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Podcast: New Books in Caribbean Studies
Episode: Hilda Lloréns, "Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice" (U of Washington Press, 2021)
Description: When Hurricanes Irma and MarÃa made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pommeled by economic austerity, political upheaval, and environmental calamities. To navigate these ongoing multiple crises, Afro-Puerto Rican women have drawn from their cultural knowledge to engage in daily improvisations that enable their communities to survive and thrive. Their life-affirming practices, developed and passed down through generations, offer powerful modes of resistance to gendered and racialized exploitation, ecological ruination, and deepening capitalist extraction. Through solidarity, reciprocity, and an ethics of care, these women create restorative alternatives to dispossession to p...