Primero secaron los ríos
Check out our new home today at Digital Collections
The classic platform is no longer being updated and will be retired permanently on July 1, 2024.
Note, collections from the Amistad Research Center will be available only via the Louisiana Digital Library.
Description
In the opening words of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, the authors write, “the winds of the Anthropocene carry ghosts—the vestiges and signs of past ways of life still charged in the present” (2017, G1). In Vieques, Puerto Rico, these hauntings can be traced in dry riverbeds, diverted watersheds, and chemical residues of various toxic substances—among them, Agent Orange, depleted Uranium, Napalm, white phosphorous, mercury, lead, TNT, and RDX—that were dispersed throughout the so-called Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Facility (Eastern Vieques) between 1941 and 2000. My aim in this master’s thesis is to examine the Training Facility through the lens of demonic grounds, the concept that Katherine McKittrick (2006) offers in her exploration of how black women inhabit diasporic sites shaped by the legacy of slavery and agrarian labor. In providing a reading of this “imperial debris” (Stoler 2016) and what remains a contested topography, I draw attention to the hauntings on Vieques island, layering them with land occupation narratives and water mythologies, and cimarrón resilience systems as they were recounted to me while conducting ethnographic fieldwork on the archipelago. While the rest of the Global South pushed to decolonize and decentralize power in the context of the Cold War and Fidel Castro’s nearby revolution, the Usonian powers strengthened their grip on Puerto Rico and, to an even greater extent, Vieques, in the name of geostrategic importance. This thesis attends to the U.S. Navy’s racialized occupation of Vieques, Puerto Rico and the subsequent ecological ruination of the island as racialized, colonial encounters. Thinking in terms of voluminous states (Billé 2020) to capture the multiple dimensionalities of territorial sovereignty, I hope to emphasize how toxicity permeates the Viequense landscape, water, and lifeways. I am interested in mapping out the ways in which the mostly black and brown natives 3 of Vieques push back upon this violence and find abundance amidst land and water scarcity. Despite having facilitated capitalist expansion and unfavorably altered landscapes, cattle-grazing figures importantly in the island’s history of occupation and counteroccupation. I explore how pasturing was an important first foray into informal land holding and tending for Viequenses. Furthermore, I propose that the practice of cimarrón beekeeping (working in collaboration with semi-wild and Africanized bees) is a means of sustenance and subversion that models strategies for life and abundance in the wake of the so-called Anthropocene, or perhaps more fittingly, what Donna Haraway (2016) calls the Chthulucene, to stress the inextricable links between human and nonhumans. Since the very imaginings of the colony up until today, Viequenses have pushed back against the boundaries imposed by empire. By focusing on some ways in which Viequenses are reclaiming the land for purposeful and productive activities, I aim to reveal how land segregation at the hands of the Spanish empire but especially the US military complex has lasting material and corporeal ramifications on Vieques.