Browsing by Subject "Puerto Rico"
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Item A political ecology approach to investigate the environmental impacts of cattle management in Puerto Rico, 16th to 19th centuries(2018-05-04) Sánchez-Morales, Lara M.; Rosen, Arlene MillerThe nature and scale of environmental impacts due to the introduction of livestock into New World contexts has been the subject of much debate within disciplines concerned with changes of land use and land cover. The introduction of Old World species of herbivores into New World landscapes is often regarded as a catalyst to rapid environmental changes and a prevailing notion associates the presence of cattle with environmental degradation. My research aims to explore the environmental effects of cattle in Puerto Rico following European colonization. In this report, I employ a Political Ecology framework to contextualize the development of cattle management practices in Puerto Rico from the 16th to the 19th centuries. I discuss the potential of using a Political Ecology approach to understand the relationship between Spanish colonialism, cattle management practices, and environmental transformations. Finally, I propose the implementation of a geoarchaeological methodology to answer remaining questions on the impacts of cattle management during the colonial period in Puerto Rico.Item Afro-Latinx literary history : identities and politics across the ethno-racial divide(2018-05-03) Mills, Regina Marie; González, John Morán; Cox, James H; Wilks, Jennifer M; Vázquez, David JMy dissertation finds that Afro-Latinx writers have repurposed the genre of life writing in response to their marginalization in US Black and Latinx communities. Through journalistic sketches, collaborative autobiographies, and other forms of life writing, Afro-Latinxs have constructed and deployed a variety of Afro-Latinidades—the negotiation of ascribed characteristics and lived experiences that shape the confluence of migrant, Black, and Latinx identities—that take form in their writing, which critiques existing hegemonies of race, gender, politics, and religion in US, Caribbean, and Latin American institutions. The writers and organizers who are the subjects of this study recover Black contributions to politics and the arts globally, articulate a distinct strand of socialist politics, fight the stigma against Afro-diasporic religions, and reclaim the legitimacy of street practices. My dissertation ties together literary close reading with extensive archival research. Because of a certain unease about where to place Afro-Latinx writers (Black Studies or Latinx Studies) and the overtly political and pedantic structure of some Afro-Latinx memoirs, these works have been underexamined in literary studies. As the first book-length analysis focused entirely on Afro-Latinx life writing, my dissertation builds on the recovery work of the last 20 years to take seriously the literary and political contributions of Afro-Latinxs. My project contests the common articulation of Afro-Latinidad as a “bridge” between US Black and (white) Latinx communities, and in doing so, provides a literary history of Afro-Latinx communities. I draw from bell hooks’ conception of “writing from the margin” and woman of color feminist analyses to demonstrate that Afro-Latinx life writing has shaped our discussions on immigration, colonialism, socialism, and spirituality for a century. Each chapter illustrates how different Afro-Latinidades—political, cultural, spiritual, and gendered—structure the life writing used by activists, socialist organizers, santeras (priests of Afro-diasporic orisha worship), former prisoners, and 23andMe genealogistsItem “American” state of exception : reimagining the Puerto Rican colony and the nationalist enemy under United States rule, 1900-1940(2015-05) Jimenez, Monica Alexandra; Guridy, Frank Andre; Arroyo-Martinez, Jossianna; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia; Brower, Benjamin; Engle, KarenThis dissertation reexamines the first forty years of the United States’ dominion over the island of Puerto Rico through the lens of the state of exception in order to analyze the role of race, nationalism and violence in the formation of the Puerto Rican nation. Focusing on the period before the creation of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the project first engages in a legal historical analysis in order to understand how U.S. Supreme Court decisions concerning race, citizenship and the application of the U.S. Constitution served to create a state of exception on the island. These early pronouncements, known as the Insular Cases, were steeped in white supremacist and social Darwinian ideas about race and civic readiness. Through these decisions the Court left the island in an uncertain position in which certain natural, unspecified rights were granted to its inhabitants but the protections of the U.S. Constitution were not. This exclusion from the established legal order opened up a space for the proliferation of violence. The second part of the project turns to an examination of the workings of violence and the rise of nationalism in response to U.S. policies. I argue that the state of exception led to both the growth of nationalism on the island and to its violent suppression. Though much has been written with respect to the colonial status of the island and its legal uncertainty during the first half of the twentieth century, a reexamination of this history using the state of exception helps further our understandings of the role of race and violence in that dynamic. Finally, this discussion also deepens our understanding of contemporary U.S. states of exception created in pursuit of both global markets and the purported “War on Terror.”Item Becoming urban : a historical ethnography of Puerto Rico's development/planning ensemble and its spatial production in Santurce (1940-1960)(2021-04-19) Encarnación Burgos, Angeliz E.; Mueller, Elizabeth J.; Sletto, Bjørn; Lara, Fernando L; Cons, JasonThis study analyzes how historical political forces and development/planning processes that occurred in the 1940s and 1960s laid the foundation for the uneven landscape that persists today in Santurce, one of the oldest barrios of the capital of Puerto Rico (San Juan), and how these processes contributed to the emergence of Hato Rey as the core business center. Through an historical ethnography, this study reveals the relationships between political struggles and development/planning ideologies and illuminate the spatial implications of these struggles. In doing so, I describe the key institutions, political actors and practices that have molded the distinctive development/planning institutional ensemble of Puerto Rico over time. I also consider how certain spatial strategies and colonial political interventions in San Juan have been deeply tied to economic growth policies designed to attract US investors and to uphold US hegemony and the Colonial state. My study traces how pivotal political changes, including the expansion of federal regulations, new funding opportunities, and the appearance of new institutional forms and agents have structured San Juan’s urban space under the shifting, often contradictory conditions of capitalism and colonialism. Different from previous studies on Puerto Rico’s development and industrialization experiences, I developed the analytical concept of the Puerto Rico’s development/planning ensemble to better explore the pivotal engagements of a wide array of colonial and metropolitan agents, at multiple scales, without obscuring their individual or collective roles in the production of space. The study aims to provide additional insight on how a critical framework can be arranged to account for the historical experiences (colonial and neocolonial) of communities in the Global South when forecasts and traditional models fail. More broadly, this study aims to contribute to new ways of engaging in planning praxis. Furthermore, I propose to explore the urban as a social construction, shedding light on what the “urban” means in the case of Puerto Rico (especially in San Juan) and how this idea has been constructed by multiple pivotal development and planning state-led maneuvers (i.e., the Colonial state and the Metropolitan state ) that produce uneven geographies and contestation.Item Beyond the 50 states: Puerto Rican statehood and representation in the U.S. Congress(2012) Gargiulo, Juan PabloItem Book Review of Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television(New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, Vol. 82, No. 3 & 4, 2008) Arroyo, JossiannaItem Causes of displacement : a look into the state of Puerto Rico's housing crisis before, during, and after Hurricane Maria(2023-04-20) Reyes Cruz, Charmelis A.; Wegmann, Jake; Karner, AlexThe displacement of Puerto Rican people due to social, political, and economic factors has created a cycle of disrepair, where migration trends due to precarious economic conditions prevent economic growth. The housing market on the island has also been affected, resulting in more people losing their homes or becoming rent-burdened. This report aims to understand Puerto Rico's socioeconomic situation, taking into consideration the impact of Hurricane Maria. To achieve this, an extensive literature review was conducted using reports from governmental agencies and nonprofit organizations, academic research papers, and news articles. US Census and American Community Survey data were also used to examine trends in the economy, demographics, and housing over the study period. The report is divided into three chapters: pre-storm conditions, storm impact, and post-storm conditions. The research found that Puerto Rico's economic crisis was triggered by changes in tax law that repealed incentives for foreign companies to locate on the island, leading to a shift from manufacturing to a service-based economy. This resulted in younger families migrating due to a lack of alternatives, with Hurricane Maria worsening the situation by damaging the island's physical and economic infrastructure and prompting a population relocation. Recovery efforts have focused on attracting foreign investment rather than addressing preexisting issues, resulting in slow progress. Despite this, there have been some improvements in socioeconomic, demographic, and housing conditions.Item Cuerpos resonantes : sonidos y voces en la poesía del Caribe y el Cono Sur 1930-1980(2016-05) Staig Limidoro, James Christian; Cárcamo-Huechante, Luis E.; Arroyo, Jossianna; Borge, Jason; Robbins, JillIn the present research I approach the sonic materiality in the works of poets of the 20th Century from Chile, Argentina, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. I analize the works of Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957), Nicolás Guillén (1902–1989), Néstor Perlongher (1949–1992) and Pedro Pietri (1944–2004); all of them presenting particular approaches to the production, consumption, and representation of sound through poetry. This research works with notions of sound studies, performance, animal, sex-gender, and cultural studies, to explore the different forms in which these authors use sound as part of a poetic-politic of the spoken word. I explore also how in their uses of sound they problematize notions of cultural identity, political revolution, nation building, censorship and belonging. In the present study I propose that these four poets—Mistral, Guillén, Perlongher, and Pietri—use their sound production as a tool for a political and aesthetic exercise that materializes notions of identity, agency, and belonging. Also, I claim that each poet presents a sonic conscience, bot in the production of sound and hearing.; that is, from their behalf there is a performatic notion of their work as sound and voice. This allows them to explore topics of gender, race, politics, diasporas, and aesthetics that amplify their “resonance” no only in writing but also in the sono-sphere of language and body. Thus, I explore the recording of their voices and performances as archives in which is possible to practice a critical, material, and bodily listening. Together with that, on methodological terms, I propose mi own reading as part of a escucha profunda, in dialog with the elaborations of close listening by Charles Bernstein and an attention to the effects of “resound” (Jean-Luc Nancy) that leads the poetic phenomenon in a sense level, physical experience and perception (Don Idhe).Item Destabilizing racialized geographies : the temporality of Blackness in Puerto Rico(2016-05) Machicote, Michaela Andrea; Arroyo, Jossianna; Leu, LorraineIn this thesis I analyze the way in which the de-colonial construction of Puerto Rico, and subsequent acquisition by the US as a territory, came to inform and create a whitened identity through the confinement, historicization of African influence, and erasure of Puerto Rico's Black population/heritage component via the narrative of mestizaje and mulataje. I look specifically at Loíza; Loíza is a city celebrated by Puerto Rico as a site of authentic Blackness and exemplifies efforts by the state to commodify and restrict the movements of Black Bodies. It is in these marginalized and racialized spaces that I explore the possibility of self-making and Black identity in Loíza, Puerto Rico.Item Digitizing ethnonational identities : multimediatic representations of Puerto Rican soldiers(2012-05) Avilés Santiago, Manuel Gerardo; Kumar, Shanti; Mallapragada, Madhavi; Arroyo-Martínez, Jossianna; Rivero, Yeidy; Fuller, JenifferThe silence and invisibility of Puerto Rican soldiers in fictional and non-fictional representations of U.S. Wars has motivated me to look for alternative spaces in which these unaccounted voices and images are currently being produced, stored, circulated, and memorialized. Within this framework, my dissertation explores the self-representation of Puerto Rican servicemen and women in social networking sites (SNS), (i.e. as MySpace and Facebook), in user-generated content (UGC) platforms, (i.e. YouTube), and also in web memorials. I am interested in understanding how Puerto Rican soldiers self-represent their ethnonational identity online within the overlapping of second-class citizenship. The theoretical framework proposed for this research will apply theories such as 1) articulation; 2) the notion of contact zone; and 3) colonial/racial subjectivities. To complete this goal, my research method draws on online ethnography, textual, and critical discourse analysis. Firstly, I will discuss the limited repertoire of images of Puerto Rican soldiers in TV and film. My argument is that, besides the massive omission of this history, the images and motifs that do escape de facto social censorship will be in conversation with the self-representations. The second chapter is the result of four years of the process of online ethnography on which I analyze the instances of self-representation of Puerto Rican soldiers in SNS. My interest was seeing how those spaces were inflected by an ethnonational subjectivity. The third chapter explores the ways Puerto Rican soldiers, embedded in mash-up cultures, uses UGCs platforms to upload videos that transform the soldiers from passive consumers of images to active producers of content, which tend to disrupt dominant narratives of power. The last chapter explores the emergence of web memorials dedicated to the Puerto Rican soldiers. My main argument is that these instances of self- representation in online spaces are in conversation with the moments of silences and misrepresentations of Puerto Rican soldiers in traditional media, but also have become acts of enunciation in which the particular Puerto Ricanness of the Puerto Rican soldier is affirmed within complex, layered histories of imperialism, racism, heterosexism, and second-class citizenship.Item Disaster Capitalism on Puerto RIco: Causes and Consequences of the Privatization of Puerto RIco's Public Electric Authority after Huricane Maria(2018-05) Naseck, KobiAfter the Spanish American War, the United States established full control over the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico and several small islands surrounding it. Unlike other territories outside the continental United States, Puerto Rico was never offered a path to statehood. Under U.S. policy and control, the island, its government, and that debt held by the government and its many public authorities like PREPA (the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority) grew over time. This thesis investigates the causes and consequences of the privatization of PREPA (the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority), especially in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Examining the privatization of this crucial government service in the context of the Puerto Rico’s unique status within the United States and its history as an unincorporated commonwealth territory, the specific measures of success and failure for an electric power utility, neoliberal policy that favors privatization and contractors, and the intersection of this neoliberal policy and the practice of disaster capitalism uncovers a complex story of policymakers, businessmen, union leaders, and government officials fighting to control an ailing service provider. By describing the current state of PREPA and the unique political landscape on Puerto Rico, this thesis considers the environmental, political, economic, historical, and social impact of the privatization of this public electric utility, answering the following questions: What role does Puerto Rico’s unique colonial legal environment play in PREPA’s decline, if any? Is PREPA simply a “failed experiment” of a public energy utility in the United States, or are other factors to blame for its current sub-par state of operations, lack of financial stability, and the resulting privatization focus of its managers and other political leaders on the island? What does the current state of PREPA reveal about federalism and neoliberal political ideology? Synthesizing the answers to these questions and many others through research on both government and private sector documents and across disciplines, this thesis accurately portrays different motivations for the privatization of PREPA and the impact that such a decision will have on Puerto Rico and its population.Item Distances and proximities : Havana and San Juan from the point of view of literature and oral histories(2015-05) Mercado Diaz, Mario Edgardo; Salgado, César Augusto; Merabet, Sofian, 1972-Cuba y Puerto Rico have for long been considered sister islands, fighting together against the influences of the Spanish Empire and the United States. The decade of the 1950s, however, proved to be the splitting point for both islands, sending them into very different trajectories of development. In their shared experience of Spanish colonization and USA interventions, how do San Juan and Havana residents perceive and use space today in their particular socio-political contexts and how does this affect the resident's sense of citizenship? I closely engage with the different urban spaces using ethnographic data and photographs taken during my recent fieldwork, creative texts describing said spaces and case studies examining the formation of racial, gender and class identities. Focusing on a specific place on the Malecón, Havana's iconic esplanade, I examine how practices of leisure, intimacy (e.g. erotic homosexual and heterosexual encounters), and self-expression challenge the revolutionary rhetoric of "sameness" (i.e. absence of race, class, crime or gender violence). As for San Juan, I dissect the layers of significance in public visual representation, as exemplified in the artwork painted over an abandoned house in Santurce, the site for queer, artistic and marginal expression. The scene, two black women drinking on the porch, rescues a sense of citizenship lost to the class and racial polarization, fragmentation, and the "ruination" of San Juan. Finally, I argue that an archipelagic city, composed of the descriptions of specific places in different cities, has been created in the sea, a space of crossing, endurance and death, within these inter-capillary exchanges of people, cultures and habits. This archipelagic city, not spoken about directly but referenced semantically, aids in the construction of trans-national identities and perspectives, specific perceptions on time and space, and the production of media and cultural forms of expression. My goal is to tie together these narrative strands linking trans-oceanic places into an urban map surpassing its own geographical context.Item Effects of pharmaceutical wastes on growth of microalgae(1970) Van Baalen, C. (Chase), 1925-1986; Batterton, JohnThe purpose of this work was to assay samples of waste material from Puerto Rican pharmaceutical industries for inhibition of growth of algae. Two samples (noted as I and II) supplied to us were tested for toxicity to six microalgae. The test organisms, two blue-green algae, two green algae, and two diatoms [r]epresent three major divisions of algae.Item El lamento borincano : Puerto Rico, the United States and 100 years of "unjust and unintelligent" policies(2007-05) Jimenez, Monica Alexandra; Levinson, Sanford, 1941-The United States took possession of Puerto Rico in 1898 with the end of the Spanish American war. Since that time, U.S. policies toward the island have been predicated on notions of race and the other and on confused interpretations of Constitutional and federal law. This work attempts to provide a broad legal and historical examination of the United States-Puerto Rico relationship and to flesh out some of the inherent confusion and lacunae left by U.S. court decisions. The later part of the work focuses on the applicability of the federal death penalty on the island as a case study of problems that arise when United States federal law is applied to Puerto Rico in the face of a Puerto Rico constitutional ban.Item Employing the Protestant sound : a study of the first Protestant hymnals in Spanish used in Puerto Rico after 1898(2021-09-27) Pabon-Rico, Luis S.; Nardini, LuisaThe early twentieth century is one of the main periods of Puerto Rican colonial history characterized by a dramatic change in politics, culture, and religion. After the victory of the United States in the Spanish-Cuban-American war, Puerto Rico became a US colony, ending 400 years of Spanish colonial rule and dramatically changing the Puerto Rican political panorama with the rise of the United States as a twentieth-century empire. Immediately after, several US-based mainline Protestant churches drew plans to start mission projects in Puerto Rico and among the distinctive features of the new missionaries was the arrival of hymnals. While US Protestantism in Puerto Rico has received notable scholarly attention, the musical practices of the missionaries and, later, the first congregations have barely been addressed. Through the study of the first hymnals and hymn books more widely used in Puerto Rico during the first decades of the twentieth century, we can observe trends of musical aesthetics and theological dogma that Puerto Ricans were exposed to during that time. I suggest that, in terms of music, the ontology of these hymnals is characterized by the Anglo-American hymnody tradition, a condition made more complex when inserted into the colonial context of institutionalized Protestantism in Puerto Rico. Drawing from previous historiographic scholarly works done on Protestant hymnody in Puerto Rico, this study explores the origins and contents of the first five Protestant hymnals in Spanish used in Puerto Rico from 1898 to 1924, while also providing a more comprehensive groundwork for future research on this topic. The hymnals under study are the 1893 and 1895 editions of Himnario evangélico, Nuevo himnario evangélico (1914), Himnos de gloria (1921), and Cantos sagrados (1924). The website luispabonrico.com serves as the digital component of this report. Among other features, it includes infographics of textual analysis of hymn texts and timelines and maps of the trans-atlantic genealogies of the hymnals. As a repository of public scholarship, its principal aim is to be an auxiliary resource for the report’s contents and to reach a larger audience interested in Protestant hymnody in Puerto Rico.Item Fake Deaths(2018-09-18) O'Neill, ConnorItem Farming and resistance : survival strategies of smallholder farmers in Puerto Rico(2014-12) Avilés-Vázquez, Katia Raquel; Knapp, Gregory W.; Doolittle, William; Butzer, Karl; Torres, Rebecca; Carro-Figueroa, VivianAgriculture in Puerto Rico has declined sharply since industrialization of the island in the early part of the 20th Century. Rural towns withered as people migrated to the cities, and the landscape was transformed with forested areas increasing as agricultural land decreased. Reduction in the farming population and loss of agricultural lands in concert with increases in forested areas has led to a discourse that agriculture is a thing of the past and antagonistic to economic progress. This dissertation draws from cultural and political ecology, as well as critical ethnography and rural sociology, to analyze the present-day status of small holder farmers in Puerto Rico and ascertain some of the production strategies and tactics utilized by these farmers. I worked with agricultural organizations in order to determine the networks and adaptations that farmers employ in adapting to an increasingly difficult socioeconomic environment. The greatest threats to these smallholder farmers are a lack of access to land, loss of community networks and knowledge, and one size fits all policies designed for larger land holdings and based on antiquated economic systems that depend on “cheap”, heavily subsidized labor. To survive, small-scale farmers have: (1) redistributed their social capital, (2) diversified both the use of their farms and household income, (3) expanded the geographic reach of their networks using tools such as the internet, and (4) created new marketing chains to access consumers directly. On the landscape, smallholder farmers are intensifying their use of small plots of land while leaving larger tracts in reserve. I use the findings and observations of this research to present recommendations for breaking out of the cycle of subsistence poverty. Finally, just as small-scale farmers are adapting the ways they interact among themselves and with the land, the findings of this study suggest that the way farmers are viewed and defined must be reconsidered in order to create policies that serve the agricultural sector.Item Final report : NOAA Puerto Rico pharmaceutical wastes, January 11, 1980(1980) Van Baalen, C. (Chase), 1925-1986Individual pharmaceutical wastes from operations in Puerto Rico were examined for toxicity towards representative types of microalgae.Item Focus on Our Faculty(LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, 2014) Sharpe, SusannaItem Impacts of unpaved roads on runoff and sediment production in Culebra, Puerto Rico(2019-12) Mclaughlin, Preston Wyatt; Ramos-Scharrón, Carlos E.Terrigenous sediment delivery into tropical coastal waters from unpaved road development is a key stressor influencing the global decline of coral reef ecosystems. Higher turbidity of coastal waters from this terrigenous sediment can result in smothering, bleaching, and reduced photosynthetic activity for coral reefs. Since the 1990’s, the small Puerto Rican municipality of Culebra has experienced significant rates of land development, and an expansion of its unpaved road network, which has been identified as the contributing factor responsible for the continuous decline of the island’s live coral cover. This research focuses on quantifying runoff, and sediment production rates for Culebra’s unpaved road and undisturbed surfaces at the plot (~3 m²), and watershed (~1 km²) scales. A total of 46 rainfall-runoff simulations, and 119 Guelph permeamter tests were conducted to collect this data. Results indicate that only 1.2 mm of rainfall is required to produce overland flow on unpaved roads. At least 7.9 cm of rainfall is needed to generate overland runoff on undisturbed hillslopes. Erosion rates were greatest for recently graded road segments, with an average annual erosion rate of 54.65 Mg ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹. Unpaved roads that have been left ungraded for over one year erode at about half this rate (29 Mg ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹). Undisturbed surface erosion was negligible in comparison, with a mean rate of 0.05 Mg ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹. Based on this data, there are up to five orders of magnitude difference between erosion rates of graded unpaved roads and natural soil surfaces in Culebra. Within one year, a total of 335 storms occurred between. Around a quarter of all recorded storms produced overland runoff on unpaved road surfaces. Hurricane Maria was estimated to be the only storm that year to generate overland flow on undisturbed surfaces. ArcGIS was used to identify segments of road most likely to transport overland runoff to the coastline, as well as segments generating the most erosion. Sediment production rates for the study areas ranged between 3.1 and 10.9 Mg yr⁻¹. This information is beneficial towards documenting the overall effectiveness of erosion mitigation structures built to reduce terrigenous sediment transport produced from these roads