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Beneath the shimmering surface of the paradise we call home, an undeniable chasm separates the haves from the have-nots. Like dark clouds overshadowing the Island's potential, income inequality and poverty cast a shadow on countless Puerto Ricans' lives.

This article will peel back the layers of statistics and economic jargon to reveal the human stories at the heart of this pressing issue. It is time to confront the challenges head-on, armed with compassion and an unwavering determination to create a more just and equitable Puerto Rico for all its inhabitants.

There are millions of Americans on islands, near and far, that are systematically forgotten and mistreated by our government. They fight and die for our country, but have no right to vote for their Commander in Chief. They are subject to federal laws and regulations, but have no voice in their enactment. They have been characterized as “savage,” “half-civilized,” and “ignorant and lawless” in influential legal scholarship and widely-cited cases by the Supreme Court and lower courts, but continue to strive peacefully for rights and recognition in our judicial system. They endure catastrophic storms, but do not receive the assistance that is freely given to other Americans. They have been described by the Supreme Court as “alien races,” “utterly unfit for American citizenship,” and not of “a foreign country,” but “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.” They are the over four million Americans on the islands of Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands. They are the almost and forgotten Americans of the unincorporated territories of the United States.

In 2017, natural and human-made disasters brought the predicaments of several US territories into the national limelight. In August 2017, North Korea announced a detailed plan for a missile attack on Guam in its conflict with the United States. A few weeks later, Puerto Rico endured the onslaught of two cataclysmic Category 5 hurricanes while it was already struggling with an unprecedented bankruptcy and economic crisis. Hurricanes Irma and Maria ravaged an already crumbling island, causing billions of dollars of damage, destroying essential infrastructure, and irreparably changing the daily lives and futures of the people of Puerto Rico. Hurricane Maria alone led to nearly 3,000 casualties in Puerto Rico by 2018. The two storms also had a catastrophic impact on the US Virgin Islands, destroying much of its beautiful habitat and shutting down many of its businesses for extended periods of time.

The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to supporting Puerto Rico’s recovery and renewal. In 2021, President Biden unlocked billions of dollars in disaster funding and enacted historic expansions of economic and healthcare assistance programs for Puerto Rico. Since then, the Biden-Harris Administration has built on these unprecedented investments to ensure Puerto Rico has a strong foundation for sustained growth. President Biden’s Investing in America agenda – including historic legislation such as the American Rescue Plan (ARP), Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – is delivering results and bringing good jobs to the island. Puerto Rico is now a more attractive place for companies to invest, expand, and drive U.S. competitiveness. For example, Biosimilar Solutions Inc. is investing $200 million in Aguadilla to establish world-class facilities dedicated to research, development, and manufacturing of biosimilar therapies.

In short, the economic downturn in Puerto Rico has been exacerbated by natural disasters. Many of the island’s residents need government assistance. Even as Americans, Puerto Rican residents are excluded from federal programs created for Americans in need: Supplemental Security Income (SSI), SNAP, and Medicare Part D Low-Income Subsidy (LIS).

On April 10, 2020, the First Circuit held that the categorical exclusion of otherwise eligible Puerto Rican residents from SSI violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fifth Amendment, finding eligibility based on the differentiation in status not to be rationally related to a legitimate government interest. 17 The ruling in Vaello-Madero guided much of the District Court of Puerto Rico’s analysis in Martínez, which looked not only at Puerto Rico’s access to SSI, but also its access to SNAP and Medicare Part DLIS benefits.18 In Peña-Martínez, the Court held it was unconstitutional discrimination to deny eligible residents of Puerto Rico access to SSI, SNAP, and LIS benefits solely due to their residency in Puerto Rico.19 The District Court declared, “[T]o be blunt, the federal government discriminates against Americans who live in Puerto Rico.”20 While both decisions are major victories for Puerto Rican residents, the U.S. government’s appeals in Vaello-Madero and Peña-Martínez are pending before the U.S. Supreme Court and the First Circuit, respectively.

If SSI discrimination is ended, and poor and disabled residents of Puerto Rico are able to receive the same benefits available to their fellow citizens, the U.S. government has estimated that as many as 435,000 people will qualify for the SSI program—about 10 times as many Puerto Ricans as receive AABD benefits. Rosanna Torres, Ctr. for a New Economy, Impact of the Supplemental Security Income in Puerto Rico (June 25, 2020), https://grupocne.org/2020/06/25/impact-ofthe-ssi-in-puerto-rico/. Benefit amounts will increase dramatically because SSI’s maximum monthly benefit is $794, compared to $164 for AABD. See Ctr. for Budget & Policy Priorities, supra, at 3. The end of SSI discrimination would have major, salutary effects on Puerto Rico’s economy. Perhaps most obviously, extending SSI to Puerto Rico would lower the island’s poverty rate, likely by more than seven percentage points. Econometrika Corp., The Impact of Disparities in SNAP and SSI on Puerto Rico’s Poverty and Economic Growth 4 (Feb. 2019), 22 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340610699_ The_impact_of_disparities_in_SNAP_and_SSI_ on_Puerto_Rico’s_poverty_and_economic_growth. This reduction in poverty would in turn help to stem out-migration, which drains the island’s tax base and imposes economic strain on those states to which Puerto Ricans move. See Suzanne Gamboa, Puerto Rico’s Population Fell 11.8% to 3.3 million, Census Shows, NBC News (Apr. 26, 2021), https://www. nbcnews.com/news/latino/puerto-ricos-populationfell-118-33-million-census-shows-rcna767; see also Andrew Boryga, How the Turmoil in Puerto Rico Affects Florida, S. Fla. Sun Sentinel (Jul. 26, 2019), https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/florida/fl-ne- what-to-know-about-florida-puerto-ricans-20190726- pc3ijrxonbdg7pd2vterwvn3wu-story.html. In addition, because SSI recipients qualify for assistance due to their extremely low income levels, Puerto Ricans who receive SSI benefits would likely spend their funds quickly and locally to purchase necessities like food, electricity, and housing. According to a recent study by the Econometrika Corporation, SSI parity for Puerto Rico would encourage on-island spending, resulting in tens of millions of additional dollars in sales tax revenue. Econometrika Corp., supra, at 5. Together, SSI and nutrition assistance parity would also create 39,026 new jobs. Id. at 4. Simply put, there is no reason to believe that extending SSI benefits to Puerto Rico will have a negative, disruptive effect on the island’s economy. To the contrary, extension of SSI benefits to Puerto Rico’s population will simultaneously reduce poverty and increase consumer spending. Only one who believes, irrationally and unjustifiably, that “programs designed to help the poor should be less fully applied in those 23 areas where the need may be the greatest” could conclude otherwise. Rosario, 446 U.S. at 655 (Marshall, J., dissenting).

2. A Structural Proposal: Ending Territorial Exceptionalism in Public Benefits

The need for the emergency appropriations and revisions discussed above would be greatly reduced by legislative fixes to the structure and fi- nancing of territorial welfare programs. This more ambitious legislation could simply incorporate the five U.S. territories into the existing statutory framework for SNAP, Medicaid, Medicare Part D, and SSI.

Technology and politics are conspiring to make the world dangerously unstable. The result: War and nuclear escalation are becoming more likely. These are the summary conclusions of a diverse group of scholars and policymakers who offer a grim list of reasons why stability is vanishing. Advances in sensors and weapons make disarming counterforce strikes more tempting than ever. The threat of assured retaliation, which may have injected a dose of caution among those considering a preemptive attack during the Cold War, is disappearing. At the same time, the rapid spread of disinformation may lead to confusion and unpredictability during crises, as carefully crafted government signals give way to ad hoc tweets. New technologies blur the line separating conventional and nuclear weapons and create opportunities for weaker states and non-state actors. In this environment, as one Obama administration official recently put it, “classical notions of strategic stability offer scant guidance.” The peculiar technological characteristics of cyberspace make everything worse. Military forces have spent years centralizing communications to maximize efficiency, but in so doing become more vulnerable to crippling [destructive] information attacks. Nuclear command-and-control networks are similarly attractive targets for leaders seeking to disable enemy nuclear capabilities. Offensive cyber operations rely on secrecy to succeed, but this undermines deterrence, which requires that adversaries advertise their forces. The result is a powerful incentive to get the first shot in, whether in cyberspace or the real world. Some analysts offer the potentially hopeful reminder that politics, not technology, drives decisions about the use of force. Innovation may have important social and political consequences, but it does not cause war. If international politics are sedate, war is unlikely and nuclear war is unthinkable. Unfortunately, today’s politics are defined by a series of deepening conflicts among existing and aspiring nuclear powers. Great powers are competing. Regional conflicts are becoming more hostile — and more violent. Status quo nuclear states are opting for “maximum pressure” against those they suspect of wanting to join the club. And the political agreements that have anchored arms control for decades are coming apart.

Modern wars are often driven by scarcities of food, land and water. Dafour, Rwanda, Eritrea, the Balkans were all destabilized, at root, by squabbles over these resources. Going further back, the French and Russian civil wars both grew out of bread crises. We know that hunger breeds war. The UK Ministry of Defence, America’s CIA, the US Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Oslo Peace Research Institute all identify famine as a potential trigger for conflicts and possibly even for nuclear wars. The wars of the C21st are less likely to be global conflicts with sharply defined sides and huge armies than a scrappy mass of failed states, rebellions, civil strife, insurgencies, terrorism and genocides sparked by bloody competition over dwindling resources. However the good news is that many wars can also be prevented – by using science to meet the rising demand for sustenance, despite the constraints described in this paper. Refugee and internally displaced person numbers have risen sharply in recent years. Future famines in any significant region – Africa, India, Central Asia, China, Indonesia, Middle East or any of the megacities – will confront the world with tidal waves of tens, even hundreds of millions of refugees. But the 50m refugees who now flee every year are now preceded by over 200 million legal immigrants – a quarter of a billion people on the move each and every year. These are mostly people smart enough to read the signs in their home countries – and leave before disaster strikes. Yet such vast movements are as nothing to the movements of the future. These will dwarf the greatest migrations of history. Thanks to the universal media, all the world now knows that safety, sustenance and a good life are to be found elsewhere if you have the courage and the means to reach for them. In future, even places that are physically remote may face refugee tides in the millions or tens of millions, threatening profound change to society. If we fail to secure the world’s food supply, governments in many countries may collapse under the onrush of people fleeing regional sustenance disasters. Every nation will face heavier aid and tax burdens and soaring food prices as a result. Solving the challenge of global food insecurity should be the paramount concern of all nations and all people in the coming three generations. The global financial crisis is trivial in comparison. Even climate change, for all its menacing potential, is less immediately pressing. If we don’t want wars and tidal refugee movements, one way we can prevent many of them is by securing the food supply – everywhere.

Fragile and conflict-affected states, home to 1 billion people across more than 40 countries, are at particular risk in this era of economic uncertainty. After struggling with poverty, low-capacity institutions, governance challenges, violence, and other risks for decades, these countries must now contend with the scars of the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Accordingly, the international community must work together to help ensure their stability as a global public good—or else spillover effects associated with fragility and conflict become even more disruptive. The pandemic has had a lasting economic impact, with income per capita in fragile states projected not to recover to 2019 levels until 2024. Russia’s war in Ukraine and its related spillovers, including on food and energy prices, further aggravated the situation. Sub-Saharan Africa, home to about half of countries in the FCS category, has been hit particularly hard. Consumer prices have increased by more than 20 percent on average this year, while public debt is approaching 60 percent of gross domestic product—a level not seen since the early 2000s. We forecast that economic growth in seven countries—Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Comoros, Eritrea, Mali, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe—will be below the regional average of 3.6 percent this year. In addition, 123 million people, or 12 percent of the region’s population, face acute food insecurity, equivalent to two-thirds of the worldwide total. FCS in the Middle East and North Africa—more than one-third of the countries in the region—confront lingering effects from the pandemic and higher food and energy prices. Growth has remained sluggish at less than 1 percent, while per capita GDP continues to decline. Consumer prices are projected to rise by more than 30 percent on average this year and inflation will remain in double digits in 2023. Public debt as a share of GDP is forecast above 60 percent. As a result, FCS are facing very difficult trade-offs between rising spending needs, the difficulties in raising extra revenue, and elevated debt levels Vulnerable countries in the region also face food insecurity and social and political instability. Conflict has returned even to regions considered to be more stable. According to the United Nations, Russia’s war in Ukraine increased the number of forcibly displaced people to 100 million. The influx of almost 8 million Ukrainian refugees in neighboring European countries requires governments to cope with short-term fiscal costs amid already tight budget constraints, and make policy decisions about labor market integration and access to social services. These challenges are well-known in Africa and the Middle East, where policymakers contend with refugee flows and other regional impacts of fragility and conflict with few resources at hand. In this context, we should prioritize three ways to move these countries and their neighbors from fragility to stability and resilience.

The recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which is causing COVID-19 disease, has taught us unexpected lessons about the dangers of human suffering through highly contagious and lethal diseases. As the COVID-19 pandemic is now being partially controlled by various isolation measures, therapeutics, and vaccines, it became clear that our current lifestyle and societal functions may not be sustainable in the long term. We now have to start thinking and planning on how to face the next dangerous pandemic, not just overcoming the one that is upon us now. Is there any evidence that even worse pandemics could strike us in the near future and threaten the existence of the human race? The answer is unequivocally yes. It is not necessary to get infected by viruses found in bats, pangolins, and other exotic animals that live in remote forests to be in danger. Creditable scientific evidence indicates that the human gut microbiota harbor billions of viruses that are capable of affecting the function of vital human organs such as the immune system, lung, brain, liver, kidney, or heart. It is remotely possible that the development of pathogenic variants in the gut can lead to contagious viruses, which can cause pandemics, leading to the destruction of vital organs, causing death or various debilitating diseases such as blindness, respiratory, liver, heart, and kidney failures. These diseases could result in the complete shutdown of our civilization and probably the gradual extinction of the human race. This essay will comment on a few independent pieces of scientific facts, and then combine this information to come up with some (but certainly not all) hypothetical scenarios that could cause human race misery, even extinction, in the hope that these hypothetical scenarios will trigger preventative measures that could reverse or delay the projected adverse outcomes.

This means that 2.8 billion people around the world are still waiting to get their first shot. Vaccine inequity jeopardizes the safety of everyone, and contributes for growing inequalities between – and within – countries. Not only does this state of affairs risk prolonging the pandemic, but the lack of equity has many other impacts, slowing the economic recovery of entire countries, global labour markets, public debt payments, and countries’ ability to invest in other priorities. Recovery harder than ever Two years on from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, poorer countries are finding it harder than ever to recover economically, labour markets are suffering, public debt remains stubbornly high, and there is little left in the coffers to invest in other priorities. New analysis by UNDP shows that most of the vulnerable countries are found in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Chad, where less than one percent of the populations are fully vaccinated. Outside of Africa, Haiti and Yemen are still to reach two percent coverage. The studies show that, if low-income countries had the same vaccination rate as high-income countries in September last year (around 54 per cent) they would have increased their GDP by US$16.27 billion in 2021. The countries calculated to have lost most potential income during the pandemic, due to vaccine inequity, are Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. This lost income could have been used to address other pressing development challenge in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that make up the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the organization’s blueprint for a future that is fair for people and the planet. In South Sudan, for example, the costs associated with COVID-19 vaccinations could have covered all social assistance programmes and education expenditure in the country, whilst in Burundi, the costs could have provided healthcare for some 4.7 million people.

To stop the next pandemic in its tracks we need to ensure that people all over the world are protected quickly, and that will entail having all these pieces in place. The good news is, all these elements are feasible, and indeed starting to work today. On vaccine R&D, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), was set up with the precise purpose of identifying and investing in R&D for vaccines against emerging infectious diseases with epidemic potential. So, when it came to COVID-19, with CEPI’s and other R&D support, as well as industry engagement, the scientific and vaccine manufacturing community rallied, producing the first safe and effective vaccine in record time—just 327 days. Today we have not just one but 15 in widespread use. Increased investment now could get us there even faster the next time, particularly given the potential of the relatively new RNA vaccine technologies that have proved so effective with COVID-19. These plug-and-play vaccine technologies not only make it possible to identify and develop antigens rapidly, but much of the regulatory testing and approval can be done in advance, even before we know what the threat is. As for manufacturing, it may be difficult to immediately discern when there are severe supply shortages, but the world has actually rapidly built up manufacturing capacity during COVID-19. Waiving intellectual property has been talked about a lot as a potential solution for boosting production. But the growth we have seen in the past year has been achieved through technology transfers, where both the intellectual property and the vital know-how needed to make vaccines is shared between manufacturers. However, we need to do more. Given the extremely large number of doses needed during a pandemic, export bans of vaccines and essential components and supply bottlenecks have led to a vaccine divide. Currently, more than a third of adults in high-income countries have now been vaccinated, while less than 1% of those in low-income countries have had their first jab. To prevent this kind of scenario from happening the next time round and ensure that those most at risk are prioritized wherever they are, it is not distribution channels we are lacking, but global manufacturing capacity. We already have highly effective distribution channels, through COVAX and its partners, and we already have access to doses, enough to protect 1.8 billion people in lower-income economies by early next year, enough to protect almost 30% of people in these countries. But through investments now to increase global manufacturing capacity, particularly in emerging economies, and support of technology transfers, the next time a pandemic strikes we can get there sooner.

Puerto Rico is, they say, “the Medicine Cabinet of the U.S.A.” The territory exports more pharmaceutical products than California or Indiana — more, in fact, than any state. Of the top 20 medications in the world, Puerto Rico produces half. 75% of FDA Class III device manufacturers are in Puerto Rico Pharmaceuticals and medical devices make up 70% of Puerto Rico’s exports. The territory already has multiple FDA-approved production facilities, and a bilingual workforce with experience in this field. At the same time, the United States has recently seen the drawbacks to relying on foreign countries for the medical supply chain. The majority of generic drugs and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient or APIs have been made in India and China. During the pandemic, supply chain disruptions made it clear that this is not good business for the USA. As manufacturers across the nation work to shorten their supply chains, Puerto Rico is in the perfect position to step up as a pharmaceutical producer. The economics How can it be that Puerto Rico produces half the top drugs but generics and APIs for compounding are produced overseas? American pharmaceutical companies would rather put their resources into blockbuster brand-name drugs, which are extremely profitable. As drug patents expire, generic drugs tend to be shunted to offshore facilities for the sake of the lower costs. But as more of the high-dollar drug patents expire, biosimilars are becoming more important. Biosimilar drugs are biologically identical to drugs which have already been approved by the FDA. This is the fastest-growing class of drugs in the United States. Biosimilar Solutions, Inc. is investing $200 million in a production facility in Aguadilla. It is expected to provide 350 new jobs in the northwestern city. This is not the only private investment in Puerto Rico biotech this year. Cytolmmune Therapies has allocated a substantial investment of $28 million towards the development of innovative cancer treatments in Toa Baja, aiming to revolutionize the field. With this investment, the company anticipates the creation of 100 new job opportunities, contributing to the local economy and advancing the fight against cancer. The federal government has also dedicated millions toward biotechnology. Grants and other financial support will eb available for the industry in Puerto Rico as well as in the states. What’s great about Puerto Rico for biotech Puerto Rico, as a territory of the United States, is under U.S. laws and regulations. This gives consumers confidence and makes it easier for manufacturers to ensure compliance. Most of the residents are U.S. citizens and the currency is the U.S. dollar. This makes it easy for American companies to site production facilities in Puerto Rico. The existence of an experienced workforce is important. Puerto Rico also has a high concentration of scientists and STEM-trained workers. Puerto Rico’s universities are home to experts in bio-technology and medical agriculture, too. Logistics are already in place for controlled substances, medical devices, and other healthcare products. Puerto Rico’s status This potential benefits the United States while Puerto Rico is a territory of the U.S. It will also benefit the nation when Puerto Rico is admitted as a state. If Puerto Rico were to become an independent nation, the Island would lose the benefits described above, and the United States would lose the benefits of Puerto Rico’s manufacturing strength.

Economic decline and a subsequent population downturn are often tied to the loss of key industries. The repeal of section 936 of the IRS code, which exempted multinational corporations from paying U.S. corporate income tax on profits from operations on the island, had a negative impact on employment and caused workers to look elsewhere for work. While Puerto Rico’s population has been declining for decades, the economic losses in manufacturing accelerated this trend. Unemployment in Puerto Rico is highest among the least educated, and they would be apt to benefit from emigrating to the U.S. mainland where jobs are more plentiful; however, people with at least a high school diploma are more likely to have the means to relocate to the U.S. mainland. To determine whether Puerto Rico has suffered a loss of intellectual capital, Able and Deitz measured the annual net migration of each of the following educational attainment groups: less than high school, high school graduate, some college, and college graduate. The authors calculated the net change as the number of immigrants less the number of emigrants. Although Puerto Rico has a net loss of citizens across all groups, the share of college-educated emigrants has fallen below the proportion of college-educated people in the general population. So although a brain drain has occurred and is of some concern, the emigration rate of less educated Puerto Ricans has exceeded that of the more educated population, and the net migration pattern shows that people with higher levels of educational attainment are less vulnerable to the economic forces driving Puerto Rico’s demographic losses. The authors note that 17 American states have experienced post-World War II population losses like that of Puerto Rico in that they lasted at least 5 years. These losses are usually tied to economic declines in key industries, such as the coal or steel industries. In Puerto Rico’s case, the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry was hard hit by the removal of tax advantages.

This troubling decline presents a host of difficulties for the island. A smaller population translates into a shrinking tax base, which in turn strains government finances. In addition, Puerto Rico is losing a disproportionate share of its younger citizens, a trend that has accelerated the aging of its population. This demographic shift adds to the burden of supporting the island’s elderly population, who tend to be poorer and more intensive users of the health care system, and puts stress on already fragile pension systems. Together, these pressures can create a cycle of economic decay and further population losses that can be difficult to break.

Walter Mignolo’s (2000a; 2011) work offers useful metaphors2 that explain[s] the difficulties of working pedagogically with the violences of modernity (see also Andreotti, 2012). One of these metaphors implies that modernity [has] is commonly defined in relation to a bright, shiny side associated with concepts such as seamless progress, industrialization, democracy, secularization, humanism, linear time, scientific reasoning, and nation-states, amongst others. These concepts, in turn, depend on subjectivities deeply invested in: the notion of universal reason and history; teleological, logocentric, dialectical, and anthropocentric thinking; the objectification and commodification of ‘nature’; and the Cartesian self. Modernity’s ‘shine’ is articulated in ways that hide its shadow, or the fact that the very existence of the shiny side requires the imposition of systematic violence on others. This violence can be articulated through what Quijano (2000) calls coloniality. Coloniality can be understood as a system that defines the organization and dissemination of epistemic, [and] material, and aesthetic resources in ways that reproduce modernity’s imperial project. In other words, coloniality represents the spaciality (expansionist control of lands), ontoepistemic racism (elimination and subjugation of difference) and geopolitics of knowledge production (epistemic violence) that are constitutive of modernity (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Mignolo (2000b) therefore argues that modernity’s shadow of coloniality is both the hidden face of modernity (for those enchanted by its ‘shine’) and the condition of its possibility (p. 772). The link between deep investments in modernity and the role that these investments play in the systemic production of violence must therefore be denied (foreclosed) for those who want to continue believing themselves to be good, altruistic people progressing towards a homogeneous future of rational, consensual harmony. Thus, the project of modernity depends both on the fact of its violent shadow and on the foreclosure of this fact. This foreclosure is reproduced by the ‘ontoepistemological’ modern grammar (Silva, 2013, p. 50). This modern grammar is rooted in taken-for-granted metaphysical principles and supports deep investments in the ‘shine’ of progress, autonomy, innocence, and engineered futures (Ahenakew, Andreotti, Cooper & Hireme, 2014). For those enchanted with modernity’s shine, the shadow is interpreted as a lack of modernity and as something that can be fixed with more modernity. Hence, when exposed to critiques that implicate modernity’s shine in the creation of its shadow, those enchanted with the shine tend to resist and deny their complicity in harm. The pedagogical challenge is also formidable given the interdependence of the various violent social relations that constitute modernity’s shadow. Grosfoguel (2012) captures many of these in his description of a “Modern/Colonial Capitalist/Patriarchal Western-centric/Christian- centric World-System” (p. 82). Many other scholars have examined how nation-states in North America are made possible through Indigenous genocide and dispossession, Black slavery and subjection, as well as exploited labour, ecocide, white supremacist and heteropatriarchal immigration policies, compulsory heterosexuality, gendered violence, and war and imperialism abroad (Alexander, 2005; Coulthard, 2014; King, 2013; Lawrence & Dua, 2005; Sharma & Wright, 2008; Smith, 2006; Spade, 2011; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Walcott, 2011; Walia, 2013; Wilderson, 2010; Wynter, 2003). The cumulative effect of these and other violences has been what Wynter (2003) described as the overrepresentation of the White, bourgeois, male, who rationalizes his dominion over those he deems to be irrational, affectable, and inferior[.] (Silva, 2007). Thus, with the advent and continued maintenance of the modern/colonial system, Othered ways of knowing and being are “disavowed (displaced, negated, and engulfed)” (Silva, 2009, p. 42). For Alfred (2004), colonialism is therefore “a total relation of power”, and must be understood in “consideration of how we as Indigenous peoples have lost the freedom to exist as Indigenous peoples in almost every single sphere of our existence” (p. 91). Meanwhile, Alexander (2005) emphasizes the ways “colonization has produced fragmentation and dismemberment at both the material and psychic levels” (p. 281). While we do not mean to suggest that the modern grammar is [not] totalizing in the sense that it forestalls resistance, we emphasize that [but] it affects nearly all realms of life for those inhabiting both its shine and its shadow. Discussing modernity’s violence with those whose existence and imaginaries have been framed by modernity is therefore a challenging task both in terms of intelligibility and in terms of affective resistance. This is exacerbated in neoliberal educational contexts driven by the desires of educational consumers to feel good, to look good and to be affirmed as ‘doing good’ (see Andreotti, 2014a). Social cartography is one approach that has allowed us to begin these challenging conversations with audiences that have varied investments in modernity’s “shine.”

A recent Supreme Court decision denying certain Social Security benefits to U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico “rubs salt into the collective wound” of those citizens by reminding them (again) of their lo;wer status in American society, writes Ediberto Román, professor of law at Florida International University College of Law, and Ernesto Sagás, ethnic studies professor at Colorado State University.

Colonialism, an issue that rarely occupies the minds of most Americans, has once again reared its ugly head with the April 21 (8-1) U.S. Supreme Court decision in the United States v. Vaello Madero. The court—following the nativist and xenophobic decisions of more than a century ago—upheld the federal government’s exclusion of Puerto Rico from a Social Security benefits program, which will stop more than $2 billion a year from flowing to U.S. citizens living on the Island.

Disaster colonialism within/across Puerto Rican institutions

Puerto Rican families often share stories of the ‘big storm’. In our time, it is Hurricane María, but in the past, it was San Ciriaco, San Felipe II, San Cipriano II, Betsy or Hugo (Rodríguez, 1997). Yet despite their reoccurrence, the history of Caribbean hurricanes remains poorly documented beyond meteorological studies or examinations of the resilience of flora and fauna (Schwartz, 2005: 390). Hurricanes have continuously aided in destabilizing societies across the Caribbean, making it a ripe zone for ongoing colonization. Barnet (2010: 4) called this ‘una cultura del disastre y la Resistencia’ or ‘a culture of disaster and resistance’. To illustrate how hurricanes factor into Puerto Rican culture, a historic Plena expresses the place hurricanes hold in the popular imagination (Carrero Morales, 2013):

Climate disaster preparations in Puerto Rico, including efforts to mitigate damage and planning for effective responses, are increasingly important as hurricanes become more frequent and more destructive. After Hurricane Maria, U.S. federal agencies and Puerto Rican local authorities attempted to build an anticipatory response capacity to increase climate resilience on the island but did not provide adequate resources. Investments in sustainable infrastructure can help the most vulnerable communities, particularly in the southern part of Puerto Rico. The Biden administration has pledged to support Puerto Rico in recovering from Fiona’s impact and in building resilience against future tropical storms. Successful investments in resilience building, however, should also address the persistent social, economic, and political insecurities within Puerto Rico that contribute to the severity of the impacts of weather events.

Q1: Why is the devastation so severe?

Armando Perez and his 81-year-old mother survived Hurricane Maria when it hit Puerto Rico in 2017. Five years later, they just witnessed Hurricane Fiona, a categorically less intense storm, but one that disrupted their lives nonetheless.

Perez's mother, Carmen, has advanced Parkinson's disease and dementia and has been bedridden since June. The two live together in the town of Dorado. Perez bathes and feeds his mother and changes her diapers.