What Natural Disasters Say About Our Colonial Conditions

Hurricanes like Ian, Fiona, María, and Katrina lay bare an unequal American experience.

Utuado, Puerto Rico on September 20, after Hurricane Fiona
Utuado, Puerto Rico on September 20, after Hurricane Fiona (AFP / Getty)

Like millions of my fellow Americans, I have been watching the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Ian in Florida with a heavy heart. Just last week, it was Hurricane Fiona. Because that storm hit Puerto Rico, rather than the U.S. mainland, there are many, including me, who are worried that Puerto Rico will soon be forgotten as we respond to the devastation of Ian. Despite the fact that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, the island is often neglected in our shorthand for the United States.

I first went to Puerto Rico as a teenager to visit family friends, meaning that I encountered it as someone invited into a position of community rather than as a tourist. That kind of intimacy allows a person to witness an environment and its people more fully, I think, although one remains a novice for a long time. Feeling close to a place happens before knowing it deeply.

Still, I learned a lot through the generosity of the Borrás family of Guayama, a warm, animated, and intelligent group of people. It was easy to feel comfortable in the heart of this Afro Latinx family. They had golden-brown to deep-brown-red skin and curling to coily hair on a spectrum like that of my own family in Alabama. They taught me about the history of slavery on the island and took me to Loíza, the historic center of African culture in Puerto Rico; they taught me about the culture of the Indigenous people, the Taínos, and laughed while pointing out the distinctions between the academic Spanish I’d learned in school and the more florid, nuanced, and expressive Caribbean Spanish they spoke. I was instructed in foodways, music, dance, colorism, and, of course, the colonial condition.

Puerto Rico was acquired by the United States in 1898, at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War. That year marked a sharp decline of the Spanish empire in the Americas, and was a landmark year in the imperial development of the United States. Although slavery had been abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873, much like the United States in 1898, it remained a racially stratified society.

In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones-Shafroth Act into law, which granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship. That citizenship was formal, yet partial. Island residents could not vote for the U.S. president, nor could they elect senators and representatives to Congress.

Puerto Rico as an island nation is a part of the United States structure of settler colonialism. And as part of the United States, Puerto Ricans have existed within the U.S. racial matrix. Black Puerto Rican U.S. soldiers fought in segregated units, and Puerto Ricans who migrated to the mainland tended to live in segregated communities adjacent to, or along with, African Americans. White-skinned Puerto Ricans, on the other hand, could at times be assimilated into whiteness in the new mother country.

And yet, it would be false to suggest that the racial matrix on the island is identical to the United States. Though colorism existed and exists, racialization is much more of a continuum there, with a common general discourse around being a people who are racially mixed. Perhaps that is why Puerto Rico, as a country, is racialized in relation to the United States. Despite the fact that the average brown of Puerto Ricans’ skin is lighter than the average brown of African Americans,’ and that there are white Puerto Ricans, it is nevertheless an identity that figures as racially “other.”

In the history of debates around its status, Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans have often been subject to pernicious racial stereotypes. To this day, there is a racial valence to Puerto Rican islanders’ partial U.S. citizenship status. The country of Puerto Rico exists as a possession. It has a local legislature, but the U.S. president has the authority to veto any law passed by that legislature, and the U.S. Congress can override any action it takes. The economy of the island is controlled by the United States, as is the military.

In my visits to Puerto Rico through the years, I could see both common ground and a clear distinction between African American and Puerto Rican histories. Hurricane Fiona has reminded me of this relationship.

More than 240,000 Puerto Rican islanders remain without electricity following Hurricane Fiona, nearly two weeks after the storm hit. Many still have no water. On the island, people are undoubtedly anxious that recovery from the disaster will drag on as it did in the aftermath of Hurricane María. Nearly 3,000 deaths were attributable to the impact of the 2017 storm; Puerto Ricans on the island went for months without basic needs met, living in the dark. And, for many, María echoed yet another event: Hurricane Katrina, which disproportionately devastated Black and poor residents of New Orleans and the U.S. Gulf Coast 17 years ago.

In the wake of Hurricane Ian’s wreckage in Florida, it is worth mentioning that Florida is the state with the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans in the United States, and that notwithstanding the multiculturalism and multilingualism of that state, racial inequality persists across varying identities. Sadly, I expect that as with Katrina, we will witness racially disproportionate impacts and recovery efforts from Ian on the mainland, as well as distinctions between the responses to Hurricanes Fiona and Ian.

Sometimes, the cascade of natural disasters that are exacerbated by a history of inequality feels endless: Hurricanes Irma in St. Thomas and Harvey in Houston, earthquakes in Haiti, and so on. Although the circumstances are different, there is a pattern that unites them. Places directly shaped by the history of the transatlantic slave trade, which also continue to be occupied largely by descendants of African and Indigenous people, are places that are often abandoned or disregarded in moments of crisis. At best, the response is inadequate.

Setting aside for a moment the question of whether Puerto Rico should be an independent nation or a state (which admittedly is a complicated question deserving of far more exegesis than I have room for here), it is controlled by our country. And yet, the United States consistently fails to treat its citizens in Puerto Rico fairly. Just as Jim Crow created a formal second-class citizenship that continues to be evident in persistent racial inequality, so too does the status of the island as an unincorporated territory. And the discrimination faced by Puerto Ricans in the United States and on the island today is both structural and cultural. It is also unjust.

This speaks to why, when I wrote a book about the South, I wrote about the region not just in terms of the history of British colonialism and U.S. nation building, but also as the product of competing European empires. The South is the child of Spain and France too, and profoundly connected to the parts of the settler-colonial enterprise that we now refer to as the Caribbean and Latin America.

Last week, the news coverage of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral dwarfed the disaster in Puerto Rico. Of course it did. Because the hierarchies of humanity, the ideas about whose life matters most that were formally enacted in the age of conquest, remain everywhere we turn.

As much as we go on and on about citizen and noncitizen status in this country, all citizens are not treated equally, nor are all noncitizens. Queen Elizabeth, for example, is no more a citizen than the undocumented person preparing the food you order. And I say that as the descendant of enslaved noncitizens.

As a descendant of Jim Crow, I insist that the people on the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico are no less deserving of disaster relief than the New Yorkers who faced Hurricane Sandy, or the Floridians presently recovering from the catastrophic blow of Hurricane Ian. There should be no such second-class citizenship. I am not a native Spanish speaker, but  I recognize intimately the land and inheritance of Puerto Rico.

This week, I taught Piri Thomas’s classic 1967 Afro Puerto Rican memoir, Down These Mean Streets, in my “Diversity in Black America” class at Princeton. In that class, we are thinking about what it means to be Black in the United States, as people who are identified as Black have always had multiple identities. Likewise, we are troubling what being “American” means alongside being racialized. And we are doing so, now, in the middle of what is called “Hispanic Heritage Month.”

While it is quite common for Americans to reference the growing number of Hispanic and Latinx people in our country, it is all too uncommon for us to pay attention to the centuries-old relationship between Spanish- and English-speaking empires and their offspring. What I learned in the fold of an Afro Puerto Rican family is that, whether or not we acknowledge them, we live within the complex yet common relations produced by our pasts. And we carry the weight of our shared sins, and the beauty of our common struggles for justice. As we turn to offering support to our people who are hurting from the ravages of storms, let’s not forget our people in Puerto Rico.

Imani Perry is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Unsettled Territory. Perry is also the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, and her most recent book is South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.