Post-Disaster Futures: Ruin, Repair, and Decolonial Imagination in Puerto Rico, edited by Yarimar Bonilla and Isabel Guzzardo Tamargo, 2026, Haymarket Books
Say what you like about Bad Bunny’s music, there is little doubt about his commitment to Puerto Rico’s future.
Whether or not that future is one of independence—the musician openly endorsed Juan Dalmau, the candidate of the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), during Puerto Rico’s 2024 election campaign—it is one that is surprisingly optimistic.
Optimism is at first sight hard to maintain when it comes to the assessment of this neglected US colony, which today is mired in overlapping political, economic and environmental crises and gripped in constitutional limbo under the thumb of an avaricious empire.
Yet as Yarimar Bonilla notes in her introduction to Post-Disaster Futures, as Bad Bunny says, “Puerto Rico está bien cabrón”—it may face seemingly insuperable challenges and heartbreak, yet it is also suffused with beauty, strength and possibility.
That possibility, she says, is sustained by a web of creative projects and innovative community-led experiments that comprise a “hopeful pessimisim”: perhaps not optimisim per se, but something resembling it.
Bonilla writes: “As institutions falter and the myth of state competence unravels, residents are imagining and enacting other ways of living.”
It goes without saying that at first sight Puerto Rico is a mess: a colony battered by “repeated disasters, the increasing hardening of imperial power, the ever-present threat of displacement, and the escalation of racist, antidemocratic politics in the United States”.
Just a few examples to sum these up would include the US Supreme Court decisions known as the Insular Cases issued between 1901 and 1922, which established Puerto Rico’s legal status as an unincorporated territory where constitutional rights could be arbitrarily denied.
In the mid-twentieth century, the political project of the Estado Libre Asociado (ELA) sought to reconcile the contradictions of colonial rule but in fact merely rebranded it, offering the illusion of self-governance as a commonwealth while leaving imperial structures intact.
This was confirmed in 2016 when fiscal collapse led to the imposition of a “Fiscal Oversight and Management Board”—dubbed locally as “La Junta”—which merely reasserted colonial control in the language of financial recovery.
As the editors say, La Junta exemplified the exceptionalism of US colonial rule as a governing body unaccountable to Puerto Rican voters and unbound by constitutional protections.
One result of its policies has been the financialisation of whole areas of social policy, which has transformed Puerto Rican demographics by reshaping who can afford to live there, driving up housing costs and accelerating displacement.
In short, disaster recovery policies, investor tax incentives, and the proliferation of short-term rentals have turned the archipelago into “a site of speculative extraction, fuelling mass displacement and widening inequality”.
Is there any hope for Puerto Rico, whose omni-disaster we might consider to be inevitable once we understand that this landscape is the direct product of a colonial structure built to exclude its people from both citizenship and sovereignty?
The editors of this collection believe there is every reason to hope, because “the ruins produced by these policies are not merely testaments of collapse. They are also repositories of memory, spaces of critique, sites of resistance, and grounds for regeneration.”
Contributions to this book identify concrete examples of what the editors term “futuring”, or indeed “Borifuturism”—ways of engaging with crisis that resist complacency and fatalism in order to create space for a new Puerto Rico and visions of decolonial possibility.
It is admittedly a speculative endeavour, but no less exciting for it. Four thematic sections explore how, from the commonwealth’s failed promises, artists and activists are reclaiming collective memory.
While racio-colonial regimes have shaped Puerto Rican models of citizenship, governance, and decolonisation, these are now being contested through demands for reparations, diasporic healing, and more equitable forms of self-determination.
Here, “recovery” is imagined not as a return to the status quo ante, but as an opening to what could be possible in terms of housing, education, energy and the return of the islands’ massive diaspora.
At the same time, decolonial creative practices—from superhero comics and speculative design to plena music and antifuturist literature—are reframing Puerto Rico’s cultural identity, offering visions rooted in ancestral knowledge, inclusivity and solidarity.
This is an important book because, given Puerto Rico’s long and twisting journey through the labyrinth of imperial control with little sign of freedom, its contributors refuse to give into complacency and fatalism. There are lessons in here for us all.
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Categories: Caribbean, Puerto Rico, United States