Puerto Rico’s Catastrophe

• Published date: 01 May 2020
• Date: 01 May 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20915570
• Author: Francisco J. Concepción Márquez
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20915570

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 232, Vol. 47 No. 3, May 2020, 138–140

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20915570

© 2020 Latin American Perspectives

138

Book Review

Puerto Rico’s Catastrophe

by

Francisco J. Concepción Márquez

Translated by

Mariana Ortega-Breña

Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico before and after

the Storm. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019.

Marisol LeBrón Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico.

Oakland: University of California Press, 2019.

As I write this review, the ground in Puerto Rico is still shaking. On January 7, 2020,

Puerto Ricans woke up to the roar of a new natural event: a 6.4-magnitude earthquake

shook the south of an island that had already experienced two Category 5 hurricanes in

2017. Hurricane Irma went through Puerto Rico on September 5, 2017, and Hurricane

Maria did the same on September 20. The ensuing economic crisis led to bankruptcy

and a debt of more than US$72 billion; the events experienced during the summer of

2019 also led to the ousting of a governor.

Following all these events, the best description of Puerto Rican reality is that prof-

fered by Nelson Maldonado Torres in his afterword to Yarimar Bonilla’s Aftershocks of

Disaster: a catastrophe whose radical nature highlights the weakness of the regime that

regulates behavior in the colony. The essays compiled and edited by Bonilla and Marisol

LeBrón reflect a reality that is vanishing into escape and flight.

Aftershocks of Disaster is the result of a conference held in September 2018 that sought

to explore the impact of Hurricane Maria on all dimensions of Puerto Rican reality.

While it provides us with the tools needed to understand the dimensions of the catas-

trophe, it also gives us a glimpse of alternative futures. With more than 30 essays on

topics from trauma and the representation of disaster to Puerto Rican transformation,

the book includes a multiplicity of new and radical viewpoints that reveal the fragility

of the colonial project begun in 1898. Colonialism is the fundamental context for the

readings presented in this volume. The status of the colonial subject in a regime that has

forgotten the fundamental binding agreement leads to an experience of reality trans-

formed by art, social commitment, the renewal of the economic system, and the con-

struction of new ways of achieving energy independence for the island. The reality of

Puerto Rico, in Aftershocks of Disaster, is a space for challenge, a context of death and the

possibility of life.

The fundamental agent of transformation in all of the texts is the community—the

social and the collective. The book speaks not of one face but of many. It is the project

not of an individual but of a collective, a group, a sector: the hidden voices, those erased

Francisco J. Concepción Márquez is a professor of criminal justice at the Inter-American University

of Puerto Rico Barranquitas Campus. Mariana Ortega-Breña is a freelance translator based in

Mexico City.

915570LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20915570Latin American PerspectivesConcepción/Book Review

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