Disparate federal responses for disaster relief are a unique instance of colonial violence within Puerto Rico – only the affirmative’s allowance for local self-determination solves.

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):

Temporal, temporal, allá viene el temporal.¿Que será de mi Borinquen, cuando llegue el temporal?[Hurricane, hurricane, here comes the hurricane.What will become of my Borinquen 2 when the hurricane arrives?]

This Plena was written to refer to the 1928 hurricane San Felipe II, one of the worst hurricanes to ever strike Puerto Rico (Schwartz, 2005: 381). San Felipe II decimated the coffee industry across the archipelago and, with no assistance to rebuild these fields, led to an economic downturn initiating one of the first large-scale migrations to the US (ibid.: 382). Much as contemporary scholars compare disaster responses to Hurricanes Harvey and María (Willison et al., 2019), sluggish disaster response in Puerto Rico after San Felipe II can be compared to the more rapid response in Florida (Schwartz, 2005). The neglect of Puerto Rican coffee farmers also parallels assistance sent to midwestern farms following the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. These decisions concerning who receives relief aid first (or at all), how communities are rebuilt, and how cities are rebuilt point to the power of disasters as ‘tools for restructuring society’ (ibid.: 401), and the theme of poor post-disaster relief and reconstruction recurs throughout Puerto Rican history.

However, environmental historians only began conducting critical examinations of hurricanes and their socio-political impacts in the Caribbean in the 1990s (Carrero Morales, 2013). This research seeks to illustrate how climate and environment were used by early European colonialists, like Christopher Columbus, to pathologize different cultures and their practices (Grove, 1995: 154). Particularly in the Caribbean and tropics, Taínos 3 were portrayed as leisurely and lazy due to the abundance of their locales (Mahony and Endfield, 2018: 2–3). Such tropical abundance contributed to early European ideas of differential mortality and racial identifiers, both necessary theoretical constructs to institute colonization (Quijano, 2000), as European colonists associated nature's abundance with ‘Eden’ surmising that Taínos could not be human (Mahony and Endfield, 2018).

For centuries, European settlers feared the power of hurricanes in destabilizing Puerto Rico's governance and inciting slave rebellions (Schwartz, 2005; 2015; Mahony and Endfield, 2018). In each hurricane, Taíno and Black slaves were placed in the path of the storm, often denied access to adequate shelter, resulting in a rush to subdue these populations after each hurricane. However, soon the colonialists became displeased with the lack of disaster aid, which they viewed as the purview of the Spanish government (Schwartz, 2005; 2015). In 1867, Puerto Rico was hit by the hurricane San Narciso. The disruption from the hurricane coupled with the Spanish government's inaction led to widespread unemployment. The colonial government on the island feared that governmental inaction would lead to widespread revolution from the pro-independence movement—a year later the famous ‘Grito de Lares’ protest erupted (Schwartz, 2005: 402–3). The parallels between San Narciso/Grito de Lares and María/Verano de Boricua are compelling and merit further research.

Unfortunately, poor disaster relief and response persisted through US occupation in 1898, becoming transparent in the response to Hurricane San Ciriaco, which struck Puerto Rico in 1899. San Ciriaco remains one of the deadliest hurricanes to strike Puerto Rico, claiming an estimated 3,369 Puerto Ricans, primarily through widespread flooding (Rodríguez, 1997: 122). Even in 1899, there was a recognition that history had already been unkind to Puerto Rico. The effect of US-led post-disaster reconstruction following San Ciriaco was to tighten control over the island through military force, weakening Spanish political systems and furthering indigenous disenfranchisement. This quote from The New York Times published in 1899 demonstrates this perspective:

Puerto Rico is refused a political organization by her new masters [the United States]. She is not even allowed the autonomy that existed under the old regime. The cyclone that has devastated the island is a symbol of the just wrath of God toward the American occupation (as quoted in Schwartz, 1992: 317).

This idea of a ‘just wrath of God’ was palpable, particularly among Cuban nationalists angered by US presence in and occupation of Puerto Rico (Schwartz, 2005: 394). US aid sent to the island carried overtly anti-Puerto Rican rhetoric through to policy by denying direct aid, in order to avoid supporting ‘lazy’ jíbaros 4 (Schwartz, 1992).

Beyond the denial of relief aid, meteorology was also used in both Spanish and US disaster colonialism. Taíno forms of hurricane-tracking often detected hurricanes four days before landfall by monitoring unusual cloud and ocean patterns (Schwartz, 2005: 392). This practice was criminalized under the Spanish who, until the advent of ‘modern’ meteorology, cast Taíno weather predictions as witchcraft or as ‘evidence of their pact with the devil’ (Schwartz, 2005: 392). As the US began to enter the Caribbean, meteorology was cast as a matter of security and US meteorological data were regularly withheld from neighboring Caribbean nations (Mahony and Endfield, 2018: 5); most notably, in July 1898 Haiti denied the US permission to establish a weather reporting station in their country (Pietruska, 2016). In response, the US deemed Haiti ‘exceedingly unfriendly’ and failed to warn the entire region about an approaching hurricane in September 1898, with disastrous results (Pietruska, 2016: 418). Given the massive information asymmetries, following the 1898 hurricane a number of Caribbean nations began to ‘cooperate’ with the US and their weather stations. However, as quickly as these meteorological insights were established for security purposes during the Spanish–American war, they quickly began buttressing US farms and their investors across the Caribbean (Pietruska, 2016; Mahony and Endfield, 2018: 5).

The embedding of disaster colonialism extends beyond meteorological institutions to include US-based emergency management institutions. Notably, FEMA has inherited a tradition of militarization and colonization from its predecessor, the Office of Civil Defense (OCD), as Rodríguez-Silva (2019: 178) explains:

The OCD's history in the PR islands during the Cold War highlights the complex web of long-standing, multilayered, overlapping, colonial entanglements at the core of United States–Puerto Rico relations, which FEMA continues to replicate through its militarization of emergency efforts and complex bureaucratic and financial arrangements with insular state offices.

Between 1941 and 1979, the OCD merged cold war-era politics into emergency management systems in Puerto Rico, rewarding pro-statehood organizations and individuals while reinforcing statehood in their materials (Rodríguez-Silva, 2019). Specifically, in the 1950s, the OCD's charge was changed from avoiding ‘sabotage’ to ‘rebellion’, allowing the OCD to directly respond to anti-colonial political movements emerging from the establishment of the Commonwealth States (or Estado Libre Asociado) (ibid.: 175–6). These colonial practices continued with the founding of FEMA in 1979, as the new agency inherited the same security-focused and militarized emergency response tactics employed by the OCD (ibid.: 178). Disaster colonialism extends beyond withholding relief aid to include anti-Indigenous messaging in even rote correspondence, such as emergency preparedness materials.

Today, clear parallels exist between the responses to Hurricanes San Felipe II and María, particularly in poor and slow federal disaster response (Caban, 2017). María caused more damage in Puerto Rico (across a greater population) than Hurricane Harvey caused in Texas, however nine days after each hurricane, Texas received three times more aid workers from FEMA (Willison et al., 2019). Additionally, significant post-disaster reconstruction funding was withheld from Puerto Rico following María. In addition to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) (Fadulu, 2019), FEMA also withheld its funding from the archipelago. Molinari (2019) shows how, through María, FEMA even perpetuated stereotypes of lazy Puerto Ricans waiting for handouts, as the reasoning behind the nearly 50% rejection rate for individuals and households program assistance.

In Puerto Rico, and much of the Caribbean, disaster colonialism emerges through the following: lack of disaster aid/support, , the historic stigmatization of Indigenous weather tracking knowledge militarization of meteorology and weather technology, and anti-Indigenous and anti-Black messaging within aid. Undoubtedly, there are more processes and procedures through which disaster colonialism may operate, a question which merits further research.