Petromobility and Energy Coloniality in Puerto Rico: Reading Luis Rafael Sánchez’s La Guaracha Del Macho Camacho

ABSTRACT

Since the mid nineteenth century, oil has powered a new phase of global capitalist relations in a world-system that might be appropriately called petro-capitalist. This paper focuses on Puerto Rico, an island which imports all of its oil and occupies a specific position in the petro-capitalist world-system, given its entanglement in several interconnected, inextricable dynamics. I examine the relationship between what Catalina M. de Onís calls ‘energy coloniality’, U.S. imperialism and petro-capitalism in 1970s-80s Puerto Rico. The primary lens through which I analyse these issues is Luis Rafael Sánchez’s novel La Guaracha del Macho Camacho, which critiques and resists the orthodoxy of energy coloniality and socio-economic imperialism.

KEYWORDS:

• Puerto Rico
• Caribbean
• automobility
• coloniality
• petroculture
• energy privilege

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Environmental racism is arguably an offshoot of the phenomenon of energy coloniality. Across the world-system, from Bhopal to the Niger Delta, it is it is poor people and people of colour that suffer the unequal consequences of the disproportionate distribution of environmental hazards. From ‘garbage dumps, air pollution, lead poisoning, toxic waste production and disposal, pesticide poisoning, noise pollution, occupational hazards, and rat bites’ to the siting of petro-based toxic waste facilities, factories and radioactive waste near people’s homes, it is poor and non-white communities which bear the brunt of exposure (Foster and Cole 2000, 66). The antithesis of this environmental racism is, then, environmental privilege, which as Park and Pellow note:

2. […] is embodied in the fact that some groups can access spaces and resources, which are protected from the kinds of ecological harm that other groups are forced to contend with every day […] If environmental racism and injustice are abundant and we can readily observe them around the world, then surely the same can be said for environmental privilege. We cannot have one without the other; they are two sides of the same coin. (2011)

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Natasha Bondre

Natasha Bondre is an early career researcher whose work, with its focus on Latin-American and Caribbean petrofiction, sits at the intersection of world-literature, the energy humanities and postcolonial studies. She currently teaches as Associate Tutor at the University of Warwick, where she is also a Fellow of the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies, and as Associate Lecturer at the University of Northampton. She is presently working towards publishing her monograph with Palgrave Macmillan. The work will chart the responses of various Latin-American and Caribbean novelists and poets to the incursion of petro-capitalism across the region that Peter Hulme has called the “expanded Caribbean.” Her general research interests revolve around the axes of Caribbean and Latin-American literature, post-colonial literature and theory, the energy and environmental humanities, the blue humanities, animal-studies and materialist literary criticism.