no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria

In a tweet from 2018, Governor Ricardo Rosselló—who would resign a year later after mass protests—attempted to lure foreigners to invest in Puerto Rico’s economy by describing the archipelago as “a blank canvas for innovation,” thus conveying the idea of an empty nation ripe for gentrification. But even before then, the government had focused on foreign investments and a visitor economy that caters to short- and long-term tourism rather than empowering new and existing local industries and entrepreneurs. Central to this economic turn have been Act 20 and Act 22 of 2012, Puerto Rican laws that created a tax haven for corporations and wealthy individuals—many of them real-estate speculators and cryptocurrency aficionados. 

Meanwhile, dispossession as a result of losing homes in the hurricane, aggressive redevelopment, the difficulty of meeting basic needs, or any combination of these factors has forced many people living on the archipelago to relocate to the United States. In 2018 alone, one year after Hurricane Maria, nearly 150,000 residents (4.3 percent of the population) migrated. These artworks pointedly examine the consequences of Puerto Rico’s economic policies on its people and landscape.