In this article, the author presents some of the counterpoints between historical developments and feminist studies in Puerto Rico since the 1970s, elaborating on the most recurrent topics. She includes a brief historical overview of Puerto Rico and the trends in women's status, feminism, and feminist studies in the Island. Next, she provides a brief summary of general theoretical and methodological issues. Then she discusses research on specific topics, including the intersections of gender, nation, race, class, (...) and sexuality; women's employment and poverty; family structures and relations; sexual and reproductive rights; and current issues such as the relationship between feminism and the state and the context of globalization. (shrink)

"La filosofía en Puerto Rico: los transterrados reúne varios estudios sobre filófofos extranjeros que en algún momento decidieron compartir su vida, su enseñanza y sus trabajos académicos con los habitantes de esta bella y hospitalaria Isla de Puerto Rico. La presente es una obra en la cual han colaborado varios autores: Manfre Kerkhoff, Antonio Mansilla Triviño, Juan José Sánchez, Luis Ramírez, José Rivera y Carlos Rojas Osorio, quien estuvo a cargo la iniciativa, el plan de la (...) obra y la edición."--Cubierta. (shrink)

This essay discusses engineering ethics in Puerto Rico by examining the impact of the Colegio de Ingenieros y Agrimensores de Puerto Rico (CIAPR) and by outlining the constellation of problems and issues identified in workshops and retreats held with Puerto Rican engineers. Three cases developed and discussed in these workshops will help outline movements in engineering ethics beyond the compliance perspective of the CIAPR. These include the Town Z case, Copper Mining in Puerto (...) class='Hi'>Rico, and a hypothetical case researched by UPRM students on laptop disposal. The last section outlines four future challenges in engineering ethics pertinent to the Puerto Rican situation. (shrink)

This book explores how Puerto Rico’s affective archive of Caribbean relations, comprised of historical-political figures and communitarian, activist, and artistic work, has envisioned and embodied decolonization and sovereignty in relation to the archipelagic and the sea, thus furthering emancipatory and reparatory horizons.

This essay develops a loosely understood Marxist notion of material conditions in light of the Caribbean plantation complex. The racial order endemic to the plantation and its continuation in post-emancipation contexts undermines any spurious base/superstructure distinction at work in an understanding of material conditions even in some accounts of racial capitalism. Material conditions are as ideological as they are “infrastructural” (Sylvia Wynter) in being ongoingly articulated by anti-black coordinates of sense. The ongoing actualization of the racial order of slavery is (...) understood not as required by altered material conditions, but rather as altering material conditions. The essay considers the continuity of the racial order of the plantation through the contract in a specific site, namely, post-emancipation Puerto Rico. (shrink)

Climate change is a threat to food system stability, with small islands particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events. In Puerto Rico, a diminished agricultural sector and resulting food import dependence have been implicated in reduced diet quality, rural impoverishment, and periodic food insecurity during natural disasters. In contrast, smallholder farmers in Puerto Rico serve as cultural emblems of self-sufficient food production, providing fresh foods to local communities in an informal economy and leveraging traditional knowledge systems to (...) manage varying ecological and climatic constraints. The current mixed methods study sought to document this expertise and employed a questionnaire and narrative interviewing in a purposeful sample of 30 smallholder farmers after Hurricane María to identify experiences in post-disaster food access and agricultural recovery and reveal underlying socioecological knowledge that may contribute to a more climate resilient food system in Puerto Rico. Although the hurricane resulted in significant damages, farmers contributed to post-disaster food access by sharing a variety of surviving fruits, vegetables, and root crops among community members. Practices such as crop diversification, seed banking, and soil conservation were identified as climate resilient farm management strategies, and smallholder farmer networks were discussed as a promising solution to amass resources and bolster agricultural productivity. These recommendations were shared in a narrative highlighting socioecological identity, self-sufficiency, community and cultural heritage, and collaborative agency as integral to agricultural resilience. Efforts to promote climate resilience in Puerto Rico must leverage smallholder farmers’ socioecological expertise to reclaim a more equitable, sustainable, and community-owned food system. (shrink)

A Citizen Public Debt Audit is an emancipatory praxis that can mobilize citizens to make legible public debt that has been accrued in their name. Ideally, it should hold creditors accountable for debt that is determined to be odious. This study examines the public debt crisis in Puerto Rico to illustrate the historically unjust circumstances under which public debt was accumulated on the island in the context of US federal taxation and economic policies. It explains how citizens are (...) mobilizing via a CPDA to make these circumstances legible and argues that citizens should not be obliged to service debt that was accrued contrary to their own welfare, especially if conditions of repayment threaten their current and future well-being. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the weaknesses of development strategies which have been applied in Puerto Rico. The process of industrialization by invitation, referred to as Operation Bootstrap, was instituted by the United States of America by the end of the 1940s. This involved tax incentives and subsidies for companies and was dependent on industrial peace and low wages in labor-intensive, low-wage industries, especially those of textile and clothing. Naturally, women's labor was encouraged as a result of the (...) lower cost, as well as assumed dexterity, of the female in such areas. While these new activity areas for women also allowed other benefits in the form of legislation and increased social services, the inherent problems of rapid, labor-intensive industrialization also led to displacement and increased underemployment and impoverization of female headed families from the 1960s onwards. The paper explores some of the changes in gender relations which resulted from these policies and looks at the challenges which the feminist movement in Puerto Rico has made, particularly with regard to state processes to bring about beneficial changes in the economic, legal, political and social status of women in Puerto Rico. (shrink)

Pedro Álvarez (Cuba) y Rafael Trelles (Puerto Rico) son dos importantes exponentes de la plástica contemporánea en el Caribe hispano que encontraron en dos hitos artísticos del siglo xix una vía para cuestionar las fórmulas fijadas por la Historia y el Arte. Ambos, a partir de la reapropiación de la obra de Víctor Patricio Landaluze y Francisco Oller, respectivamente, reflexionan sobre las complejas circunstancias de sus islas. Mediante el estudio del pasado ambos se preocupan comprometidamente por el sentido (...) de su historia patria, por la (re) actualización de su tradición artística o las funciones del intelectual en la configuración de sus contextos nacionales. La fragmentación y el collage resultan métodos constructivos eficaces que utilizan ambos artistas para descontextualizar los múltiples signos culturales de sus referentes de partida y readecuar sus múltiples significados en la nueva obra, y en el nuevo contexto. Sin embargo, a pesar de las semejanzas se advierten igualmente diferencias de intención, de acuerdo a las respectivas realidades nacionales. (shrink)

After the United States invaded Puerto Rico in 1898, the new unincorporated territory sought to define its future. Seeking to shape the next generation and generate popular support for colonial rule, U.S. officials looked to education as a key venue for promoting the benefits of Americanization. At the same time, public schools became a site where Puerto Rican teachers, parents, and students could formulate and advance their own projects for building citizenship. In _Negotiating Empire_, Solsiree del Moral (...) demonstrates how these colonial intermediaries aimed for regeneration and progress through education. Rather than seeing U.S. empire in Puerto Rico during this period as a contest between two sharply polarized groups, del Moral views their interaction as a process of negotiation. Although educators and families rejected some tenets of Americanization, such as English-language instruction, they also redefined and appropriated others to their benefit to increase literacy and skills required for better occupations and social mobility. Pushing their citizenship-building vision through the schools, Puerto Ricans negotiated a different school project—one that was reformist yet radical, modern yet traditional, colonial yet nationalist. (shrink)

After drug and weapon trafficking, trafficking of women is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world. According to sociologists César Rey Hernández and Luisa Hernández Angueira in People Trafficking in Puerto Rico: The Challenge of Invisibility (2010), fifty percent of the victims are women and minors. This translates to 2.7 million women and girls that are enslaved in this inhuman business. Puerto Rico is no exception. One of its main problems is the slavery of (...) Dominican women who, in search of a better life in Puerto Rico, are lured to illegally migrate to the island for better opportunities. However, once in the new territory, they are imprisoned and forced to become prostitutes. In addition, femicide is another world-wide pressing issue. The World Health Organization (WHO) affirms that violence against women, between fifteen and forty-four years of age, is the leading cause of death, more than cancer, malaria, car accidents and war combined, and the report ‘A Gendered Analysis of Violent Death’, compiled by Small Arms Survey Center, fourteen out of twenty-five countries with the highest rates of femicide in the world are in Latin America and the Caribbean. This essay focuses on Life is a Sexually Transmittable Disease (2014) by Wilfredo Mattos Cintron. In this novel, the enslaved-immigrant girls and women constitute an ‘injured body’, a body that is merely diminished. The third-world prostitute’s body is the material side of male-controlled dominance, subjugation and violence. Mattos Cintron’s text denounces the ‘suffering body of women’—rape, kidnapping, beating, femicide, their exclusion from human rights and sexual relegation. Moreover, along with patriarchy’s power and the socioeconomic variables as responsible agents of creating the injured body, globalization and capitalism objectify and make women’s bodies currency of the system. (shrink)

The United States Federal Government has repeatedly put the people of Vieques, Puerto Rico in harm’s way due to the injurious after-effects of air-to-ground weapons testing. Most of the harm happened during the Navy’s 70 years on the island. Yet, the harm continues today considering that aspects of the cleanup count as continued acts of environmental injustice, viewed within the context of the island’s colonial history. Usually, this harm deals with public health issues, but the remediation protocols do (...) not account for considerations such as cultural identity and heritage. This paper shows how the procedures for environmental remediation in Vieques qualify as a case of environmental injustice according to Robert M. Figueroa’s ‘environmental justice paradigm.’ The aim of employing this kind of approach is to pinpoint the underlying reasons why this is a case of environmental injustice. (shrink)

In 2005 the new Governor of Puerto Rico appointed a panel of experts to evaluate the healthcare system of Puerto Rico and make recommendations. Among other things, the panel recommended the creation of an advisory board on bioethics for the commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

Without the maternal hold, without its herethical ethics and sublimation, without the stability that this hold can bring, we are melancholically or defensively driven to commit the most heinous acts of atrocity and violence in the name of eternal life, development, and progress. For the most part, Kristeva has described the combination of personal loss and social, cultural, and historical pressures brought to bear on the vexed sublimation of the maternal hold by artists like Giovanni Bellini. More recently, however, her (...) attention has turned to other contemporary examples, in particular, Max Beckmann whose works, she claims, sublimate the loss of the maternal hold itself. They are examples of a Sacred Family, a Pietà, or a Dormition that have undergone a radical transformation. They are representations of a society, a culture, indeed a world, that is losing its maternal hold; a world that is losing both its herethical ethics, and the capacity to sublimate its apoptotic inheritance. Following Kristeva, I will put Eduardo Lalo’s book of poems and drawings Necrópolis in a tradition of representation of the maternal hold that is close to a thousand years old. This tradition goes from the confrontation with nothingness in Theophane the Greek’s Dormition to the modern matricide represented in Pablo Picasso’s Maternity Apple. (shrink)

This paper examines ethical violations committed by Certified Public Accountants in Puerto Rico in the 2002–2010 period and the related disciplinary actions taken by the local regulatory bodies. The institutional settings for the accounting profession in PR are different from those of the United States. Ethical complaints are investigated by the PR Society of CPAs and evaluated based on the Code of Professional Conduct of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, although most CPAs in PR are not (...) affiliated with the AICPA. Our study is based on data provided by the PR Society of CPAs that is not publicly available. We examine the association between the occurrence of the ethical violations and certain variables such as gender, type of practice performed by the CPA, and whether the CPA participates in a peer review program. Results of a multiple correspondence analysis suggest that not being a member of the AICPA, practicing as a sole practitioner, and not participating in a peer review program seem to be more associated with the occurrences of ethical violations by CPAs. We compare our findings with prior research on ethical infractions committed by CPAs in the United States and find some differences attributable to the institutional settings in PR. Overall, our results suggest the importance of codes of conduct in the accounting profession and compliance with such ethical guidelines by practicing accountants. (shrink)

Over de filosofie van Nietzsche in het kader van drie decennia Nietzsche studies in Puerto Rico.

Entre tradiciones y procesos de transformación, asistimos a una poética del pensar del poema extenso en las Antillas hispanas. Desde la “décima”, venida de Europa, se desarrolla una creatividad lingüística por medio de una apertura pragmática, en estrecha relación con la particularidad colonial: entre mito del progreso y mito de la edad de oro. Para entender la inventiva caribeña, recordamos la práctica del Neobarroco, elaborado a base de las confluencias de lo heterogéneo. Vemos como a través de una heteroglosia discursiva, (...) el poema extenso se asienta en este espacio cultural que son las islas antillanas y subrayamos su papel actual en el relato de historias mínimas que alimentan por otro cariz la historia universal. (shrink)

Using analysis and anecdote, the author examines fifteen Puerto Rican political prisoners in the U.S. prison system and the disproportionate sentences for their actions to end U.S. colonial control over Puerto Rico. These prisoners, lacking prior felony convictions, received punitive, restrictive treatment by the U.S. justice system - despite monitoring by Amnesty International and lawsuits by attorneys. The manufacturing of sting operations to entrap prisoners in illegal activities; their isolation from families; the infliction of physical abuse and (...) psychological torture; and the withholding of medical care, are strategically applied by U.S. courts and prisons to force the renunciation of their political beliefs. (shrink)

The joint effort by the U.S. government and the political elite of Puerto Rico to industrialize the island created increased demand for female labor and a decline in the number of jobs traditionally held by men. The authors examine whether women's labor force participation in the formal sector responds to improving opportunities for women, declining opportunities for men, or the household's changing opportunity structures. Specifically, they examine a woman's return to work after the birth of her first child (...) as the initial point of conflict between productive and reproductive work. The data used in these analyses are from the 1982 Puerto Rican Fertility and Family Planning Assessment, an islandwide, representative sample of never-married and ever-married women between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine. The authors estimate a series of nested logistic regression models to evaluate the influence of occupational expansion or contraction on the timing of return to work after the first birth. Their findings offer selective support for the idea that women's lives are affected primarily by the occurrence of growing labor demand for women's labor. (shrink)

In this article, I explore how masculinity and gender nonconformity are viewed by 37 migrant Puerto Rican gay men who had been raised in Puerto Rico and migrated Stateside as adults. Most of these migrant men note the importance of masculinity in their development and interactions with others, particularly other men. They resist identification of themselves as effeminate and distance themselves from locas. They associate locas with overt homosexuality, disrespect, and marginality. I argue that migrant Puerto (...) Rican gay masculinities are maintained within the precept of hegemonic masculinity through various social mechanisms, including a gendered construction of male homosexuality; the connection of social and interpersonal respect with masculinity; the socially allowable and pervasive ridicule and punishment of male femininity; and marginalization based on multiple social statuses. Through these interconnected social mechanisms, heteronormative perspectives on gender, gender binaries, and power are incorporated into homonormative migrant Puerto Rican gay masculinities. (shrink)