Coloniality of anti-corruption: Whiteness, disasters, and the US anti-corruption policies in Puerto Rico (original) (raw)
Related papers
Latino Studies
A 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck Puerto Rico on 7 January 2020, adding a new episode to the multilayered political, economic, and humanitarian crisis affecting the island since 2006. This article demonstrates how the recovery efforts and management of the emergency constitute a state crime. The analysis draws from governmental and journalistic investigation and engages with legal and critical discourse analysis to provide a criminological and sociolegal analysis of state crimes in Puerto Rico-which feature prominently in US colonial and racialized history and anticorruption policies in PR-and of the genealogy of colonial violence that generates these and other legalized and state-facilitated harms. The article analyzes legally contrived states of exception and executive orders used to manage the earthquake emergency, the cases of corruption and criminal negligence (so salient in the public conscience that structural critiques of incompetent, unethical, and extractive governance have been coalesced by popular movements under the hashtag #wandalismo), the legislative public hearing on the case of the government hoarding and stalling distribution of disaster supplies, and the anticorruption mobilizations of January 2020. The article articulates the timeliness and urgency of prioritizing research and theorizing of state crimes within the burgeoning field of Latina/o/x criminology.
A BOOK REVIEW The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists
ALTERNAUTAS , 2018
The one-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria calls into question the temporality of disaster, both in terms of lived experience and analysis. It was difficult for Puerto Ricans to mark the first anniversary while so many still live Maria's daily effects physically, emotionally, and financially. Failing institutions and disaster recovery initiatives have too often deepened vulnerability in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, thus augmenting the confused sense of pre-and post-disaster. During a September Rutgers University symposium on the "Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico a Year after Maria" anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla suggested that perhaps Hurricane Maria was the "aftershock" itself, the culmination of over a century of colonial-capitalist exploitation and layered traumas. If Hurricane Maria was the aftershock, how can we think about disaster and disaster capitalism?
American Anthropologist, 2021
Using the concept of "racecraft" to describe the state production of racial subjectivities, we argue that this process has been increasingly compromised in Puerto Rico by a lack of sovereignty and by the current socioeconomic crisis. We argue that the state-sponsored idea that Puerto Rican white and mixed-race identities operate separately from the US racial framework is receding. Based on the unconventional use of an open-ended question for racial identification in a survey administered to over one thousand Puerto Ricans, we found: a reluctance to identify racially, an awareness of a normative "whiteness" that excludes Puerto Ricans, and a tendency to embrace US federal categories such as "Hispanic" and "Latino." We interpret these results as evidence of a Puerto Rican racial
Radical History Review, 2017
This article performs a relational historical reading of the colonial formations that have bound Puerto Ricans to other colonial subjects throughout the US empire. It begins with an overview of the connections between how the Supreme Court contrived a state of constitutional exception that sanctioned the conquest of Native American tribes and lands, and how between 1901-1921, they derived a similar status for the United States’s insular colonies. It then foregrounds another interrelationship between Puerto Rico and its homologues: connected geostrategic and economic logics from the early to mid 20th century that allowed US government and private interests to reap benefits and profits from the overseas territories while impeding their economic sustainability. Finally, this paper illustrates how today, an updated version of US colonialism through capital investment and debt is substituting the more direct modes of control that the US empire previously employed in its far-flung colonial archipelagos.
Hurricane María wiped out the infrastructures that helped sustain modern life in Puerto Rico. As communities, organizations, and the government responded to the disaster, the politics of infrastructure took on a central and urgent role in debates about colonialism, debt, life, and death. This paper describes everyday life in the days and weeks that followed Marıa, focusing on the strategies people used to obtain essential services such as power and water. People mobilized family and community networks, along with material objects including buckets and gas tanks, into improvised infrastructures that compensated, however inadequately, for what was destroyed. This article considers how state and corporate forms of governance shape day to day survival through people’s entanglements with these emergency infrastructures. It argues that the experience of obtaining food, water, power, and other necessities in the aftermath of Marıa revealed, in an embodied way, the racialization of Puerto Ricans as colonial subjects.
OÑATI SOCIO-LEGAL SERIES, 2023
This paper engages in a sociolegal analysis of the anti-corruption legislation enacted by the Puerto Rican Government in the aftermath of hurricane María (2017). It pays particular attention to the implementation and sociolegal impact of Act 2 of January 4, 2018, entitled, "The Anti-Corruption Code for the New Puerto Rico" and the creation of a Registry of Persons Convicted of Corruption. The rationale behind the Act and the Registry is to enforce transparency, open governance, and help the Puerto Rican government in its efforts to eradicate public corruption. Conversely, this paper argues that these reforms have introduce a punitive approach to anti-corruption in PR. The paper suggests Act 2 and the Registry had have a dual outcome: 1) a punitive approach to corruption that harm people in precarious positions, and 2) normalize the structural dynamic enabling corruption of the powerful. Thus, this paper intends to illustrate the contradictions in anti-corruption as punitive governance, and the way in which a specific image of corruption is reproduced through governmental actions, legal practices, and discourses.
(2019) Puerto Rico, Colonialism, and Neocolonialism
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, 2019
This essay aims to briefly collect the historical context of colonialism in Puerto Rico since the Spanish era but primarily focuses on revealing the reasons to consider Puerto Rico as a colony and non-self-governing territory of the US-rather than a neocolony of the US. Later, the article addresses the three non-colonial options recognized by the 1514 United Nations (UN) Resolution and the results of the five referendums on the political status of the Caribbean archipelago held over the last five decades. The essay concludes that Puerto Rico is undoubtedly a colony and asks for the United Nations and the sovereign countries of the world to denounce this illegal colonial relationship that subordinates residents of Puerto Rico to the will of the US Congress where they have no voting representatives.
"Promises Are Over: Puerto Rico and the Ends of Decolonization"
Theory & Event
How do the lived conditions of colonialism assume particular forms of legibility and dissociation in relation to imperial nation-states such as the United States, where a variety of colonialisms remain both constitutive and continuing, but are seldom understood as such? Conventional historical narratives of decolonization are insufficient for addressing the complex overlay of colonizations in the present and what might come afterward. This essay focuses on Puerto Rico in order to consider the colonial disavowals that strive to render these conditions unintelligible and against which counter-epistemologies and new social possibilities take shape under the escalating pressure of recent judicial rulings and fiscal crises.