Fantasy Island
Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
An “urgent, fascinating, and impassioned” (Daniel Immerwahr) history of Puerto Rico’s 122 years as a colony of the United States
Since its acquisition by the US in 1898, Puerto Rico has served as a testing ground for the most aggressive and exploitative US economic, political, and social policies. The devastation that ensued finally grew impossible to ignore in 2017, in the wake of Hurricane María, as the physical destruction compounded the infrastructure collapse and trauma inflicted by the debt crisis. In Fantasy Island, Ed Morales traces how, over the years, Puerto Rico has served as a colonial satellite, a Cold War Caribbean showcase, a dumping ground for US manufactured goods, and a corporate tax shelter. He also shows how it has become a blank canvas for mercenary experiments in disaster capitalism on the frontlines of climate change, hamstrung by internal political corruption and the US federal government's prioritization of outside financial interests.
Taking readers from San Juan to New York City and back to his family's home in the Luquillo Mountains, Morales shows us the machinations of financial and political interests in both the US and Puerto Rico, and the resistance efforts of Puerto Rican artists and activists. Through it all, he emphasizes that the only way to stop Puerto Rico from being bled is to let Puerto Ricans take control of their own destiny, going beyond the statehood-commonwealth-independence debate to complete decolonization.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Morales (Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture) begins this eye-opening economic and political history by asserting that when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September 2017, the Category 5 storm did more than down power lines and flatten homes it "laid bare the racist colonialism with which the United States has often administered" the island. Morales traces the history of that colonialism to the Insular Cases, a series of Supreme Court rulings issued in 1901 that codified Puerto Rico's status as an unincorporated territory, and to the 1917 Jones Act, which granted Puerto Ricans a limited form of U.S. citizenship while exempting the island's bonds from federal, local, and state taxes, effectively setting the stage for the rampant speculation that helped to create the debt crisis a century later. Morales's high-level economic analysis will be heavy lifting for nonexperts, but he argues persuasively that federal interventions such as Operation Bootstrap, a mid-century program to industrialize the local economy, and the 2016 Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act, which created a White House appointed board to oversee the island's debt restructuring, have been disastrous for Puerto Ricans. Morales's preferred solution is "independence with reparations"; his technical yet impassioned polemic will persuade those with a keen interest in the subject.
