Currents of Resistance: Water Justice, Climate Imperialism, and Decolonial Futures in Late-Stage Empire

• In Event: Water, Geology, and Archipelagic Imaginaries

Abstract

As climate disasters intensify, water remains both a site of struggle and a way for decolonial renewal. In Puerto Rico, decades of infrastructural neglect, privatization, and colonial rule have deepened water crises, revealing the persistent of empire. Yet alongside these challenges, resistance flourishes. Communities cultivate knowledge outside of state control, rejecting the logic of scarcity and extraction.
This paper explores how Indigenous media, Latinx speculative narratives, and environmental storytelling create alternative ways of relating to water that challenge settler-colonial frameworks. Focusing on Puerto Rican and Chicanx artists, activists, and water protectors, I trace how creative practices imagine futures beyond imperial extraction—ones shaped by relational ecologies and principles of water justice.
Bringing Puerto Rico’s water struggles into conversation with transnational movements, I argue that critical frameworks must broaden their scope to fully engage with hydro-colonialism and climate imperialism. By analyzing the intersections of empire, environmental crisis, and decolonization, this paper focuses on two primary questions: How does water function as both a tool of colonial dispossession and a means of radical futurity? What can we learn about late-stage empire by following the currents of resistance? Centering water as both a material reality and a metaphor, this work reimagines the possibilities of decolonial currents against imperial tides.

Biographical Information

Dr. Maricela DeMirjyn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Race, Gender and Ethnic Studies at Colorado State University. Her doctorate was completed at University of California, Santa Barbara in Cultural Perspectives and Chicana & Chicano Studies. She teaches Latinx creative expression, Chicana feminisms, and qualitative methodologies. Dr. DeMirjyn’s research areas of expertise include critical visual discourse and narrative inquiry, Chicana & Latina subjectivity, and women of color in academe.

Author

• Maricela DeMirjyn, Colorado State University-Fort Collins