Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice [REVIEW]
Asked about the audience she has in mind for Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice, Hilda Lloréns responded with the classroom: “It’s a short book, so I was hoping it would be taught [both in high schools and at the college level].” Given her hope, this book review is written collectively by a faculty member and students, and centers on teaching and learning with an emphasis on the salient themes that emerged in the classroom.
Anthropologist Hilda Lloréns’s Making Livable Worlds is a highly teachable and thought-generating autotheoretical and engaged ethnographic reflection about how Black and Afro-Puerto Rican women craft “life-affirming strategies that resist long-term oppressive systems” (146), such as “the violence, rupture, and sense of loss and longing wrought by enslavement, colonialism, racism, and sexism” (19). She opens,
The Afro–Puerto Rican women documented in this book are everyday builders, visionaries, believers, path breakers, and problem solvers who don’t take no for an answer and who make a way out of no way. These are not women whose lives are regulated by despair. On the contrary, they are women whose kinship, community, and alliance-building practices illustrate that they understood long ago that the social world they inherited was a construction unequally stacked against them and thus they could set out to reconstruct it in ways that sustain their own, their families, and their community’s life and well-being. (3)
Rúa assigned Making Livable Worlds for the course Latinx Studies and the Global South. This 300-level interdisciplinary seminar takes a thematic approach to the social histories and contemporary lives of distinct Latina/o/x communities within and beyond a continental U.S. context and at the intersection of Latin American, Caribbean, and other transnational frameworks of the Global South. Students engaged the book alongside works, like Jesús Colón’s A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches (1961), that emphasize local and regional peculiarities and invite a hemispheric and internationalist comprehension of Latinx Studies. Additionally, the seminar examines the formation of a field of study attentive to imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy on a global scale; the study of power and racialization within global capitalism; and relations among aggrieved communities across national, linguistic, and ethnoracial lines.
In various detailed ways, Lloréns teases out the distinct yet intertwined racial ideologies of Puerto Rico and the United States. Her work nudged students to more thoroughly explain what it means to say that “race operates differently in Puerto Rico” or that “US racial categories are imposed” in discussions about the archipelago and its US diaspora. Lloréns demands that readers hold the significance of Puerto Rico as “a Spanish colonial settler society that was then colonized by the United States” (157). Noting that these tangled relations are complicated, she walks readers through how this is so. The often singular focus on Puerto Rico’s status as an unincorporated colonial territory of the United States generally elides or avoids both local and federal scales of racialization at work in the archipelago. From the outlook of the continental United States, all Puerto Ricans are federally categorized as “Hispanic” or “Latino” and minoritized as “people of color.” Such a determination perpetuates the idea that environmental racism and its attendant environmental harms are equally distributed in Puerto Rico. It also gives cover to the myth of a colorblind Puerto Rican society; that “seeing race” is a US colonial administrative imposition. Ignoring, in the process, that “modern Puerto Rico, like the rest of the Americas, is a colonial settler society” (79) with a racial and class system inherited from Spain and reconstituted and maintained since. Spanish criollo descendants, who lay claim to European lineage, largely dominate the upper echelons of society and government and situated at the bottom rung, descendants of enslaved Africans, Black Puerto Ricans. Thus, as Lloréns writes, “in its determination to only understand and uphold as authentic ‘Nordic whiteness,’ the United States has failed to grasp the internal racial logics of white and light-skin supremacy” and anti-Blackness “that already existed in Puerto Rico and that remains nearly intact in the twenty-first century” (157). The region’s long history of colonialisms and racial capitalism has subjected Black and Afrodescendant communities in the Puerto Rican archipelago to environmental harms and injustice. Environmental degradation in the Jobos Bay communities of Salinas is but one example.
Lloréns draws on the intensely personal experience of being unable to trace a record of her foremothers because of racial and gender oppression. She brings gender into focus by introducing the concept of “matriarchal dispossession” to describe and analyze how Black and Afrodescendant women are alienated from knowing their histories and influence. Students found the concept and analysis quite compelling. Through this autotheoretical framework, Lloréns positions her life within the larger context of “an unjust system” (13) that relentlessly blames impoverished single women, more often than not Black women, for their circumstances. In policy and social science parlance, descriptors like “matriarchal,” “matrilineal,” or “matrifocal” have been used to pathologize these women and their families as a social problem and as a means to uphold patriarchal ideologies (30). But the dispossession they face does not wholly define them. Because these women are regenerating social ties, reclaiming, reinventing, and reinforcing their agency, Lloréns roots her inquiry within matriarchy. Therefore, she reclaims and re-articulates a language often used to demonize her maternal kinswomen to show that they do indeed operate from a different value system. They seek alternative restorative solutions, at times imperfect, to the systemic socio-economic, political, and environmental challenges they confront as they forge good, tenable lives.
Laser focused on documenting experiences, practices, and stories that often are obscured, unheard, and rarely archived, Lloréns makes “visible the often hidden and frequently erased lives of Black Puerto Rican women” (19). Milagros, for example, took a technical course on electricity and solar panel installation to provide an accessible source of clean energy for herself and her neighbors. Another woman, Ana, who created shelter for her family on a basketball court along a busy highway in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, refused a FEMA short-term housing solution. While precarious, Ana believed that remaining in public view would put more pressure on the local and federal governments to find a permanent subsidized housing solution. Lloréns highlights matriarchs like Milagros and Ana throughout the book in response to the ways scholarship has treated women’s histories as “unheroic, unremarkable, and valueless.” However, Lloréns does not wish to legitimize the women’s stories using these existing frameworks by proving that they are heroic or remarkable. Students admired and valued Lloréns work because it did not pursue a glorified narrative of strong Black women. Instead, she shines a light on their “series of daily improvisations” and the modes in which they live for themselves, their families, and their communities through generational practices of care and sustainability (20). These actions work against a system that devalues their lives and regards their knowledge as illegitimate, showing powerful refusals to accept ongoing matriarchal dispossession.
By rigorously engaging contested terms, Lloréns encourages students to bring a similar critical openness to their thinking and to extend it into their discussion and writing praxis. To give another example, Lloréns frames the notion of “resilience” through local activists and cultural workers who run a camp for low-income youth in Southeastern Puerto Rico. Prioritizing humans’ relations with their local ecosystem, camp leaders hosted evening charlas about “resilience and community solidarity.” In fact, the theme of that year’s camp was “To survive we have to cohabitate” (6). This grassroots collective comprehension of resilience contrasts starkly with the co-opted neoliberal “bootstrap” model of individuals rebounding from adversity. As Lloréns plainly states, “It is important to underscore that the neoliberal ‘discourse on resilience’ gets resilience wrong.... Resilience doesn’t have to be self-reliant. Households can be resilient by relying on others or by relying on the government and protesting and pressuring it when it fails” (99). As with the concept of matriarchy, Lloréns’s extended discussion of resilience is instructive and thought-provoking (98-103; 137-139). Alongside the strategic approaches of the women and other community members are found the ecological, policy, development, and social science literatures on resilience, prompting students to consider the dimensions, capacities, utilization, and manipulations of the term. Moreover, students can delineate what Lloréns means when she writes, “solidarity, sociality, and mutuality are resilient practices, but coercive resilience is tiring” (98).
Finally, the theme and the method of “home-work” especially resonated with students, challenging them to rethink their ideas about research and prioritize the humanness of this line of work. Lloréns contemplates the role and positionality of the “native anthropologist” using the concept of “home-work.” For students, Lloréns’ text was especially valuable to the syllabus for her emphasis on the role of the researcher in relation to the researched and a complicated familiarity with the field site (58), engaging the autotheoretical approach to “show what a just anthropological ethnography might look like, one that leads with the ethnographer’s skin in the game” (40). Lloréns’s engaged ethnographic reflection not only presents her research accessibly while amplifying the voices of the communities she works with, but also demonstrates the importance (and benefits) of developing relationships with the communities and actively participating in their betterment without treating them as alienated subjects of research. Her critique of Western colonial modes of legitimizing knowledge and her resistance to it through the research methods used in this book serve as a significant example of scholarship. It exemplifies how the pursuit of knowledge can foster a multifaceted perspective when agency and authority are granted to a wider community of “knowers.”
For those designing undergraduate and graduate courses in Puerto Rican Studies, Latinx Studies, and Ethnic Studies and seeking readings that present innovative methodological and epistemological contributions, Hilda Lloréns’ Making Livable Worlds is highly recommended. The work invites spirited and engaging classroom discussions that promote expanded thinking in written work. Beyond the classroom, Lloréns’s methodology and nuanced treatment of too often simplified contested concepts make all-important contributions to these fields of study. Her serious attention to the daily work and interventions of Black and Afro-Puerto Rican women to make livable worlds in the here and now and for coming generations addresses gaping holes in environmental justice-minded Puerto Rican Studies, Latinx Studies, and Ethnic Studies.
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Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice
By Hilda Lloréns
224 pgs. University of Washington Press. $30.00
Valeria Chavez Roncal holds a BA in Spanish and BM in Violin Performance from Millikin University. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Musicology at Northwestern University. Her research interests include music for modern dance in the 20th-century New York avant-garde sphere, focusing on the realization of competing philosophies within music and dance and their respective reception histories. Her research also revolves around musical representations of indigeneity and “other-ness” in Peruvian cumbia fusion genres, such as chicha and cumbia selvática. In addition to her studies, Valeria maintains an active performance career as a violinist.
Cydney Johnson is an undergraduate at Northwestern University studying International Studies and Journalism with a minor in Film & Media Studies. Her research interests include the portrayal of blackness in media produced in colonized countries, along with other topics relating to her Afro-Latina identity. In her free time, Johnson is an avid volleyball player and hopes to increase access to sports in low-income communities.
Lauryn Madise is an undergraduate at Northwestern University studying Radio/Television/Film. Her research interests center Black Indigeneity in Latin America, topics in urban youth culture, and the aesthetics and meanings of media representation. Madise is an aspiring filmmaker and media designer.
Mérida M. Rúa, professor of Latina and Latino Studies at Northwestern University, is the author of A Grounded Identidad: Making New Lives in Chicago’s Puerto Rican Neighborhoods, editor of Latino Urban Ethnography and the Work of Elena Padilla, and co-editor of Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies: A Reader (with Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas). Rúa’s current book project, “Migrations to Elderhood,” is an interdisciplinary study of the multifaceted socio-spatial lives of older adult Puerto Ricans in Chicago. She teaches courses on aging and urban life; race, ethnicity, and diasporas; key concepts and approaches in Latinx studies; and Latinx Studies and the Global South.