Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico

Introduction by Joaquín Villanueva, Department of Geography, Gustavus Adolphus College, Saint Peter, MN

La Recta Final, a 1989 rap album by Vico C, was one of the first cassettes I ever bought. The album contained four songs that spoke about violence, drugs, the police, sex, AIDS, Jason (from the Friday the 13th slasher movie series)—but also about love. It described a world foreign to me, a world socially distant from my suburban, middle-class lifestyle, but, paradoxically, a world geographically close to me. I grew up in a subdivision in Cupey, in the south of San Juan, Puerto Rico. The east end of my neighborhood was shouldered by two housing projects. My childhood home was located right across from a basketball court. Occasionally, youngsters from the housing projects would play basketball there. The rims of their basketball court were broken, and public authorities did not bother replacing them. I never questioned why they were not repaired. It just was.

The 1990s in Puerto Rico was a transformative decade. Underground (later reggaetón) music was widely heard by young people across class and race. My middle-class friends, punk rockers in the 1980s, began emulating the lifestyle of reggaetoneros. During my teens in the 1990s, I began to hear real-life stories that resembled the world described by Vico C. Some basketball mates from the projects suddenly stopped playing. Some joined a gang, sold drugs or got hooked on them, and got arrested; others were murdered. The crisis that had enveloped these housing projects for decades started to spill over into my neighborhood. Middle-class neighbors also got entangled in the drug economy. The social boundaries separating the housing projects from my neighborhood were no longer distinguishable. Today, the basketball court across from my parents’ house has no rims either.

The neighborhood council met to discuss possible solutions to the rising tide of crime. Their solution was simple: Build a gate to keep the criminogenic elements outside the neighborhood (Dinzey-Flores 2013). It was a futile effort because the neighborhood was rotting from the inside. Despite repeated efforts, the neighborhood council never got the necessary permits to build the gate. I was disappointed.

Luckily, I thought, the government had launched its anticrime program, operación mano dura contra el crime, or iron fist against crime. The military-style operation consisted of occupying housing projects, closing off projects with fences, and criminalizing entire populations that had been deemed a threat to the well-being of people like me. I never understood the full implications of this penal approach to social and economic crisis. In Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico, Marisol LeBrón brilliantly traces the origins and evolution of punitive governance in Puerto Rico. The book, a necessary addition to the contemporary history of Puerto Rico, forcefully demonstrates that “punitive governance has left an indelible mark on how life and death are understood and experienced in Puerto Rico” (p. 3). The fact that I never questioned and rather welcomed the militarization of housing projects for the sake of my own safety suggests that punitive governance and its entire ideological apparatus had succeeded in making me believe that my life was more valuable than that of my former basketball mates.

In 2001, the French police detained me due to my resemblance to North Africans. The experience was traumatizing to the point that I decided to study the root causes of these racist practices. I ended up writing a dissertation about criminal justice responses to crime, uprisings, and insecurity in the Parisian banlieue. I was interested in a program launched by the Minister of Justice in the early 1990s called the Local Groups for the Treatment of Delinquency (GLTDs; Villanueva 2017). Spearheaded by the prosecutor’s office, the program consisted in identifying hot spots in housing projects, followed by mass arrests and prosecution, and a preventative approach in the months after. While studying GLTDs I noticed that the logics animating the French program, the justifications and discourses that legitimized it, and the criminalizing effects on racialized communities were eerily similar to mano dura in Puerto Rico. I did not explore this connection further, but the parallels stayed with me.

Then I read LeBrón’s book and it all made sense to me. In it, the author maps the global, regional, and local policy landscape that informed mano dura in Puerto Rico. In reviewing the book, Micol Seigel welcomes the transnational framework on which LeBrón analyzed colonial punitive governance in Puerto Rico. Jordan T. Camp, likewise, places the book within a larger context of neoliberal austerity, resistance, and solidarity. Stuart Schrader, on the other hand, circumscribes the book within the power geometries of empire by critically interrogating the far-reaching carceral geographies of U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico and beyond. Beverley Mullings narrates the ambivalent position of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean and celebrates LeBrón’s ability to connect the archipelago within regional geographies of racial capitalism. Finally, Jenna M. Loyd pays greater attention to local policing practices and remarks on LeBrón’s intersectional analysis for understanding the differential politics and effects of policing. That all five commentators read the book along distinct scalar registers speaks to Marisol LeBrón’s rich and critical geographic analysis.

Indeed, the author’s spatial analysis extends to the personal level, too. It is quite remarkable how precisely LeBrón contextualized my experience as a middle-class blanquito (“whitey”) anxious about crime, violence, and insecurity in suburban San Juan. After Vico C’s, I never bought another reggaetón cassette. I was conflicted with the genre’s associations in the public sphere with criminality and insecurity. Nevertheless, LeBrón’s book helped me grasp with more clarity the extent to which the policing of underground and reggaetón music played a critical “role in designating certain populations for surveillance and control as part of mano dura’s fight against crime” (p. 103). The book is a history of (state) violence in contemporary Puerto Rico. It takes readers through diverse scales, times, and spaces—including the cultural geographies of underground music—to demonstrate how punitive governance shaped our (and notably my) understandings of who deserved to live and die. This is essential reading for those interested in life and death, or what I broadly call human geography.

Commentary by Micol Seigel, Department of History, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN

Marisol LeBrón’s timely and important Policing Life and Death sets out to wonder what role policing might have played in creating our current situation in which some people clearly do not care if certain of their fellows live or die. What role, that is, did policing play in producing life and death? In answer, the book traces the rise of punitive governance in Puerto Rico, including a fantastically rich account of activism in cultural venues, on campuses, online, and in neighborhood communities. The chapters order these topics in a way that refuses to separate the political-historical narrative from culture, placing all in the context of the ongoing colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States.

Reaching back to the mid-twentieth century to trace the rise of punitive policing, LeBrón sketches the crises provoked by partial and incomplete decolonization. The Cold War’s international pressures forced the United States to grant limited autonomy to its various colonies, allowing Puerto Rico to write its own constitution and shift to a commonwealth status but not to determine its own fate. Authorities from mainland and island together aimed at those Cold War watchwords, modernization and development, undermining agricultural work and courting U.S. manufacturers. These profited handsomely while failing to provide the expected pool of well-paying jobs. Rural residents were forced to flock to cities and the mainland in search of work, shifting their own options irrevocably. When the artifice of the “boom” years of the 1950s and 1960s were revealed by the 1973 oil crisis and recession, unemployment resurfaced, having never vanished, even in the best of times. The pharmaceutical industry’s inroads in the 1970s made the situation worse. As unemployment skyrocketed and the state failed to help, extensive informal economies arose, the perfect justification for increased policing.

One of the book’s great virtues is the care it takes throughout to insist that other forms of state violence such as incarceration are a part of punitive governance along with policing. LeBrón does not isolate police violence as if it were exceptional, placing it instead along the continuum of state violence. Policing is one in the series of technologies of punishment that includes war, incarceration, and even violence by nonstate actors that is not explicitly state sanctioned. That is, even violence that appears not to be state sanctioned is also provoked by technologies of state violence, LeBrón understands. This argument extends the work of radical left theorists of prisons and capitalism from the 1930s to the 1960s such as Georg Rusche, Otto Kirchheimer, Dario Melossi, Massimo Pavarini, and eventually Michel Foucault. Rusche’s concept of “less eligibility” in particular applies. “Life in the workhouse had to be less bearable in every way than the life of the lowest stratum of free workers,” Rusche (1933) argued (quoted in Melossi and Pavarini 1981, 38). To make prisons worse than free life, violence is invited from the “dangerous classes” themselves, who are allowed or encouraged to inflict violence on each other or on those who occupy the ladder’s next rung down (Rusche and Kirchheimer 1968, quoted in Melossi 1993, 262). This is an understanding of state violence that can comprehend its critical relationship to capital, an essential piece of the puzzle for those of us wrestling with these questions.

Violence is yoked to capital not only in the political economy underlying the rise of policing, in LeBrón’s excellent analysis. The other link in the late twentieth century works through privatization. As policing intensified, public space began to be privatized, as did security itself. Crime fighting was a great windfall for private security and private prison companies in the 1970s. The privatization of public space in housing districts generated equally great profits in the real estate sector as gated communities proliferated, creating the notorious “apartheid boricua” (p. 35) of the present moment. LeBrón here reveals a settler colonial landscape where punitive policies labor in the service of capital, an unmistakable manifestation of the “state-market” assemblage that resists all attempts to separate these inextricable entities.

The metaphor of “apartheid boricua,” a comparison to South Africa, draws the globe into a single frame, emphasizing how thoroughly punitive policing has been a transnational product. LeBrón shows this for Puerto Rico by placing punitive policing in the context of the colonial relationship and by showing how it developed through the constant exchange of strategies, equipment, and discourses of the moral and cultural deficiencies of the poor. This transnational circulation amplified the authority of these practices, with police and supporting characters citing the circulation itself as evidence of effectiveness. The book’s focus on transnational context is one of its great strengths, and I even wished for more. LeBrón mentions the presence and importance of Dominican citizens in Puerto Rico, for example, but does not include them in her analysis. Every author gets to delimit their subject, of course, but I cannot help but wonder what insights could emerge from stepping beyond the single imperial circuit of metropole and colony.

The other question this book raises for me involves the concept of “security from below,” the phrase LeBrón borrows for a chapter on a community antiviolence center. Although the community center indubitably contributed to the safety and well-being of the people it served, I wonder, following Mark Neocleous and adherents who theorize antisecurity, whether the concept of security is, at this point, one that can be wielded from below. This concern applies, in a sense, to LeBrón’s implication that Puerto Rico would have been better off shaping its own security policies. Is an independent nation-state the best option we can imagine? What is the form of social organization we might envisage instead? LeBrón recognizes that the policing structure in Puerto Rico today responds in part to demands from people there, not because police were what they deeply desired, but because police were what they could imagine. This is a wonderful point. Let us indeed be daring in these flights of imagination, well beyond the nation-state, so irretrievably linked to capital.

LeBrón’s keen and stark analysis of the ways profit flows from state-market management of life and death sits alongside the clear vision of how people step in when the state disappears. For this welcome impetus to dream of other ways of organizing collective life, I am grateful.

Commentary by Jordan T. Camp, The People’s Forum, The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY

In the wake of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico (just as in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, as I have described elsewhere), political and economic elites promoted aggressive policing strategies as solutions to crisis. They deployed populist narratives of security, law, and order to win consent to these coercive strategies of crisis management. In her new book, Policing Life and Death, Marisol LeBrón makes clear that this structure of policing represents an accretion of a long-term structure of dominance. “Punitive governance” in Puerto Rico, as she describes it, is an essential element of a world system of “racial and colonial capitalism” that deleteriously impacts the poor and working-class residents of the island.

Policing Life and Death describes how the policing strategy known as mano dura contra el crimen (iron fist against crime) justified and sustained the policing of public housing and other spaces occupied by the poor, working class, and students. The book examines how this policing strategy contributed to the rise of “punitive governance” in Puerto Rico, by which she means the way that the state has policed crises that rocked the archipelago in the neoliberal period. She interrogates how this more punitive form of governance emerged amidst increasing inequality and vulnerability for poor and marginalized communities. In turn, she explores how this tilt toward more punitive governance reflected broader shifts in the political economy of neoliberal capitalism and the expansion of carceral regimes in the United States and the world. This political and economic context is vital to the book’s central argument that punitive governance functions as a form of “colonial crisis management,” which has prevented radical political and economic transformation and sutured “ruptures of colonial capitalism.”

In this way, Policing Life and Death suggests how punitive policing models serve to contain the deleterious effects of colonial capitalism in space and enable the restructuring of urban space, a process marked by gated communities, extreme inequality, and the policing of huge and growing surplus populations. In one of the most provocative insights of the book, LeBrón essentially argues that policing produces race. In particular, she locates the social production of purportedly racial differences in long histories of colonial capitalist development. Geographers will appreciate the book’s attention to how narratives of spatial location and class “function as coded ways to invoke Blackness,” as well as its intervention that policing produces race by trapping people in place. After all, it employs a geographically specific framework to account for the ways that racism has naturalized the aggressive policing of poor and working-class communities.

Drawing on a range of sources including government documents, interviews, participant observation, expressive culture, and social media, LeBron offers a critical analysis of a “series of flashpoints” to better understand how ideas about race and policing legitimated the making of punitive governance in Puerto Rico. In particular, she shows how populist narratives of security were essential for shoring up the idea that policing served the interests of “hard working people.” At the same time, she suggests how these narratives sustained state violence and the imposition of an austerity regime in the interest of capitalist elites. Officials asserted that the National Guard and police were deployed in so-called crime hot spots to reduce crime and violence, but in actuality they increased state violence. This increase is not incidental in LeBrón’s account, but rather the logical outcome of a system of punitive governance that shifts the responsibility for neoliberal restructuring onto the victims. These narratives criminalized the poor and dispossessed and served to ideologically distract audiences from the underlying conditions that create social problems such as poverty and unemployment.

To challenge these populist narratives, Policing Life and Death interrogates how these forms of policing emerged alongside the globalization of capital. The Puerto Rican state attempted to brand its model of policing as one that could be exported to the United States and the world. The Puerto Rican elite’s embrace of broken windows policing aided and abetted the privatization of public goods and assets such as public housing, “quite literally, at gunpoint.” As such, the book suggests these policing strategies were expressions of “the neoliberal common sense of our times.” LeBrón also locates struggles over the neoliberal common sense articulated in media and expressive culture. Following the lead of scholars in U.S. and comparative ethnic studies, she analyzes how underground rap and reggaeton serve as important sources of evidence for understanding the perspectives of populations rendered surplus by transformations of the political economy. In particular, the book suggests how the music’s celebration of smoking weed, having sex, and hanging out reflected the idleness experienced by surplus populations and therefore provides a “glimpse of reality.” At the same time, it takes issue with elite narratives depicting these cultural productions as evidence of a “culture of poverty,” and suggests how such narratives obscure more than they explain.

Policing Life and Death is attendant to shifts in policy across time and in space. The final chapters turn to showing how mano dura was recast as community policing as the former lost legitimacy in the 2000s and 2010s. Elites in both major parties distanced themselves from the image of authoritarian forms of policing by focusing on restoring trust and building community. This language reflected a rhetorical shift away from zero tolerance to “quality of life,” which took shape in response to the crisis of legitimacy for the state that took hold amidst the crisis of 2007 and 2008. This crisis was registered in massive student protests against neoliberal austerity measures in Puerto Rico in 2010 and 2011. LeBrón situates these university struggles within a broader opposition to the austerity agenda being imposed by global capitalism and its local representatives in Puerto Rico. The university is a crucial site of struggle, one that was targeted by the police because it had long been a space for anticolonial and socialist organizing. Some in the movement connected the repression they faced to the criminalization of the poor and the privatization of public housing, and demanded Fuera, Fuera, Fuera, Policia: Get out police! This demand enabled a vision of solidarity that linked spaces at the same time as some stayed within the tight reins of common sense: Somos estudiantes, no somos criminales (We are students, not criminals). These contradictions were among the people rather than between the people and therefore pointed to the possibilities of building alliances between students, workers, and public housing residents to confront colonial capitalism.

Of course, these necessary alliances took on new meaning in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which rocked Puerto Rico in September 2017. The state’s response to the event demonstrated one of the central insights of this book, and that is “life and death … are unevenly distributed along lines of race, class, region, sexuality, gender, and citizenship” (p. 235). The Puerto Rican state once again deployed broken windows policing in the wake of the storm to enforce this unevenness. Although it was purportedly justified in response to increases in violence and homicide, as it had before, it produced the untenable situation it purported to prevent. An actual confrontation with these problems, LeBrón concludes, would require a radical transformation in the political economy through solidarity and mutual aid in people’s struggles for radical transformation.

These are critical insights and urgent questions to take on amidst the current crisis of legitimacy for neoliberalism. The policies of broken windows policing, the privatization of public housing, the criminalization of the racialized poor, and the repression of radical oppositions to the restructuring of higher education has created a vacuum, one that has been filled by the rise of neofascism. This explosive situation suggests the stakes in developing precise conceptualizations of the nature of the world system. We need to understand the dangers of this situation, but also the possibilities for change.

LeBrón’s book should stand out for locating the roots of the policing crisis in Puerto Rico in transformations of the political economy. Using a framework of “racial and colonial capitalism” throughout the text, the book traces how the policing crisis unfolded in this specific historical and geographical context. Readers might therefore ask if the concept could have been elaborated more fully. There are certainly elements of such an elaboration in the text, such as the discussion of genocide, slavery, colonization, and capitalist development, as well at the shifts in the political economy that took shape in the post–World War II period and again in the neoliberal era. Yet there is a large and growing body of scholarship that could have been engaged that might have bolstered this intervention, including the work of Samir Amin, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Laleh Khalili, Cedric Robinson, and Vijay Prashad. At the same time, these works illustrate the stakes in debates about the kinds of political organization necessary to confront the world system as a whole.

Policing Life and Death’s standpoint on the urgency of solidarity is essential in this context. The book suggests that scholars neglect the complex dialectics of race, class, gender, region, sexuality, and space underpinning policing to our peril. In the end, it suggests the importance of engaging with visions of justice that counter the dominant narrative of “acceptable punishments,” ones that are being articulated in the expressive culture of social movements. These visions, LeBrón concludes, might enable a “future grounded in justice and freedom” (p. 22). As we face the current crisis of global capitalism and U.S. imperialism, this book provides us with a vital resource for interpreting and building these solidarities.

Commentary by Stuart Schrader, Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD

Marisol LeBrón’s Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico is a major contribution to American studies, history, urban studies, geography, and other fields. This book represents an important step forward for critical carceral studies because it problematizes the field by putting U.S. empire at the center of the analysis at theoretical, methodological, and empirical levels. This study of policing and carceral power in Puerto Rico in the era of neoliberalization could reshape the literature, not least by insisting that the framework of the African American civil rights struggle and the frontlash and backlash to it cannot be the sole lens through which to understand the politics of the modern U.S. carceral state. Bringing the colonial dimension into the analysis necessarily leads to new explanations.

Puerto Rico is impossible to study in isolation from broader carceral trends, but the archipelago has not been a passive recipient so much as an active progenitor. In Chapter 2, LeBrón makes a nuanced argument about policy transfer, building on sophisticated scholarship in geography. She discards the categories of “laboratory” and “experiment,” through which scholars have analyzed topics from sterilization of women to economics. These commonly used terms, in her view, fail to capture what changed for policing in Puerto Rico once the era of Operation Bootstrap ended and the onset of neoliberalization had arrived. Instead, LeBrón advocates the term model to explain how penal policy in Puerto Rico related to the rest of the United States in the 1990s. Puerto Rican elites hoped that the mano dura style of intensive policing used in public housing could become fast policy, a model adopted elsewhere. The term model encourages rethinking who the powerful actors actually were. The model metaphor implies colonialism without colonizers, whereas the laboratory metaphor implies invasive work by external agents. With the model metaphor, the key actors testing the limits of punitive innovation are Puerto Rican elites, not outsiders, yet coloniality remains central in a moment of tense historical change. During Puerto Rico’s 1990s economic transition, while the existing colonial economy disintegrated, the archipelago’s elites became opportunistic, entrepreneurial, neoliberal subjects themselves, treating penal policymaking as a vehicle for the colony’s (and their own) new self-actualization in a competitive marketplace of punitive one-upmanship.

LeBrón avoids rehabilitating Puerto Rico’s punitive elites. She illustrates how carceral containment was their strategy for negotiating the archipelago’s shifting position vis-à-vis the political economy of capitalism in the hemisphere. Harsh policing was the vehicle of Puerto Rico’s continued incorporation in and salience to the United States. In LeBrón’s analysis, the failure of this model on its own terms is at the forefront. Paradoxically, because the model relied on the uniqueness of Puerto Rico as a colony, its modular application might have been destined to fail. The dream of the policymakers was that the model they crafted would travel frictionlessly to the mainland and become adopted. One of the reasons it could not was that mainland municipal authorities did not want to call in the National Guard to police public housing units. Puerto Rico’s unique political and economic trajectory prevented its policy innovations from achieving practical implementation elsewhere because conditions differed. Local anticrime success was elusive, too, though. The model was a double failure.

Determining how appropriate usage of metaphors like model is in social analysis can be tricky. I once heard the interdisciplinary scholar Ira Katznelson explain the difference between sociology and history as turning on the way that sociologists use metaphor to explain social processes, whereas historians rely on more literal empirical description. Geographers are more like sociologists. One reason historians shy away from metaphors, I believe, is that they can often occlude as much as they reveal. Sometimes, though, critical social analysis requires us to stretch our imaginations, and it might require even mixed metaphors or paradoxical concepts to get at contradictions of social structures and processes. Policymakers often use metaphors, but they are not always precise and can carry baggage. Yet historians often attempt to be true to historical sources by adopting actors’ categories as analytic categories. This approach carries risks.

The metaphors of model and experiment are common among analysts of policy mobilities because policymakers use them (Peck and Theodore 2015), and the metaphors of experiment and laboratory are common in discussions of empire because colonizers use them (Machold 2018). General Maxwell D. Taylor, for example, assured President John F. Kennedy that “The greatest possible use is being made of South Viet-Nam as a laboratory for techniques and equipment related to the counterinsurgency program” (Michaels 2012, 53). Byron Engle, who would go on to lead the Cold War U.S. overseas police assistance program, described occupied Japan as the “best laboratory” imaginable for police reform (Schrader 2019, 61). These examples suggest adopting this actors’ category unreflexively. When critical analysts think transnationally, comprehending distant sites of empire as relational spaces connected by geographic wormholes, these empire-specific metaphors break down.

There is no such thing as a social laboratory. No social situation, especially in the chaotic setting of war or intensive policing, maintains the closure, independence, control, and consistency necessary for experimental conditions like a laboratory would. It is a fantasy of positivist social science as much as it is a fantasy of racial power. Perhaps even more important, when colonizers discussed Puerto Rico as a laboratory for policy innovation, what was the experimental setting and what was the general setting of application? If an experimentalist tests a policy in a limited setting and applies it in another, the distinction is blurry in Puerto Rico, even outside all the derogatory implications of considering the archipelago an experimental object. LeBrón is right to eschew the notion of experimentation in her analysis.

Because the modeling of mano dura was short-lived, perhaps another concept is needed to explain the thorough integration of colony and mainland through penal policy. Institutional networks matter, like the United States Conference of Mayors and International Association of Chiefs of Police. They are both vessels for transmission of policy and powerful actors, however, even as they are both internal and external to a site like Puerto Rico. To treat all these institutions themselves as locations on a single uninterrupted fabric can reveal the unevenness across them in terms of imperial intensities and gradations. Perhaps uneven development remains the best metaphor.

The challenge for carceral studies going forward is to view the U.S. carceral state in an analysis of colonialism and empire that does not reaffirm or reify the divisions between the imperial and the mainland or domestic setting. It will be harder than it seems. Logically, it should be possible to erase the divisions between foreign and domestic in our analyses, but inherited concepts are inadequate and given methodologies limit us. State archives themselves are an impediment. They are organized around imperialist categories and practically unsustainable, value-laden divisions of foreign and domestic and civilian and military. Liberal notions of the rule of law, jurisdiction, and the rights and duties of citizenship all can cloud rather than clarify.

If the neocolonial model from Puerto Rico did not spread exactly as its stewards had hoped, does that mean that mainland policing avoided the pitfalls of colonialism? Imperialist thinking renders the mainland as more progressive or liberal than the far-off imperial zone, which is debased, repressive, and exceptional. Even critical scholars fear the reverberation of colonialism at home if it renders the home front less liberal, less socially progressive, and more repressive. What if the opposite were true? In 2019, Puerto Ricans toppled their ruling regime through peaceful protest. Perhaps this feat could become modular. To reverse analytic polarity and avoid terms like experiment or laboratory and possibly even model might allow us to appreciate the U.S. carceral archipelago as an uneven fabric where island territories are actually just zones of intensity.

Commentary by Beverley Mullings, Department of Geography and Planning, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada

When I lived in Jamaica, Puerto Rico was considered a world away from the Caribbean. It wasn’t just about language, because nearly every Jamaican had a story to tell about a relative who had gone to Panama to build the canal; they knew someone who went to Cuba or Costa Rica to work for the United Fruit Company, or had a long-lost ancestor now part of the Nicaraguan population of Bluefields. It was instead the strong presence of U.S. multinational regional headquarters, the presence of skyscrapers, U.S. brand name stores, and the modernization narratives of industrial success that made us think of Puerto Rico as “not us.” Perhaps because of the differences in language, or the clear and uncompromising way in which Puerto Rico embraced its Latin identity (Ricky Martin perhaps being the island’s greatest ambassador), Puerto Rico stood out as an island space that seemed not to have the sort of présence africaine that Stuart Hall argued, although repressed by slavery and colonialism, remained hidden in plain sight in every aspect of Caribbean society and culture.

Now, so many years later, and especially after the 2017 hurricanes, there is a growing sense of a certain sort of similarity, a sort of topographical recognition to draw on Cindi Katz’s term, that Puerto Rico, too, shares the legacy of the particular coloniality of power that has shaped life (and death) throughout the Caribbean region as a whole. Policing Life and Death is a really important and timely book that helps us to apprehend this shared legacy through the important connections that it makes between neoliberal forms of racial capitalism and the technologies of policing, surveillance, and violence that have become an instrument, a way to govern, particular populations on the island.

Marisol LeBrón, in rigorous and captivating detail, helps us to understand the coloniality of Puerto Rico’s historical relationship to the United States, the impossibility of its postwar modernist experiment—Operation Bootstrap—to be socially transformational, and the consequences of its subsequent failure to sustain black life across the island archipelago. LeBrón introduces us over seven chapters to the peculiar ways that antiblack racism has shaped how the Puerto Rican state has framed its economic crisis—as the outcome of the internal and corrupting threat of blackness to the Puerto Rican body politic for which punitive governance is necessary.

The book turns our attention to what Cedric Robinson argued to be the peculiar workings of racial capitalism—how blackness emerged as a symbol of criminality and an alien threat to the ability of Puerto Rico to continue to serve as a model for Latin America and dare I say also the Caribbean. LeBrón deftly demonstrates how spaces associated with blackness and black life in Puerto Rico became spaces that needed to be contained, policed, and ultimately eliminated. From the policing of public housing, to efforts to ban or regulate the forms of creative production giving rise to reggaeton as a musical genre in its own right, this book offers in rigorous detail how the fallout from the neoliberal crisis experienced in Puerto Rico came to be understood as a crisis produced by vulnerable racialized populations.

Drawing parallels between the policing of black bodies in places like Chicago, Louisiana, and Washington, DC, LeBrón draws our attention to threads of commonality in the way that disciplining and carceral policies quickly came to be seen as forms of best practice that politicians could claim credit for and export across very different local landscapes. I really appreciate how this book draws our attention to the contour lines that connect racial violence across distant places and that analytically produced possibilities for fertile political connections across time and space. LeBrón does a remarkable job of this when she examines the solidarities that were created when striking students at the University of Puerto Rico found themselves subject to the same racializing logic that marked the student body as one that could be exposed to violence and ultimately to death. How students and community members in marginalized public housing refused state efforts to remove their right to differently articulated freedoms, and how they built solidarities across the connecting contours that connected their lives, even if for a fleeting moment in the history of town–gown relations, was an intriguing moment that spoke to the power of countertopographical engagement.

Reading this book filled me with wonder at the similarities between the way that the crisis of the 1980s and the U.S. war on drugs created the context for a necropolitics to draw on Achille Mbembe’s work, which subjected young men and women, as well as gender-nonconforming individuals in the most impoverished parts of urban Jamaica to lives defined by precarity, violence, and exposure to premature death. That the lines of connection could be so close—the antiblack racialization of poverty; the futility of the mano dura policies; and the terror endured by poor communities, not only by warring gangs, but also often at the hands of law enforcement agents; as well as the tyranny of austerity measures aimed at embedding the market into every aspect of island life—suggests the possibility of solidarities that could extend beyond the spaces of connection outlined in the book.

Mano dura approaches to policing, for example, have become widespread not only in Latin America (most notably Central America), but also throughout parts of the anglophone Caribbean. Many of these countries were early conscripts to a particular form of neoliberal restructuring in the 1980s that was notable for its unflinching focus on “getting the fundamentals right” and its disregard for the human cost of market reform. Mano dura also speaks to a particular approach to policing that demands the production of a certain type of vulnerable population whose extermination can be justified through racial discourses that position black life as socially disposable and already dead. This is evident not only in El Salvador, where the phrase was first coined, but also Nicaragua, Honduras, and Jamaica, a place that at first sight would appear to be anomalous given the fact that 95 percent of the population generally identifies as black. The global blackness that most Jamaicans proudly identify with, however, is significantly different from the disposable blackness that racializes young men in the poorest neighborhoods and exposes them to forms of violence that would be unthinkable in other parts of the city. Thus, although seemingly differentiated by language and different degrees of imbrication within America’s imperial web, the similarities between the state’s production of vulnerable populations across Central America and the Caribbean represented, for me, a contour line that positioned Puerto Rico within the Caribbean in ways that I had not considered before.

That these connections are not immediately visible in this book speaks not to an absence on the part of the author, but rather to the challenge of recognizing and reckoning with uncomfortable truths about the peculiar racial logics at work in the formation of the region at the dawn of capitalism, and the peculiar racial logics that continue to shape how states govern racialized segments of their population. This recognition is important because of the sorts of solidarities that it can inspire, solidarities that the devastating effects of climate change are beginning to alert us to, but more important, solidarities that will be necessary as the United States begins the process of letting go of its moral accountability to a region that it has historically used as a testing ground and space for its own ascendancy to power on a global scale.

As unfolding events at the U.S. border in all its spatial complexity demonstrate, the twenty-first century marks a turning point in the relationship between the United States and the Caribbean region. Dispossessed of all resources of value to the United States, the Caribbean region is being let go, abandoned, and left to the vagaries of hedge fund managers and other debt collectors, or other erstwhile states intent on building their own spheres of empire. How the region will fare is unknowable, but as this book makes clear, without a commitment to engaging the difficult questions about the way that the présence africaine structures how populations are governed throughout the region, an opportunity to build much-needed regional geographies of solidarity will be lost.

Commentary by Jenna M. Loyd, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI

Marisol LeBrón’s Policing Life and Death makes an important contribution to critical carceral studies, specifically through examining the roles of policing within racial capitalist crisis. Although such crisis is sustained, its manifestations are uneven, particularly evident in the case of a colonial territory, such as Puerto Rico. Outcomes of crises are not foregone conclusions, but rather contingent. The contingency of policing as a political formation points to the importance of an intersectional analysis of who comes to be targeted for policing, and relatedly how different groups of people might form alliances to challenge policing. It is one thing to posit “the police” or policing as a general political problem and another to articulate how, in the thick of everyday life, people who might not see themselves as costrugglers manage to construct sustained challenges to ideological apparatuses and policy reforms that aim to divide and conquer. LeBrón models an intersectional analysis that I regard as necessary for abolitionist challenges to policing.

LeBrón’s careful intersectional analysis places Policing Life and Death alongside path-breaking feminist and queer contributions to the understandings of policing and prisons, among them Davis ([1971] 2016), Gilmore (2007), Richie (2012), Haley (2016), and Hernández (2017). Space constraints preclude me from more fully citing the extensive feminist and queer literature in the field. Yet, even these few citations illustrate that their attention to the ­specificities of the carceral state—in its racialized, gendered, heteronormative, classed, uneven geographic articulations—provides different theorizations of the carceral state, which have significant implications for understanding who is targeted for capture or surveillance where and terms of reform (e.g., gender-responsive prisons). We also know from them that organizing against state violence proceeds in part through how people are able to articulate their experiences across difference.

In one of the most fascinating chapters of the book, LeBrón shows how government authorities reused the infrastructure of mano dura contra el crimen (iron fist against crime), which was designed to police public housing residents, to contain the 2010–2011 student strikes. Chapter 5, “Policing Solidarity,” carefully discusses how, despite the extension of neoliberal austerity through Puerto Rico’s university system, the Río Piedras campus remained a relatively better off space for mainly the middle class, but also some poor Puerto Ricans. In an effort to break the strike and popular support that the students had built, the administrators contracted with a private security firm, which in turn offered jobs to unemployed young people from a predominantly black, low-income neighborhood nearby. The administration’s move was baldly designed to split public and student sentiment, but as solidarity grew, the administration invoked the same pretexts earlier used to deploy police forces to public housing, calling the students and university space terroristic and drug-infested. A group of community leaders and residents of public housing, in turn, challenged the police suppression by claiming the students as family members, neighbors, and fellow citizens: “These students are our children, our grandchildren, neighbors in our community; they are people who do not have the money to pay this fee and are seeking a decent public education for all Puerto Ricans” (pp. 165–66).

Yet, as the student strike became increasingly consumed with fighting the police incursions on campus, some student organizers began to regard their strike as doomed because their broader demands around tuition and fees had been eclipsed. This is where the intersectional analysis that LeBrón provides is so necessary. I did not at first understand why the students thought that getting the police off campus had narrowed rather than supplemented their strike demands. LeBrón explains that many student leaders viewed police violence as a “distraction from the ‘real’ issues of the student movement highlight[ing] the difficulty that students had at times decentering narrow student concerns in favor of broader issues affecting nonstudent populations, especially those living in racially and economically marginalized communities” (pp. 172–73). To maintain their demands for accessible educations, LeBrón contends that they would have needed to recognize both the “asymmetrical responses of the state to articulations of resistance by each group [students and barrio residents]” (p. 170) and reject respectability politics positioning students as innocent and undeserving of police violence. Such a double move would have made it more possible to build a durable, cross-class, interracial coalition.

A second moment where LeBrón’s intersectional account is so crucial comes in Chapter 6, “#ImperfectVictims,” which recounts how two social media campaigns worked to challenge prevailing “understandings about who deserves to experience violence and when and where violence can be allowed to proliferate” (p. 176). In the first case, a brutal murder of a middle-class man on his way home from work to his wife fueled a diasporic discussion about feelings of insecurity under the hashtag #TodosSomosJoseEnrique (#WeAreAllJoseEnrique). A salacious post soon circulated suggesting that the victim had actually been pursuing sex with a man, which led some to retract their sympathy and instead rationalize his violent death. In the second case, a well-known woman folk singer had been killed by a car driver while she was walking home. In this case, feminist activists challenged the assumed impropriety of her being out alone at night using the hashtag #AndandoLaCalleSola (#WalkingTheStreetAlone) in two ways. First, they aimed to “interrupt the notion that women who fail to live up to normative gender expectations deserve to experience harm,” and second, they called for “gender-inclusive education in Puerto Rican schools and government agencies” as a way to undermine structures of heteropatriarchy they understood as sustaining violence against women and queer folks (p. 179).

This brings me to my concluding points on why the intersectional analysis that LeBrón provides is so necessary and timely to organizing against policing. Although policing might have some common tactics and outcomes—of coercion, of containment, of threat, of defense of property and the capitalist status quo—who is subject to policing most relentlessly, the relational spaces that are created through policing, and the political context of and mobilization against policing are deeply racialized, gendered, and classed. Policing differentiates even as it claims uniformity through its persistent reforms. Further, because Gilmore (2007) taught us that “organizing is constrained by recognition,” opposing “the police state” or “the surveillance state” means approaching it not as a monolith, but through its differentiation. LeBrón shows both that the deployment of police force against public housing residents and students was not uniform, and that the creation of solidarity across these class and racial boundaries must work to confront the ways in which the expectation of innocence for students relied on the expectation of guilt and criminality that rationalized violence in the barrios and toward black residents. For students to understand that they must make ending police violence a necessary demand in their struggle would have meant using the analysis LeBrón develops of police violence as a means to deepen austerity in education, simultaneously not diminishing the ubiquity of policing for the same reason in the barrios and public housing complexes. Yet, in shying away from this understanding, the students implicitly reproduced their position as innocents to be protected by police.

An intersectional, movement-building approach to organizing against police violence, as LeBrón shows, necessarily pushes against the heterogendered and racialized categories that policing creates and through which different subject positions are articulated and arrayed in relation to one another. In the #WalkingTheStreetAlone campaign, organizers did not seek to redraw the line of who does not deserve violence to only “respectable” women, but rejected the heteropatriarchal premise that women are inherently vulnerable, and either subject to violence or in need of paternalistic protection by the police. A challenge to heteropatriarchal social relations, such as the demand for gender education in schools, is an intersectional demand in both critiquing the legitimation of violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people or people thought of as sexually deviant and in refusing a patriarchal protector rationale deployed by the police.

Because each of us is structured in different social positions in public spaces, how we can speak and be heard while challenging policing is also differential, involving a critique of how policing deepens and sustains violent racialized, gender, and sexual hierarchies. This is where LeBrón’s analysis of the police in Puerto Rico can be drawn on as an analytical method to speak to the strong arm of austerity across quite different places.

Response by Marisol LeBrón, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, University of Texas, Austin, TX

I am deeply humbled by Jordan Camp, Jenna Loyd, Beverley Mullings, Stuart Schrader, and Micol Seigel’s careful and thoughtful engagements with Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico. I am grateful to Joaquín Villanueva for convening us during the 2019 American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual conference and for his important framing comments. It is an honor to be in conversation with scholars whose work I have long admired and who have influenced my thinking about race, capital, carcerality, the state, and spatial politics. Thank you to The AAG Review of Books for providing the space for my response.

When I began the research for this book, I was preoccupied with a set of questions that I felt were crucial for thinking about contemporary Puerto Rico and the endurance of U.S. colonialism there. First, how can we trouble the temporality of colonialism and the myth of decolonization in Puerto Rico beyond the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In other words, how can we reckon with the fact that Puerto Rico continues to exist as one of the world’s longest serially colonized spaces? Second, how can we think about Puerto Rico and not just the diaspora as an important site for understanding the emergence and expansion of the carceral state? The barrios of the diaspora were far from the only places where Puerto Ricans were likely to encounter the punitive institutions, practices, and ideologies that we widely recognize as part of the U.S. carceral state. In that way, how does Puerto Rico trouble our geographical understanding of the U.S. carceral state? Third, how can policing function as a lens that allows us to see in plain view the multiple ways that racial boundaries are drawn and enforced in a place that prides itself on being a racial democracy, particularly in comparison to the United States? Finally, how does policing often produce the very things that it is charged with alleviating—insecurity, crime, violence, and fear—and why?

In Policing Life and Death, I set out to answer these questions by tracing the emergence and consolidation of punitive governance in contemporary Puerto Rico from the late twentieth century to the present. Punitive governance refers not only to the government’s increased reliance on police, prisons, violent discipline, and surveillance, but also the ideological work of linking justice and safety with punishment in the minds of the people. I argue that punitive governance has fundamentally affected what it means to live and die in Puerto Rico and has done so in a way that has intensified the violence of colonial capitalism on the archipelago’s most vulnerable populations. Throughout the book, I demonstrate that punitive governance has become a key strategy of colonial crisis management on the part of both U.S. and Puerto Rican elites that targets those most likely to experience structural dislocations due to race, class, spatial location, gender, sexuality, and citizenship status. I do this by tracing mano dura contra el crimen, or iron fist against crime, a series of crime prevention measures that explicitly targeted economically and racially marginalized Puerto Ricans living in public housing and other low-income communities. Although mano dura lasted only a short time, from 1993 to 2000, it created a terrain for understanding questions of criminalization, violence, and race in Puerto Rico with which Puerto Ricans are still forced to grapple. I end the book by suggesting that the current moment of crisis that Puerto Ricans are experiencing, marked by debt colonialism and climate catastrophe, has pushed Puerto Ricans to enact radical forms of decolonial organizing with the potential to upset the punitive common sense that often governs everyday life.

As a number of the engagements point out, in the book I work to put U.S. empire at the center in the hopes of challenging the tidy narrative of the carceral state that has emerged over the past decade. In his response, Stuart Schrader notes that a focus on Puerto Rico problematizes the literature by “insisting that the framework of the African American civil rights struggle and the frontlash and backlash to it cannot be the sole lens through which to understand the politics of the modern U. S. carceral state.” As I have suggested elsewhere (LeBrón 2019), looking at Puerto Rico and other nonsovereign (Bonilla 2015) sites such as Guam, Hawaii, and Native territories as important nodes in the development of the U.S. carceral state complicates understandings of the geography, temporality, and scale of the U.S. carceral state in ways that are both necessary and productive. As Hernández (2017) showed, colonialism and not just race and labor must be central to our understanding of carceral growth in the United States and its territories. Efforts to subsume Puerto Rico within the dominant framework of the U.S. carceral state fail to recognize the ways in which racial formation and colonial state practice operate in ways that intersect but are also distinct from the other U.S. territorial contexts. In this way, Policing Life and Death should be read as a call to trace the numerous histories and contexts that have created what we might understand as a U.S. carceral empire that is multiscalar and geographically expansive.

Although I emphasize the U.S. colonial relation as one of the key features of how and why punitive governance was seen as a solution to a wide range of political, economic, and social problems in Puerto Rico, I challenge the idea that mano dura contra el crimen and other punitive measures should be understood as a mere diffusion of so-called Made in the USA policies (Wacquant 2009). As geographer Peck (2003) suggested, “the convenient stereotype of ‘Americanization’ may convey the broad thrust of recent transnational policy change, but it cannot account for the subtleties and contradictions of this process” (229). Indeed, the notion of mano dura contra el crimen as little more than a tropical carbon copy of zero tolerance and broken windows policing that is imposed on Puerto Ricans ignores the ways in which local elites drew from these global policy trends to, as I argue in the book, maintain power relations based in capitalist development and racial and colonial exploitation. This offers us a more textured understanding of the multiple vectors of power at work that come together to support and consolidate systems of punitive governance. As Micol Seigel notes in her response, it is essential to understand punitive governance as a transnational phenomenon at the same time that we are careful not to lose sight of the specificities of place that are also at work.

This emphasis on centering structural forces and relations of power, helps, as Jenna Loyd points out in her contribution, to show that the outcomes of crisis are far from foregone conclusions, although they respond to local and global pressures. This is what is at stake in analyzing moments of crisis related to the expansion of the carceral state as Jordan Camp asks in his response. In highlighting the contingencies, we see the specificities that produced the carceral state in each site, which is necessary in figuring out what it will take to dismantle these structures of violence and extraction. The contingent nature of crisis also allows us to think about the paths not taken as we imagine a world free of cages and police. Paying attention to the highly contingent and uneven implementation of punitive policy in different locales allows us to move away from a totalizing and bleak narrative of global carceral convergence, and instead recognize the fissures specific to local contexts, which social actors deftly maneuver in their attempts to challenge the punitive state. This is something I try to show throughout the book, but especially in the last chapter, when I show how organizers and activists work to exploit small openings to create alternatives to punitive governance that foster life and opportunities in economically and racially marginalized communities.

As a scholar trained in American Studies, I work throughout the book to situate Puerto Rico within the longue dureé U.S. empire—to remind people through this work that for many the violence of the “American Century” (Ayala and Bernabe 2009) extends well into this one. In her response, however, Beverley Mullings challenges me to think about how resituating Puerto Rico within the Caribbean might deepen and even challenge my analysis. As she notes, Puerto Rico is often imaged as somewhat apart from the larger Caribbean context. This effort to distance Puerto Rico from the rest of its Caribbean neighbors is a direct product of U.S. colonization and entrenched antiblack racism in the archipelago. Although elements of this existed under Spanish rule, as Puerto Rico became further entangled within U.S. colonial structures, the failures of decolonization and the recapture of the Caribbean through structured poverty and debt were wielded like a club to justify continued colonial rule and the “gift” of U.S. citizenship (Nguyen 2012). One still hears with great frequency the familiar chorus, “Without the Americans we’d be like Haiti,” or “Do you want Puerto Rico to be like the Dominican Republic?” Of course, this ignores the reality that Puerto Ricans often find themselves in exile alongside their Caribbean neighbors in New York, Massachusetts, and Florida, for example. This distancing from the broader Caribbean is part of the lie that U.S. colonialism sold to Puerto Ricans. It is also a product of Puerto Rico being widely regarded as “the whitest of the Antilles,” which fostered racist notions of Puerto Rican superiority in comparison to the rest of the Caribbean. The recapture of the Caribbean through neocolonial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were interpreted as a result of black people’s inability to govern themselves, despite the deep irony that Puerto Rico was, in fact, a colonial territory in a sea of ostensibly free states.

As Mullings notes, however, my book shows that despite attempts to hold it above the greater Caribbean, “Puerto Rico, too, shares the legacy of the particular coloniality of power that has shaped life (and death) throughout the Caribbean region as a whole.” In looking at punitive governance, racial formation, and strategies of resistance in Puerto Rico, it is my hope to illuminate the grounds of solidarity that exist between the archipelago and the greater chain of islands that makes up the Caribbean. Additionally, in focusing on how black Puerto Ricans have not only borne the brunt of punitive policing but been at the forefront of imagining alternatives to racial capitalism and the colonial state, I hope that my work can speak to the présence africaine that has long been suppressed in Puerto Rico through colonial rule and the myth of mestizaje. A commitment to the présence africaine—to finding inspiration and strength in the history of black freedom struggles—is the only way forward for a Caribbean that must work against capitalist dispossession and austerity. For me, this forms a basis for the kinds of urgent solidarities that Jordan Camp calls for to confront the current political moment.

I want to conclude this reflection by addressing Micol Seigel’s question of how Dominicans and Puerto Ricans of Dominican ancestry fit into this narrative of punitive governance’s expansion, with a call for greater research on policing and immigration enforcement in Puerto Rico. There is no doubt that Dominicans encounter a violent carceral apparatus in Puerto Rico that marries together xenophobia and antiblack racism. Indeed, as Alford (2019a, 2019b) showed, not only are Dominicans heavily surveilled and policed in Puerto Rico, but black and dark-skinned Puerto Ricans are often assumed to be Dominican and thus, are more likely than nonblack Puerto Ricans to come into frequent contact not just with local police, but also Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. My book gestures toward this, but does not go into detail about the policing of dominicanidad in Puerto Rico. My hope is that my book opens up space for research on various aspects of policing in Puerto Rican society, which have until recently received scant scholarly or journalistic attention outside of the policing of the pro-independence movement. Policing is a key technology for defining citizenship and racial belonging in Puerto Rico, and I hope this book can provide an entry point for other scholars to pursue these questions and address things that I was unable to. Ultimately, this book is not meant to be a definitive account of punitive governance’s rise and consolidation in Puerto Rico, but I hope that it can help carve out a path for future research directions that are more necessary than ever if we want to keep one another safe and get free together.