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Infrastructure and Colonial Difference in Puerto Rico after Hurricane María
Author(s) -
Ficek Rosa E.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
transforming anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.325
H-Index - 9
eISSN - 1548-7466
pISSN - 1051-0559
DOI - 10.1111/traa.12129
Subject(s) - colonialism , racialization , corporate governance , government (linguistics) , power (physics) , politics , state (computer science) , everyday life , sociology , political science , political economy , business , law , linguistics , philosophy , physics , finance , algorithm , quantum mechanics , computer science
Hurricane María wiped out the infrastructures that helped sustain modern life in Puerto Rico. As communities, organizations, and the government responded to the disaster, the politics of infrastructure took on a central and urgent role in debates about colonialism, debt, life, and death. This paper describes everyday life in the days and weeks that followed María, focusing on the strategies people used to obtain essential services such as power and water. People mobilized family and community networks, along with material objects including buckets and gas tanks, into improvised infrastructures that compensated, however inadequately, for what was destroyed. This article considers how state and corporate forms of governance shape day to day survival through people's entanglements with these emergency infrastructures. It argues that the experience of obtaining food, water, power, and other necessities in the aftermath of María revealed, in an embodied way, the racialization of Puerto Ricans as colonial subjects.