Punitive governance in Puerto Rico reproduces marginalization on a macro-scale.
LeBrón 19 {“ Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico,” Marisol LeBrón (Associate Professor in Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Prior to arriving at UCSC, Dr. LeBrón held appointments at the University of Texas at Austin, Dickinson College, and Duke University. Dr. LeBrón received her PhD in American Studies from New York University and her bachelor's degree in Comparative American Studies and Latin American Studies from Oberlin College.). 1st ed. University of California Press. Published 2019, Accessed July 22, 2023. doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvfxvc7m.}–CPSW–TW
Punitive governance functions through an unequal distribution of resources and life chances that affects those populations occupying some of the most tenuous positions in Puerto Rican society.11 It has hardened existing discriminatory attitudes and structures that target low-income, Black, queer, and residentially marginalized Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico in ways that have normalized and in some instances increased their vulnerability to harm at the hands of the state and their fellow citizens. As ethnic studies scholar Lisa Marie Cacho argues, the practices of criminalization that ani- mate punitive governance make structures of human value “intelligible through racialized, sexualized, spatialized, and state-sanctioned violences” that target the most vulnerable, especially those who experience overlapping forms of marginalization.12 Within punitive regimes, vulnerable populations experience a form of “social death” that renders them “targets of regulation and containment,” subject to the law’s discipline but excluded from its pro- tection when confronted with violence.13
Yet Puerto Ricans also challenge deadly punitive logics and practices by working toward alternative understandings of justice, safety, and accountabil- ity in ways that are both spectacular and quotidian. This book follows a range of efforts by Puerto Ricans to critique punitive governance and imagine new ways of living in Puerto Rico. From public housing residents strategically using the press to provide their own accounts of the havoc policing has caused in their communities, to underground rappers skewering the absurdities of the war on drugs, to university students trying to build social movements across racial and class differences, to community activists implementing local solutions to violence that decenter policing, the story about punitive govern- ance told in this book is as much one of resilience and resistance as it is one of repression.
I situate the growth of punitive governance in Puerto Rico within the ongoing colonization of the archipelago by the United States. Over the course of the late twentieth century and into the present, the Puerto Rican state has strengthened its security apparatus in an attempt to manage a range of social, economic, and political crises stemming from its continued incor- poration into the United States as a commonwealth territory. By the late 1970s the once unprecedented levels of social and economic improvement experienced by Puerto Ricans were in steady decline, and personal insecurity increased as US-led development strategies had seemingly run their course. As the limitations of the commonwealth arrangement between the United States and Puerto Rico made themselves more intensely felt on Puerto Ricans, policing emerged as the state’s primary means of responding to an array of resultant social problems such as high unemployment, chronic pov- erty, and a growing drug-based, informal economy. I demonstrate how a refusal on the part of both the US and Puerto Rican political establishments to fundamentally alter Puerto Rico’s colonial status, which prevents Puerto Rico from meaningfully shaping its own policy, helps us understand why it is in the realm of biopolitical calculation—the policing of life and death— that we encounter the contemporary Puerto Rican state at its most robust.