Decolonization solves the case – you should refuse to evaluate all of their 2ac arguments about Puerto Rico needing assistance from settlers – there is ongoing resistance NOW – your role is to pick a side.

Carlos Rodríguez-Díaz has argued that instead of seeing efforts to support community survival and recovery from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico as examples of resilience, these are better understood as forms of anticolonial resistance.12 Based in volunteer brigade work and rustic, do-it-yourself, communitarian approaches, as well as on a descaling of life in terms of lowering carbon footprint and reducing participation in mass consumer economies, independent feminist art collectives and small farms led by queer and transfeminist people in Puerto Rico have in some senses flourished in the interstices and margins of the state, even throughout the economic and ecological crises of recent years. But the paradigm of vulnerability and resilience is stretched thin by the likelihood of recurring and intensifying storms and social conditions characterized by a lack of access to health care and social services, extreme wealth polarization, and extensive interpersonal violence (including high rates of intimate violence and suicide).

The paradigm of vulnerability and resilience that reigns over the disaster-industrial complex dominated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and others is not sufficient to create conditions of livability.13 The ways Puerto Ricans lived both before Maria and after were and are themselves too destructive and too tied up with fossil fuels, throw-away commodities, and the corporate-driven destruction of the natural world. Resilience as a figure of return to a previous state of balance is impossible because the balance never existed. The crisis has always been with us. As Hilda Lloréns, in her critique of the notion of disaster capitalism asks, “When was capitalism not a disaster?” Lloréns’s work among coastal foragers in southeastern Puerto Rico shows that “their moral values and ideals of what it means to be successful in leading a good life [are] incongruent with middle and upper class values.” Coastal resources foragers (and, I would add, small farmers working through feminist agroecology models) “have built strategies to navigate and resist local and global crises” and “exercise their agency by crafting life affirming strategies that resist long-term oppressive systems, such as the racial capitalism with which Caribbean people have long grappled.”14 These are lives lived in between, flourishing in the cracks and fissures of colonial governance and epistemology despite antagonism and neglect from the government and state institutions.