Making Space for Empire (Colonial Elites, Whiteness, and the Planning of Modern Puerto Rico)

In Making Space for Empire, Joaquín Villanueva documents how white elites in Puerto Rico and the United States collaborated to produce the physical and ideological landscapes of the archipelago in the modern day. Throughout the mid-twentieth century, the Puerto Rico Planning Board worked to transform a tropical climate into an industrial one to attract US investors. This modernization produced a colonial economy fully dependent on US knowledge, capital, and interests for its survival. Drawing on the Puerto Rico Planning Board archives, Black geographies, and the work of Frantz Fanon, Villanueva shows how dominant conceptions of space, whiteness, and the tropics came together under a midcentury planning ideology that embraced dependent development models, defining Puerto Rico’s future through debt. He offers new insights into both the past and future of the archipelago, showing how seemingly simple acts like letter writing, strategic friendships, and the racialization of nature and space have sustained colonialism on the archipelago. Mapping how planning and imperialism shapes lands and ideologies alike, Making Space for Empire shows that Puerto Rico is not bound to its history. It can, and must, determine its own future.