Post-Disaster Futures (Ruin, Repair, and Decolonial Imagination in Puerto Rico)

An interdisciplinary exploration of how Puerto Ricans imagine repair, recovery, and decolonial futures amid disaster, austerity, and colonial constraint

In the wake of hurricanes, earthquakes, and fiscal collapse, Puerto Ricans have confronted the limits of state-led reconstruction and the rise of post-disaster speculation. At the same time, they have forged new community-based experiments in self-governance, collective care, and imaginative practice. Post-Disaster Futures brings together scholars, artists, and activists to examine how disaster recovery can both reinforce existing hierarchies of power and open pathways toward transformation.

Moving between the archipelago and its diaspora, the volume traces a collective effort to rethink what repair means when the very institutions of recovery and governance perpetuate the damage they claim to fix. Through essays, interviews, poetry, and conversations, contributors explore themes ranging from energy justice and housing displacement to memory, migration, and artistic practice. They show how the ruins of colonial modernity—its failed infrastructures and broken promises—can be sources of solidarity  and imagination.

Contributors include: Elizabeth Aranda, Alvin Padilla–Babilonia, Raúl Santiago Bartolomei, Yarimar Bonilla. Mikey Cordero, Rafael V. Capó García, Mercedes Trelles Hernández, Mónica A. Jiménez, Natalia Lassalle–Morillo, Marcelo López–Dinardi, Bettina Pérez Martínez, Edgardo, Miranda–Rodríguez, Sarah Molinari, Ed Morales, Juan Carlos Rodríguez Rivera, Erika P. Rodríguez, Michael Rodríguez–Muñiz, Isabel Guzzardo Tamargo, Ana Teresa Toro, Fernando Tormos–Aponte, Érika Fontánez Torres.