The 1AC is NOT a radical departure from the squo but instead utilizes the rhetoric of decolonization as a FRONT for MORE GOVERNANCE.

But the state-centered discourse of crisis cannot offer a thorough accounting of the potential for decolonization in this historical time because crisis always already registers disorder as a problem of economy and proper governance. Seen in this way, disasters become opportunities for the financialization of resources and the securitization of the colonial state. But futurescapes in the middle Anthropocene contain moves we have not seen yet and may not know how to anticipate—modes of accumulating and dispersing life that are intertwined with but not entirely determined by political economic machinations or biopolitical exigencies. The stakes and scales of these debates are changing.

Decolonial Resurgence

I began conducting interviews with Hurricane Maria survivors in Puerto Rico in December 2017, talking with dozens of people who took part in the recovery efforts in different ways. The interviewees comprised several different groups, including health care workers providing medical services to those affected by the storm; small farmers working in various rural parts of the Puerto Rican archipelago; agricultural educators; volunteers; activists; and community organizers who were involved in hands-on brigade and recovery work. In 2019, along with a team of undergraduate students I also began interviewing Hurricane Maria survivors who moved to the Midwestern United States after the storm. In these interviews, a common theme emerged about the ways the shortages in water, food, and gasoline that people experienced led them to understand in a visceral way that they could live reasonably well with less than they would have thought they needed. As one nephrologist told me when interviewed about his family’s experiences after Maria, “Yo me di cuenta que nosotros podíamos vivir sin muchas cosas que pensábamos necesarias” (“I realized that we could live without a lot of things we thought we needed”). Suddenly one could observe that the idea of the ecologically driven need for decrecimiento (degrowth) or the scaling down of consumptive practices and development was not simply a question of personal discipline or ethics but a practical matter dictated by the reality of a lack of access to consumer goods and of federal and state resources that were missing in action. In the weeks and months after the storm, being able to feed one’s family and community was for many the most immediate task.

The local market in foodstuffs in Puerto Rico is very expensive, since it is saturated by highly processed surplus items from US distributors and taxed with the highest sales tax in the United States (11.5 percent). After Hurricane Maria, there was a shortage of fresh foods, and people relied mostly on canned food and highly processed meals, which tend to be very high in sodium and sugar, posing potentially serious consequences for people suffering from high blood pressure, diabetes, and other common medical conditions. Furthermore, research has found that the food aid distributed by the military and federal agencies in Puerto Rico after Maria did not meet nutritional guidelines because of the high levels of sodium and sugar.

Scholars have noted that the agroecology movement in Puerto Rico represents “a desire for autonomy and freedom from ongoing dependence on US imports.” Yet, at present, Puerto Rico imports approximately 85 percent of the food its residents consume.7 Although this statistic is repeated so often that it has become dogma, my research suggests the number does not account for food items that are not commoditized because they never enter the commodity chain and instead are traded or exchanged as part of gift, salvage, or solidarity economies.8 These exchange or solidarity economies form the basis of a decolonial praxis that exists in the colonial present, working “within, against, and in between the powers of the sovereign liberal state.”9

The collective search for a possible decolonial praxis within the permanent crisis has led in part to a surge in environmental consciousness among the population in Puerto Rico and a growing interest in forms of social organization centered on shared ecological and agricultural work. Based in rural communities and organized in large part through the class-, gender-, and race-conscious theory of popular agroecology that emerged from South America through groups such as Vía Campesina and the Movimento Sem Terra in Brazil, this sector dovetails with the network of Mutual Aid Societies, feminist and queer collectives, and ad-hoc community service groups that activated after Hurricane Maria.10 From these entanglements emerged a new locus of civil, social, diasporic, artistic, and political action and radical speculation on the future of Puerto Rico. In the desperate weeks and months after Hurricane Maria, it became abundantly clear, as in the epigraph that opens this essay, that “all we have is what we owe to ‘one another.’ ”11 The terrible beauty of this was expressed through the shared growing of crops, cooking, and eating with others, generating forms of sociality and solidarity that had not been immediately visible or available before the events that unfolded in the weeks and months after Maria. “We went back to the way we used to do it,” a seventy-three-year-old woman I interviewed told me. “Cooking together and sharing food with our neighbors. That used to be very common!