Counting Death and Making Death Count: Puerto Rico before and after Maria

• In Event: Temporalities of Catastrophe

Abstract

In the wake of Hurricane Maria's devastation in Puerto Rico, scholars, journalists, and pundits have debated how to count and categorize the dead. A number of individuals and groups working in Puerto Rico have suggested that the Puerto Rican government's official death count of sixty-four is nearly one thousand bodies short. In an attempt to challenge claims that what occurred in Puerto Rico was not a "real catastrophe like Katrina," in the words of U.S. President Donald Trump, and to contest the notion that the local government's response was appropriate and adequate, Puerto Rican organizers are determined to highlight the storm's deadly impact and aftereffects. But what does it mean to only categorize post-Maria deaths as an effect of the hurricane and in what ways do these deaths intersect with a much longer history of colonial violence and biopolitical calculation on the island?

In this paper, I argue that we must expand the temporality of the hurricane death count if we are to truly reckon with the ways in which the storm itself, as well as the state's response, will produce harm and premature death for years to come and will build upon existing patterns of vulnerability. For instance, Puerto Rico is in the midst of what has been termed a "post-Maria murder surge." What happens to our understanding of the storm's death count if we include those who have been killed because of the disruption that the storm caused to the island's informal drug economy or because someone was suspected of trying to steal a generator? Similarly, how can we think about the "weathering" effects of racial discrimination and exclusion that may negatively impact the life chances of the more than 200,000 Puerto Rican who have moved to the continental U.S. since Maria? Can we understand premature death due to stressors associated with migration, poverty, and racial discrimination as storm-related?

In addition to looking ahead in order meaningfully grapple with the deadly effects of Hurricane Maria, we must also look backwards in order to think about how these deaths fit into the existing "slow violence" of colonialism in Puerto Rico. I conclude this paper by examining how Maria worsened the harms related to the colonial debt crisis and environmental racism on the island. I suggest that those deaths that we count as storm-related, and the deaths that fall out of its purview, highlight the longue durée of U.S. colonial rule in Puerto Rico and its dependence on the deadly exploitation of Puerto Rican land and bodies. Ultimately, an interrogation of Puerto Rico's post-Maria death count pushes us to think about how the temporality of colonialism intersects with that of natural disasters in ways that exacerbate and prolong existing vulnerabilities.

Author

• Marisol Lebron, The University of Texas at Austin