Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice

by Hilda Lloréns

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 ongoing multiple 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.

Genres: Nonfiction

222 pages, Hardcover

Published November 21, 2021

Reviews

[Teagan]

Maybe 3.5 stars

[Marina Hernandez]

Insightful book that balances personal/family history with (more or less) objective research. Lloréns skillfully uses her own knowledge and genealogy to make sense of larger themes that emerge from her research interests. This is by no means a biased account but rather "this is the situation, here's an example of what it looks like but neither my family nor my identity politics are representative so here are some interviews with other women to help contextualize more."

This book is a very zoomed in approach to share Afro Puerto Rican women's experiences as they navigate histories of slavery, colonization, environmental injustice, and racism.

[Bailey]

Let me just say WOW… another banger on the syllabus

[Harriet Slaats]

was engaging for an academic style book. i enjoyed the use of anecdotal evidence, cultural traditions, and personality woven into this work.