Month: April 2023

By: Kaitlyn Clingenpeel

The following excerpts come from the written fictional experiences of a university student from the US serving as an intern in Mexico. They uncovered a shocking truth and proceeded to publish and expose this truth to try and bring justice to those who were negatively affected by these events as they were understood prior to the discovery of these new facts.

Little could have prepared me for what I would find during the summer that I worked as an intern for the United States Consulate in Mérida, Yucatan, Mexico and how it would come to affect the trajectory of my life and history. My interests in history and the history of the relationship between the US and Mexico brought me to Mexico in the first place and would continue to send me on a path to uncover a lost truth and bring it into the light for the world to see. The story I found that had been “lost” to time calls into question what the two countries know of the events that sugar plantation and the events that followed its discovery were all efforts to bring the truth into the light and move forward by recognizing it and making efforts of reparations and amending the narrative.

Arriving at the Consulate campus in Merida, I was always struck by the stark white building contrasting with the lush greens of the foliage surrounding it. As an intern, I was given menial tasks, but I was genuinely happy to have my foot in the door and knew that this position would bode well for my future. A few weeks into my stay there, I was handed a key card and told that I would be helping to digitize some old archival files stemming back to the 1840s when the Consulate was first founded. I jumped at this opportunity to pour over these documents as they were scanned and this is where I discovered a box that seemingly some hoped would be forgotten to time, and it had been for almost 150 years.

This box contained witness testimonies related to the events of the Monkaab sugar plantation in 1875 following the murder of its American owner, Patrick Edwards. I recalled reading a book about these events for a project in one of my classes on US-Mexico relations, but these testimonies seemed to contrast everything that I knew on the topic. After I left that day, I went back to my accommodations and searched through my files from my previous research. This confirmed that those testimonies did not match up with the accounts I was reading about. Later searching through the documents would reveal correspondences between the Consul at the time, Charles Visage, and his counterparts in the United States that implied that those testimonies I had discovered earlier were potentially put aside and left out of any reports on the case. With this new information being brought to light, I knew I had to take this to someone and I started working my way up the chain of command until I ended up sitting in front of the Consul General, Dorothy Ngutter.

I started our meeting by explaining the current understanding of the narrative of those events as they were without the new documents I had uncovered:

Patrick Edwards was an Irish-American man who had moved to the northeast Yucatan and bought a sugar plantation named Monkaab (meaning sugar in Yucatec Mayan) with the hopes of making a fortune. After a tough hurricane season, which destroyed much of his crop, the year before, he and his hired Maya workers were set to have a great harvest and a productive season. This success was unprecedented in the area and drew the attention of local Mexican plantation owners and led to, according to Edwards, a great deal of jealousy. One of these plantation families decided to take him out of the equation by trying to bring Maya rebels from the Caste War of the Yucatan, which was going on concurrently with these events, to Monkaab. It is believed that a local official, who was bribed by the plantation family, ordered for a path to be cut through the jungle near Monkaab under the guise of plans for a new road. In reality, this path would create an easy access point to Monkaab if any Maya rebels decided to head up that way from where they were hiding out. Patrick Edwards’s last day was marked by just that, Maya rebels marched onto his plantation, captured him and his workers, and murdered all those who could not escape fast enough, including Edwards. When putting together the official reports on the case, Edwards’s initial complaints to the Consul about jealous competitors out to get him were removed from the narrative, which instead focused more on the violent attack by the rebels as the root of the situation at hand. This is the narrative that was presented to Edwards’s wife and three daughters that sparked an international crisis that jeopardized the relationship between the US and Mexico for almost 70 years following his murder and prior to a settlement of the case for $10,000 USD to be paid to Edwards’s surviving family.

I explained to Ngutter that the witness testimonies and other case-related documents found hidden within the archives present a different narrative and that I believed it is one worth telling. One where Edwards was a cruel boss who mistreated his workers and sought to put down his competitors through malicious means. He was willing to do anything to put himself on top, including abusing his workers and sabotaging those around him. Additionally, a majority of these testimonies from local workers were Indigenous Maya people and I felt it entirely necessary that these long-silenced voices needed to be heard. It was also necessary to show the intentionality of the silencing of these voices by American officials.

This was probably the most nerve-wracking part of my entire conversation with her that day. I had no clue what to expect, but I knew that I was going to an American official in a foreign country and telling her that the US was actually in the wrong and needed to admit it and adjust to move forward towards a better future. I never expected her to look at me and say “Okay, you’ve presented a great case to me. So. what’s next? How are you going to tell this story?” and I can imagine the look of shock on my face entirely gave those sentiments away when she did. Ideas started floating around my head as I thought of how to answer her, but there was one thought that kept pushing itself to the front of my brain: It’s not my story to tell. So, that’s what I told her.

Working with Ngutter and the professor from the class where I originally learned about the story of Monkaab, we reached out to the author of the original story about Monkaab, Paul Sullivan, and a colleague of my professor who was based out of a university in Valladolid, Ivan Dzul, which is a couple of hours away from Monkaab, that had been working with locals in the area. With the help of Sullivan and Dzul, we were able to reach out to some of Sullivan’s original informants, Jorge Noh and Yuraima Arceo, and other Maya locals from Dzul’s current project, Patricia Marrufo and Juan Pinzon. With this team: myself, Ngutter, Sullivan, Dzul, and our group of local collaborators, we set out to compile these new witness testimonies and revise the narrative that had been floated around for years leading up to this point.

Sticking to my goal of allowing our collaborators to decide how this story should be told, myself, Ngutter, Sullivan, and Dzul did our best to serve as resources to Noh, Arceo, Marrufo, and Pinzon as they decided how to move forward with the project. With the original title of Sullivan’s book being Monkaab Must Die: The Lost Histories of a Murder on the Yucatan this project quickly became known as Monkaab Revived. As per the choices of our team, the goal of our project became to revise the story as it had been known to incorporate the recently discovered testimonies, call attention to the cover-up of these testimonies, and to included the voices of our local collaborators along the way. The decision was made to create a follow-up to Sullivan’s original book to serve as a sort of second edition and sequel combined into one. This new book, Monkaab Revived: The Revised History of a Murder on the Yucatan, served as an edited volume. We included chapters discussing Sullivan’s original work to uncover what he could about the story of Monkaab, chapters from myself and Ngutter outlining the rediscovery of the testimonies and their implications and the steps we took to pull this project together, and chapters from our local collaborators detailing their experiences with the project and the revised history of Monkaab in their own words. The concluding remarks of this book served as a call for the incorporation of more Indigenous voices and for the use of this book as a guide to do so in the future in other cases.

In putting the final touches on the book, we reflected on our goals of inclusion and accessibility. We wanted to incorporate these often-silenced voices into our project in a way that anyone could read and understand. We didn’t want this book to end up behind university paywalls or be loaded up with so much jargon that you needed a Ph.D. to understand what we were trying to say. So, we used accessible language and tried our best to put those unheard voices at the forefront of our narrative. One of the biggest ways we did this was when listing out our editors/contributing authors. Our collaborators held the so-often coveted position of first on the list, then Professor Dzul, followed by the remaining American contributors. Another way we tried to incorporate silenced voices and accessibility was with our cover. The original cover of Monkaab Must Die featured an art piece of the wetlands of that part of the northeastern Yucatan Peninsula. During a visit to the Monkaab plantation, we were all taking pictures and discussing the mangroves. Dzul managed to snap a picture of an egret among the mangroves before it was spooked and flew off. This was one of the pictures we floated around for the book’s cover. In the spirit of the original cover, Sullivan suggested that we find an artist to create a painted version of the picture. As luck would have it, one of Sullivan’s original collaborators and our team member, Yuraima Arceo, is also an artist that uses a Maya art style that stems back to her ancestors. We used her version of the picture on the cover to further emphasize the importance of incorporating Indigenous voices (and hands) in this project and others.

            Through the help of Ngutter and Sullivan, we were able to make sure that this book was published, seen, and recognized by people around the US and Mexico and that US officials acknowledged their wrongdoing in this case, hopefully setting a precedent for similar ones in the future. The book was published in both English and Spanish and copies of the book in Yucatec Mayan were printed to be distributed to the local Maya population around Monkaab. US and Mexican officials have also begun talks on how to proceed with this new information and correspondences have also started to come in to our team asking for help with revising other narratives and bringing those long-silenced voices out of the shadows. This was in no way how I expected that internship at the US Consulate in Merida to go, but I am grateful for these experiences and how they have shaped my career and the future for the better.

Author’s Note

This fabricated account of the Monkaab sugar plantation and the murder of Patrick Edwards almost completely mirrors the true events of the murder of Robert Stephens that took place at Xuxub. What happened there is chronicled by Paul Sullivan as he seeks to find the truth of the events in his book Xuxub Must Die: The Lost Histories of a Murder on the Yucatan (2004). At the end of his introduction, “Terrible Beauty,” Sullivan admits that he never could crack the whole truth of the events that took place in October of 1875 at Xuxub due to a lack of information and instead has compiled all of the known facts of the case to set the stage and provide enough context to get as clear of a picture as is possible (2004). This admission from the start struck me and set the stage for my imagination as I tried to envision how the story would change with just a few more pieces of information. Could one more document have entirely changed the canon of this history? Whose voices were never heard on the situation? What would they say if given the chance? And thus, this imaginative narrative was born to explore a possible postcolonial future where more pieces fell into place on this puzzle.

The Truth Behind the Fiction

            Robert Stephens purchased the Xuxub sugar plantation and had been working hard to make it a successful business venture (Sullivan 2004). According to Stephens’s accounts of the events leading up to his death, he eventually gained enough success that a rival plantation family, the Ureclays, grew jealous of him (Sullivan 2004). The Ureclays were a powerful family that were bribing local officials to start to clear a path to Xuxub and to look the other way if or when Maya rebels made their way up that path and onto the Xuxub plantation (Sullivan 2004). Stephens raised his concerns with officials in Mexico, but they were waved off and disregarded, leaving Stephens in the same position he was in before he went to them (Sullivan 2004). In October of 1875, rebels did make their way up the path and onto Stephens’s plantation where they end up murdering him (Sullivan 2004).

The American Consul at the time of the murder of Stephens, Alphonse Lespinasse, purposefully sought out workers and other locals that knew Stephens and would speak kindly of him for the official record of events (Sullivan 2004). Based on his research of the available information and the interviews he conducted, Sullivan speculates that Lespinasse tried to paint Stephens in a positive light after his murder (2004). Those interviewed on the record spoke of him as a kind boss who treated him with respect and that would take in workers who had been mistreated by other plantation owners, such as the Urcelay family (Sullivan 2004). Some Maya people and other local workers, however, did not ally themselves with this version of Stephens. They saw him as harsh, cruel, and abusive to the Mexicans and Indigenous people that worked under him (Sullivan 2004). The possible purposeful omission of this information is what sparked the idea for the discovery of some “missing” or “lost” testimonies that were in fact left out of the official records intentionally.

This case is one that created a large amount of uproar on the American side. The Stephens family continued to fight for justice for the loss of Robert. It continued to plague US-Mexico relations until it was settled almost 70 years later in 1943 when an agreement was reached at a Claims Convention and a total of ten thousand dollars was paid out to the family (Sullivan 2004). With this settlement, the cries of the Stephens family were quieted and this allowed for both the United States and Mexico to put the situation behind them and for the story of what happened at Xuxub to truly die and become lost to time in their eyes (Sullivan 2004). As previously stressed, the Maya people involved in this case have not forgotten these events, but their voices are quieted behind those of Mexican and American officials and history writers (Sullivan 2004; Trouillot 1997).

Theoretical Framework and Background

Violence

Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, but the new mestizo population and the Indigenous populations remained at odds (McArdle Stephens 2017). This fighting eventually escalated into a Caste War by the end of the 1840s and lasted until 1901. The violence displayed during this time is used as their defining characteristic to paint Indigenous people in a negative light both in history and the specific accounts of the events of Xuxub (McArdle Stephens 2017; Sullivan 2004). This peasant revolt against the ethnic and economic oppression of the Yucatecan elite served as a perfect backdrop for the events at Xuxub to be pushed under the rug (McArdle Stephens 2017; Sullivan 2004). Placing blame on the violent rebels attempting to free themselves from the continued oppression of Mexico’s colonial remnants served as a scapegoat for the root causes of the attack on Stephens, a way to maintain Mexico and US relations, and as a way to continue to put down those at the bottom of Mexican society for years to come (Fanon 1963; McArdle Stephens 2017; Sullivan 2004). The anti-colonial use of violence by Maya rebels during the Caste War mirrors the events in Algeria as described by Fanon (1963; McArdle Stephens 2017). These Indigenous peoples, who were violently oppressed during the Spanish occupation of Mexico and viewed as less-than-human, continued to experience those same sentiments after the colonizers left and Mexico gained its independence (Fanon 1963). This sets the stage for the reactions to the Xuxub murders that would take place in the middle of the events of the Caste War.

Subaltern Studies

            While subaltern studies originated in India, its ideas are certainly applicable to the events that occurred at Xuxub as well. As described by Gayatri Spivak in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (2010), societies live in a hierarchy of the elite and the subaltern, with the elite being broken down into two categories: foreign and local, with the foreign elite holding the top position. The oppression of these subaltern groups often serves as a form of imperialism (Spivak 2010). In Spivak’s piece, she outlines Indian women as the subaltern class, but here the Maya rebels take up that role (2010; Sullivan 2004). The descriptions of the causes of the Caste War (McArdle Stephens 2017) align with Ranajit Guha’s description of peasant revolts (1983) as well. According to Guha, the subalternity of a group of people is solidified by the structures put into place by the colonizers, thus turning this oppression into tradition and making the breaking of that tradition an explicit violation of societal norms (1983). This violation of the norms by Maya rebels was used as a method to further put them down and place blame upon them, thus leading to further silencing (Guha 1983; Spivak 2010). This creates what Chakrabarty referred to as a Minority History and pushes for the idea that there are histories that are more important than others (2002). Rather than working to preserve the plurality of history, these “lesser” histories are often written out or ignored when it comes time to set a history in motion (Chakrabarty 2002; Middleton 2023).

The Production of History

This story is a clear example of the fact that the US and Mexico hold the authority on what pieces of history in situations like these are focused on (Trouillot 1997). Everyone knows about and wants to visit the major archaeological sites of the Indigenous populations of Mexico, but people are usually less familiar with the Indigenous perspectives post-Mexico’s independence from Spain and do not care as much for these perspectives. This reflects who is writing the history and who is being silenced here and in other similar cases (Trouillot 1997). The US wanted to spin a tale of a kind and successful man being taken out by violent natives and Mexico chose to push these events to the background to focus on the pieces of Indigenous history that can be used for tourism and boosting the economy.

Accessibility

One of the key discussions we have had throughout the semester for me was our discussions about accessibility. The availability and accessibility of information has come up many times throughout our discussions and assorted voices throughout the semester, along with discussions in other classes. One key example of this that I was faced with this semester came from my role as a teaching assistant in the course ANTH 270: Living Medicine. My students read two books throughout the course of the semester A Heart for the Work: Journeys Through an African Medical School by Claire Wendland (2010) and Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande (2002). The book by Wendland is an anthropological ethnography and is clearly written with an academic audience in mind, but Gawande’s book is written for a more mainstream audience. Seeing the difference between the students’ abilities to understand the two books in our recitation discussions further cemented the necessity for accessibility within this project.

When developing this imagined future for the story of Xuxub and how the information about the fictional “Monkaab” would be disseminated, I knew that I wanted to try and find more accessible ways to get the story out there. I had never heard of Xuxub prior to checking this book out. While written in a slightly more accessible manner than most books centering around theory, the book itself was hidden behind university paywalls and would likely not be very accessible to the layperson. I wanted to see some kind of artistic expression and collaboration play into how this lost history was put out into the world as well. So, I chose to have the discoverer seek out local collaborators who would have knowledge of the area and its history to produce an accessible work designed for a more mainstream audience to put this along with a Maya artist local to the area where Monkaab would have been located to paint the wetlands of that part of the Yucatan for the cover of the revised story.

Conclusion

            One of the pieces of this fictional story is just how optimistic it is. I found myself doubting if this is actually how it would play out if a similar discovery was made about Xuxub. Still, in this fictional narrative, where anything could happen, I was able to explore how things could go with minimal obstacles in place to create a version of a postcolonial future that presents the ideal outcome. Shifting to a more accurate representation of a historical narrative and a method of history production that incorporates lost and far too often silenced voices in a collaborative way should be something that we see as more normal. Removing the narratives that are written solely by the colonizers brings forward the voices of the oppressed. Throughout working on this piece, I found myself thinking of the work of Ann Stoler on Imperial Ruins and Ruination (2016). In particular, when she addresses the questions prompted by Derek Walcott in his piece “Ruins of a Great House” (1990): “What is the rot that remains when the men are gone? What forms does rot take? What does it corrode; what interior spaces does it touch; and how does it seep through the social and material fabric where it remains?” (Stoler 2016, 361). I would like to close this out by calling others to consider another question prompted by these ones and the work done here in this piece to highlight silenced voices: What can grow out of the rot when given the chance to have the sun shine on it once again?

References

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2002. “Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts” in Postcolonial Passages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 229-242.

Fanon, Frantz. 1963. “On Violence” + “Conclusion.” in The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1-62, 235-239

Gawande, Atul. 2002. Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. New York: Picador.

Guha, Ranajit. 1983. “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency.” in Subaltern Studies II, edited by R. Guha. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

McArdle Stephens, Michele. 2017. “Caste Wars in Yucatán.” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Accessed 24 April 2023. https://oxfordre.com/latinamericanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/acrefore-9780199366439-e-386.

Middleton, Townsend. 2023. “Subaltern Studies: From South Asia to Latin America,” ANTH 461 Class Notes and Discussion, February 23.

Spivak, Gayatri. 2010 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” revised edition, from the “History” chapter of Critique of Postcolonial Reason, in Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea,  edited by R.C. Morris, 21-78. New York: Columbia University Press.

Stoler, Anne Laura. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham NC: Duke University Press

Sullivan, Paul. 2004. Xuxub Must Die: The Lost Histories of a Murder on the Yucatan. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1997 Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.

Walcott, Derek. 1990. “Ruins of a Great House,” In Collected Poems: 1948-1984, 20. New York: Noonday.

Wendland, Claire L. 2010. A Heart for the Work: Journeys Through an African Medical School. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

The Yucatan Times. 2023. “Yucatan Mangroves: the ideal habitat for the Melipona Bee.” The Yucatan Times website, February 13. Accessed April 25, 2023. https://www.theyucatantimes.com/2023/02/yucatan-mangroves-the-ideal-habitat-for-the-melipona-bee/

By: Madison Holt

“Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it” -Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon

Silences in historical narratives are everywhere, and unavoidable. As Rolph Trouillot writes in the first chapter of Silencing the Past: Power and Production of History, “the production of traces is always also the creation of silences. Some occurrences are noted from the start; others are not. Some are engraved in individual or collective bodies; others are not. Some leave physical markers; others do not.”¹ This “materiality of the sociohistorical process” is often what we think of when we attempt to decipher historical truth from fiction, as Western ideologies have attempted to create as close to an objective, scientific study of history as possible.² Although helpful in establishing credibility in the study of history, it consequently silences narratives that may not have any “material proof.” Because many silences are simply due to the nature of human memory and perception, searching for this objectivity distracts us from the goal to examine, as Trouillot writes, 

how history works. For what history is changes with time and place, or, better said, history reveals itself only through the production of specific narratives. What matters most are the process and conditions of production of such narratives. Only a focus on that process can uncover the ways in which the two sides of historicity intertwine in a particular context. Only through that overlap can we discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others.³

This “differential exercise of power” that Trouillot refers to goes beyond silence due to lack of materiality; as I will illustrate in the subsequent pages, silences in the historical archive are often intentional, damaging, and demonstrative of legacies of colonial power that still exist today. ⁴

As Trouillot explains, historicity 1 is “what happened,” whereas historicity 2 is “that which is said to have happened.”⁵ Colonialism, in the past, has taken advantage of this distinction by controlling the public view, passing off its version of historicity 2 as historicity 1. For example, the Haitian Revolution is the first and only successful slave revolt in history, as formerly enslaved people successfully drove out plantation owners and established the country of Haiti. However, as monumental of a moment in history this revolution was, it is not as nearly well known by the global West as, say, the French Revolution, or the American Revolution, even though it is a part of Western history since the French colonized Haiti. This is not coincidental. As class discussion explains, colonialist histories tend to erase, trivialize, or overwrite other views on historical processes for the sake of emphasizing their own narratives, which can be seen through France’s denial of Haitian sovereignty, the media’s downplay of the mistreatment experienced by Haitian enslaved people, and the spinning of the historical process to make it seem like Haiti is a failed “test-case of Black Humanity.”⁶ In the case of Haiti, if the French empire can control prevailing narratives about what happened during the Haitian Revolution, then it can create the illusion that it still has hegemony over Haiti. Therefore, colonialism seeks to undermine subaltern histories as one tool in the colonial toolbelt. 

Who is a subaltern? According to class discussion, subalterns are people that are “excluded from hegemonic power and its systems of representation,” “those who lack voice,” and “those who have been written out of history.”⁷ In the case of the Haitian Revolution, the enslaved people were subalterns in relation to the plantation owners and the French empire. But how did they become subalterns? At the same time that Europe was colonizing other countries, forcing the inhabitants to contribute to an economy they were not benefitting from, the idea of liberal universality⁸ emerged in Western thought. Needing a way to justify hegemony over the colonized despite advocating for individual freedom and universal human rights, Europe then perpetuated the idea of the anthropological minimum, which established a threshold of humanity that the colonized needed to achieve in order to deserve human rights.⁹ Furthermore, the colonial difference went hand in hand with the anthropological minimum as it suggested an absolute difference between the colonizer and the colonized, a difference that justified treating the colonized as less than human.¹⁰ As Partha Chaterjee writes in The Nation and Its Fragments, 

to the extent this complex of power and knowledge was colonial, the forms of objectification and normalization of the colonized had to reproduce, within the framework of a universal knowledge, the truth of the colonial difference. The difference could be marked by many signs, and varying with the context, one could displace another as the most practical application of the rule. But of all these signs, race was perhaps the most obvious mark of the colonial difference.¹¹

For the enslaved population in Haiti, race did, in fact, become a mark of colonial difference, thus they became the subalterns in the history of the colonization of Haiti. This legacy of using race to subjugate colonized populations then made its way to the United States as the plantation system resulted in the forced migration of millions of Africans. Although Robert F. Williams was not alive when chattel slavery was legal in the United States, as a Black man, he was still excluded from the power and its systems of representation that White people were, and still are, afforded, which is why he fought to dismantle this power during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Therefore, as a subaltern in the history of the United States, Williams is no stranger to silences. 

ROBERT WILLIAMS

Going into the research I planned for this essay on Robert F. Williams, I didn’t expect much. A fellow alumnus of Piedmont High School, Kristina Drye, who has also looked into Williams’ life, recounts her experience looking for sources: 

In July of 2020 I found myself sheltering from the humidity of a North Carolina summer in the local history room of the Monroe Public Library…The librarian soon arrived with the materials I had asked for. I already knew that the area was a hive of KKK movement. Infamous Grand Wizard Catfish Cole set up shop one county over in Cabarrus, and though Union County had only 11,000 residents in 1961, Klan rallies could reach sizes of an estimated 7,500. Given this, I expected some robust material. Instead I was handed a slim manila folder with only a handful of records, so thin that the entire folder didn’t need so much as a rubber band to keep it closed.

“This all?” I asked the attendant, perplexed.

“That’s all we got,” she said. “There’s a drawer back there on Rob Williams, but let me see what I can find for you. Pretty sure that’s it, though.” And by the finality in her voice, I knew it was.¹²

Because it was so difficult for Drye to find sources on the event that took place in Monroe from the Monroe Public Library, and because, as I’ve gained more experience doing archival research, I’m becoming increasingly aware of the lack of volume at which subalterns get to speak in the archive, I wasn’t hopeful for extensive information on Williams. And yet, as I hit “search” after typing in the keywords “Robert F. Williams” into the search bar on the UNC Libraries page, I found myself rather surprised. There were, in fact, a multitude of newspapers, oral interviews, transcripts, and court documents, all providing details about the life of Robert Williams, his family, and acquaintances. There were even works written about Williams, from articles and books written by Timothy B. Tyson to a PBS documentary, as well as Williams’ own work, Negroes With Guns. Seeing as I grew up in Monroe but knew absolutely nothing about this Monroe native until I read Drye’s article about him my senior year of high school, I was quite shocked to find the amount of information that I did on him, as well as embarrassed. My entire argument throughout this essay was meant to be about the lack of information on Robert Williams, especially from Robert Williams himself, yet there were interviews and newspaper articles staring back at me, almost taunting me with “you look so uneducated right now.” However, this instance reminded me of Trouillot’s explanation of the four points throughout the creation of a history in which a silence may occur: 

Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).¹³

Remembering Trouillot’s typology, it became clear to me that the biggest silencing of Robert F. Williams’ story emerged from the lack of retrospective significance. As demonstrated earlier through the Haitian Revolution, this vast lack of public knowledge can be attributed to colonial pasts that are persistent in attempting hegemony over subaltern populations through controlling historicity. Yet, despite the surprising amount of material I found on Williams in the archive, silences that emerge during fact creation, assembly, and retrieval still remain. For example, the singular scholar that I found to write a narrative about Robert F. Williams, Timothy B. Tyson, provides this telling of the event that resulted in Williams’ exile in Cuba: 

Williams welcomed the Freedom Riders warmly but had a similar understanding of the stakes. “I saw it first as a challenge,” he recalled, “but I also saw it as an opportunity to show that what King and them were preaching was bullshit.” Two weeks of picketing at the Union County Courthouse grew progressively more perilous for the Freedom Riders. Crowds of hostile white onlookers grew larger and larger. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, August 28, a mob of several thousand furious white people attacked the approximately thirty demonstrators, badly injuring many of them; local police arrested the bleeding protesters. In his classic memoir, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, James Forman later called this riot his “moment of death,” “a nightmare I shall never forget.” To the consternation of SCLC, the nonviolent crusade swiftly deteriorated into mob violence; throughout the community, white vigilantes attacked black citizens and even fired fifteen shots into the home of the former mayor J. Ray Shute, a white moderate who had befriended Williams. At the height of this violent chaos, a white married couple, for reasons that are unclear, entered the black community and drove straight into an angry black mob milling near Robert Williams’s house. “There was hundreds of niggers there,” the white woman stated, “and they were armed, they were ready for war.” Black residents, under the impression that the demonstrators downtown were being beaten and perhaps slaughtered, threatened to kill the white couple. Williams, though busy preparing to defend his home, rescued the two whites from the mob and led them into his house, where they remained for about two hours. White authorities later charged Williams and several other people with kidnapping, although the white couple met two police officers on their way home and did not report their alleged abduction. The woman later conceded that “at the time, I wasn’t even thinking about being kidnapped . . . the papers, the publicity and all that stuff was what brought in that kidnapping mess.” During a long night of racial terror, Williams slung a machine gun over his shoulder and walked several miles with his wife and two small sons to where Julian Mayfield waited with a car. “I didn’t want those racist dogs to have the satisfaction of legally lynching me,” he explained to Dr. Perry. The Williams family fled first to New York City, then Canada, then on to Cuba to escape the hordes of FBI agents who combed the countryside in search of them. Supporters of Williams gloried in the escape. Some black residents of Monroe still maintain that Fidel Castro sent helicopters for Williams. Others tell of how he got away in a hearse owned by a black funeral director from Charlotte. An agent assigned to search for Williams locally reported his frustrations to FBI director Hoover: “Subject has become something of a ‘John Brown’ to Negroes around Monroe and they will do anything for him.¹⁴

Continuing to reference Trouillot’s typology of silences, it is evident that there are a multitude of silences occurring in this narrative, not only as a result of Williams’ experiences in real time, but also as a result of Tyson’s choices for retelling. Examining Tyson’s narrative, one can see that attempts were made by white citizens, the local police department, the media, and the FBI to silence Williams and the Freedom Riders with threats of arrest and death, so much so that Williams had to escape the US to Cuba to avoid false kidnapping charges.¹⁵ Williams was also prevented from relaying the way in which he made his escape to Cuba for fear of the harm that would come to the people that helped him if they were revealed.¹⁶ Yet, Tyson’s retelling produces its own silences, as there’s no direct mention of the KKK’s role in forcing Williams’ exile in Cuba, nor is there any direct mention of where Williams was or what he was doing when the picketers got attacked by the mob of white residents. These silences, exacerbated by Monroe’s purposeful failure to keep Williams’ public memory alive, have contributed to the persisting legacy of colonialism. 

CORNELL WATSON

As I walked toward Alumni Hall to finish this essay, I became distracted by the large congregation in the Pit protesting Mike Pence’s presence on campus. I stood watching for a few minutes, until someone caught my eye. It was Cornell Watson, the same Cornell Watson whose Tarred Healing exhibit I brought attention to in class however many weeks ago. I’m not typically an outgoing person, so I was fully prepared to let him pass me by and regret it afterwards, but my friend and coworker Abi, who saw how excited I got when I spotted him, urged me to introduce myself. I did, in fact, work up to the courage to talk to him, and I’m so glad I did. He was warm, welcoming, and equally excited that I recognized him. We talked for a little bit, I told him about this class and the paper I was working on, and we parted ways. I then made my way to Alumni Hall, replaying our conversation in my mind like a crazed fangirl the whole way there. I remembered how he said I must be inspired to think about colonialism by the ongoing conflicts between the Pit and the Union, and indeed I was. However, I was more inspired to think about colonialism when I saw Watson taking pictures. As the sounds from the crowd swelled around me, I couldn’t help but notice how Watson slowly snaked through the rows of people, completely silent, looking for scenes to photograph. As I watched, his silence captivated me, distracting me from the rest of the noise. It made me wonder, who else noticed him? Furthermore, who didn’t notice him because they were enthralled by the speakers protesting Mike Pence? I originally brought up Cornell Watson in class to talk about the ways in which the University system censors and silences certain narratives for the sake of maintaining funding, which stems from colonial pasts that destroy subaltern narratives to maintain power. Now, in meeting him and experiencing Watson as one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met, it makes me wonder what, other than certain perspectives on historical processes, do we lose to these silences? Yes, Watson’s art was censored and therefore the alternative narrative about Black life in Chapel Hill that he wanted to convey was lost, which prevents any chance of moving beyond colonial pasts. However, censoring Watson’s art also censors his humanity, as it prevents any chance of visibility. If the institution were successful in their silencing mission, if I never saw Watson’s photography, I would have never gone up to him in the crowd, never experienced his humanity. Seeing Watson and being able to speak with him, being able to experience him for who he is outside of his art, reminded me of what’s missing from Robert F. Williams narrative. I’ve examined how he’s been silenced and prevented from offering an alternative narrative to the archive, but how did he greet his wife when he came home from work? Did he play with his kids in the backyard? What time did he get up for church on Sundays, did he even go? These tidbits of life that detail the simple, day to day routines that all humans experience in one way or another are silenced when we only ask for perspectives, rather than life stories. 

Ultimately, it is evident through both my experience researching Robert F. Williams and my encounter with Cornell Watson that silences produced by the legacies of colonialism are harmful to subalterns. As the legacies of colonialism silence significant events in subaltern histories, like the Haitian Revolution or the attack on Freedom Riders in Monroe, it maintains the power that institutions continue to gain from subjugating minorities and prevents any chance of moving past these legacies. However, this is not the only harm done to subalterns. The phrase, “history will say they were best friends,” is a popular response on the Internet to any depictions of homosexuality that suggest ambiguity, meant to mock the legacies of colonialism persisting in the archive that erase LGBTQIA+ pasts. Although humorous, this joke also points out the dangers of erasure, trivialization, and overwriting. LGBTQIA+ people have always existed, yet their purposeful erasure from the archive suggests that they have not existed throughout history. This is where the legacies of colonial power come into play, as the erasure of their history is used as an excuse to claim they don’t, or shouldn’t, exist today. The erasure of Black Americans, specifically in the case of Robert F. Williams, plays out similarly. By failing to emphasize any retrospective significance in Williams’ life, Monroe has perpetuated the idea that Black people are of no significance in the town’s present, either. Furthermore, the lack of details on Williams’ personal life in the archive essentially objectifies him, as it perpetuates the idea that he’s only valuable to the archive as a catalyst for the Black Power movement. This objectification is yet another legacy of the colonial past, as colonizers maintained power through the objectification of the colonized.¹⁷

FUTURES OF THE ARCHIVE

There’s a certain magic in meeting a figure you’ve only read about on the internet or in history books in real life. In the case of Cornell Watson, meeting him in person brought his story to life, and I find myself more intimately connected with him, more hopeful for his future success. This is what is missing from the archive. Videotaped interviews come close, but when those aren’t possible, creative expressions could serve to foster a similar connection. For example, Rhiannon Giddens is a world-renowned singer and banjo player who commits to writing songs that tell stories about Black history, using as much empirical evidence from the archive as possible. In this way, Giddens brings to life accounts in the archive that would otherwise remain static. However, as Saidiya Harman points out in Venus in Two Acts,

How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know? How does one listen for the groans and cries, the undecipherable songs, the crackle of fire in the cane fields, the laments for the dead, and the shouts of victory, and then assign words to all of it? Is it possible to construct a story from “the locus of impossible speech” or resurrect lives from the ruins? Can beauty provide an antidote to dishonor, and love a way to “exhume buried cries” and reanimate the dead? 

As a writer committed to telling stories, I have endeavored to represent the lives of the nameless and the forgotten, to reckon with loss, and to respect the limits of what cannot be known. I chose not to tell a story about Venus because to do so would have trespassed the boundaries of the archive. History pledges to be faithful to the limits of fact, evidence, and archive, even as those dead certainties are produced by terror.¹⁸ 

Unfortunately, there are some limitations of the archive that will never be reconcilable, but that doesn’t mean the archive is incapable of change. As anthropologists, historians, folklorists, artists, and storytellers, we can make a commitment to making the archive more dynamic and representative of subaltern pasts. As Chakrabarty suggests, we could eventually create an archive of “‘workable truths’, which would be based on a shared, rational understanding of historical facts and evidence.”¹⁹ In this way, maintaining historical credibility while representing all participants of history in dynamic ways would be a step in the right direction toward leaving the legacies of colonialism behind. 

Notes

1.  Trouillot, Rolph. 1997. Silencing the Past : Power and the Production of History. Chapter 1. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, Pp. 1-30. 
2. Ibid.; Trouillot explains that positivism seeks to distance the sociohistorical process from its knowledge in order to give the study of history objective credibility.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6.  Class Discussion on the ways in which empire tries to change public perception of historical processes (H1) using its own narratives (H2). Lecture on the Problem of History.
7.  Class Discussion. Lecture on Subaltern Studies: History From Below
8.  An idea that developed in the 18th century in the Global West that advocated for equality, freedom from institutional oppression, individualism, political representation, citizenship, civic responsibility, and progress. 
9.  Class Discussion. Lecture on the State and Difference. 
10.  Class Discussion on the Anthropological Minimum. Lecture on the State and Difference.
11.  Chaterjee, Partha. 1993. “The Colonial State” in The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 14-34. 
12.  Drye, Kristina. “Forgetting Robert F. Williams: Critical Race Theory’s Long Game.” Medium (blog), November 9, 2022. https://medium.com/@kd719/forgetting-robert-f-williams-critical-race-theorys-long-game-bf43913db327. 
13.  (Trouillot 1997)
14.  Tyson, Timothy B. “Robert F. Williams, ‘Black Power,’ and the Roots of the African American Freedom Struggle.” The Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (1998): 540–70. https://doi.org/10.2307/2567750.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17.  (Chatterjee 1993).
18.  Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14. muse.jhu.edu/article/241115.
19.  Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2002. “Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts” in Postcolonial Passages. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 229-242. 

Bibliography

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2002. “Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts” in Postcolonial Passages.

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 229-242. 

Chaterjee, Partha. 1993. “The Colonial State” in The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton :

Princeton University Press, 14-34. 

Drye, Kristina. “Forgetting Robert F. Williams: Critical Race Theory’s Long Game.” Medium

(blog), November 9, 2022. https://medium.com/@kd719/forgetting-robert-f-williams-critical-race-theorys-long-game-bf43913db327. 

 Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14.

muse.jhu.edu/article/241115.

Trouillot, Rolph. 1997. Silencing the Past : Power and the Production of History. Chapter 1.

Boston, MA: Beacon Press, Pp. 1-30. 

Tyson, Timothy B. “Robert F. Williams, ‘Black Power,’ and the Roots of the African American

Freedom Struggle.” The Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (1998): 540–70.

by Regina Lowe

Abstract

By following the life of chemical products from an area of concentrated petrochemical production in Louisiana (LA), I argue that chemicals are material artifacts that collapse temporality by building on the contingencies of the past and extending into the lives of individuals in the present and future. Drawing on post-humanist ideas and the writing of Michelle Murphy (2017) and Anne Laura Stoler, (2016) I situate this work as continuing to confound the boundaries between the human and non-human as well as the boundaries between past and present. The historic plantations in Ascension Parish, LA are archaeological examples of colonial contingencies making way for the petrochemical plants of Geismar, LA. By examining records from the plantations of Ashland-Belle Helene, L’Hermitage, and Linwood as well as the chemical plants of BASF and Shell in Geismar, I look at chemicals as a material to collapse space and time. 

Introduction

In the following paper, I will first explore the history of the sugar plantation and petrochemical economy in Louisiana. Second, I will provide a specific example of sugar plantation lineage leading to petrochemical plant ownership. Third, I will discuss how these histories are entangled and fold on each other. Thus, I argue that by understanding chemicals in the landscape as persistent materials, we can understand temporality in a non-linear postcolonial framework.

Temporality is the way time is ordered and experienced. Anne Laura Stoler (2016) suggests there are multiple kinds of temporalities, such as rupture versus continuity. Where ruptures reflect distinct epochs and shifts in time and continuity represents seamless extensions and transitions. While tracking colonial presences, though, our colonized conceptions of time may inform the way we interpret the present and the past. Stoler (2016) instead uses a recursive analytic to describe how histories fold back onto themselves, revealing new contingent possibilities. 

Stoler’s (2016) work feeds directly into the work of Michelle Murphy (2017) and the idea of materiality influencing colonial afterlives. In Murphy’s work, chemicals challenge the bounds of the body and the human. Murphy specifically draws on how PCBs have entered the human body through the pollution of the landscape to become persistent through time (2017). These inescapable entanglements and persistent materials are what the following of this paper revolves around.

History and Background

The sugar cane plantations of Louisiana were the driving mode of production and economic growth in the 19th century. Between 1820-1860, planters experienced rapid growth in the industrialization process of sugar. However, “Louisiana evolved as the last of the New World’s cane sugar colonies, and its industry combined the collected experience and suffering of plantation sugar production with lessons drawn from American slavery and industrialization” (Follett 2005:8). Due in part to the demanding cycles of sugar production and the horrific conditions of enslaved workers, the need for labor stability and consistent production drove the industrialization of cane processing and sugar production (Follett 2005:13-16).

By 1805, the river bottomlands of South Louisiana had been transformed into a rising sugar production landscape (Follett 2005:19). In the early 19th century, demand and federal tariffs allowed planters to exploit the sugar market and the number of estates went “from 308 in 1827 to 691 in 1830” (Follett 2005:21) With tariff support, the sugar production expanded across South Louisiana with the core zone along the Mississippi River spanning between New Orleans and Baton Rouge (Follett 2005:21).  In 1853, sugar planters in Louisiana produced a quarter of the world’s exportable sugar (Follett 2005:22). Sugar production did take a turn in the late 1840s as land, labor, and capital costs increased and federal tariff protections for sugar were reduced. This caused increased mergers between estates. “In 1850, the average sugar planter in Ascension Parish cultivated 460 acres. A decade later, fourteen fewer sugar planters recorded that 29,149 acres— approximately 800 acres per estate— lay under crop” (Follett 2005:32). 

At the same time, the expansion of plantations caused a rise in enslaved populations. In 1830, one average plantation consisted of 52 enslaved peoples. In the 1850s, average plantations consisted of 85 enslaved workers, and “by the Civil War, most large sugar plantations listed as many as 110 enslaved African Americans on their inventories.” (Follett 2005:25-26) In Ascension parish specifically, enslaved persons outnumbered whites two to one (Follett 2005:26). Plantation landscapes have been a subject of anthropological, archaeological, historical, and geographical study. It has often been argued that Plantations are a panopticon based on Michel Foucault’s (1977) idea of prison panopticon. Scholars argue that the plantation is spatially organized for the social control of the enslaved black population (Marshall 2022; Nielson 2011; Singleton 2001; Kumar 2015; Davis 2016; Epperson 2000; Michelakos 2009)

From a postcolonial perspective, the plantation offers a place for reimagining the environment and ecologies. As the location of anthropogenic violence, plantations capture the capitalist nature of ecological simplification and progress and at the same time offer places of “multispecies resistance and resurgence” (Chao 2022:363). To envision the co-creation of life in these landscapes and the impacts of non-human forms draw on the work of Donna Haraway (2015), Anna Tsing (2012), and Catherine McKittrick (2013). McKittrick (2013) offers up the idea of futures within the plantation where opportunities emerge to contemplate survival. The rest of this paper will continue to think with her questions: 

“What are some notable characteristics of plantation geographies and what is at stake in linking a plantation past to the present? What comes of positioning the plantation as a threshold to thinking through long-standing and contemporary practices of racial violence? If the plantation, at least in part, ushered in how and where we live now, and thus contributes to the racial contours of uneven geographies, how might we give it a different future?” (McKittrick 2013:4). 

I continue to draw on these questions and thoughts of alternative ecologies (McKittrick 2013, 2020; Cervenak 2021; Haraway 2015; Tsing 2012; Barra 2023) as I draw out the relationships of place, time, and non-human actors. 

The area between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that was the core of sugar production in the 19th century is now home to “more than 150 petrochemical plants and petroleum processors” (Allen 2006:112). In the aftermath of the civil war, the Freedmen’s Bureau awarded small areas of land to black family groups in the area where they had previously been enslaved and worked. However, large plantation lands stayed in the hands of white owners. As a result, the region was made up of large blocks of land owned by a single owner with smaller separated communities of freed blacks and poor whites adjacent to the larger properties (Allen 2006). As chemical and petroleum companies moved into the region, the preferable land for building was large areas owned by a single owner. Thus, the smaller “African-American communities and petrochemical facilities came to exist in such close proximity along the river” (Allen 2006:113).

Initially attracted to the region for its access to transportation and ports as well as favorable treatment from Louisiana politicians, Mexican Petroleum (now Amoco) and Standard Oil (now Exxon) were the first companies to establish plants in the area. Despite the economic downturn of the 1930s, “the Gulf Coast experienced tremendous growth in both petroleum processing and chemical production” (Allen 2006:114). Decades later, in 1964, the African-American town of Geismar was sighted as the next location for major petrochemical development. By this time, there was multi-corporation cooperation making the region interconnected by infrastructure and piping and ideal for increased development. The list of corporations buying property along the river in Geismar included Mobil, MonoChem, BASF, Morton, Allied, and others. 

The attraction to this area was not just based on the property availability and corporate cooperation/infrastructure but also the government assistance in the forms of little to no property taxes, Corps of Engineers work on levee stabilization, construction of state highways and bridges, and the lack of political pressure from the governor (Allen 2006). The biggest benefit to building and operating in Louisiana is the state’s corporate tax-exemption programs, which assist plants like Shell’s Norco facility and Exxon’s Baton Rouge refinery (Allen 2006). These two companies in particular “avoided paying over $175 million in taxes during the 1980s” (Allen 2006:117). This exemption dates to 1936 and has persisted into the present where Louisna grants the exemption status without local approval or input such that the lack of tax revenue has caused these local areas to be underfunded and lack access to basic resources (Allen 2006).

Case Study – Geismar, Ascension Parish, Louisiana

            The case study I present here offers an opportunity to examine how the postcolonial landscape is shaped and changed over time. I specifically look here at how chemicals can change temporality and expose recursive sociohistorical elements of the landscape. To do this, I will delineate the landscape history of two chemical plants in Geismar, LA. These plants are situated on property that used to be large sugar plantations in Ascension Parish. Thus, I will begin with a lineage of plantation ownership before moving on to their present-day petrochemical plant counterparts and the persistent chemicals they produce. 

            The first plantation I followed the history of is Ashland-Belle Helene, or Ashland Plantation, also known as the Belle Helene or Ashland-Belle Helene Plantation. It may be evident already that this plantation is a result of property consolidation. Today, the entire property of the estate belongs to and is surrounded by the Shell Chemical, LP, Geismar plant (Couvillion 2015). In 1840 the Kenner brothers acquired the Oakland, Belle Grove, and Pasture Plantations. In addition to this consolidation, Duncan Kenner acquired land and property that included not only what was to be named the Ashland Plantation and mansion that he built for his wife, Anne Guillemine Nanine Bringier, but also the Bowden, The Houmas, the Hollywood, the Hermitage (as his wife was related to the Bringier family), the Fashion (home of his brother-in-law and partner General Richard Taylor), and Roseland plantations (“Bibliographical and Historical” 1892). The 1860 U.S. Census Slave Schedules for Ascension Parish, Louisiana (NARA microfilm series M653, Roll 427) includes the Kenner name and number of enslaved people associated with them. Duncan F. Kenner is associated with 473 enslaved people (Blake 2001).

The second plantation is the Hermitage, or L’Hermitage. Shortly after his marriage in 1812- to fourteen-year-old Louise Aglaé duBourg, Michel Doradou Bringier built the Hermitage on land given as a wedding gift by his father. At Bringier’s death in 1847, his second son, Louis Amédée, became owner of the plantation. In 1881 Duncan Kenner of Ashland-Belle Helene, who was married to Bringier’s daughter Nanine, purchased a part share of the plantation. He acquired full control from 1884 until his death in 1887 (“Bibliographical and Historical” 1892). The 1860 U.S. Census Slave Schedules for Ascension Parish, Louisiana (NARA microfilm series M653, Roll 427) includes the Bringier name and number of enslaved people associated with them. Louis A. Bringier held 144 enslaved people and M. L. Bringier (likely the first son) held 386 enslaved people (Blake 2001). 

            Linwood Plantation was owned by the J.N. Brown until his death in 1859 (“Bibliographical and Historical” 1892). Probate records of Brown (1807–1859), a wealthy sugar planter from Iberville Parish, Louisiana, contain primarily financial records related to the administration of his estate, which mentions legal and family ties to the families Ventress and Minor (Brown J. (1858-1871). The 1860 U.S. Census Slave Schedules for Ascension Parish, Louisiana (NARA microfilm series M653, Roll 427) includes the Brown, Ventress, and Minor names and number of enslaved people associated with them. John M. Brown held 105 enslaved people, John L. Minor held 193 enslaved people, Wm. J. Minor held 223 enslaved people, James A. Ventress held 88 enslaved people, and W.C.S. Ventress held 89 enslaved people (Blake 2001).

            The petrochemical plants that have replaced these plantations in the present firstly include Shell Geismar. The facility uses ethylene feedstock to manufacture ethylene glycol and alpha olefins, chemicals that can be converted into plastic resins and polyester fibers. Linear alpha olefins are used to make polyethylene, synthetic lubricants, detergents, and waxes (Environmental Integrity Project 2022). The second major plant is BASF Geismar. BASF, which owns the complex, is an acronym that stands for Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik, which is German for Baden Aniline and Soda Factory. Germany’s largest chemical company was founded by Friedrich Engelhorn in 1865. “Currently, the Geismar Complex is composed of 14 plants which produce ethylene oxide/glycols, aniline, acetylene, butanediol, and other chemicals and petrochemicals” (Environmental Integrity Project 2022).

As recently as April 7, 2022, BASF invited representatives from Ascension Parish, the River Road African American Museum, the United Houma Nation, and members of the descendant community to dedicate a new memorial at the BASF site in Geismar to those who were enslaved on what was previously Linwood plantation (Anderson 2022).

Discussion

Steiniger (2021) argues that there are connections of the petrochemical corridor in Louisiana to German industrialism. Because of this Steiniger argues that it is important to develop a “‘chemical cultural theory’ that seeks to observe the specific technicalities of modern materiality and the historical settings that enabled this” (265). Because chemicals have a significant materiality, the material and technical aspects are entangled with mechanisms of power (Steiniger 2021:265). Steiniger (2021) combines aspects of the study of the Anthropocene and contingencies with a material centered approach that I suggest is archaeological in perspective. In a material ontological turn, Stieniger (2021) places the chemicals (in his argument fertilizer) in an agentive role transforming history, landscape, and power. 

One persistent aspect of these chemicals that is felt and seen is in the pollution of the landscape and the health of the residents of the area. “According to a seven-parish survey of residents living within a mile of the river, where industry is most heavily concentrated, 35 percent suffer from respiratory problems, 21 percent from allergy problems, and 17 percent from other sinus problems, in addition to claims of elevated cancer rates” (Allen 2006:117-118). Terrell and St. Julien (2022) explore these claims of elevated cancer rates that residents of the area have long said they are disproportionately affected by. Their results (Figures 2 and 3) show that there is a higher cancer risk from air toxins and higher cancer incidence did affect black populations and impoverished populations, which tended to coincide (Terrell and St. Julien 2022:10). 

The chemical presence and continued pollution in Cancer Alley (Figure 4) illustrate the chemical persistence as well as the way the chemical presence collapses temporality. Kang (2021) argues that the Plantationocene “firmly emplaces the machination and violence of the plantation in the present. As such, the material theorization of coloniality and the temporalization of the Plantation epoch helped give shape to the ongoing violence of Cancer Alley” (109). Because of this, the perception of time and place has consistently changed for the residents of the area. There is visual change with the surrounding influx of industrialization and slow death of the environment, which itself is a non-human actor part of the larger ecology. In addition, residents of the area have an underlying consciousness of their potentially shortened life-span. Time and the time spent in their homes affects them differently. Time is afforded differently because of the chemical conviviality residents endure. 

In addition, the chemical landscape provides us an opportunity to interrogate recursivity in the history and use of the landscape. Returning to colonization and plantations while connecting with the present allows us to see webs of contingencies. Indigenous artist, Monique Michelle Verdin, uses collages to collapse time and demonstrate colonial and postcolonial erasure on the landscape. She describes this work as: “The collages illuminate how these sites are variously represented or simply erased, and how the challenges of today are founded in colonialism, with rapacious multinational corporations and international financing fueling violations against basic human rights like clean water” (Verdin 2020:80). 

Orienting us within the native language she describes what is now Baton Rouge: “Istrouma is both a place and a symbol, a red stick, le bâton rouge, used to mark territorial lines, acknowledging the Houma nation’s hunting grounds to the north and the rights of the Bayou-goula tribe to the south, or thus it was recorded in the journals of colonizers” (Verdin 2020:81). Geismar is not represented within her collages but sits on the eastern Bank of the Mississippi River between Plaquemine Island and Donaldsonville: Point Houmas, which I include in this paper. She follows the river to “Bvlbancha (“place of many languages” in Choctaw) is the original name of the lower Mississippi River that was successfully rebranded “Nouvelle Orleans” by French colonizers. Plaquemine means persimmon in Mobilian, a pantribal pidgin language and the predominant trade jargon spoken in the territory when the colonizers arrived.” (Verdin 2020:83).

The collage of Plaquemine Island (Figure 5) connects it to the long history of extraction in the region. As she states, “In the early years of colonialism, from the late seventeenth century through the 1920s, the fur trade fueled such a get-rich-quick furor that beavers, minks, muskrats, and other furry creatures nearly went extinct” (Verdin 2020: 83). Second the collage (Figure 6) of Donaldsonville: Point Houmas represents “the historic distributary La Fourche des Chitimatchas (the fork of the Chitimatcha), also called the River of the Chitimatcha, [which] is known today as Bayou Lafourche” (Verdin 2020:84). This area was historically an area that connected a web of bayous to Indigenous settlements, a place where enslaved peoples found food security, and where sugar planters began to claim land after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 (Verdin 2020).

Conclusion

            Throughout this paper, I have worked to show that the landscape of Ascension Parish offers a case study to reconsider chemical materiality. As persistent and invasive artifacts of human activity ion the region, their presence and agency shape the ecosystem in new and different ways. In addition, their role in the present is underscored by contingencies of the postcolonial world. Because of this, chemical artifacts also change our temporality. They represent a postcolonial present and past interacting in one locality.

            I want to end this paper by turning to the questions posed by McKittrick in “Plantation Futures”:

“What are some notable characteristics of plantation geographies and what is at stake in linking a plantation past to the present? What comes of positioning the plantation as a threshold to thinking through long-standing and contemporary practices of racial violence? If the plantation, at least in part, ushered in how and where we live now, and thus contributes to the racial contours of uneven geographies, how might we give it a different future?” (McKittrick 2013:4). 

Using the case study, I have presented, what at stake in linking a plantation past to the present is a different understanding of temporality and ecologies. Positioning the plantation as a threshold to thinking through long-standing and contemporary practices of racial violence allows us, as Verdin (2020) shows, to see the hidden parts of the post-colonial world and the continued racial inequities that manifest from those parts. Finally, McKittrick (2013) invites us to consider a different future. By reckoning with the past, we begin to shape how we can change the future, but with our understanding of a non-linear temporality, we can also consider how the future we design will fold back on the past and where we are in the present.

Works Cited

Allen, B. L. (2006). Cradle of a revolution? The industrial transformation of Louisiana’s lower Mississippi river. Technology and Culture, 47(1), 112-119.

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By Kayla McManus-Viana

Introduction: “The Puerto Rican Problem”^[1]

           My capstone project is on the topic of Puerto Rican status alternatives and has largely been motivated by my own desire to find some hope for the future of Puerto Rico. But why does Puerto Rico need hope? Puerto Rico has been in an explicit colonial relationship with the United States (U.S) since 1898, when the island was ceded to the U.S. as part of the peace treaty that concluded the Spanish-American War. While some may argue that Puerto Rico achieved “decolonization” once it became a “Commonwealth” or “unincorporated territory” of the United States in 1952, I argue that the explicit colonial relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico has persisted, as the island’s shift in official legal designation to “Commonwealth” did nothing to tangibly address the technologies of colonial control the United States has and continues to implement to subjugate Puerto Rico.

         “Technologies of colonialism” are the explicit mechanisms of domination that are used by colonial powers to subjugate and dispossess colonial subjects. These mechanisms can manifest politically, economically, strategically (i.e. be related to military concerns), culturally, etc. While I will be unable to get into the nitty-gritty of each and every technology of colonial subjugation the United States employs to keep Puerto Rico subordinate and dependent, I will address a few of the most explicit here.

         The first technology of colonial control operating in Puerto Rico is constitutional, and subsequently political, domination. While Puerto Rico does have its own constitution and Puerto Ricans “…[can] elect their own local government, governor, and legislature,” Puerto Ricans remain “subject to Congress’s power under the Territorial Clause of the US Constitution and previous Supreme Court rulings [specifically the Insular Cases],” among other political limitations.^[2] In other words, “Congress gives and Congress takes,” as the rulings of the U.S. federal legislature, in every scenario, supersede those of the Puerto Rican legislature. Additionally, the precedent set by the Insular Cases, which are a series of early-twentieth century Supreme Court rulings that established the “separate and unequal” status of U.S. territories, has created a situation in which only the barest of rights are guaranteed to Puerto Ricans as U.S. citizens.^[3] Anything beyond the “fundamental rights established in the Constitution” are prejudicially and inconsistently decided upon on a case-by-case basis by the U.S. Supreme Court.^[4] For example, the right to vote in federal elections is not one of the “fundamental rights” conferred to Puerto Ricans, and Puerto Ricans’ access to various social welfare programs (such as Supplemental Security Income) is decided by the Supreme Court and not guaranteed to Puerto Ricans by virtue of possessing American citizenship alone. Thus, not only do Puerto Ricans have functionally little control over their island’s governance, they also inhabit a space of second-class U.S. citizenship.

In order to fully understand the concept of “second-class citizenship,” one must first understand what full modern citizenship entails. According to Ariana Valle, “At its simplest level, citizenship is a legal status that represents formal membership in a political community; as such, citizenship as status distinguishes between citizens and foreigners” (emphasis added).^[5] Beyond this legal differentiation, citizenship also confers “social, civil, and political rights as well as duties and responsibilities to all citizens” and, even further, a sense of belonging to a larger national community (emphasis added).^[6] Valle argues that Puerto Ricans lack both the legal and social conceptions of membership modern citizenship confers. For Puerto Ricans, the lack of citizenship’s legal protections manifests in ways previously mentioned (not being able to vote in federal elections, unequal funding for and access to federal welfare programs), and the lack of a social membership conferred through citizenship – of belonging to the American national imaginary – manifests through the racialization of Puerto Ricans as “Latino.” According to Valle, Puerto Ricans are “subsumed into the Latino group and the broader racialization of Latino with foreigner” and as such are perpetually viewed as “Other than” American.^[7] This results in a lack of inclusion of Puerto Ricans in the American imaginary. Moreover, Valle argues that the racialization of and discrimination against Puerto Ricans have been further compounded by socioeconomic vulnerability stemming from decades of colonial economic exploitation and dependence, which has contributed to the conceptualization of Puerto Ricans as “lazy, welfare dependent, and criminal.”^[8]

The colonial technology of economic domination and exploitation manifests in Puerto Rico as colonial-capitalism. Colonial-capitalism refers to the “mutually constitutive and inextricable links that exist amongst capitalist logics and colonial power, which can continue even after formal colonization ends. These indissoluble relationships…continue to be highly influential in how governance, societies, economies, and certain cultural norms have been fashioned and operate [in the Caribbean and other formerly colonized territories].”^[9] In other words, the technology of capitalism acts as an extension of and complement to colonial power, as capitalist policies are enacted through and inseparable from “colonial worldviews, institutions, and relations.”^[10]

As Naomi Klein evidences in The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists, colonial-capitalism is a persisting economic paradigm and tangible reality in Puerto Rico. Colonial-capitalism is so prevalent on the island that Klein goes so far as to describe the Puerto Rican experience as “shock-after-shock-after-shock doctrine.”^[11] This “cyclical invasion and retreat of [American] colonial capital” is intimately tied to the imposition of neoliberal policies by the United States, which have wrecked the island’s manufacturing, education, and public sectors, resulting in “capital flight and the erosion of social programs and economic opportunities.”^[12] This in turn creates additional crises, such as “unemployment, crime, debt, [and] dilapidated infrastructure,” which are used to further justify even more “austerity and privatization…exacerbating existing crises, spawning new ones, and continuing the cycle” of colonial capitalism and dependence.^[13] A timely example to root the idea of colonial-capitalism in the reality of life on the island is the current move to privatize Puerto Rico’s power grid. As of January 25, 2023, Genera PR, a subsidiary of the New-York based company New Fortress, Inc., has signed a ten-year contract to take charge of operating and maintaining the island’s outdated and failing power grid from the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), the public corporation previously in charge of the power grid until its 2017 bankruptcy.^[14] While this is but a singular example of colonial-capitalism in Puerto Rico, it is part of a larger history of capitalist exploitation that has resulted in a ballooning $73 billion debt crisis, a massive flight of Puerto Ricans from the island, and immense economic inequality.

In addition to accelerating neoliberalism and austerity measures on the island, colonial-capitalism is directly working to dispossess Puerto Ricans of their homes and land. First established in 2012 to attract outside investment in exchange for income tax breaks, Act 60 of the Puerto Rican tax code grants massive tax breaks to Americans who relocate to Puerto Rico and establish a “bona fide” residence on the island. Since its inception, Act 60 has expanded its purview to “attract finance, tech and other investors” (such as “crypto currency miners”) in addition to new residents.^[15] While resulting in an influx of cash to and interest in the island, the growth of the wealthy (largely white) American population has increased property prices on the island, accelerated gentrification, and resulted in the internal displacement of native Puerto Ricans.

Additionally, the explicit political and economic colonial modes of domination discussed above have led to the development of a state of “coloniality” in Puerto Rico. “Coloniality,” an idea pioneered by Anibal Quijano and further developed by Puerto Rican philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres, is defined as “long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism…that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations” (emphasis added). According to Irma Serrano-García, the explicit modes of colonial relation and domination discussed above have led to and perpetuate a state of coloniality in Puerto Rico; colonialism and coloniality thus occur simultaneously, though they manifest in different ways. Serrano-García argues that coloniality in Puerto Rico primarily emerges in “the ‘Americanization’ of our way of life and the psychological, as well as concrete, dependence on U.S. welfare…[which have] generated a sense of American superiority, the idea that the United States is a nation to emulate, and that were it not for the United States we could not survive”^[16]

The concept of coloniality and internalized inferiority is unpacked further in Chapter 2 of my thesis, but for now it is important to note that Puerto Rico exists in both a colonial relationship with the United States and a state of suspended coloniality. Thus any decolonization plan that does not sufficiently address both of these aspects of American domination will simply result in a reification of Puerto Rico’s subordinate, colonial status in relation to the United States.

Solving the “Puerto Rican Problem”   

The most recent attempt to remedy the colonial relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico is the Puerto Rico Status Act (PRSA), introduced in the United States House of Representatives on July 20, 2022. Should the PRSA pass both the U.S. House and Senate, it would call for a binding plebiscite to decide Puerto Rico’s future. The current options between which Puerto Ricans would vote include: 1) full admission into the American Union as the 51st state, 2) independence in a Westphalian sense, or 3) a “Free Association” between a sovereign Puerto Rico and the United States.

         Far from uniting the Puerto Rican people, however, the PRSA has been a source of controversy and debate. The grassroots social justice and decolonization advocacy organizations Boricuas Unidas en la Diaspora and CASA condemned the bill as being “negotiated behind closed doors in Washington, D.C., with minimal input from the Puerto Rican people.”^[17] Other organizations, such as LatinoJustice and Power4PuertoRico, have similarly come out against the legislation in its current form because they claim it “[ignores] our community’s drumbeat for transparency and fairness.”^[18] This sentiment was further echoed by Representative Jesús “Chuy” Garcia, a democrat from Illinois who currently sits on the House Natural Resources Committee, who justified his vote against the bill by arguing that “[the Puerto Rican community] was not given an opportunity to contribute their perspectives into the debate.”^[19] The critiques presented here raise an important, albeit ironic, question: if the Puerto Rican people had little say in the plan meant to give them a voice in their island’s decolonization process, then whose opinions or voice does the bill actually reflect?

         The lack of Puerto Rican input in the PRSA suggests that the bill centers the interests and positionality of the colonizer (the United States) more than it presents any true decolonial option for the colonized (Puerto Rico). This is not a novel argument, however. Puerto Rico’s decolonization process has been dominated by U.S. interests from the start, as evidenced by the factthat the same pool of options have been presented to the Puerto Rican people in seven separate plebiscites since 1967 (See Table 1). The only difference between the PRSA and these earlier plebiscites is that the option of the Commonwealth, or the ability to maintain the current status quo, would not be up for vote. The fact that Puerto Ricans have been presented with and have voted upon the same three options for decades speaks not only to the lack of interest or effort on the part of the United States to truly solve the “Puerto Rican Problem,” but also highlights how limiting these options truly are. Moreover, the PRSA’s attempt to “move the meter” towards a solution by presenting, once again, the same three options has only re-enforced the status stalemate. This begs the question: if these three options do not seem to be moving Puerto Rico toward decolonization, what other path(s) exists for the island?^[20]

My research addresses this question by imagining an alternative path forward to shake up Puerto Rico’s status stalemate. Importantly, my research focuses on generating possibilities by thinking-through a different or “fourth” status option that could grant Puerto Rico dignified decolonial justice – not evaluating its viability or operationalizability. In this paper, “decolonial justice” is conceptualized as a status for Puerto Rico that directly addresses and remedies the colonial power relations between the island and the United States (i.e. the “colonial rot,” which includes the concept of coloniality), and prevents future (neo)colonial subordination from developing.

Methodological Approach: Hopeful Pessimism

“We have to  find something that works for us. We have to create something new. And I think that’s where we are headed. There is a new movement that is being forged here. It still hasn’t been born, but it’s about to be born. A new future for Puerto Rico is already developing.” “Annie”^[21]

         As Yarimar Bonilla notes in “Postdisaster Futures: Hopeful Pessimism, Imperial Ruination, and La futura cuir,” in addition to a plethora of political, environmental, and economic crises, Puerto Ricans are currently experiencing the aftereffects of a “postcolonial disaster,” or “a political context of material and affective ruin that isno longer guided by the promise of a better postcolonial future or the palliative anticipation of a sovereignty to come” (emphasis added).^[22] This means that many Puerto Ricans have become disillusioned with the promise of a future in line with the current, hegemonic definition of political “modernity” – understood here primarily by its organizing political factors, Westphalian-based sovereignty and territorially-bound states.^[23] Thus, the question of “what comes next?” for many on the island no longer involves dreams of political independence or even US statehood, as successive mismanaged crises have shattered their faith in government. As one man Bonilla interviewed remarked, “The government [both local and federal] doesn’t work. So now we have to work harder because the government can no longer help us.”^[24]

         According to Bonilla, the pervasive feeling on the island is that top-down, government reform is not the solution; the Puerto Rican people are. Thus, self-reliance and community care, i.e. grassroots or bottom-up movements, not another status plebiscite, are increasingly seen as the most likely way to break free of US dependence.^[25] This sentiment stands in stark contrast to the Puerto Rican Status Act and reaffirms the critique that those composing the bill did not take into account the perspectives and opinions of the Puerto Rican people but instead re-packaged and re-imposed what they thought the Puerto Rican people should want.

         Bonilla takes care to assert that this turn toward community solutions is not an act of “giving up” but rather one of “hopeful pessimism.”^[26] She asks, “Unlike a cruel optimism that blind us to the threats of the present, a hopeful pessimism opens our eyes to the hard tasks required to transform the here and now. How can we live and act politically in the absence of faith in a better future?^[27] How can we develop not a cruel optimism that blinds us to what is to come but rather a kind of hopeful pessimism that can serve to build politically in the face of ruin and the promise of further decay?”^[28] These are questions central to Bonilla’s current work and ones that have motivated my own research. To this end, I aim to build upon Bonilla’s work and critique what has been historically presented by the United States as the only potential paths forward for Puerto Rico and infuse the discursive conversation surrounding the “Puerto Rican Problem” with a sense of possibility in line with Bonilla’s call for “hopeful pessimism.”

         While I amconscious ofthe disenchantment with both the U.S. and Puerto Rican governments across the island, I contend that top-down government transformations are possible and indeed necessary for Puerto Rico to decolonize because without such structural transformation, the rot of colonialism remains.^[29] Thus, I am preoccupied in this thesis with exploring what alternative top-down government transformations are possible for Puerto Rico when inspired by and rooted in the grassroots organizations and solidarities the Puerto Rican people themselves view as the best path forward.^[30]

         In order to incorporate the voices of Puerto Ricans themselves, in lieu of being able to speak with them directly via ethnographic research, I analyze the work of three grassroots organizations on the island in order to imagine an alternative future rooted in the work of Puerto Ricans themselves. For the purpose of this short paper, I will only include my analysis of one: El Departamento de la Comida.

Imagining an Alternative: Grassroots Innovation and El Departamento de la Comida

“Prefigurative politics” is the main analytical framework through which I analyze the work of grassroots organizations across the island. As understood by Paul Raekstad, the “case” for prefigurative politics: “…starts from the premise that our basic institutions – capitalism, the state, the patriarchal family and so on – are inherently unfree and unequal…how can we emancipate ourselves if current institutions prevent us from developing the powers, drives and consciousness we need to do so?…Organizations of struggle and transition must begin to implement the social relations and practices they want for the future in the here and now. This is because doing so is important for developing the right kinds of revolutionary agency; for developing the powers, drives and consciousness necessary to bring about universal human emancipation” (emphasis added) (37-38).^[31] In other words, prefigurative politics is concerned with living out a desired future in the present, with bringing into being by doing.

            Prefigurative politics is closely related to what Puerto Rican filmmaker, scholar, and activist ​​Frances Negrón-Mutaner describes as “sovereign acts.” Sovereign acts are understood as the “freedom to act and imagine in excess of an imposed law, order, or norm, [and may be] capable of opening up other ways of being in the world…In this context, sovereignty can be understood as the capacity to act and be otherwise” (emphasis added).^[32] Sovereign acts attack both colonialism – through the actions themselves – as well as coloniality, through the concept of “problematization.” According to  Cristina Pérez Jiménez, problematizacion subverts coloniality through the critical analysis of peoples’ “submission and exploitation” which leads to the realization that said submission is not natural and instead “the result of alterable socio-historical processes” (emphasis added).^[33] It is this combination of action and analysis found in sovereign acts that “should lead to a different understanding of reality, and the belief that people can alter their circumstances.”^[34]

Each organization discussed in my project involves both an action that directly works to undermine the ongoing relations and effects of colonialism in Puerto Rico as well as an effort to problematize Puerto Ricans’ exploitation and subjugation, thus targeting the island’s state of coloniality. Therefore, each organization is engaging in sovereign acts. Additionally, the work of these organizations is prefigurative in the sense that they are working toward a Puerto Rico in the present that they want to see emerge in the future. Thus, the following organizations can be described as engaging in prefigurative sovereign acts.

El Departamento de la Comida: Food Sovereignty

As mentioned earlier, part of the status quo in Puerto Rico is colonial subjugation by and dependence on the United States. Economic dependence in particular – on PROMESA to restructure the island’s billion-dollar debt crisis, on an infusion of cash from American investors and corporations – is part and parcel to everyday life on the island. This dependency can be starkly seen in the agricultural and food sectors.

Between 80-90% of the total food supply in Puerto Rico is imported, which has resulted in intense levels of dependency – particularly on imports from the United States:^[35] “There is local agricultural production, but the food distribution companies have an almost absolute control of the market. While it is not hard for producers to grow food, it is quite hard for them to sell it. Local produce is frequently more expensive than imported food, even with taxes and transportation costs added. Since most of the Puerto Rican economy turned to developing its industrial sector decades ago, there is very little economic incentive from the government to boost local agricultural production and make it more competitive” (emphasis added).^[36]

In the face of this extreme dependency, food sovereignty organizations are popping up across the island. Food sovereignty is as much about “having enough food” as it is creating “place-based alternatives to the destructive logic of the colonial state and highlight[ing] the imaginative potential of thinking beyond what exists…food sovereignty cultivates healing through mutual aid and community care, connecting resistant imaginations to tangible political possibilities” (emphasis added). El Departamento de la Comida is one of the most public-facing and well-known organizations trying to bring about food sovereignty in Puerto Rico.

El Departamento de la Comida (El Depa) was founded in 2010 by Tara Rodríguez-Besosa as a multi-farm community agriculture program that “aggregated produce from farms and sold it to families and restaurants in San Juan.”^[37] Since then, the work of El Depa has expanded to encompass a food hub, a restaurant, and in the face of Hurricane Maria’s destruction, support for coalitions of volunteer brigades to help local farms in the aftermath of the disaster.^[38] Through these initiatives, El Depa not only works to actively undermine the dependent and colonial relationship between Puerto Rican and the United States by providing access to locally grown (i.e. non-imported) food, but also the coloniality this relationship engenders.^[39] As Rodríguez-Besosa notes, “We were told how to be civilized: It’s the can, it’s the microwave, it’s going into the supermarket and having money to treat yourself to packaged foods…we were told that these fruit trees growing in our backyards were worthless,” but El Depa problematizes this narrative and successfully illustrates that Puerto Ricans can support themselves, that the island provides, and that reliance on the United States and its packaged foods is not necessary.^[40]      

A common phrase among food sovereignty activists is, “if you can feed yourself, you can free yourself.”^[41] In the case of Puerto Rico, El Depa is working to free Puerto Ricans from having to engage with a highly exploitative capitalist food system that is a byproduct of a  dependent colonial relationship with the United States.^[42] Thus, El Depa is engaging in prefigurative work to bring about a self-sustaining, “free” Puerto Rico.

What Are Puerto Ricans Showing Us They Want?

Using the concepts of prefigurative politics and sovereign acts, my analysis of grassroots mobilization in Puerto Rico points toward the following answer to the above question: self-sufficiency, an end to structural harms created and perpetuated by colonialism, and engagement in acts of consciousness raising that help to actively challenge coloniality and internalized inferiority.

I argue that a top-down “fourth-option” for Puerto Rican decolonization should be focused on generating an alternate “relationship with government.”^[43] This top-down plan would involve re-orienting the Puerto Rican government to a supportive position focused on creating the infrastructure, policy, resource coordination, etc. necessary to support the expansion and existence of prefigurative organizations – across the island and even the world – and the sovereign acts they engage in.Such a “fourth option,” inspired by and rooted in supporting the mobilization and solidarity of Puerto Ricans, would not only help break the cycle of colonial dependency and foster self-sufficiency throughout the island, but also challenge the structural harms brought about due to both Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the U.S. and state of coloniality. Such a plan would allow Puerto Ricans to slowly untangle the threads that tether them to the United States and provide the decolonial future Puerto Ricans deserve – on their own terms.

The Bully in the Backyard: Issues for Operationalizing Puerto Rican Decolonization

The seeds of a decolonial future have already been planted in Puerto Rico, as evidenced by the prefigurative sovereign actions explored further in Chapter 3 of my thesis, and as such it is relatively easy to answer the question: what else is out there for Puerto Rico beyond the traditional three status options? But even beyond that, Puerto Ricans are showing us that the answer to this question — fostering the creation, existence, and spread of radical grassroots movements across the island – is possible to implement. But how does one create a top-down decolonization plan that fosters, for example, radical anti-capitalist food sovereignty projects? More specifically, what functional barriers exist to creating and implementing such a top-down decolonization plan throughout the island?

Before moving forward, it is imperative to state that this conclusion does not claim that a de-colonization plan along the lines of what has been imagined is unfeasible. Rather, it is here that I am engaging most directly with the pessimistic aspect of “hopeful pessimism.” Thus, in this section I am identifying what I believe to be the major challenges facing the arrival of any imagined decolonial future in Puerto Rico. Moreover, I argue that instead of debating whether or not a free association, the achievement of American statehood, or Westphalian independence is “right” for Puerto Rico for another sixty years, future researchers, policymakers, and those invested in Puerto Rico’s decolonial future should be more concerned with the following issues.

Firstly, as it stands, due to the island’s official Commonwealth status, both the U.S. House and the Senate would need to vote upon a decolonization plan in order for it to be implemented in the first place but also for Puerto Rican decolonization to be considered “legitimate” and “legal” – both in the eyes of the United States and the wider global community.^[44] That being said, the United States has a rather violent knee-jerk reaction to anything “Other” in what it sees as its “backyard,” i.e. the entire Western hemisphere (see the Grenadine Revolution, the US’s involvement in Cuba and throughout Central and South America during the twentieth century for more information). Using the example I presented earlier, food sovereignty movements are inherently anti-capitalist, and addressing the structural harms incurred from unchecked and predatory colonial capitalism would be an inherently anti-capitalist project and thus considered unacceptable by the United Status. Resultantly, any plan that seems to challenge or undermine capitalism in any way would probably not pass Congress.^[45] The question to ask ourselves now is: how do we get a decolonial plan with anti-capitalist components through Congress?

Second, there exists ample evidence of the predatory nature of neoliberal international institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, in their interaction with “developing” or recently-independent countries (see the documentary Life and Debt for more information). Resultantly, an important question is: how do we navigate the constraints of (transnational, exploitative) capitalism and protect Puerto Rico from incursions by global neoliberal institutions? Even further, what role, if any, does regional integration play in protecting Puerto Rico against neoliberalism and further economic exploitation?

Third, as Frantz Fanon argued in The Wretched of the Earth, having the colonial bourgeois (who are “mimic men” that want to assimilate with the colonists) come to power after a colonizer retreat results in “neo-colonialism.” With that in mind, how do we guard against elite-capture and potentially the establishment of neo-colonial relations with the United States? (This is a major concern for Puerto Rico, given the history of former U.S. colonies’ postcolonial experiences, see: The Philippines).^[46]

Finally, the “national question” is still an unanswered and incredibly complicated question in Puerto Rico. A de-colonization plan rooted in island-wide and international networks and solidarities would help challenge the idea that national space and a state’s territory are congruent, thus making more “space” for the diaspora in the “Puerto Rican imaginary.” However, the issue of who is and is not Puerto Rican is about much more than geographic location – it is about language, race and ethnic background (ex. if you are part of the Creole elite or of African or Taíno-descent), where you were educated, etc. Additionally, there exists a “hierarchy of suffering” in determining if one is “Puerto Rican enough.” Meaning, the more time you have spent on the island, enduring the effects of colonization, climate change, the debt crisis, etc., you are “more” Puerto Rican than those who were born and raised in the diaspora and insulated from such experiences and subsequent suffering. Working through these issues, in my opinion, is as difficult as getting an anti-capitalist decolonization plan through the U.S. Congress, because it would require a problematization of the diaspora among Puerto Ricans – both on the island and off – and the challenging of a generations-long understanding of what it means to be Puerto Rican.

The obstacles identified in this section are some – not all – of what I believe to be the most pressing challenges facing the implementation of any decolonial plan in Puerto Rico today.^[47] While daunting, addressing these questions, in lieu of debating the efficacy of the three traditional status options for another sixty years, will result in more productive conversations regarding the “Puerto Rican problem” and generate the type of critical, problematizing engagement necessary for creating a true, dignified decolonial future for the island.

Bibliography

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^[1] “The Puerto Rican Problem” is a colloquial phrase used to refer to Puerto Rico’s “in-between” status as neither a U.S. state nor a Westphalisn (nation) state. Rather, Puerto Rico is an “unincorporated territory” of the United States, but what this means, entails, and what rights this status secures for the Puerto Rican people in practice is constantly up to (re)interpretation. Solving the Puerto Rican Problem would involve providing clarity re: the island’s status.

^[2] Franklin Rodriguez and Richard Huizer, “The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Puerto Rico, Colonialism, and Citizenship,” Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies 3, no. 2 (2019): 135; “Article IV, Section 3, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution, the ‘Territorial Clause,’ empowers Congress to ‘make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States’” (emphasis added) (Rodriguez and Huizer 130).

^[3] Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship in 1917 as part of The Jones Act, but as many authors argue (Torruella 2017, Smith 2017), Puerto Ricans experience second-class and incomplete U.S. citizenship.

^[4] Rodriguez and Huizer, “The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion,” 131.

^[5] Ariana Valle, “Race and the Empire-state: Puerto Ricans’ Unequal U.S. Citizenship,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 5, no. 1 (2019): 27.

^[6] Valle, “Race and the Empire-state,” 27.

^[7] Ibid., 36.

^[8] Ibid., 27.

^[9] Levi Gahman, Gabrielle Thongs, and Adaeze Greenidge, “Disaster, Debt, and Underdevelopment: The Cunning of Colonial Capitalism in the Caribbean,” Development 64 (2021): 113.

^[10] Gahman, Thongs, and Greenidge, “Disaster, Debt, and Underdevelopment,” 114.

^[11] Here, Klein is making an explicit reference to her breakthrough and widely praised book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

^[12] Alex Standen, “Confronting Colonial Capitalism,” review of The Battle for Paradise: The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists, by Naomi Klein, New Labor Forum 29, no. 1(Winter 2020): https://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2020/02/01/confronting-colonial-capitalism/.

^[13] Standen, “Confronting Colonial Capitalism,” https://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2020/02/01/confronting-colonial-capitalism/.

^[14] Nicole Acevedo, “Puerto Rico Officially Privatizes Power Generation Amid Protests, Doubts,” NBC News, Jan. 25, 2023. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/puerto-rico-officially-privatizes-power-generation-genera-pr-rcna67284.

^[15] Coral Murphy Marcos and Patricia Mazzei, “The Rush for a Slice of Paradise in Puerto Rico,” The New York Times, January 31, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/us/puerto-rico-gentrification.html.

^[16] Irma Serrano-García, “Resilience, Coloniality, and Sovereign Acts: The Role of Community Activism,” American Journal of Community Psychology 65, no. 3 (2020): 4.

^[17] “BUDPR, CASA Issue Joint Statement on Opposition to Puerto Rico Status Act,” Latino Rebels, August 19, 2022, https://www.latinorebels.com/2022/08/19/bupdrpuertoricostatusact/.

^[18] Pedro Cabán, “Bad Bunny, AOC, and Decolonizing Puerto Rico,” The American Prospect, September 7, 2022, https://prospect.org/politics/bad-bunny-aoc-and-decolonizing-puerto-rico/.

^[19] Pedro Cabán, “Bad Bunny, AOC, and Decolonizing Puerto Rico,” https://prospect.org/politics/bad-bunny-aoc-and-decolonizing-puerto-rico/.

^[20] Through a qualitative analysis of de-colonial critiques of Eurocentric modernity, Chapter 2 of my thesis goes into more depth as to why the “traditional status options” would not bring about decolonial justice for Puerto Rico. This discussion has been excluded for the purpose of this short paper.

^[21]  Yarimar Bonilla, “The coloniality of disaster: Race, empire, and the temporal logics of emergency in Puerto Rico, USA,” Political Geography 78 (2020): 10.

^[22] Yarimar Bonilla, “Postdisaster Futures: Hopeful Pessimism, Imperial Ruination, and La futura cuir,” small axe 62 (2020): 150.

^[23] Aka “statist solutions.”

^[24] Yarimar Bonilla, “The coloniality of disaster…” 7.

^[25] Bonilla,  “The coloniality of disaster…,” 9.

^[26] Also referred to in this thesis as “visionary pragmatism.”

^[27] Here, Dr. Bonilla is referring to Lauren Berlant’s book Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012) here.

^[28] Bonilla, “Postdisaster Futures: Hopeful Pessimism, Imperial Ruination, and La futura cuir,” 157.

^[29] I also recognize that this is a rather privileged position to take, keeping in mind my positionality as a member of the Puerto Rican diaspora who was born, raised, and educated on the mainland;

This is a direct reference to Ann Laura Stoler’s “‘The Rot Remains:’ From Ruins to Ruination,” In Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, ed. Ann Laura Stoler. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

^[30] That being said, I do recognize the need to imagine within the confines of reality, to be rationally “hopefully pessimistic”. As Frank Gatell observed when discussing the state of the Puerto Rican status debate in the 1940s, “…without a viable economic life, arguments about political status represented a luxury which the island simply could not afford” (emphasis added).^# This remains the case today, nearly eighty years later. With this in mind, while the majority of this thesis imagines an ideological ground upon which we can build a fourth option by listening to the opinions and analyzing the actions of the Puerto Rican people, the conclusion brings us back down to Earth and investigate the tangible barriers impeding the development of said imagined future in Puerto Rico today.

^[31] Paul Raekstad,“Prefiguration: Between Anarchism and Marxism,” In The Future is Now: An

Introduction to Prefigurative Politics, ed. Lara Moticelli (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022): 37-38.

^[32] Irma Serrano-García, “Resilience, Coloniality, and Sovereign Acts: The Role of Community Activism,” The American Journal of Community Psychology 65, no. 3 (2020): 7.

^[33] Irma Serrano-García, “Resilience, Coloniality, and Sovereign Acts,” 4.

^[34] Ibid.

^[35] This is largely due to policies like the Jones Act which subsidize U.S. shipping and products at such a rate that Puerto Ricans cannot afford the premium attached to locally grown products. For more information, see: “How the U.S. Dictates What Puerto Rico Eats” by Israel Meléndez Ayala and Alicia Kennedy, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/puerto-rico-jones-act.html?referringSource=articleShare.

^[36] Meghie Rodrigues, “Puerto Rico Adapts to a Changing, Challenging Environment,” UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, April 22, 2021. https://eos.org/articles/puerto-rico-adapts-to-a-changing-challenging-environment.

^[37] Camila Bustos, “The Third Space of Puerto Rican Sovereignty: Re-imagining Self-Determination Beyond State Sovereignty,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 32, no. 1 (2020): 99.

^[38] Leah Kirts, “How El Departamento de la Comida Fights Colonialism Through Food,” them, October 21, 2022. https://www.them.us/story/el-departamento-de-la-comida-tara-rodriguez-besosa-puerto-rico-food-farming.   

^[39] Kirts, ““How El Departamento de la Comida Fights Colonialism Through Food,” https://www.them.us/story/el-departamento-de-la-comida-tara-rodriguez-besosa-puerto-rico-food-farming.

^[40] Additionally, El Depa challenges coloniality on the island through the existence of its resource library, “which includes a collection of seeds from native plants, books about the plant history of Puerto Rico, Indigenous poetry, and agricultural fiction, along with a tool library stocked with equipment for farming, small-scale construction, volunteer projects, and emergency response” (Kirts).

^[41] Momo Wilms-Crow, “‘Desde Abajo, Como Semilla’: Puerto Rican Food Sovereignty as Embodied Decolonial Resistance” (Honors Thesis, University of Oregon, 2020): 48.

^[42] Momo Wilms-Crow, “‘Desde Abajo, Como Semilla,’” 48.

^[43] Again, my thesis is not focused on exploring what this relationship would look like in practice. Rather, I am simply imagining an alternative future informed by the work of Puerto Ricans on the island. The next step for this project would include drawing from Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse to figure out how to “design” or “operationalize” the suggestions put forth in my thesis project.

^[44] At the time of writing, the Puerto Rico Status Act has only passed the U.S. House of Representatives. Additionally, the question of legality gets into the territory of theories of recognition (see Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks). Working through questions of recognition would be another line of inquiry for future iterations of this project to consider/expand upon.

^[45] While this might be the case, prefigurative movements on the ground in Puerto Rico could and would most likely persist in the face of a lack of Congressional certification. That being said, as I argued in Chapter 2, without fundamentally challenging the ongoing colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, true decolonization will not occur. So these prefigurative movements would simply be trying to reform the system, not contributing to its transformation.

^[46] See Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

^[47] For example, the issue of what to do about Puerto Rico’s debt is another question I believe to be essential to address in order to achieve decolonial justice for the island.