Geography Archives: Puerto Rico

On April 14, 2021 the House Committee on Natural Resources held hearings on two competing bills to end Puerto Rico’s colonial status. H.R.1522, the Puerto Rican State Admission Act and H.R.2070, the Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act.

Lear Corporation—one of the world’s largest auto parts manufacturers—rose to position 148 on Fortune magazine’s famous list of the 500 largest firms in 2018. It operates with roughly 148,000 workers spread across 261 locations.

For him to think he can keep governing for another year and a half as if nothing has happened is insulting to our core.

The protesters’ immediate demand is for governor Ricardo Rosselló to resign, but the mobilizations have also highlighted the widespread rejection of Puerto Rico’s status as a colony of the U.S.

GOVERNOR of Puerto Rico Ricardo Rossello has called for the “elimination” of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and announced that a summit of opposition leaders will be held on the occupied U.S. island later this month.

Naomi Klein gives a stirring account of the struggle against disaster capitalism in Puerto Rico after 2017’s Hurricane Maria, finds Ellen Graubart.

The movement for people’s agroecology seeks to empower the peasantry of the island through encouraging collectivism and cooperatives.

This Monday saw a session of the UN Special Committee on Decolonization, and the approval of a draft resolution that would call upon the U.S. to facilitate the island’s self‑determination.

Colorlines talks to Philadelphia poet laureate Raquel Salas Rivera about their new book, “lo terciario/the tertiary,” which revisits Karl Marx’s “Capital” to examine Puerto Rico’s debt crisis from a queer decolonial lens.

A recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine estimates the number of deaths caused directly or indirectly by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico at over five thousand.

PUERTO RICANS marked six months today since the formation of Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island, causing about $100 billion (£72bn) in damage.

Oscar Lopez Rivera, the anti-colonial leader from Puerto Rico, has criticized the United States’ callousness and “experimental” approach towards the U.S. colony.

“Policies aimed at aid and reconstruction became their own forms of punishment, leaving the island more indebted, unequal, dependent and polluted than it was before the hurricane hit.”

Last week, CNN’s Jake Tapper interviewed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and asked if he thought President Donald Trump’s punishing response to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico had something to do with “race or ethnicity.” Sanders hesitated a bit but ultimately said, “We have a right to be suspect.”

In a modern-day manifestation of the old colonial divide-and-rule tactic, corporations and New York City politicians, including the mayor, were recently caught trying to engage in backdoor deals to divide the city’s Puerto Rican community over a pro-Puerto Rican independence activist’s participation in the Puerto Rican Day Parade.

While many of us could hardly concentrate on everyday matters as we thought obsessively about the fragile and unfortunate fate of Oscar López Rivera, the former political prisoner painted peacefully in the prison in Terre Haute Indiana. Then on January 17, at 3:30 pm a guard called him to let him know that he had […]

Last week Puerto Rico officially became the largest bankruptcy case in the history of the American public bond market. On May 3, a fiscal control board imposed on the island’s government by Washington less than year ago suddenly announced that the Puerto Rico’s economic crisis “has reached a breaking point.” The board asked for the immediate […]

The Protest Encampment at the entrance of the Federal Courthouse in Hato Rey, Puerto Rico against the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (cynically called “PROMESA”), as well as the Wall Street Junta that said law imposes, constitutes an important act of popular resistance. In addition to the dictatorial Wall Street Junta, PROMESA sets up a legal framework to impose a $4.25-an-hour wage on young workers ages 20-24, curtail and even eliminate public sector pensions, cancel collective bargaining agreements, and ram through a host of other austerity measures upon the Puerto Rican people.

At a moment of growing resistance to state violence and injustice the world over, a delegation of nineteen anti-prison, labor and scholar-activists from the United States traveled to Palestine in March 2016.  Our delegation included former U.S.-held political prisoners and social prisoners, former Black Panther Party members, prison abolitionists, trade unionists and university professors.  We […]

  “Venezuela defines the future of the progressive cycle” In your work on South America, you speak of the duality that has characterized the last decade.  What exactly is that duality? Claudio Katz: In my opinion, the so-called progressive cycle of the last decade in South America has been a process resulting from partially successful […]