
food sovereignty and food in/justice, 15, 43, 53, 77, 88, 89, 119, 161, 169, 171, 187n53, 211n109, 216n35 Foraker Act, 73 Fortuño, Luis, 51, 102, 117 fossil fuels, 3, 4, 7–9, 11, 19, 21–25, 38–40, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 53, 55–59, 62, 63, 69, 84, 87, 89, 98–100, 102–5, 110–13, 116, 117, 119, 124, 146, 157, 158, 163, 160, 166, 171, 172, 187n53, 216–17n42, 220n81, 226–27n5. See also coal ash; coal disposal; methane gas Frey, William J., 188n59 fugitivity, 90, 212n114 García-Colón, Ismael, 199n47, 199n48 García López, Gustavo A., 103, 193n117, 204n118, 216n36 García-Martínez, Neftalí, 204n11, 204n13 García-Quijano, Carlos G., 136, 146, 168, 195n142, 198n35, 199n54, 211n109, 217n45, 225n1, 226n4, 230n63 García-Ramos, Tania, 204n11, 204n13 Garriga-López, Adriana, 133, 183n23, 204n115, 211n109, 223n24, 223n25, 223n26 Garza, Sarah De la, 120 Gedicks, Al, 197n5 gender, 7, 16, 36, 42, 69, 91, 144, 167, 169, 186–87n51, 208n229, 230n59. See also feminism generation of energy/power, 3, 6, 14, 40, 46, 49, 54, 63, 93, 115–18, 151, 157, 160–62, 172, 200n60, 230n49. See also fossil fuels; solar generations/intergenerational, 22, 26, 29, 30, 34, 37, 92, 93, 166 generators (household), x, 29, 134, 137, 140 Giusti-Cordero, Juan, 197n26, 198n27 Global Island Partnership, 145, 225n56 Global North, 11, 17 Global South, 17, 191n95 Go, Julian, 197n6 González, Joanisabel, 183n19, 201n76, 202n96 González, Juan, 199n50 González Colón, Ismenia, 51, 110, 164 Great American Century, 68, 73
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great Puerto Rican family [la gran gamilia puertorriqueña], 30 Green New Deal, 111, 158, 187 greenhouse gas emissions, 11, 53–56, 100, 110, 138, 165. See also fossil fuels grid(lock), 3, 6, 49, 60, 84, 89, 91, 113, 114, 117, 126–28, 130, 141, 142, 159, 160, 171, 222n10. See also microgrid(s) Grid Modernization Plan, 89, 111, 112 Grito de Lares, 43 Grossberg, Larry, 195n137, 196n1 Guam [Guåhan], 15, 16, 18, 41, 73, 144, 170 Guayama, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 1, 2, 7, 22, 25, 43, 45, 46, 106, 108, 123, 126, 137, 148, 157, 160, 172, 174, 177, 178, 202n92 Guayanilla, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 46 Haitian(s), 43, 142, 206n18 Hall, Stuart, 141, 196n1 Harney, Stefano, 212n114 Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, 30 Hawai‘i, 16, 41, 73, 75, 77, 114, 144 Hernandez, Adneris, 174 Hernández, Diana, 194n130 Hernández-López, Nitza, 135, 136 heteronormativity and cisheteropatriarchy, 10, 25, 40, 142, 168 hierarchy, 12, 13, 16, 18, 23, 31, 38, 41, 77, 91, 117, 129, 143, 164, 169 Hinojosa, Jennifer, 200n71, 201n84 hispanofilia, 31 Holling, Michelle, 12, 189n61 horizon(s) (as decolonial), 18 horizontal drilling, 105, 108. See also methane gas horizontality [horizontalidad], 13, 129, 130, 141, 142, 144, 145, 162, 165, 175 Horton, Cristi, 186n43 Howard, Robert Glenn, 185n35, 190–91n84, 213n3 Howe, Cymene, 189n62 hub, 25, 97–99, 110, 111, 117–19, 123, 155, 168. See also energy: hub(s) Humacao, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 7, 82 hurricane: Irma, 5, 6, 72, 84, 88, 133; María, x, 5, 6, 29, 72, 83–85, 88, 89, 99, 112, 122, 123, 126, 127, 133–37, 145, 148, 151, 272
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159, 168, 171, 173, 174, 223n30, 224n44; San Ciprián, 43; San Felipe, 43 import(s), 3, 25, 38, 40, 45, 46, 48, 54, 59, 63, 64, 69, 85, 87–89, 97, 98, 101, 102, 105, 111, 112, 114, 116, 118, 119, 158, 159, 161, 166, 171, 191n93, 198n26 impure politics, 132 incineration, 51, 53, 102, 110 independence movement(s), 13, 21, 33, 34, 43, 44, 70, 71, 144, 166, 167, 170, 195n5, 199n59, 205n12, 216n35. See also energy: sovereignty; Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño; self-determination indigenous/indigeneity, 11, 15, 19, 30, 31, 38–40, 42, 54, 55, 99, 186–87n51, 192n108, 198n26, 220n81. See also Taíno Iniciativa de Ecodesarrollo de Bahía de Jobos (IDEBAJO), x, xvi, 1, 121, 135, 137, 140, 147, 174, 175, 177, 218n64, 223n30, 223n33 Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), xvi, 116 Instituto Nacional de Energía y Sostenibilidad Isleña (INESI), xvi, 57, 91, 115, 134, 164, 177, 178, 212n113, 223n28 Instituto Tropical de Energía, Ambiente y Sociedad (ITEAS), xvi, 57, 91, 164 Insular Cases, 73 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), xvi, 57, 111–13 interpretation, 22, 25, 54, 98, 99, 105, 108, 109, 112, 118, 124, 138, 154, 189. See also translation intertidal zone, 20, 128, 146. See also water Irizarry-Rivera, Agustín, 59, 182n14, 188n59, 229n34 Irizarry Rubio, Guillermo, 33, 195n1 island: of enchantment, 5; as repeating, 68, 143, 205n1; studies, 14, 190n72. See also archipelago(es) Jayuya, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 151 Jobos Bay [Bahía de Jobos], xvi, 1, 46, 105, 106, 135, 137, 147, 148, 177, 202n92. See also Iniciativa de Ecodesarrollo de Bahía de Jobos
I n de x
Johnson, Ayana Elizabeth, 144, 225n1 Jones Act (Merchant Marine Act), 70, 112, 117, 136, 137 Jordán, Isaac, 59, 182n14 Jung, Moon-Kie, 192n107 just transition/transformation, 64, 92, 119, 151, 177 Kennedy, George A., 185n43 kilowatt hours (kWh), 58, 114, 157 Klein, Naomi, 83, 193n117, 209n86 Knight, Franklin W., 198n27 knowledge production, 23 Kwasinski, Alexis, 228–29n33 Kwon, Yaejoon, 16, 191n90, 192n107, 195n139, 197n6, 205n12, 225n58, 225n59 labor (as work), 4, 22, 38, 42, 43, 45–47, 54, 57, 61, 82, 98, 103, 118, 130, 137, 139, 148, 153, 155, 157, 158, 181n7. See also energy: privilege; farmwork/farmland laboratory [laboratorio], 24, 44, 68, 69, 71, 72, 78, 80, 81, 85, 91, 155, 162 Latina Feminist Group, 26, 195n144 Latinx, 11, 54, 55, 70, 186–87n51 Latinx environmentalisms, 11, 19 Law 57 (Puerto Rico Energy Transformation and RELIEF Act), 57 LeBrón, Marisol, 8, 38, 45, 71, 182–83n16, 185n33, 191n97, 192n108, 196n3, 196n5, 197n11, 199n46, 200n69, 206n15, 206n16, 209n85, 210n101, 215n29, 230n58, 230n62 LeMenager, Stephanie, 117, 189n62, 221n89 Liga del Control de la Natalidad, 82 liquefied “natural” gas (LNG), 51, 56, 89, 97–101, 104–6, 110, 112, 116, 117–19, 220n81. See also Aguirre Offshore GasPort; EcoEléctrica; methane gas Liu, Eric, 189–90n70 Lloréns, Hilda, 7, 8, 39, 83, 136, 139, 143, 146, 168, 181n2, 182n11, 183n16, 183n18, 183n21, 184n26, 184n30, 184n32, 185n34, 192n98, 194n127, 194n130, 194n132, 195n142, 195n3, 197n11, 197n16, 197n17, 197n20, 197n22, 198n30, 198n31, 198n35, 198n36, 198n37, I n de x
198n39, 199n43, 199n47, 199n54, 200n62, 205n3, 205n4, 208n58, 208n61, 209n87, 211n104, 211n109, 212n112, 214n18, 216n41, 218n61, 218n62, 219n73, 221n92, 224n93, 225n49, 226n3, 226n5, 226n6, 230n63, 231n75 Loiza, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 43 London Economics International (LEI), xvi, 114, 161 López, Iris, 209n73 López-Zambrana, Manuel, 88, 89, 92 Lozano, Nina M., 20, 193n121, 193n122 Lugones, María, 129, 192n104, 222n7 Lugo-Ortiz, Lourdes, 189n64, 208n55, 208n57, 208n59, 208n60, 208n70, 209n77 Luhring, Oscar, 59, 182n14 Luibhéid, Eithne, 208n65 LUMA Energy, 48, 49, 114. See also privatization Madison, D. Soyini, 20, 193n119, 193n120, 193n121 Maldonado, José Ángel, 187n51 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 192n105 mangrove(s), 21, 43, 146–48 maroon/marronage (politics of), 90, 146. See also African-/Afro-descendant peoples Marshall, Yannick, 90, 212n114 Martinez, Doreen E., 11, 12, 187n54, 189n65 Martínez-Fernández, Luis, 198n28, 198n29 Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda, 142, 191n92, 225n46 Massol-Deyá, Arturo, 110, 111, 118, 166, 172, 182n16, 218n56, 218n57, 226n1, 230n53. See also Casa Pueblo Massol-González, Alexis, 103, 107, 110, 118, 216n37. See also Casa Pueblo Massumi, Brian, 222n10 Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 31, 34, 56, 57, 62, 75, 89, 126, 179, 202n92, 218n64 Mbembe, Achille, 225n57 McCaffrey, Katherine T., 75, 192n100, 206n27, 206n28, 206n35, 207n38, 207n40, 207n41, 207n43
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McDermott Hughes, Dylan, 189n62, 191n96, 198n28 McKinnon, Sara, 185n35, 190–91n84, 213n3, 221, 223n32 media/film production, 21, 130, 131, 137, 148, 149 Melamed, Jodi, 184n26 Meléndez, Edwin, 200n71, 201n84 Mercado, Emmanuel, 59, 182n14 Mesa de Diálogo Energético, 57, 159. See also Instituto Tropical de Energía, Ambiente y Sociedad metaphor(s) (of energy), 4, 24, 25, 153–54. See also trope methane gas, 3, 25, 51, 52, 53, 66, 70, 87, 89, 97–102, 104, 110–14, 116, 117, 155, 157, 212n1, 213n2, 220n81, 230n49. See also greenhouse gas emissions; liquefied “natural” gas methods and methodologies, 4, 14, 16–23, 120–25, 131–41, 191n93. See also ethnography; presence Meyn, Marianne, 199n51, 202n92 microgrid(s), 15, 56, 60, 119, 130, 151, 160, 178, 228n24, 230n47. See also distributed generation; solar: on rooftop(s) Middleton, Michael K., 193n125 Mignolo, Walter D., 18, 193n110, 193n111, 193n112, 227n7 migration, 4, 6, 7, 14, 31, 32, 37, 38, 45, 48, 54, 64, 70, 71, 83, 106, 159, 167, 206n18 militarization, 11, 13–15, 43, 68, 69, 71–76, 87, 144, 163, 192n107, 192n108, 205n12 Miller, Clark, 162, 229n35 mining, 8, 38, 39, 44, 87, 158, 190n76, 197– 98n26, 210n99. See also extractivism Mintz, Sidney, 197n26 Misión Industrial de Puerto Rico (MIPR), xvi, 46, 151 Molina, Natalia, 16, 191n90, 205n8, 225n59 Molinari, Sarah, 201n82, 202n84 Mona Island, xviii (map) Mooney, Meghan, 162, 229n35 Morales, Ed, 200n71, 200n72, 206n14, 209n92, 225n53 more than human, 68, 157 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, 19, 193n116 Moten, Fred, 212n114 274
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Mountz, Alison, 14, 190n73, 190n77, 206n24 Moya, Paula, 230n52 Muñoz Marín, Luís, 33, 44, 122 Musk, Elon, 24, 85, 158 mutual support [apoyo mutuo], 1, 13, 60, 92, 136, 165, 174, 177, 181n2. See also autogestión Na’puti, Tiara R., 15, 16, 144, 188n60, 190n81, 190n82, 190n83, 190n84, 191n85, 191n93, 192n107, 192n108, 197n7, 206n22, 212n111, 225n50, 225n54, 225n55 narrative(s), 3, 5, 10, 17, 23, 26, 30, 36, 37, 39, 40, 52, 53, 68, 69, 71, 72, 80, 81, 105, 119, 121, 124, 132, 136, 137, 142, 148, 154, 157, 206n34, 228n23. See also stories National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), xvii, 108 National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), 162 necropolitics, 145, 182n11, 225n57 neoliberalism, 44, 49, 83, 90, 142, 171, 178 net metering, 160 New Fortress Energy, 116, 117, 220n81 Nishime, LeiLani, 40, 197n14, 215–16n30 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 73 nuclear, 38, 46, 53, 199n59, 200n60, 202n92, 203n104. See also Boiling Nuclear Superheater Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 170 ocean justice, 144 Oceania/Pacific, 14–16, 144, 224–25n44 Olson, Christa J., 191n93 O’Neill-Carrillo, Efraín, 24, 56–60, 92, 158, 159, 182n14, 188n59, 198n33, 198n38, 198n40, 200n73, 203n108, 203n109, 204n113, 204n114, 204n117, 204n7, 205n16, 212n116, 212n120, 224n41, 226n1, 227n12, 228n21, 228n25, 228n27, 228n30, 229n34, 230n48 Ono, Kent A., 192n105, 193n113, 204n116, 206n17
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Operation Access to the East, 74. See also Vieques Operation Bootstrap [Operación Manos a la Obra], 44–46, 48, 55, 62–64, 79, 80, 82, 106 Orama Exclusa, Lionel, 115, 134, 181n4, 182n10, 219n75 Ortiz, Miguel A., 107, 108 Ortiz Garcia, Cecilio, 57, 91, 125, 134, 162, 188n59 Padilioni, James, 136 Palmié, Stephen, 193n9, 197n26 Palo Seco Power Plant, 89, 114 pandemic, 7, 31, 77, 99–101, 123, 169, 215n24. See also COVID-19 Pantojas-García, Emilio, 208n56 Park, Lisa Sun-Hee, 53, 54, 202n94, 202n95, 203n103, 209n89 Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño, 13. See also independence movement(s) Partido Nuevo Progresista, 13, 156 Partido Popular Democrático, 13 Peeples, Jennifer, 185n39, 186n47, 187n56, 195n140, 213n4 Pellow, David Naguib, 53, 54, 163, 186n50, 202n94, 202n95, 203n103, 209n89, 227n17, 229n42 Peñuelas, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 7, 8, 22, 63–65, 97, 148, 218n64 Pepino Power Authority, 127 Pérez-Lugo, Marla, 57, 91, 125, 133–35, 162, 188n59, 212n113 Peterson, Tarla Rai, 162, 185n39, 186n43, 189n64 petroleum, 3, 46, 53, 63, 64, 97, 102, 104, 117, 157. See also fossil fuels Pezzullo, Phaedra C., 10, 11, 186n45, 186n46, 187n52, 189n66, 192n103, 193n119, 193n121, 193n124, 194n128, 195n138, 203n101, 203n102, 205n15, 213n3, 222n20, 223n21, 223n22, 227n19 Pham, Vincent N., 70, 205n8 pharmaceutical industry, 44, 47, 77 Philippines, 16, 41, 73, 77, 145 Pierluisi, Pedro, 172 pipeline [gasoducto], 25, 62, 66, 89, 99–104, 107, 108, 110, 119. See also Vía Verde I n de x
Plan 2020, 87. See also zoning poder (as power, to be able to), 12, 91, 189n64 poder del pueblo, El, documentary and website, 137–39, 148, 224n37 Poggie, John J., 217n45, 226n4 policing, 8, 11, 33, 71, 106, 169, 186n51, 195– 96n5, 216n38. See also militarization Ponce Massacre, 33 Powell, Dana E., 189n62, 189n67, 230n50 praxis, 4, 18, 24, 37, 61, 128, 152–55 precautionary principle, 216n31 presence (as research approach), 10. See also ethnography; methods and methodologies privatization, 44, 45, 48, 49, 51, 111, 113, 146, 199n45 Puerto Rican Solar Business Accelerator (PRSBA), 178 Puerto Rico Climate Change Council, 232n80 Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) [Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica de Puerto Rico], xvi, 6, 46, 48, 49, 51, 57, 84, 85, 89, 92, 99, 104, 109, 111–17, 126, 127, 151, 157, 161, 162 Puerto Rico Energy Bureau (PREB) [Negociado de Energía de Puerto Rico], xvii, 57, 89, 104, 109, 112–15, 117, 126 Puerto Rico Energy Commission (PREC), 57, 126 Puerto Rico Energy Public Policy Act, 48, 111 Puerto Rico Industrial Company [Compañía de Fomento Industrial de Puerto Rico], 62, 82 Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), ix, xvii, 49–51, 53, 119. See also Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB)/Fiscal Control Board [la Junta] Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, 44 Pulido, Laura, 182n11, 187n55 queer, 167, 222n14
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racialization, 4, 7, 11, 16, 18, 53, 55, 69, 70, 77, 83, 98, 143, 145, 182n111. See also transcolonial racial formation racism: -anti, 11, 31, 39, 40, 53, 56, 69, 70, 100, 137, 142, 143, 152, 157, 164, 168, 169, 171, 182n11, 186n50. See also capitalism: racial; environmental racism radical, viii, 18, 71, 90, 126, 141, 147, 156, 159, 162, 165, 167, 169, 171, 176 Reames, Tony, 56 (re)charge, 129, 131, 141 regeneration, 98, 99, 110, 119. See also generation of energy/power reproductive in/justice, 69, 79, 80, 82, 101, 203, 208, 250, 256. See also birth control; sterilization resilience, 17, 46, 72, 87, 118, 154, 159 Resiliency through Innovation in Sustainable Energy (RISE), 125, 134, 135, 162, 178 Resilient Power Puerto Rico (RPPR), xvii, 92, 118, 178 Resistencia contra la quema de Carbón y sus Cenizas tóxicas (RCC), 8, 179 Revolución Boricua, 26, 90, 139, 168, 169, 172 (re)wiring, viii, 24, 25, 126–30, 132, 135, 141, 143, 145, 153–55 Reyes-Santos, Alaí, 25, 136, 142, 181n7, 195n141, 195n2, 202n93, 205n6, 224n43, 225n45 rhetoric (definition), 9 Rhoads, Cornelius, 78, 79, 207n53 Richetta, Blake, 85 Rincón, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 46, 200n60 Rivera-Matos, Yiamar, 162 Rivera-Quiñones, Miguel A., 198n33, 198n38, 198n40, 203n108, 228n25 Rivera-Rivera, Ana, 204n11, 204n13 Rivero, Yeidy M., 195n3, 206n18 Roberts, J. Timmons, 193n117, 203n102 Rodríguez-Silva, Ileana M., 143, 205n1, 225n47, 225n48 Rohrer, Judy, 144, 192n108, 225n54 Rosario, Juan, 151, 152, 156, 226n1, 226n5 Rosselló, Ricardo, 24, 26, 85–88, 90, 92, 110, 111, 158, 168, 210–11n102 276
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Routes/Roots/Raíces, vii, viii, 16, 26, 29, 34, 36–38, 54, 61, 62, 79, 119, 120, 128, 132, 134, 137, 146, 148, 154, 195n143 Ruiz Marrero, Carmelo, 211–12n110 rural, 3, 4, 6, 7, 14, 22, 44, 45, 71, 91, 113, 137, 146, 148, 160, 162, 163, 171 Rutherford, Paul, 204n3 Salinas, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 1, 7, 22, 25, 43, 45, 48, 73, 93, 105–7, 122–24, 126, 127, 137, 140, 148, 149, 156, 161, 174, 177, 199n54 San Juan, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 3, 31, 42, 50, 89, 107, 116, 122, 126, 167, 172, 173, 220n81 Santa Isabel, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 7, 43, 102, 157, 161 Santiago, Ruth “Tata,” ix, 1–3, 5, 8, 9, 105–8, 118, 123, 126, 136, 138, 139, 175, 183n16, 183n18, 184n30, 184n32, 185n34, 194n127, 195n142, 211n104, 212n112, 212n120, 214n18, 216n41, 217n44, 218n61, 218n62, 219n73, 221n92, 224n39, 226n6, 230n48, 231n73, 231n75 Santurce, Puerto Rico, 89 Sanzillo, Tom, 200n72, 219n71, 219n72, 220n84 Scarano, Francisco, 193n109 Schneider, Jen, 185n39, 187n56, 195n140, 213n4 Schwartz, Stuart B., 198n29 Schwarze, Steve, 187n56, 195n140, 203n102 self-determination, 9, 24, 38, 44, 51, 59, 73, 119, 135, 165, 170. See also energy: sovereignty; independence movement(s) Senda-Cook, Samantha, 185n43, 193n125 Sheller, Mimi, 190n76, 198n26, 198n27, 231n74 Shepherd, Verene, 198n26 Shome, Raka, 17, 191n95, 192n101 Sims, Marion, 79 slavery, 22, 42, 43, 46, 61, 90, 158, 169, 194n132 Sloop, John, 193n113, 204n116 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 23, 194n135 solar: community [solar comunitario], 91, 93, 115, 165, 175, 178, 229–30n47;
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photovoltaics (PVs), 85, 92, 118, 119, 157, 160, 161, 165, 173, 228n23; on rooftop(s), ix, x, 93, 111, 113, 117–19, 157, 161, 162, 165, 173, 174, 177, 178; sun tax [impuesto al sol], 114, 157 Soto Vega, Karrieann, 183n25, 186n51, 187n51 Sovacool, Benjamin K., 185n36, 185n37, 185n38, 185n40, 191n91 Sowards, Stacey K., 20, 130, 187n57, 193n126, 221n91, 222n13 Spanish: as colonial power (Spain), 13, 24, 31, 38, 40, 42, 43, 73, 142, 143, 195n5; as language, 1, 8, 9, 12, 21, 31, 34, 57, 68, 103, 107–9, 112, 118, 137–39, 160, 165, 181n1, 186n51, 194n134, 217n49, 224n38, 226n7 Speed, Shannon, 223n23 Spivak, Gayatri, 23, 195n137, 221n3 Sprain, Leah, 162, 185n39, 189n64 Stanchich, Maritza, 182n11, 183n21, 192n98, 199n47, 200n62, 205n3, 205n4, 209n87, 211n109 Steingraber, Sandra, 213n9, 214n19, 216n31 sterilization, 80, 81, 208n69. See also reproductive in/justice stories, 3, 10, 15, 16, 18, 19, 24, 29, 30, 33, 34, 37, 40, 61, 68, 106, 119, 120, 122, 124, 136, 148, 153. See also narrative(s) subaltern, 17, 191n94, 195n137, 221n3 subterranean, 17, 19, 38 sugar(cane), 1, 42, 43, 45, 46, 61, 106, 147, 148, 199n54. See also Central Aguirre Sze, Julie, 14, 15, 117, 190n74, 190n77, 190n78, 221n90 Taíno, 30, 31, 39, 42, 220n81. See also indigenous/indigeneity Táíwò, Olúfẹ ́mi O., 11, 187n53, 227n14 Tarin, Carlos A., 188n57 Teron, Lemir, 56, 163, 229n41 testimonials [testimonios], 3, 20, 89, 108, 122, 124, 129, 137, 138, 139, 195n144 Thompson, Lanny, 16, 68, 70, 188n60, 191n87, 191n88, 191n89, 197n12, 197n15, 197n17, 197n19, 205n1, 205n2, 205n7, 205n9, 205n10, 205n11, 205n12, 207n45, 225n53 I n de x
Tito Kayak (Alberto de Jesús), 127 Torres Rodríguez, Zaida, 194n127 transcolonial racial formation, 13, 16, 24, 25, 39, 72, 75, 142–45, 154, 155, 170, 191n90, 195n139, 197n6, 205n12, 225n58 transgender, 229n46, 230n59. See also gender translation, 20, 25, 31, 54, 68, 99, 103, 105, 107, 109, 118, 138, 147, 155, 160, 165, 181n1, 181n2, 217n49. See also interpretation transmission (electricity), 6, 48, 113, 114, 155, 160, 171, 182n10 Trelles, Rafael, ix, 64–67 trope, 16, 17, 23–25, 39, 40, 42, 53, 59, 69–72, 78, 81, 88, 90, 91, 98, 99, 117, 118, 128, 129, 142–44, 153–55, 157, 171, 185n43, 213n2. See also metaphor(s) (of energy) tropical white(s), 40 tropicalization/tropics, 39, 40, 42, 53, 69, 77 Tuck, Eve, 18, 186n44, 192n106, 231n69 un/democratic, 49, 52, 71, 82, 83, 90, 91, 102, 103, 151, 163–65, 229n46. See also democracy; democratization Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y Riego (UTIER), xvii, 113, 218n64. See also labor (as work) unions, 43, 57, 107, 113 United States Coast Guard (USCG), xvii, 105–7, 217n43 United States Energy Information Administration (EIA), 3, 101, 114 United States Navy, 73–75, 172. See also militarization; Vieques urban, 15, 22, 54, 71, 163, 171 Uricuoli, Bonnie, 82, 208n68, 209n83 Valdés-Pizzini, Manuel, 198n29, 225n1 Vanguardia Popular, 44 Vats, Anjali, 40, 197n14 Vázquez, David J., 19, 188n57, 193n115, 230n52 Vázquez Garced, Wanda, 172, 229n46 Velazquez, Nydia, 170
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Velicu, Irina, 103, 216n36 Venator Santiago, Carlos R., 189n68, 206n21 vernacular discourse, 12, 19, 60, 105, 112, 118, 120, 123, 165, 170 Vía Verde, 25, 66, 98, 102–4, 107, 109, 117. See also pipeline [gasoducto] Vieques, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), ix, 17, 73–77, 79, 102, 172, 179, 194n127 Villanueva, Joaquín, 209n85, 210n101 Villarreal, Mary Ann, 40, 194n129, 197n14 Vine, David, 206n22, 206n23, 206n25 voice, vii, 1, 5, 10–12, 20, 107, 108, 112, 148, 154, 164
Watts, Eric King, 10, 11, 186n47 Western (Eurocentric), 4, 16, 23, 42, 68, 105, 120, 133, 187n53 white man’s burden, 41 white savior, 81, 85, 158 Whitefish Energy, 84 wind (energy/power), 15, 42, 56, 102, 157, 161, 165, 229n46 women, 33, 80–82, 91, 167, 169, 208n69. See also gender worker(s), xvii, 4, 43–46, 48, 49, 54, 64, 80, 81, 92, 106, 113–16, 122, 123, 142, 160, 190n76, 199n54. See also farmwork/ farmland
Waechter, Katy, 162, 229n35 Wald, Sarah D., 19, 188n57, 193n115, 230n52 Walker, Brett L., 190n76 Walsh, Catherine E., 18, 193n110, 193n111, 193n112 Wanzer-Serrano, Darrel, 18, 155, 164, 188n58, 193n113, 193n114, 197n25, 198n32, 221n91, 227n6, 227n7, 227n8, 227n9, 227n10, 229n43, 229n44, 229n45. See also Enck-Wanzer, Darrel Washington, Harriet, 207n53 water, 6, 8, 12, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 31, 42–44, 46, 47, 51, 53, 64, 66, 69, 73, 74, 76, 101, 102, 105, 106, 112, 113, 120, 128, 141, 145, 146, 151, 156, 158, 161, 177, 184n31, 199n53, 213n9
Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, xviii (map), 89, 178, 218n64 Yang, K. Wayne, 231n69 Ybarra, Megan, 23, 194–95n136, 223n32 Ybarra, Priscilla Solis, 19, 188n57, 193n115, 230n52
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Zambrana, Manuel López, 88, 89, 92 Zambrana, Rocío, 141, 224n42, 230n59, 230n64 Zentella, Ana Celia, 221n91 zone of: defense, 24, 72, 77; development, 24, 79, 87; disaster, 24, 69, 83, 155; disease, 24, 77; energy sacrifice, 22, 69, 152, 211n106 zoning, 87, 89, 90. See also Plan 2020
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