Community Organizations and Solidarity-Based Improvisations: Alternative Sociotechnical Infrastructures in Puerto Rico After Hurricane Maria

• In Event: Reimagining and Remaking the World: Decolonial and Indigenous STS

Abstract

This paper explores how community organizations in Puerto Rico improvised alternative sociotechnical infrastructures in the aftermath of hurricane Maria. Taking a decolonized approach, we emphasize on the situated nature of their practices by focusing on their ideological framing and stepping away from the traditional assumption that people pursue modernity and the restoration of pre-existing infrastructure after a disaster.
We propose that improvisation is a reflexive dialogue in which actors (individuals and collectives) negotiate their circumstances to reconfigure social, cultural, political, and technological resources. We adopt the notion of frames as drivers of improvisation. Frames are schemas of interpretation that enable people to locate, perceive, identify, and label occurrences within their living space and the world at large (Snow et al., 1986). In other words, we argue that collective frames helped organize community organization’s experience and guide their actions after Hurricane Maria to create an alternative sociotechnical infrastructure, which allowed them to respond more effectively to relief efforts than state and federal government.
Using an interpretive embedded case study methodology, we analyzed data from interviews, social media, and official documents to explain how they enacted their shared solidarity-based and anti-capitalist ideology as resourceful state-independent rearrangements. Their situated intersectional understandings allowed them to engage in the collective improvisation of collaborative sociotechnical infrastructures. This research highlights local out-of-the-mainstream conceptualizations as drivers of new alternative systems. It also sheds light on the role of community organizations as providers of critical services and infrastructure in underserved regions.

Author

• Fatima Espinoza Vasquez, University Of Kentucky