Introduction Excerpt for Crisis by Design

INTRODUCTION

EMERGENCY

On September 18, 202, five years after Hurricane María devastated the archipelago, Hurricane Fiona made landfall in Puerto Rico (henceforth PR), causing forty-four deaths, a general blackout, flooding, landslides, and inflicting $6 billion in direct economic impact.¹ Immediately after Hurricane Fiona landed, the hashtag #NoLeDonenAlGobierno (Don’t Donate to the Government) trended on Twitter (now X) and other social media platforms. Many posts featured pictures of abandoned bottles of water, food, and other emergency aid donated to the PR government in the aftermath of Hurricane María in 2017, which were never distributed. Puerto Ricans living in the United States and local activists campaigned for direct donations to local grassroots organizations that could effectively deliver aid to those in need. Disaster management was the actual disaster. #NoLeDonenAlGobierno conveys the general distrust in the PR government’s capacity to manage and effectively address the needs of Puerto Ricans after socioenvironmental disasters. The prevailing sentiment among Puerto Ricans is that both the PR and US governments have been negligent and incapable of adequately meeting people’s needs. Together with #NoLeDonesAlGobierno, a series of memes on social media read: Refuse to glorify resilience: Demand accountability.² After enduring a multilayered crisis for years, Puerto Ricans no longer want their suffering to be romanticized as resilient; they demand a just and equitable recovery.

Hurricane Fiona marks the latest disaster in recent Puerto Rican history, characterized by a continuity of disasters³ and a multilayered political, financial, economic, and humanitarian crisis. PR has been a US colony or unincorporated territory since 1898, and it has been grappling with crises and disasters since 2006, when the current economic and fiscal crisis began. This economic crisis is the result of a convergence of fiscal policies developed by the US Congress, the PR government’s financialization of the local economy, and the global financial crisis of 2008. After a decade of stagnation, significant out-migration, and austerity measures, the PR government defaulted on its $72 billion public debt in 2016, leading Congress to pass the Puerto Rican Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA)⁴ and to impose the Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) onto PR. PROMESA and the FOMB have been the US’s colonial solution to address the economic crisis, secure the financial system’s survival, ensure debt repayment, and reintegrate PR back into the world of finance and the stock market.

Amid this backdrop, Hurricanes Irma and María devastated the archipelago in September 2017, resulting in damages of up to $94 billion, thousands of deaths, and hundreds of displaced individuals. Subsequently, on January 7, 2020, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck the southern region of PR, causing the displacement of 6,400 residents, damaging over 8,300 houses, and resulting in estimated damages of $3.1 billion. When the COVID-19 global pandemic arrived in March 2020, PR was in a more precarious position than any other US state or territory, experiencing a $9.7 billion direct economic negative impact, the loss of approximately $2 billion in tax revenue, and over 6,000 lives lost due to the pandemic. It was against this backdrop that Hurricane Fiona made landfall in PR, exacerbating the already stagnant Puerto Rican economy and its legal and sociopolitical institutions.

Puerto Rican scholars and activists have demonstrated that colonialism, paired with contemporary austerity measures and governmental negligence, are critical factors contributing to the social and political conditions that foster disasters that are anything but “natural.”⁵ Similar to discourse about climate change and extreme weather events, it is reasonable to view colonial harms as somewhat intractable, inevitable, and thus unescapable. Yet the disasters articulated in this text are human-made, and human-perpetuated, and thus entirely contingent and changeable. There is no such thing as natural disaster.⁶

By insisting that the disaster is political, and the colony is the disaster, activists and scholars have shown that the PR and US governments are responsible for manufacturing the socioeconomic and legal conditions that enabled Hurricanes Irma, María, and Fiona and the January 2020 earthquakes to become catastrophic.⁷ For instance, Yarimar Bonilla (2020a) contends that disasters are socially produced and should be understood as the outcome of long processes of structural violence; their effects are experienced differently through preexisting hierarchies of race, class, and gender—and they often sharpen those relations of inequality. Additionally, Mimi Sheller (2020) argues that the Caribbean faces extreme environmental risks and existential threat associated with climate change, which must be contextualized within the region’s long history of colonial violence, slavery, plantation economy, ecological destruction, and resource extraction. Hence, the consensus among Caribbean and Puerto Rican scholars is that the crisis and disasters are manufactured by colonial structures of power, domination, and violence. Colonialism is the catastrophe.

Crisis by Design argues that the Puerto Rican multilayered crisis must be understood as the result of the legal, politico-economic, and racialized structure of US colonialism imposed in PR since 1898. Drawing on the works of Marx, Gramsci, Benjamin, Fraser, and Hall et al. (2013), and in conversation with a range of critical and contemporary scholars, I argue that the conditions for these crises are systemic, and intrinsically embedded in colonial capitalism, often leading to a rearticulation and redefinition of capital accumulation practices and the hegemonic position of the ruling elites.⁸ As such, the Puerto Rican colonial multilayered crisis should not be view as a series of random events or a rupture with the practices of wealth extraction and capital accumulation enabled by US colonialism; instead, it represents a period of strategic accommodation and rearticulation of US imperialism, the PR state, the local elites, and transnational capital in response to a new dynamic of capital accumulation within the colony.

This book maps out the legal structure and process that manufactured the ongoing colonial multilayered crisis, to clarify and understand the sociolegal and politico-economic dynamics of wealth extraction taking place in PR. The book engages with three concerns: the role of law and emergency powers in creating, exacerbating, and/or sustaining this multilayered crisis; the role of US colonialism, the PR government, corporations, and anticorruption and pro-transparency mobilizations in the multilayered crisis; and how the Puerto Rican case provides insight as to the role of law and emergency powers in crisis in other Global South, Caribbean, racialized communities, and in colonized societies.

To address these concerns, Crisis by Design unfolds a threefold conceptualization to articulate a deeper understanding of the sociolegal and juridical dynamic at play in the multilayered crisis. First, the book employs the concept of colonial state of exception to describe the legal structure of US colonialism in PR. US colonial policies in PR have manufactured a specific legal logic of inclusion-exclusion within the rule of law that can be better understood through anticolonial and Global South interpretations of the state of exception.⁹ If the state of exception has normally been understood as the suspension of the rule of law to deal with periods of emergency or crisis, in the colonial context of PR, the state of exception has become the legal structure of US colonialism. As John Reynolds (2017) suggests, the state of emergency in the colonies is better understood as structure rather than as event. Crisis by Design demonstrates how the colonial state of exception is the legal structure of colonialism, rather than a US response to a crisis or an event.

Second, the book develops the concept of colonial legality to describe a series of legal practices, emergency powers, and criminogenic dynamics through which the PR government, with the support of the Puerto Rican elites, exercises its public authority in the context of the multilayered crisis. Colonial legality aims to cluster together a series of practices developed since the 1980s that collectively can be considered as a colonial governance enmeshed with neoliberal rationalities and hyper-legalistic practices. The conjunction between the colonial state of exception and colonial legality and their operation in everyday life in PR produces an assemblage of laws, regulations, norms, emergency powers, and violent policies.

Third, Crisis by Design proposes the concept of legal interruptions to signify how civil society organizations,¹⁰ legal actors, and grassroots organizations mobilize the right to access information, anticorruption narratives, and other transparency and accountability measures to interrupt the brutal process of wealth extraction and capital accumulation enabled by colonial legality. These civil society organizations have largely engaged in legal mobilizations, litigation, and other form of activism to promoted accountability and transparency, and to resist corruption, state-corporate crime, and social harm generated by colonial legality.

Together, and often as a result of the legal interruptions, this book identifies the emergence of colonial ruptures: that is, a series of popular and grassroots mobilizations that have engaged in temporary and powerful ruptures with the repetitive temporality of the crisis. These popular demonstrations aim to transform the Puerto Rican state and disrupt its colonial relationship with the United States. Perhaps the most emblematic of these popular demonstrations can be found in the context of the Summer of 2019, when hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took the streets in PR to demand the resignation of former Governor Ricardo Rosselló.¹¹ The mobilizations began after the publication of 889 pages of a now-infamous chat popularly known as Telegramgate.¹² In addition to discussing privileged governmental information, in this chat Rosselló and his allies (including both public functionaries and private contractors) engaged in xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic exchanges about their adversaries and degraded the memory of the most vulnerable and least privileged victims of Hurricane María. These demonstrations caused a temporary rupture and challenged the repetitive temporality of colonial legality. The mobilizations underscored a radical possibility for rendering ineffective the colonial legal structure in place in PR but are marked by the reasonable challenges in mounting effective counter-hegemonic and anticolonial movements. This book unfolds the connection between legal interruptions and colonial ruptures, and emphasizes the radical possibility to disrupt the colonial state of exception in PR.

Importantly, Crisis by Design does not account for every aspect of the Puerto Rican multilayered crisis, but focuses on the role of law, exceptionality, and legal mobilizations in crises that are often framed as natural, self-evident, or unavoidable.¹³ This book looks at the multilayered crisis from the lenses of sociolegal and critical criminology traditions and aims to underscore the role of law as both an instrument of coercion and a contested tool for social change. In what follows, I offer a detailed account of the three concepts the book develops and the way in which they help us better understand the sociolegal underpinnings of colonialism in the multilayered crisis.

Notes

1. My postscript discusses the neurocognitive poetics research that underlies this view, in particular Kneepkens and Zwaan’s work on “fiction feelings” and the Panskepp-Jakobson hypothesis. Eleonore Kneepkens, and Rolf A. Zwaan, “Emotions and Literary Text Comprehension,” Poetics 23 (1995). See also Arthur Jacobs, “Neurocognitive Poetics: Methods and Models for Investigating the Neuronal and Cognitive-affective Bases of Literature Reception,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9, no. 186 (2015). For a fascinating discussion of developing a “biliterate reading brain” with expertise in both print and digital reading, and further “building [a] kind of pluripotential brain circuitry” through reading different mediums, see Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (New York: Harper, 2018), 169–71.

2. The literature on the contemporary crisis of reading is vast. An influential early contribution to this debate was Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Culture (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1994). For further bibliography and a comprehensive engagement with the topic that draws on both neuroscience and literature, see Maryanne Wolf’s extensive scholarship, especially Wolf, Reader, Come Home.

3. For a resonating critique of archival writing and reading practices, and a celebration of an alternative way of remembering (i.e., the repertoire), see Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). The complex choices involved in reading against or along the archival grain have been most influentially explored by Saidiya Hartman and Ann Laura Stoler. Good starting points for exploring their prolific work on the topic are Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Archival Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). A landmark polemical stance on alternative modes of reading that has deeply influenced this book is that of Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). A provocative edited volume excavates the genealogy and development of reparative and critical reading, and ponders their futures: Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski, Critique and Postcritique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 1–30. See also Kirstin Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Robert Reid-Pharr, Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-humanist Critique (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Zeb Tortorici, Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). The ethics of researching in declassified Eastern European archives has preoccupied the Hidden Archives collective, whose prolific work is repeatedly referenced in this book. See also the special issue of the Romanian journal Martor titled Visual Ethics after Communism, particularly its introduction: David Crowley, James Kapaló, and Gabriela Nicolescu, “Introduction. Visual Ethics after Communism,” Martor 26 (2021). The thought-provoking methodology section of the magisterial Peasants under Siege also interrogated the limits of reading in hostile archives and argued for the need to complement it with oral history. Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949–1962 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 464–71.

4. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 1, no. 110 (2004). The terms “archival impulse” and “archival turn” are treated in more detail in chapter 2.

5. The term “quantum leap” is taken from Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Impact of the Opening of Soviet Archives on Western Scholarship on Soviet Social History,” Russian Review 74, no. 3 (2015): 377. For thoughtful accounts of the “archival revolution,” including further bibliography on the term, see Donald J. Raleigh, “Doing Soviet History: The Impact of the Archival Revolution,” Russian Review 61, no. 1 (2002); Jan Plamper, “Archival Revolution or Illusion? Historicizing the Russian Archives and Our Work in Them,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 51, no. 1 (2003).

6. Michael David-Fox, “Into and Beyond the Stalinist Paradigm of Secret Policing,” in The Secret Police and the Soviet System: New Archival Investigations, ed. Michael David-Fox (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023), 6.

7. David-Fox, “Into and Beyond the Stalinist Paradigm of Secret Policing,” 4.

8. See, for example, Juliet Johnson, “2023 President’s Address: De-centering Russia: Challenges and Opportunities,” blog post, ASEEES Blog (2023), https://www.aseees.org/news-events/aseees-blog-feed/2023-presidents-add…; Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, “Decolonization in Focus Seminar Series” (2023), https://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/insights/announcing-decolonization-….

9. Besides the rehabilitation of former political prisoners, declassified archival records also played a central role in the “screening, lustration and public identification of perpetrators.” In her comparative study of the place of archival resources in transitional justice, Lavinia Stan shows that “archival records were of remarkable utility for the trials against former leaders and the truth commissions in Latin America, but the advantages—and the disadvantages—of using archival records for transitional justice purposes were particularly clearly revealed in post-communist Eastern Europe.” Lavinia Stan, “Entries on Transitional Justice Debates, Controversies, and Key Questions,” in Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice, ed. Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 112.

10. There are thousands of informer scandals across the former Soviet bloc, some of which—such as those concerning Lech Wałęsa, István Szabó, Milan Kundera, or Julia Kristeva—made international news.

11. Some scholars warned early on that the term “archival revolution” could not be justified solely by the quantity of new sources. Stephen Kotkin, “The State—Is It Us? Memoirs, Archives, and Kremlinologists,” Russian Review 61, no. 1 (2002); Mark von Hagen, “The Archival Gold Rush and Historical Agendas in the Post-Soviet Era,” Slavic Review 52, no. 1 (1993). There were lively debates about whether “new perspectives derive from open archives or whether such openings only reinforce preconceived categories of analysis.” David-Fox, “Into and beyond the Stalinist Paradigm of Secret Policing,” 7. As David-Fox concedes, in the first decade, scholars warning that “often uninterrogated purpose and structure of the archival repositories themselves, the search for revelations their opening engenders, and the way fields use them to pour old wine into new bottles makes the knowledge they create less than revelatory” found ready ammunition for their critique. However, David-Fox continues, “with the hindsight of over three decades of Soviet history in the archival era, it has become clearer that the availability and allure of new sources have served as a potential, often even necessary impetus to widen and re-focus our vision.” David-Fox, “Into and beyond the Stalinist Paradigm of Secret Policing,” 7. Rather than a defeat of those initial critics, the quality of this new research and its self-reflexive interest in methodology has likely benefited from those early warnings.

12. Jane Hirshfield, Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise (Hexham, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2008), 53.

13. As the poet Yehuda Amichai reminds us, difficulty yields interpretations and commentary in a way that straightforwardness does not: “Interpretations grew around them, as / When the Talmud grows difficult, / It shrinks on the page, / And Rashi and the commentaries, / Close in on it from all sides.” Difficulty also makes interpretation and its conclusions visible, putting them on display and thus subjecting them to critique, revision, and reinterpretation. Yehuda Amichai, Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry 1948–1994, trans. Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 38.