Hurricane Maria: Puerto Rico's Not-So-Natural Disaster

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The main purpose of this roundtable will be to address the disaster conditions, response and consequences of Puerto Rico's Not-So-Natural Disaster. The conversation will start with a brief overview of the infrastructural collapse and the challenges to rebuilding and reconstructing society (e.g., rapid out-migration, mass unemployment). The discussion will address the following issues:

• Community vs state efforts in the emergency response and reconstruction: To compensate or complement?
• High-tech capitalist responses vs local community initiatives
• International aid: Are we repeating the Haiti 2010 intervention model for Puerto Rico?
• Who's in charge?: 'La Junta' vs elected government of Puerto Rico
• Impact of the 12 years economic crisis and bankruptcy in the recovery process
• Consolidating the colony? Racial and class dynamics
• Trump, media responses and the representation of the crisis
• Uncontrolled capitalism: From an economy of production to a consumerist economy.
   

Four Puerto Rican academics from different scholarly disciplines offer us their views:

Dr. Patria Roman. Currently a Senior Lecturer in Media & Creative Industries at Loughborough University, first arrived in the UK in 1992 to study at University of Leicester where she obtained her PhD in 1996. Her early childhood was marked by her experience of growing up between the rural town of Moca in Puerto Rico and the Latin neighbourhoods of NY, Chicago and Philadelphia. This experience has informed her research with Latin Americans in London and she has built on this to found and direct Latin Elephant, a charity working to increase participation of migrant and ethnic groups, in particular Latin Americans, in processes of urban change in London. She is the author of The Making of Latin London: Music, Place and Identity (1999) and of numerous articles about urban regeneration and Latin Americans in Elephant and Castle.

Dr. Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, born and raised in San Juan Puerto Rico, is a Lecturer in Urban Futures at Lancaster University's Sociology Department. Following her BA in Tufts University, she obtained an MSc in International Development and Gender and a PhD in Sociology from the LSE. In between, she worked in international human rights organisations in London, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico. Melissa's doctoral research focused on the activism surrounding the demolition of one of the last high rise public housing projects in the financial district of Hato Rey, Puerto Rico. She has continued to pursue work on the 'making and unmaking' of homes in other international contexts, including Rio de Janeiro, London, and South Asia, which has led to a number of articles and the co-edited books Social Housing in Europe (Wiley, 2014) and Geographies of Forced Evictions (Palgrave, 2017).

Dr. Janialy Ortiz Camacho is a socio-cultural anthropologist with higher education studies and ethnographic experience in Puerto Rico, Canada and Spain. Her most recent research has focused on people's responses to governmental community development projects, and the production of political subjectivities in Puerto Rico. She is also passionate about expanding fieldwork insights into a more public-democratic platform, using visual and creative writing forms. Janialy currently lives in Cambridge, UK.

Dr. Gibrán Cruz-Martínez is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Global Development and Planning, University of Agder (Norway). After finishing his undergraduate studies in his native Puerto Rico he moved to Madrid to pursue a Masters and PhD in Political Science at the Complutense University. His research focuses on the development of emerging welfare states in Latin America and the Caribbean, and its relationship to multidimensional poverty and inequality. Gibrán is also interested in the role of organised communities in Puerto Rico as alternative welfare providers. A book on the latter entitled Produciendo Bienestar was recently published in Spain (Dykinson, 2017).