ABSTRACT
Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017. Still under US sovereign control, the disaster left by Hurricane Maria brought international attention to the unequal power relations between the island and the US federal government. Five years after the storm, the island is still dealing with the storm’s impact. In the wake of Hurricane Maria, grassroots organizations championed recovery efforts for Puerto Rico centred on climate justice and agroecology. The work presented in this chapter exposes and critiques the inequities faced by Puerto Ricans and captures the lived experiences, meaning, and interpretations of the persons most directly affected by the disaster. It also advances discourse for those seeking to comprehend how climate justice mobilization and everyday acts of resistance provide a means to resist oppression and envision a just future. The findings presented here are the result of a mixed-methods qualitative case study with data triangulated from participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and content and discourse analysis. In this chapter I pose two questions: How can people ensure their communities are sustainable and resilient in the face of future climate disasters, and what does that process entail? And, why is agroecology so important to the people of Puerto Rico? To answer the first question, I draw from the Collective Agency and Community Resilience framework to explain the processes of scaling up agroecology to promote climate-resilient sustainable communities. Using interviews from activists and farmers on the island, I respond to the second question with an ethnographic approach highlighting that agroecology in Puerto Rico is a tool for decolonization and sovereignty and is an inclusive, woman-led movement.
