Petro-States: Race, Fossil Fuels, and Disaster in Puerto Rico and Diaspora

In the devastating aftermath of September 2017’s category-five hurricanes María and Irma, Puerto Rico’s antiquated energy infrastructure was left in total ruins. Although Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) electricians worked endlessly to restore power, and local communities launched their own renewable energy initiatives, the blackout lasted 11 months, serving as one of the longest and deadliest blackouts in history.

Roadblocks to Renewable Energy

While the destruction of Puerto Rico’s energy grid galvanized discourse about the need for a transition toward more resilient and renewable electricity infrastructure, dependence on fossil fuels has since become further entrenched in the archipelago. In 2018, former governor Ricardo Rossello declared that PREPA, a state-owned electric company, would be denationalized and undergo total privatization. In June 2021, LUMA Energy, a joint subsidiary of Canada’s ATCO Group and Texas’ Quanta Services Inc., acquired control over the transmission and distribution of power. And in 2023, Genera PR, a subsidiary of New York’s New Fortress Energy, began managing the archipelago’s energy production.

The privatization of Puerto Rico’s energy system failed to bring cheaper and more reliable service as promised. Instead, residents and small businesses pay nearly twice as much for electricity as the U.S. population (despite a poverty rate “three times as high as the 12. 6% of the U.S. population overall that lived below the poverty level”) and continue to experience power outages regularly. The contract with LUMA gutted labor protections, including the influence of the Puerto Rico Electric and Irrigation Industry Workers Union (UTIER). Both LUMA and Genera PR now seek to expand natural gas production and usage, undermining the archipelago’s goal of reaching 40% renewable energy sources by 2025, as outlined in the 2019 Puerto Rico Energy Policy Act. 

 A 2020 U.S. Department of Energy study found that Puerto Rico could hypothetically meet the entire archipelago’s energy needs through rooftop solar panels. But in July 2024, the Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB), an unelected, U.S.-appointed committee with complete authority over Puerto Rico’s finances and governance, sued Gov. Pedro Pierlusi to terminate the archipelago’s net metering law. The law supports the use of rooftop solar panels for renewable energy generation by compensating residents for energy produced and fed into the grid by the panels on their homes. Together, FOMB and New Fortress Energy aim to thwart Puerto Rican residents’ struggle for vital solar power energy.

Puerto Rico remains far from realizing its renewable energy goals, with 94% of its electricity still generated by fossil fuels. And efforts to expand and democratize solar energy are increasingly threatened by the encroachment of private corporations, such as Tesla, hoping to profit off the renewable energy transition, and by “clean” technologies that are reliant on modern-day slavery and mineral extraction in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The battle for sustainable and renewable energy in Puerto Rico is emblematic of a broader and long-standing environmental struggle against imperial and local elites’ joint and, at times, conflicting efforts to seize and sell off the archipelago’s human and ecological resources. 

Uncovering the Links Between Race, Hydrocarbons, and Governance

Our climate crisis is often envisioned by the public as an unprecedented and contemporary phenomenon without historical antecedents. On the contrary, our climate crisis is the consequence of centuries of unending colonial capitalist resource extraction, land dispossession, and racialized labor exploitation. The rise of industrial empires and nation-states coincided with the emergence of fossil fuel energy and modern capitalism amidst the transition from slavery to ‘free’ labor. Accordingly, my dissertation seeks to challenge the perceived novelty of contemporary environmental degradation and energy colonialism to demonstrate how ecological destruction is the standard practice of colonial and imperial statecraft.

Tracking U.S. and Puerto Rican state-building projects across the 20th century, I explore how imperial and colonial legal, economic, and political state architecture has been designed to expropriate and siphon the energy capacities of land and labor toward the global economy. Focusing on the development of energy infrastructures and the petrochemical industry in Puerto Rico, I examine how the production and management of race, gender, capital, and energy has facilitated the toxic dispossession of land and life in the archipelago and the diaspora. At the same time, I am also interested in exploring how everyday Puerto Ricans have engaged in fugitive techno-scientific and ecological knowledge and practices of survival to navigate intensifying environmental degradation, and how these forms of refusal re/shape systems of power. 

With the financial support of the Wrigley Institute Graduate Fellowship, I have spent this summer analyzing an array of archival material—government planning records, corporate newsletters, ecological reports, and community organizing ephemera—from Archivo General de Puerto Rico and Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and from the Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora at Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York City. These archives have helped me begin to explore the links between race, hydrocarbons, and governance in Puerto Rico to contextualize how and why Afro-Puerto Rican communities in the Southern coastal region of the archipelago are disproportionately exposed to toxic pollution from fossil fuel energy plants.

During the mid-20th century, Puerto Rico underwent Operación Manos a la Obra (“Operation Bootstrap”), an extensive economic modernization program that swiftly transformed the economy from a rural, agriculture-based economy to an urban, industry-based economy centered on foreign investment. Throughout the state-sponsored industrialization program, Criollo elite—wealthy descendants of white Spanish settlers and planters—sought to represent Puerto Rico as a whitened nation, to demonstrate the archipelago’s racial capacity for self-governance and present it as a beacon of progress and modernity. 

Examining reports from the Economic Development Administration (EDA) and the Puerto Rican Industrial Development Company (PRIDCO),  I learned how the state relied on the residue of sugar plantation infrastructure to inaugurate the petrochemical industry. For instance, bagasse, a waste byproduct of sugar refining, is a substrate of ethanol and was used to generate energy.

Additionally, I observed how the rhetoric of thermodynamics was wedded to the economic discourse of productivity and value creation. To craft an “industrial way of life,” state planners sought to make the petrochemicals industry the “nucleus” that bonds all other industries in the archipelago. They argued that this industrial ecology could not be achieved “by diffusing [their] energy all over the place” but by “concentrat[ing] on a nucleus,” whereby the waste products of the petrochemical industry would serve as the raw materials and finished products of another industry. Hence, the state concentrated oil refineries and petrochemical manufacturers along the Southern coast to generate low-cost electric power. The goal was to attract industries and cheap sources of petrochemical raw materials for the existing textile industry and future downstream, intermediate, and finished-goods industries, such as nylon, motor gasoline, plant fertilizer, and aromatics.

Built from and upon the ruins of sugar plantations, this petro-industrial complex—an infrastructural circuit of petrochemical manufacturing, fossil fuel-based energy generation, and related downstream industries—operated as a mode of toxic enclosure to expropriate and ruin Afro-Puerto Rican land and labor. Perceived as a site of surplus, idle labor and wasted land, the Southern coast was demarcated as a sacrifice zone. In this region, petrochemical industrial and hydrocarbon energy infrastructure rendered Afro-Puerto Ricans vulnerable to noxious chemicals to fuel the archipelago’s industrial economy, the formation of criollo whiteness, and elites’ speculative aspirations to bring the archipelago into whitened, neo/liberal modernity. 

Toward a Better Future: Youth and Legal Action

My archival research has also shown how Puerto Rican youth organized against chemical-waste dumping in their communities in the United States. Following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OAPEC’s) oil embargo on the United States, Puerto Rico’s petrochemical industry saw a rapid decline. A chapter of my dissertation traces the flows of petro-capital and industrial labor to the United States in the wake of these industries’ downfalls. Oil corporations operating in the archipelago located refineries and waste facilities in diasporic Puerto Rican neighborhoods.

But between the late 1970s and early 1990s, amidst a growing environmental justice movement that acknowledged the disproportionate impact of industrial pollution and contamination on working-class communities of color, U.S.-based Puerto Rican organizers took to the streets. One organization I have been studying is the grassroots youth activist collective The Toxic Avengers. Named after the 1984 superhero film, The Toxic Avengers began as an environmental science class for Puerto Rican and Latinx teenagers at El Puente Community Center in 1987 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At the time, the Greenpoint-Williamsburg neighborhood had a high concentration of manufacturing industries and served as a significant storage and distribution center for petrochemical products and natural gas.

Concerned with pollution and the environmental welfare of their neighborhood, The Toxic Avengers began to investigate Radiac Corporation, a radioactive waste facility that was storing and dumping lethal chemicals in a residential area, thus presenting extreme fire and health hazards. The investigation turned into a successful campaign that mobilized the community and forced the company to clean up the waste ground, ultimately garnering city- and nation-wide attention.

Along with the intersection of race and class, age was a critical lens through which The Toxic Avengers viewed their own environmental activism. They saw combatting “adultism,” the patterns of powerlessness adults assign to and instill within youth, as necessary to animating and empowering individuals to resist oppression and serve as stewards of their own ecological futures. 

More recently, Caribbean nations including Puerto Rico have pursued legal action to hold Big Oil accountable for the industry’s significant role in climate change. In November 2022, 37 municipalities in Puerto Rico filed the first multi-billion-dollar class-action RICO lawsuit against major oil corporations, alleging joint collusion in a “fraudulent marketing scheme to convince consumers that their fossil fuel-based products did not–and would not–alter the climate, knowing full well the consequences of their combined carbon pollution on Puerto Rico.” And in July 2024, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico filed a $1 billion lawsuit against the same oil corporations for deceiving Puerto Rican consumers about the environmental impact of fossil fuels, despite decades of industry knowledge around the detrimental consequences of greenhouse gas emissions on global warming and sea-level rises.

Both lawsuits seek financial compensation for hydrocarbon-fueled environmental disasters: the former aims to recuperate damages from hurricanes Maria and Irma, and the latter seeks to regain past costs from environmental recovery efforts and contribute to a fund for bolstering public infrastructure that could mitigate future environmental degradation. What will come from these groundbreaking lawsuits, and how Puerto Rico’s colonial condition will inevitably shape these cases, is to be determined. Nevertheless, in order to craft just and effective remedies to avert climate and ecological crises, it is necessary to confront the entangled histories of colonial racial capitalism and environmental disasters, particularly as communities of color across the Global North and South are rendered most vulnerable to its devastating effects.

I am thankful to the Wrigley Institute Graduate Fellowship for supporting my professional development and intellectual endeavors. It has been an incredibly generative opportunity to form connections with the budding scholars across the humanities and sciences, as well as practitioners in journalism, curatorship, and policymaking who are dedicated to sustainability and climate justice. Mitigating our climate crisis and realizing alternative solutions to the present order of things requires such a concerted and coalitional effort.

Jaden Morales is supported by the USC Dornsife Wrigley Institute Graduate Fellowship.

Read their op-ed on North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA): The Struggle for Energy Sovereignty in Puerto Rico’s Gubernatorial Elections