Presenter(s): Momo Wilms-Crowe—Political Science
Faculty Mentor(s): Dan Tichenor, Michael Fakhri
Session 1: Oh, the Humanities!
This thesis explores the power, possibility, and agency embedded in food in the contemporary Puerto Rican context . Building from participatory ethnographic fieldwork with activists, chefs, and farmers engaged in food sovereignty work on the island, I examine the concepts of agency and subjectivity as they relate to embodied experiences of politics . This approach is made possible with the understanding that the food we consume directly connects our individual lived experiences to broader structures of power in intimate and material ways . Through food, I offer a grounded critique of US colonial violence, inherently linked to ecological destruction, cisheteropatriarchy, and disaster capitalism . I also document dynamics of radical prefigurative politics as visible in people’s generative reimagining of relationships with their bodies, each other, and the land . This analysis is supported theoretically by key indigenous, anarchist, and queer/feminist perspectives which similarly connect the personal to the political and offer examples of political action that extend beyond state-centric formal politics . Ultimately, I argue that food is a powerful site of resistance, source of resilience, and mechanism of resurgence; as Puerto Ricans reclaim autonomy via food, they are resisting deeply rooted patterns of colonial extraction and dispossession and directly cultivating a more ecologically, socially, and politically just future .