Puerto Rican Bodies of Water and Flesh Against the Hyperbolic Death Machine

• In Event: Imperial and Decolonial Waters: Knowledge, Dissent, Climate Justice

Abstract

This critical-creative piece will address historical and contemporary instances of ecological exploitation and degradation in Guanajibo, Mayagüez (canned tuna industries), Boquerón, Cabo Rojo (luxury tourism industry), and Tallaboa, Peñuelas (petrochemical industries). These scarcely studied western Puerto Rico riverine and coastal zones are deeply connected ecosystems in flesh, symbol, and history. They are also symptomatic of both historical and current trajectories of U.S. imperialism and capitalism. Arriving to, and in, these bodies of water through a Caribbean non-fiction method akin to Kevin Adonis Browne’s in A Sense of Arrival (Duke UP, 2024), I write and survive as a wounded yet audacious body of flesh, a threatened yet quite alive mammal (Gumbs, Undrowned, 2020) amid our current struggle against the luxury megaproject “Esencia” in Cabo Rojo, and in ancestral relation – in Édouard Glissant’s terms – with our Puerto Rican and Caribbean fight against the hyperbolic death machine.

Author

• Beatriz Llenín Figueroa