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Devastating hurricanes, deteriorating infrastructure, massive public debt, and a global pandemic make up the continuous crises that plague Puerto Rico. In the last several years, this disastrous escalation has placed the archipelago more centrally on the radar of residents and politicians in the United States, as the US Congress established an oversight board with emergency powers to ensure Puerto Rico's economic survival—and its ability to repay its debt. These events should not be understood as a random string of compounding misfortune. Rather, as demonstrated by Jose Atiles in Crisis by Design, they result from the social, legal, and political structure of colonialism. Moreover, Atiles shows how administrations, through emergency powers and laws paired with the dynamics of wealth extraction, have served to sustain and exacerbate crises. He explores the role of the local government, corporations, and grassroots mobilizations. More broadly, the Puerto Rican case provides insight into the role of law and emergency powers in other global south, Caribbean, and racialized and colonized countries. In these settings, Atiles contends, colonialism is the ongoing catastrophe.
Available for the first time in English, Cruz Miguel Ortiz Cuadra's magisterial history of the foods and eating habits of Puerto Rico unfolds into an examination of Puerto Rican society from the Spanish conquest to the present. Each chapter is centered on an iconic Puerto Rican foodstuff, from rice and cornmeal to beans, roots, herbs, fish, and meat. Ortiz shows how their production and consumption connects with race, ethnicity, gender, social class, and cultural appropriation in Puerto Rico. Using a multidisciplinary approach and a sweeping array of sources, Ortiz asks whether Puerto Ricans really still are what they ate. Whether judging by a host of social and economic factors--or by the foods once eaten that have now disappeared--Ortiz concludes that the nature of daily life in Puerto Rico has experienced a sea change.
This volume is a theoretically informed comparative analysis of the telecommunications and information policy-making process in two major developing economies, China and India. With a focus on how policies are made rather than what those policies are, the book investigates how policy actors interact within institutional structures to define policy problems and identify potential solutions. The authors explain the evolution of these policy-making systems as the two countries liberalized their economies and opened their media and telecommunications systems to competition over the past two-and-a-half decades. With applications in numerous international contexts, this book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in public policy studies, telecommunications, business, development economics, political science, Asian studies, and public administration.
The News Media in Puerto Rico offers a synopsis as well as a critical analysis of the Island’s news media system, with emphasis on the political and economic factors that most influence how the media operate. The authors also document the impact of Hurricane Maria on the media structures and the changing media landscape given the political, economic and colonial strictures. Building on interviews with news media professionals, the book further presents detailed insights about journalism and journalism education in these times of crises. The final chapters include theoretical frameworks and methodological guidelines for the analysis of other colonial, post-colonial and neo-colonial media systems, with research recommendations valuable for future studies of the Island’s media as well as for cross-national comparisons. This book will be an essential read for students and scholars interested in learning not only about the Puerto Rican and Latin American mass media, but also the media systems of other colonial/neo-colonial countries.
This book tackles the infodemic—the rapid, widespread diffusion of false, misleading, or inaccurate information about the disease and its ramifications—triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. With a focus on four Asian societies, the book compares and analyzes the spread of COVID-19 misinformation and its broad impacts on the public in Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Singapore. Providing both a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon of misinformation and cross-societal analyses of patterns, the book features in-depth analyses of the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation and engagement and explores its consequences in an Asian context. The book sheds lights on these key questions: What type...
Jeremy Brecher’s Strike! narrates the dramatic story of repeated, massive, and sometimes violent revolts by ordinary working people in America. Involving nationwide general strikes, the seizure of vast industrial establishments, nonviolent direct action on a massive scale, and armed battles with artillery and tanks, this exciting hidden history is told from the point of view of the rank-and-file workers who lived it. Encompassing the repeated repression of workers’ rebellions by company-sponsored violence, local police, state militias, and the U.S. Army and National Guard, it reveals a dimension of American history rarely found in the usual high school or college history course. Since it...
Natural disasters and the dire effects of climate change cause massive population displacements and lead to some of the most intractable political and humanitarian challenges seen today. Yet, as Maria Cristina Garcia observes in this critical history of U.S. policy on migration in the Global South, there is actually no such thing as a "climate refugee" under current U.S. law. Most initiatives intended to assist those who must migrate are flawed and ineffective from inception because they are derived from outmoded policies. In a world of climate change, U.S. refugee policy simply does not work. Garcia focuses on Central America and the Caribbean, where natural disasters have repeatedly worsen...
A panoramic history of Puerto Rico from pre-Columbian times to today Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking territory of the United States with a history shaped by conquest and resistance. For centuries, Puerto Ricans have crafted and negotiated complex ideas about nationhood. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo provides a new history of Puerto Rico that gives voice to the archipelago’s people while offering a lens through which to understand the political, economic, and social challenges confronting them today. In this masterful work of scholarship, Meléndez-Badillo sheds light on the vibrant cultures of the archipelago in the centuries before the arrival of Columbus and captures the full sweep of Puert...
This book addresses the issues raised by digital platforms in the Global South, with an emphasis on the cultural stakes involved. It brings together an interdisciplinary team of researchers – including political economists, socio-economists, geographers, media sociologists or anthropologists – who each explore these issues through an insightful case study at a local, national, regional or international scale. While studying the strategies of some of the main US-based Big Tech platforms or video streaming platforms towards the Global South, the chapters also consider the often-neglected active role local or regional actors play in the expansion of those Western digital players, and highli...
Challenges the framing of Puerto Rican cultural politics as a dichotomy between nationalism and colonialism. Discussions of Puerto Rican cultural politics usually fall into one of two categories, nationalist or colonialist. Puerto Rican Jam moves beyond this narrow dichotomy, elaborating alternatives to dominant postcolonial theories, and includes essays written from the perspectives of groups that are not usually represented, such as gays and lesbians, youth, blacks, and women. Among the topics discussed are the limitations of nationalism as a transformative and democratizing political discourse, the contradictory impact of American colonialism, language politics, and the 1928 U.S. congressional hearings on women's suffrage in Puerto Rico.