The catastrophic conditions after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, homeland to the second largest US Latinx group, also result from a long history of colonial exploitation exacerbated by economic downturn, debt crisis, and federally imposed austerity. US policies affecting agriculture and attracting contaminating industries set the groundwork for extreme environmental degradation, which in turn has long motivated local community activism, coalition-building, and de-colonial praxis. The authors illustrate that in Puerto Rico, environmental resistance has been a vanguard terrain of struggle against the deepening insertion of multinationals and continued degradation. Culminating with a glimpse of how the very basics needed for survival-such as water-have been sacrificed to the logics of capital extraction, this essay points to the urgency of making an environmental justice perspective of central concern to US Latinx Studies.
During Hurricane María, individuals throughout the Caribbean uploaded video and photographs to social media, but as winds downed communication towers and electric lines, sharing stopped. Still, satellites orbiting high above Earth transmitted views of the massive hurricane. In the following weeks, the media bombarded viewers with scenes of devastated landscapes, people wading through waist‐deep water, infrastructure shredded beyond recognition, apocalyptic desolation, and desperation. Media portrayals focused on a “powerless” people, literally without electrical power, further reduced into social, economic, and political powerlessness. This article combines ethnographic elicitation with cultural analysis to understand how images of trauma and suffering affect diverse audiences. Do these images compel viewers to fight for justice or do they desensitize them? Do they lead people toward feelings of pessimism, resignation, and cynicism? I explore how people's backgrounds and relationships to specific places inform the ways they are even able to look at, grapple with, and work through traumatic images. I demonstrate how long‐term prejudice is imbedded into the media's imagery and representations of Hurricane María to show how associated governmental neglect exacerbates the trauma of disaster. Lastly, I engage with the place of responsibility and sorrow as I raise the question of how the specter of future natural disasters haunts the current state of devastation.
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