Shelter from the Storm: Disaster Capitalism and Puerto Rican Undergraduates in Post–Hurricane María Stateside Higher Education

Abstract

Background/Context:

Our study takes an asset-based approach to examine the experiences of Puerto Rican undergraduates and the consequences of cascading disasters (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes, COVID-19). Puerto Rican undergraduates were prone to vulnerability during cascading disasters because they lacked emergency supplies (e.g., flashlights), effective communication pre- and postdisaster (e.g., texts), and/or knowledge of disaster-related procedures on campus.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study:

In this article, we use disaster capitalism and the trauma doctrine as our theoretical underpinnings to address the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, in which Puerto Ricans have experienced disaster as an ongoing process illuminated by the sociopolitical and sociohistorical contexts that only exacerbate a longer history of deep-seated colonial traumas.

Research Design:

This study employs disaster capitalism and the trauma doctrine as a theoretical guide to depict an anticolonial approach and provide a thick description of the multiple case study design bounded by the phenomenon of disaster across two units of analyses from 2017 to 2020. The first unit of analysis (case 1) demonstrates how the public education sector has been diminishing in Puerto Rico due to investments, in this instance, in stateside institutes of higher education (IHEs) through hurricane relief programs. The second unit of analysis (case 2) shows how increasingly paramount it is to examine the experiences of Puerto Rican undergraduates left prone to these vulnerabilities.

Conclusions/Recommendations:

The theoretical application and findings from our study demonstrate that based on the intersections of disaster capitalism and the trauma doctrine, Puerto Rican undergraduates have and are still experiencing deep-seated trauma masked in disaster “relief” and “recovery” at the hands of the U.S. government and IHEs. These provide an understanding of disaster at the national, institutional, and individual levels.