Description
When Hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pummeled by economic austerity, political upheaval, and environmental calamities. To navigate these multiple ongoing crises, Afro-Puerto Rican women have drawn from their cultural knowledge to engage in daily improvisations that enable their communities to survive and thrive. Their life-affirming practices, developed and passed down through generations, offer powerful modes of resistance to gendered and racialized exploitation, ecological ruination, and deepening capitalist extraction. Through solidarity, reciprocity, and an ethics of care, these women create restorative alternatives to dispossession to produce good, meaningful lives for their communities.
Making Livable Worlds weaves together autobiography, ethnography, interviews, memories, and fieldwork to recast narratives that continuously erase Black Puerto Rican women as agents of social change. In doing so, Lloréns serves as an "ethnographer of home" as she brings to life the powerful histories and testimonies of a marginalized, disavowed community that has been treated as disposable.
Author: Hilda Lloréns
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 11/24/2021
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9780295749402
ISBN10: 0295749407
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Women's Studies
- Social Science | Black Studies (Global)
- Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social
About the Author
Hilda Lloréns is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Rhode Island and author of Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family: Framing Nation, Race, and Gender during the American Century.