Making Livable Worlds

Brings to life Afro-Puerto Rican women’s creative struggles for environmental justice

Winner of the 2022 Frank Bonilla Book Award, sponsored by the Puerto Rican Studies Association

Winner of the 2022 Gregory Bateson Book Prize, sponsored by the Society for Cultural Anthropology

Brings to life Afro-Puerto Rican women’s creative struggles for environmental justice

When Hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pummeled by economic austerity, political upheaval, and environmental calamities. To navigate these multiple ongoing crises, Afro–Puerto Rican women have drawn from their cultural knowledge to engage in daily improvisations that enable their communities to survive and thrive. Their life-affirming practices, developed and passed down through generations, offer powerful modes of resistance to gendered and racialized exploitation, ecological ruination, and deepening capitalist extraction. Through solidarity, reciprocity, and an ethics of care, these women create restorative alternatives to dispossession to produce good, meaningful lives for their communities.

Making Livable Worlds weaves together autobiography, ethnography, interviews, memories, and fieldwork to recast narratives that continuously erase Black Puerto Rican women as agents of social change. In doing so, Lloréns serves as an “ethnographer of home” as she brings to life the powerful histories and testimonies of a marginalized, disavowed community that has been treated as disposable.

Hilda Lloréns is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family: Framing Nation, Race, and Gender during the American Century (Lexington Books, 2014) and Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice (UWP 2021).

Hilda Lloréns is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Rhode Island and author of Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family: Framing Nation, Race, and Gender during the American Century.

"Making Livable Worlds is perhaps one of the most important texts to have come out in the aftermaths of Hurricanes Irma and Maria. While it certainly looks to the past as others have, it is Lloréns’ and her informants’ insistence in looking towards the future at other possible Puerto Ricos and worlds that makes it such a significant read."

"[P]rovides valuable insight on how capitalism, slavery, matriarchal dispossession, ecological crises, and colonization relate to Afro-Puerto Rican women’s lives, and models liberatory responses to these oppressive circumstances, empowering the reader to engage in further action toward similar goals of collective liberation."

"Scholars of social reproduction and the solidarity economy will find Lloréns’s case study useful for understanding how alternative economic logics develop and flourish under adversity."

"Lloréns’ ambitious book skillfully weaves her personal and her family history with the histories of other Black Puerto Rican women in the coastal southeast part of Puerto Rico."

"Powerful and beautifully written, Making Livable Worlds opens an ecofeminist archive that invites researchers to extend this kind of study to other islands. It also provides inspiration on how to undertake this task with such methods as autoethnography, which will hopefully become more ingrained in the toolbox of young Caribbeanist scholars. One of the most important attributes of this work is that we hear through Lloréns myriad voices presented not as heroines or victims but as women making the best out of their imposed dispossession."

"The primary strength of Lloréns’s book rests in the intimacy that she brings to excavating the troubling environmental injustices Black Puerto Rican women have to live under even as they struggle against marginalization...Making Livable Worlds is a timely and necessary examination of the growing crisis in environmental justice and other cultural issues such as gender, race, and the effects of colonialism."

"For those designing undergraduate and graduate courses in Puerto Rican Studies, Latinx Studies, and Ethnic Studies and seeking readings that present innovative methodological and epistemological contributions, Hilda Lloréns’ Making Livable Worlds is highly recommended. The work invites spirited and engaging classroom discussions that promote expanded thinking in written work. Beyond the classroom, Lloréns’s methodology and nuanced treatment of too often simplified contested concepts make all-important contributions to these fields of study. Her serious attention to the daily work and interventions of Black and Afro-Puerto Rican women to make livable worlds in the here and now and for coming generations addresses gaping holes in environmental justice-minded Puerto Rican Studies, Latinx Studies, and Ethnic Studies"

"With memories and stories at the forefront, the book is a magisterial contribution to the discipline of anthropology."

"A remarkable book, firmly grounded in ordinary—yet extraordinary—Black Puerto Rican women’s everyday eco-feminism, and informed by important interventions that diverse Afro-descendant feminists have made in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States."—Faye V. Harrison, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"By centering her own experience and the voices of the Afro-Puerto Rican women, Lloréns makes an essential empirical and theoretical intervention."—Miranda Martinez, Ohio State University

"An ambitious narrative that makes a significant contribution to the recent history of Puerto Rico, the emergent environmental movement, and how Black Puerto Rican women have been agents of social change as community leaders, mothers, workers, and storytellers."—Maura Toro-Morn, Illinois State University