I am currently interested in understanding how rural communities and farmers in Northern Ireland organize and navigate the complexities Brexit and the changes to the Northern Ireland Protocol suppose for their livelihoods. Broadly my work looks at the relationships between social movements, nationalism, rural politics, and sovereignty in times of political and climate instability. I am also working on two additional projects in Puerto Rico. The first one tries to look at how communities in Puerto Rico are relying on energy transformations to imagine and build political projects. My secondary research strand on Puerto Rico, looks at how the Puerto Rico New Song Movement (PRNSM) documents and participates of Puerto Rico’s environmental movement since the 1960s.

In the past a research assistant to Dr. Manuel Valdés Pizzini, a cultural anthropologist affiliated with the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of the Coast (CIEL) at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. Initially, my work here was to document and understand the historical changes the Puerto Rican coast had undergone since the nineteenth century. However, in 2017, two months after beginning to work with Valdés Pizzini, Hurricane María devastated Puerto Rico. After the storm, my work transformed into a systematic understanding of how communities survive under dire conditions. I had the opportunity to visit  and collaborate with different communities and documented how they survived the complex and challenging reconstruction processes. I prepared and distributed educational material for coastal communities and fishers. The idea was not to tell them how to organize, but to be a facilitator and help them feel empowered through communication, information, and support.  

RESEARCH INTERESTS

The Caribbean, Atlantic Europe, Northern Ireland, Social Movements, Historical Anthropology, Political Anthropology, Nationalism, Political Economy, Sovereignty, Critical Agrarian Studies

RESEARCH PROJECTS

1. Old Passions, New Protocols: Agricultural Politics in Northern Ireland after Brexit

On June 23rd, 2016, the United Kingdom voted, by a thin majority, to exit the European Union, leading to an event known as Brexit (Wilson 2020, 23). For areas such as Northern Ireland (NI) and its borderlands with the Republic of Ireland (ROI), meant a life-threatening matter as a long and complex road to peace has been achieved after decades of ethnoreligious conflict in the region. Although more than seven years have passed since these results were posted, the negotiations and intricacies of Brexit still need to be discovered.

For many specialists, Brexit, threatened the peace that had been achieved after decades of ethnoreligious conflict in the region.  During this period of conflict in NIR, between 1969 to 1998, known as the Troubles, the region saw ethnoreligious conflict between Catholics, usually referred to as those of Irish descent, and Protestants, people of Scottish or English descent (Wilson 2020; Ketonen 2019a, b; Donnan 2017; Kelleher 2006). A complex sociopolitical landscape is emerging in NIR as the UK, and the EU negotiate the Northern Ireland Protocol. This agreement aims to ensure that the relationship between NIR and the ROI is not affected and that the commodities that flow between these regions do not go through customs checks. However, the modifications to the Northern Ireland Protocol are not the only ruptures Brexit has caused. As commodities face higher tariffs and customs checks, Brexit also disrupted the movement of people, such as agricultural workers, access to markets beyond the UK, and the subsidies the EU offers farmers and for rural development (Creamer et al. 2017). NIR is a crucial site where anthropology could deepen its understanding of nationalism, sovereignty, borders, agropolitics, community-based organization, and the flow of commodities.

This research project analyzes how farming communities in Northern Ireland organize and navigate the complexities of Brexit, the Northern Ireland Protocol, and the transformation of the Common Agricultural Policy by the British State. Consequently, my main research questions are: 1) How will farming communities in Northern Ireland deal with new barriers to trade and the loss of E.U. funding? and 2) How are popular understandings of sovereignty in these communities shifting in response to the emergence of new border relations between the E.U. and the U.K.? As stated earlier, my project aims to understand the historical processes and dynamics that have molded the development of farming communities and the ongoing political tensions in NIR.

2. Energizing an Archipelago: Transforming the Energy Matrix as Self-Governance in Puerto Rico

On September 20th, 2017, Puerto Rico was impacted by a category 4-almost 5 hurricanes that devastated the archipelago’s electrical grid affecting its critical infrastructure like public health, communication, and food security, which complicated the reconstruction process. The archipelago’s devastated social and critical infrastructure, which was reconstructed due to state-sponsored modernization, industrialization, and development processes, made the reconstruction process long, complicated, and unfinished for many communities. The panorama that emerged almost obligated many community and environmental organizations, particularly on both coastal and mountainous regions, to take charge of their localized recovery processes if they were going to survive in the absence of governmental support.

For organizations like Casa Pueblo, located on the municipality of Adjuntas, the solution was to rely on solar-generated energy to help their communities survive. By acting as an “electrical oasis” they assisted vulnerable residents by preserving their medicines, charging their telephones and medical equipment, and communicating news from the local and state government. These self-governance strategies have allowed them to make the energy independence, or energy insurrection, of the municipality one of their top priorities (Massol Deyá 2019, 2020). They are not only preparing for future atmospheric events, such as Hurricane Fiona that impacted Puerto Rico on September 18th, 2022, but also to ongoing efforts to privatize the Electrical Energy Authority, the state-owned grid. For example, after the summer of 2021, the government of Puerto Rico transferred the management of the distribution infrastructure to the company LUMA, while the state only oversees the production of electricity.

This project, has the goal of understanding how community and environmental organizations in the mountainous regions of Puerto Rico, such as Casa Pueblo in Adjuntas, rely on and promote the transformation of the energy matrix as a means for survival in times of political and environmental uncertainties. It will also study how energopolitics, defined as “power over (and through) energy” (Boyer 2011), transform self-governance strategies in Puerto Rico, sovereignty, community development strategies, and the historical process of energization of Puerto Rico. The main question that guides this project is, how is renewable energy becoming part of the mission of community and environmental organizations like Casa Pueblo? Other questions that arise in this work are: (1) How do these organizations, like Casa Pueblo, promote community development using solar energy and related infrastructure? (2) What can the state-sponsored rural electrification process of Adjuntas explain about the current state of the energy infrastructure of the municipality? and (3) How renewable energy creates and modifies discourse of sovereignty for these organizations?

3. The Times They Are A-Changin’: The Puerto Rican New Song Movement and Its Relationship with Modern Environmentalism in Puerto Rico

The Puerto Rican New Song Movement (PRNSM) surged in the 1960s, as part of a global phenomenon of cultural and political movements that were against imperialism, racism, the Vietnam War, and, among other things, environmental degradation. They were against the political status of Puerto Rico (the Commonwealth or Estado Libre Asociado, a reformed colonial status), the occupation of the islands Vieques and Culebra by the Navy of the United States of America, the transformation of the Puerto Rican landscape and natural resources, and the mining projects; while rearticulating through song-making the demands of the student marches in the University of Puerto Rico, the working class, anticolonial discourse, and the modern environmental groups. As a musical movement, the PRSNM contributed to distinctive social movements by documenting and reimagining these struggles and by participating actively in these events both on the Island and the diaspora (Cancel Bigay 2021). In this project I pay careful attention to how they construct an environmental discourse and praxis. These texts will be approached as part of an environmental culture, defined by Juan Giusti Cordero (2016) as a: “group of norms, practices, and values of the civil society that are diffused but very real and are created from the ‘the outside’ by people for the insertion on particular social context and also generated from ‘the inside,’ meaning particular experiences and practices” (730). In addition, an environmental culture should look at how humans relate to their natural environment. However, not only is the PRNSM an environmental cultural product, but it also creates an environmental discourse and advocates for environmental justice. The PRNSM makes clear that there was not only one environmental discourse or only one type of artistic activism. The songs studied will be divided into three major categories related to the environment: the exploitation and modification of the Puerto Rican landscape, the occupation and destruction of the ecosystems in Vieques and Culebra, and the mining projects.