Presenter(s): Sofia Bermudez-Eredia
Faculty Mentor(s): Brian Klopotek & Laura Pulido
Poster 124
Session: Social Sciences & Humanities
On September 20th, 2017, Puerto Rico, alongside with several islands in the Caribbean, was hit by a powerful category 4 storm known as Hurricane Maria. Hurricane Maria is considered the worst natural disaster on record to affect the Caribbean. This put Puerto Ricans in dire need of resources and assistance.
Often times, we look at these hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes as “random acts of nature” that do not discriminate communities based on race, class, sex, etc. So far, however, these disasters tend to negatively affect and impact more communities or areas that are lower in socioeconomic statuses than affluent. This includes high-risk geographical areas such as Puerto Rico, whose island is more susceptible to being affected by hurricanes and floods than somewhere in the Midwest of the United States. But throughout the United States’ history in dealing with natural disasters, a pattern is beginning to emerge. Not only are these natural disasters affecting more marginalized communities, but the responses and support from the U.S government and FEMA are often slower than with communities of higher socio-economic levels.
My research will focus on the history between the U.S and Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico’s financial vulnerability, and FEMA’s processes of disaster relief after Hurricane Maria as examples of neocolonial practices and racial violence.
This research will use the following guiding questions to address these topics:
How do recent processes of disaster relief, such as recent “aid” to Puerto Rico, perpetuate systematic racial violence in the United States?
How can we conceptualize financial vulnerability as an explicit mechanism of racial violence? In what ways is this process neocolonial? What are specific examples of this?
In this study, I will examine the public and federal responses to the aftermath of Hurricane Maria from 2017-2018. I will use governmental constructed data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) website as my primary source. FEMA’s website presents data and findings from Hurricane Maria, specifically, the 2017 Hurricane Season FEMA After-Action Report which describes their relief efforts in Puerto Rico. I will then use discourse analysis to identify and analyze a variety of secondary data and archival studies such as news articles and tweets to show how the public commentary from the U.S federal government and Puerto Rico’s government are found to contradict with FEMA’s report and present examples of racial violence and support neocolonial processes. My research will refine the knowledge of environmental racism by using a recent disaster to demonstrate the lack of progress we have made since Hurricane Katrina in regards to taking into consideration how people of color are disproportionately affected by disasters.