Puerto Rican inequality must be analyzed from a unique position – only by understanding the marginalization of Puerto Rico as a unique phenomena can harms be solved.

Under neoliberal and colonial capitalism, punitive governance functions to contain the effects of a social order that is marked by extreme racial and economic inequality. Literature on the intersections between neoliberal gov- ernance and carceral expansion has focused on the ways in which these regimes of accumulation and dispossession have intensified conditions of precarity, particularly for already marginalized subjects. 29 Puerto Rico is no exception to this trend. The rise and consolidation of punitive governance in Puerto Rico have reproduced hierarchies based on race, class, spatial location, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. In particular, the securitization of urban space and the proliferation of gated residential communities segregated along lines of race and class have resulted in the exposure of economically and racially marginalized communities to greater harm at the hands of the state and their fellow Puerto Ricans. 30

Punitive governance as a response to crisis has not led to greater public safety for many Puerto Ricans. Rather, it has only created the illusion of safety at the expense of low-income and racially marginalized populations, who experience elevated levels of insecurity, discrimination, violence, and death in their communities, much as Giovanni Roberto suggested during our conversation. The ways in which punitive governance targets the most vul- nerable populations in Puerto Rico are of central concern to this work. Throughout this book I detail how punitive governance functions through the reification of already existing hierarchies of value at work in the archi- pelago, which largely target those Puerto Ricans who find themselves at the margins. In particular, this book demonstrates the ways in which punitive governance plays a central role in producing and reinforcing discriminatory understandings of race, which associate Black and dark-skinned Puerto Ricans with crime and subsequently expose them to greater levels of exclu- sion and harm

Revealing how policing and other punitive technologies produce and reproduce race in Puerto Rico is a necessary task, as Puerto Rico is often imagined as a “racial democracy” free of the kinds of violence and animus associated with race relations in the United States. 31 Puerto Ricans have been taught to understand themselves as products of the harmonious mixture of indigenous Taínos, Africans, and Spaniards—a family tree nurtured by three roots. Cultural nationalist discourses maintain that the absence of racial strife is a direct result of this racial mixing and is something that marks a distinct Puerto Rican cultural identity. As a result, efforts to discuss race and racism in Puerto Rico are often dismissed as attempts to import US racial problems and apply US racial analytics to the Puerto Rican context. As his- torian Ileana Rodríguez-Silva notes, there is no more effective strategy to shut down conversations about historical and contemporary expressions of racialized marginalization than to “deem race, racialization, and racism as foreign matters, specifically as U.S. phenomena” or to question the speaker’s “commitment and love to the Puerto Rican nation.”32

Racial formation in Puerto Rico has been structured by the histories of plantation slavery, indigenous genocide, serial colonization, and capitalist exploitation, as well as the resistance to these practices. The specific manner in which these historical processes unfolded in Puerto Rico makes the archi- pelago’s racial formation distinct from that of the United States, although we should understand white supremacy as something that connects Puerto Rico to the United States, as opposed to something that is simply exercised upon Puerto Ricans by the United States. White supremacy in Puerto Rico was formed through histories of Spanish and US colonization at the same time that it emerged as a way to resist US colonial efforts by emphasizing cultural difference. Although Puerto Ricans are positioned as a racially and culturally mixed people, Puerto Rican elites have consistently emphasized a white, Hispanic identity in order to create a unified Puerto Rican identity under colonization. As anthropologist Hilda Lloréns points out, in response to Americanization projects and continued US colonial rule, “the upper classes were invested in representing the Puerto Rican nation as white, but they claimed that Puerto Ricans inherited their whiteness from the ‘Iberian race’ as opposed to the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’ of the American colonizers.”33 Similarly, according to Carlos Alamo-Pastrana, “Both nationalists and annexationists use racial democracy as an anticolonial strategy from which Puerto Rican I n t roduc t ion • 13 cultural and political formations are disentangled from those in the United States.”34 The result is an ideology of racial exceptionalism that positions the United States as the “sole arbiter of racial violence and exclusion” and Puerto Rico “as a racially tolerant society,” “effectively disavow[ing] Puerto Rico’s own history of legally (i.e., slavery) and socially (i.e., segregation) sanctioned racial exclusions.”35 Elite (and with time, popular) discourses therefore posi- tioned whiteness as central to the elaboration of a respectable and distinct Puerto Rican cultural identity under US rule at the same time that discourses of racial mixing functioned to distance Puerto Rico from the US racial regime and silence discussions of anti-Black racism within Puerto Rican society more generally.

The twinned structures of colonization and white supremacy in Puerto Rico have resulted in a color-blind discourse of racial mixing, which obscures the way that Blackness is managed and sublimated in contemporary Puerto Rican society. Thus, while Black and dark-skinned Puerto Ricans are the populations who perhaps have the most frequent contact with the state’s security apparatus, the policing they experience is often discussed and justi- fied by law enforcement officials, as well as members of the public, in racially neutral ways. In other words, while Blackness is policed by state and nonstate actors operating in Puerto Rico, how exactly Blackness is policed can be dif- ficult to explain given the adherence to color-blind, racist discourses and ideologies in the public sphere. 36 Analyzing how discourses of spatial location and class function as coded ways to invoke Blackness provides a means of documenting how policing produces and reproduces ideas about race and Blackness in Puerto Rico. In particular, we see that spaces that are suppos- edly race neutral but are commonly associated with economically marginal- ized Puerto Ricans have been constant targets of oppressive surveillance and policing.

If dominant discourses of racial mixing and racial harmony serve to bury explicit references to racism and its effects in Puerto Rico, an analysis of spa- tial inequalities, particularly as they cohere around class position, provides a means of excavation. As American studies scholar George Lipsitz asserts, “Race is produced by space,” and “it takes places for racism to take place.” 37 Pointing out how “seemingly race-neutral urban sites contain hidden racial assumptions and imperatives” about “who belongs where and about what makes certain spaces desirable,” Lipsitz highlights how racial subordination is often achieved through the segregation and policing of space. 38 This is true in Puerto Rico, where ideas about space and how it intersects with levels of socioeconomic inclusion or exclusion have been central to the creation and expansion of racial meaning.

In Puerto Rico, Blackness has long been tethered to particular spaces while rendered invisible or “out of place” in others. For instance, coastal regions are often understood as spaces of Blackness, due to their role in Puerto Rico’s plantation economy under both Spanish and US rule, while the big island’s rural interior has been figured as isolated and whiter and thus more authentically representative of Puerto Rican culture and identity. While there is a racialized dichotomy between Puerto Rico’s rural interior and its coastal regions, racial difference becomes further delineated within localized contexts. For instance, according to cultural anthropologist Arlene Torres, the opposition between caseríos (public housing complexes) and arra- bales (very poor neighborhoods and informal settlements) on the one hand, and urbanizaciones (suburban-style developments) on the other hand, has become a key way of understanding and making sense of race in contempo- rary Puerto Rico. 39 Torres explains that despite the wide range of phenotypi- cal variation found in these residential areas, urbanizaciones are understood as white spaces, while public housing and other low-income communities are considered Black spaces.40 In other words, Puerto Ricans are racialized through their association with particular classed residential spaces. Racialized associations with space are so powerful that they can sometimes override the racial self-identification or the perceived phenotypical difference of people who inhabit particular spaces. In this sense, in the Puerto Rican spatial imaginary, money, and the access that it buys, whitens, while its absence blackens. Spatial location and class position, and the way they intersect, are thus essential for understanding the way that many Puerto Ricans under- stand and discuss race without making explicit reference to it.

As Blackness is considered spatially bounded within certain low-income and urban locations suffering the effects of structural discrimination, those boundaries and the people within them are subjected to intense conditions of formal and informal policing in an effort to keep the “social ills” they encounter from spreading. According to Black studies scholar Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, the “emplacement” of Blackness within low-income urban areas grappling with structural inequality and disinvestment serves to “per- petuate common stereotypes of blackness, such as violence and hypersexual- ity.”41 Speaking about mano dura contra el crimen’s incursions into public housing, or caseríos, Rivera-Rideau notes, “Mano Dura thus depicted caseríos as sites of abjection, the loci of urban blackness defined by various immoral’ characteristics that differentiated them from the presumably more ‘respectable’ Puerto Rico, all while ignoring the larger structural poli- cies that produced the adverse conditions affecting caseríos residents.”42 For anthropologist Isar Godreau, the emplacement of Blackness functions to circumscribe Black people and Afro-Puerto Rican culture to very specific places, which problematically “conveys the sense that blackness is different or exceptional from the context of the larger ‘mixed nation’ ” and implicitly marks the broader national context as not Black.43 Punitive power is deployed by state and nonstate actors, then, to contain the racialized and classed dangers of public housing while reifying spaces understood as white as worthy of protection from the state.\