Debt, Death, and What Life is Worth in Puerto Rico

• In Event: Puerto Rican Lives in Debt and Disaster

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. In an attempt to challenge claims that what occurred in Puerto Rico was not a “real catastrophe like Katrina,” Puerto Rican organizers are determined to highlight the storm’s deadly impact and aftereffects. But what do we understand as storm-related death and how does it intersect with a much longer history of colonial violence and biopolitical calculation on the island?

I argue that we must expand the scope and temporality of the hurricane death count if we are to truly reckon with the ways in which the storm itself, as well as local and federal responses, will produce harm and premature death for years to come. We must understand the deaths that followed in the wake of Maria not only as the result of a “natural disaster” but also as effects of austerity and the existing “slow violence” of colonialism in Puerto Rico. I suggest that those deaths that we count as storm-related, as well as those that seemingly fall out of its official efforts to measure the effects of the storm, 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, University of Texas at Austin