ABSTRACT
This essay offers an ecocritical interpretation of Mayra Santos-Febres’s novel Nuestra Señora de la Noche (2006, Our Lady of the Night). Drawing on the work of Rob Nixon and Greta Gaard, I argue that the novel’s protagonist, a woman of color named Isabel Luberza Oppenheimer, exemplifies the environmentalism of poor women of color in twentieth-century Puerto Rico. Luberza impedes the slow violence of industrial development by refusing to sell land she owns on the banks of the Portuguese River in the impoverished neighborhood of San Antón in Ponce. Santos-Febres’s protagonist uses her Afro-diasporic spirituality, ecological sensitivity, and sense of community to resist the exploitation of the river and the displacement of vulnerable local residents.
