Data Ecologies, Colonialism, and Sovereignty in Puerto Rico

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel critically explores the contemporary data landscape in Puerto Rico from an interdisciplinary and decolonial perspective. Presenters will examine how colonial histories and dynamics shape the production, availability, and use of economic, census, and spatial data and statistics in Puerto Rico. Isar Godreau will discuss the imposition and implication of U.S. ethnic and racial categories in Puerto Rico. José Caraballo-Cueto will explore how data deficiencies hinder economic planning and sustainability in the archipelago. Drawing inspiration from indigenous data sovereignty, Lorraine Torres Colon and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz will reflect on Puerto Rico’s urgent need for data sovereignty. Ultimately, the panel will shed light on the data challenges, silences, and omissions that shape what and how we understand Puerto Rican society, politics, and identity—and identify opportunities for change.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• The Imposition of U.S. Census Racial Categories in Puerto Rico - Isar Godreau, University of Puerto Rico-Cayey

• Data gaps in Puerto Rico - José Caraballo-Cueto, University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras

• Data Sovereignty for Puerto Rico: A Decolonial Feminist Proposal - Lorraine Torres Colon, University of California-Berkeley; Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, University of California, Berkeley

Chair

• Nicholas Vargas, University of California, Berkeley

Biographical Information

Isar Godreau (Ph.D., Cultural Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz). Godreau is a researcher at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey. Her research focuses on issues of “race” and cultural nationalism, racism, racial discrimination and identity in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Godreau has published on the impact of current austerity measures on public higher education in Puerto Rico after hurricane María. She is the author of Arrancando mitos de raíz: guía para la enseñanza antirracista de la herencia africana en Puerto Rico (2013) (Pullying Myths from the Root:  Guide for an antiracist pedagogy about the African heritage in Puerto Rico) and Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism and US Colonialism in Puerto Rico (2015 University of Illinois Press) which received the Frank Bonilla Book Award from the Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA) in 2016. Godreau has received fellowships and grants from the Ford Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Puerto Rican Foundation for the Humanities. She has held visiting positions at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, New York University, the University of South Florida, and Northwestern University.  While at Princeton, Godreau will be working on two publications that address how racism can exacerbate social inequalities in Puerto Rico, affecting health outcomes and also racialized constructions of the “Puerto Rican self” vis a vis the U.S.

José Caraballo Cueto is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras. For seven years, Caraballo worked as an associate professor of statistics and finance at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey, a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Research Institute, and director of the only Census Information Center in Puerto Rico. He completed a PhD in economics at The New School for Social Research in 2013, where he specialized in development studies and applied econometrics (a branch of statistics). He has won research grants from the National Institute of Health, the Open Society Foundation, the New York City-based Global Foundation for Democracy and Development, the Network of Foundations, and other institutions to study topics related to human development. The American magazine Diverse Issues recently listed him as one of the "emerging academics" in the United States. He has published 20 peer-reviewed academic articles and has published a book and more than 150 non-refereed articles in and outside of Puerto Rico.

Lorraine Torres Colón is a postdoctoral scholar with the Latino Social Science Pipeline Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a PhD in Sociology from The City University of New York, The Graduate Center. Torres Colon is a decolonial feminist sociologist whose work lies at the intersections of coloniality, health, gender, and violence. Methodologically, she bridges community-engaged quantitative methods with Afro-Latinx and Indigenous-Latinx knowledge traditions to model contemporary disparities in mental health, labor-market access, and exposure to violence among racialized communities within former metropoles and the non-sovereign territories they administer. One of her current projects explores data sovereignty as a response to the structural challenges researchers face when engaging with colonial logics embedded in data collection, ownership, localization, and accessibility in Puerto Rico.

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on race and the politics of knowledge, primarily in Latinx communities and movements. His award-winning book, Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change (Princeton University Press, 2021), explores the political production and mobilization of ethnoracial demographic projections. His work has also appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Du Bois Review, American Behavioral Scientist, among other outlets. Along with several collaborative projects, Michael is immersed in an oral history book project on the afterlives of anticolonial resistance and political repression in Puerto Rican Chicago. He also co-leads Digitizing the Barrio, an archival project of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago.