An in-depth look at Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and the preexisting crisis that conditioned this historic disaster. The concept of “aftershocks” is used in the context of earthquakes to describe the jolts felt after the initial quake, but no disaster is a singular event. Aftershocks of Disaster examines the lasting effects of hurricane Maria, not just the effects of the wind or the rain, but delving into what followed: state failure, social abandonment, capitalization on human misery, and the collective trauma produced by the botched response.
Aftershocks editors Marisol LeBrón and Yarimar Bonilla will be conversation with Alana Casanova Borges of WNYC’s On the Media.
Marisol LeBrón is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in race, policing, and political activism in Puerto Rico and U.S. communities of color. She is an Assistant Professor of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico and, along with Yarimar Bonilla, co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm. Marisol is also one of the co-creators of the Puerto Rico Syllabus, a digital resource for understanding the Puerto Rican debt crisis.
Yarimar Bonilla is a political anthropologist specializing in questions of sovereignty, citizenship, and race across the Americas. She has tracked these issues across a broad range of sites and practices including: postcolonial politics in the French Caribbean, the role of digital protest in the Black Lives Matter movement, the politics of the Trump presidency, the Puerto Rican statehood movement, and her current research—for which she was named a 2018 Carnegie Fellow—on the political, economic, and social aftermath of hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.
Alana Casanova Borges is a radio journalist and producer for the WNYC show On The Media. She has conducted on the ground in Puerto Rico for the WNYC newsroom, culminating in a special episode of On the Media devoted to Hurricane Maria in 2017 and coverage of the 2019 #RickyRenuncia Protests. Her work has been recognized by the ONA, PRNDI, and the Council on Contemporary Families. She is a bilingual native New Yorker with roots in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
About the Latinx Project:
The Latinx Project at NYU explores and promotes U.S. Latinx art, culture and scholarship through creative and interdisciplinary programs.
Founded in 2018, it serves as a platform linking scholarship, media and activism to foster critical thinking about US Latinxs. Our use of Latinx indicates an openness to gender, sexual and racial inclusivity, while also paying attention to the multiple ways in which Latinx organize and forge community around nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, and other designations.
The project advocates for Latinx Studies and explores the generative power of Latinxs in U.S. society.