Flashbacks and Foreshadows at the Ends of Empire: Lessons from the Periphery to a Collapsing Center

Figure 1.

Eli eli borícua. By Evelyn María Dean-Olmsted.

August 17, 2017. I drafted this version of Hannah Szenes's famous Hebrew poem from a sweltering apartment in the overgrown, semi-abandoned faculty housing at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. ¹ Playing in my head was the popular melodic version composed by David Zahavi, a staple of Holocaust commemorations. I was recovering from illness and a devastating semester of huelga, a student-led strike that paralyzed the university and shuttered my young children's affiliated schools for over 70 days. The students' protest actions were more than justified. Earlier that year, a federally imposed fiscal control board threatened to halve the university's already shrunken budget in order to satisfy the Wall Street bondholders that held most of the island's 74-billion-dollar debt. Such a move was also in line with the anti-university proclivities of local right-wing political sectors, including the now disgraced, then Governor Riccardo Rossello. But the strike took heavy tolls. The macho bungling of the non-faculty employee's union, coupled with an administration that evaporated into silence, created an experience that even my therapist labeled traumatic. After scrambling to make up the semester—improvising distance learning while catching bronchitis on a research trip to Mexico—I was depleted: not just from the strike, my illness, and the new mode of teaching (sound familiar yet?), but from the stifling weight of perpetual calamity that is life in twenty-first-century Puerto Rico. "The crisis generation" is how political scientist Mayra Vélez Serrano dubbed our students, because it is all they've known. ² Having only arrived in Río Piedras four years earlier in 2013 to start my first full-time academic position, it felt like I'd arrived at the end of the party. It felt like a lot of beautiful things were ending.

Not a month later, the situation would come to a head (one of many, monstrous heads) with Hurricane María in September 2017. The compounded crises eventually compelled my family, like hundreds of thousands of others, to leave Puerto Rico a year later, in summer 2018. ^{3 4} The parallel crisis in academia compelled me, like thousands of others, to exit faculty life altogether.

Now, as I watch the coronavirus disaster unfold from my new home in Miami—including the falling of centuries-old dominoes of racial injustice, in the words of Trevor Noah ⁵ —I and all who lived in Puerto Rico during this time experience an uncanny sense of déjà vu. In May 2020, I shared a meme on Facebook created by a local Puerto Rican artist. ⁶ The caption reads, "Puerto Ricans, looking at how Americans are being left to die by their own government during a national emergency." ⁷ The image, drawn from a still of the film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, features a noosed cowboy (played by James Franco) grinning from the gallows and asking the man weeping next to him: "First time?" "Second time if you count New Orleans as America, although most of America didn't at the time," my colleague Edie Wolfe from Tulane chimed in. ⁸

The gaslighting. The victim-blaming. The demands to get back to work at all costs. In the rush to reopen economies, we hear the slogan screamed from government-sponsored radio spots and billboards: ¡Puerto Rico se levanta! Puerto Rico rises! Meanwhile, the bodies pile up in the hospitals. Anyone from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) could have told you how states would treat their universities; administrations, their employees; and some faculty, their students. We could have told you what would happen to women's careers. And we could have told you how police would react to protests. ⁹ (Though in the competition for brutality, the US officers can certainly put their Puerto Rican counterparts to shame.) A disaster novice, I once concluded that such blatantly inhumane responses were...