Thought Portal

In this second episode of our new radio documentary series The Response, we shine a spotlight on Puerto Rico. When Hurricane Maria slammed into the island about a year ago, it resulted in thousands of deaths and knocked out power for almost an entire year. The result was what many consider to be the worst disaster in the United States.

Further, the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria exacerbated the ongoing debt crisis that has been crippling the country’s public services for years — a crisis that has forced many communities on the island abandon hope that the government will ever come to their assistance. And so when Hurricane Maria hit, it wasn’t a surprise to many of these already-abandoned communities when the official response was often nowhere to be seen.

This conversation has been told before by many mainstream news outlets. What you might not have heard, however, is the story of the grassroots response that arose after Maria. In the midst of all the austerity and hurricane-driven chaos, a quiet revolution has been slowly taking place on the island. What began as an impromptu community kitchen meant to help feed survivors in the town of Caguas has since grown into an island-wide network of mutual aid centers with the ultimate aim of restoring power — both electric and civic — to the people. We’ll hear from many of those involved in these centers and find out why they are growing so quickly and what they are doing to begin addressing both the acute and chronic disasters that Puerto Ricans are facing today.

....This is the true fringe of the “Radical Left”: ambitious in theory, practical in action and driven by a desire to prove that people don’t need a nation-state to support fulfilling lives. Usually, that means tackling non-violent tasks to help vulnerable Americans without the assistance or permission of the government, as with the work of groups that bring aid to neighborhoods damaged by natural disasters, create humane conditions for prisoners and increase wages for poor workers....

...Does anarchism provide a blueprint for a whole alternative system of governance? Ross doesn’t think so. After all, being an anarchist doesn’t necessarily mean dropping all reliance on government services, or not paying taxes, or not voting, Ross notes — that would be unrealistic given the power structure of nation-states, he says. What anarchism can do is provide a value system for anyone who wants to effect change in their community today, and in this sense, Ross admits anarchism feels to him more like a spiritual way of viewing the world than a strict political theory.

“What all anarchists have in common is a rejection of one person having power over another,” he says. “And that’s a profound and important idea for us to wrangle with.”...

When Raul Villanueva presented his Puerto Rico driver’s license late Wednesday night, the clerk told him, “Oh, you need a license from the United States,” he said. 

“I said, ‘This is a license from the United States, that’s Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is the United States.’ She said, ‘No, it isn’t,’” Villanueva recalled.