pez-Santiago
Angel Lo
THE ANTILLEAN LEAGUE
Abstract
This article argues that the passage of Irma and
Mar
ıa—the two destructive hurricanes of September
2017 that brought so much death and destruction to
the Caribbean islands—offers us a chance to reas-
sess the political relevance of the old idea of a regio-
nal Antillean League. After revisiting the historical
ideas of the Confederaci
on Antillana, a political
pan-regional union spearheaded by Puerto Rican
and Cuban revolutionaries during the late nineteenth
century, and the difficulties and complexities of the
West Indies Federation of the late 1950s, I argue
that an Antillean League is perhaps a more relevant
idea today than in the past, that it should be
thought of as a series of locally-rooted and intercon-
nected sovereign practices revolving primarily
around land control, and that the Caribbean diaspo-
ras living in the large urban centers in the West
have a fundamental role to play in this Antillean
League. The article revolves primarily around the
post-Mar
ıa experience in the island of Puerto
Rico. [Puerto Rico, Hurricane Mar
ıa, community
land trust, Antillean League, Caribbean diasporas]
September of 2017 saw the Caribbean suffering
two Category 5 hurricanes making landfall, with
devastating and fatal consequences for many of
the islands, and the entire region. It is the first
time, since record-keeping of such atmospheric
phenomena began in 1851, that two Category 5
hurricanes have made landfall in the Caribbean in
a single year. From Cuba to Barbuda, the hurri-
canes Irma and Mar
ıa brought death and destruc-
tion on a scale not seen in the region for over a
century.
Yet, it is not the first time that the region has
suffered such tragic devastation stemming from a
combination of natural phenomena and human-
made (in)actions. It is widely agreed, for example,
that on May 8, 1902, human greed, corruption,
and politics played a central role in creating the
conditions for the death of around thirty thousand
people on the island of Martinique when the
Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 26, Number 2, pp. 181–194, ISSN 1051-0559, electronic ISSN 1548-7466. © 2018 by the American
Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/traa.12131.
Mt. Pel
ee volcano erupted. A pyroclastic flow
engulfed the town of St. Pierre, reportedly killing
almost everyone in the city and leaving two known
survivors (Morgan-Witts and Thomas 2014;
Zebrowski 2002).
Given the unique post- and/or neo-colonial
type of political relationships and engagements
that most of the Caribbean have with more power-
ful and “developed” states—what Yarimar Bonilla
(2015) describes as the “North Atlantic” (the Uni-
ted States, France, the United Kingdom, and the
Netherlands)—it is widely expected that the bur-
den of responsibility to support these islands after
tragedy strikes should be shouldered by the domi-
nant partner in the relationship.1 It is almost as
natural as the hurricanes themselves to assume
that the controlling state in the colonial relation-
ship would be the responsible party in times of
tragedy such as the recent natural disasters that
have affected the region. Indeed, it can be argued
that timely aid-relief in times of natural disasters
is one of the justifying rationales for the unique
(neo-colonial) political dynamics that tie the differ-
ent islands together with more powerful states. As
part of an implicit colonial social contract, it is
generally agreed that so-called developed countries
with a long history of colonialism have continued
to retain legal, economic, and/or de facto control
over some of the islands’ politics and resources in
exchange for “protecting” them from enemies
internal and external, as well as natural disasters.
Although the “colonial social contract” that links
the diverse Antillean islands to European powers
and the United States is obviously more complex
than this, “protection” in exceptional times is, I
would argue, an implicit assumption. However, as
we saw from the lack of response to hurricanes
Irma and Mar
ıa, colonial states are showing that
this assumption of protection and responsibility is
one-sided. In the case of Donald Trump’s initial
refusal to lift the Jones Act to allow much-needed
supplies to reach the people of Puerto Rico, some
have described the response as not only negligent
but also cruel and genocidal. Carmen Yul
ın Cruz,
the mayor of Puerto Rico’s capital, San Juan,
181
called the United States’ botched response “some-
thing close to a genocide.”2
On the other hand, the lack of colonial
responsibility also opens up questions about other
alliances and affinities that might serve to assist
the vulnerable region. At different points in the
history of the Antillean islands, the idea of an
Antillean Confederation (Confederaci
on Antillana)
has been put forth to foster a sense of regional sol-
idarity and mutual support, and to protect the dif-
ferent islands from the common and persistent
threat of foreign intervention primarily (though
not exclusively) from North Atlantic powers
(Rama 1971, 10). Yet, although the main thrust of
the confederation idea has always been an explicit
political association to shield the region from the
colonial adventurism of the diverse North Atlantic
powers that still own territories in the Caribbean,
I suggest here that the type of natural disasters
seen in 2017 gives a new sense of urgency and rele-
vance to the idea of an Antillean Confederation.
What follows is a sketch of two distinct,
although interrelated, investigations. First, a
genealogical and historical examination of the idea
of an Antillean Confederation, and second, an
assessment of the pertinence of this idea in view of
the regional devastation brought about by the
human-made natural disasters of the deadly hurri-
canes in September 2017. Through a philosophical
approach to these concerns, I argue that the dev-
astation of the hurricanes of 2017, and the
botched response of the North Atlantic powers
that hold sovereignty over the impacted islands,
demonstrate the need to reexamine, under a new
light, the idea of an Antillean League.
There are several factors that further exacer-
bate the plight of the Antilles as a particularly vul-
nerable site of exploitation and disaster: (1)
Global warming will likely make these deadly hur-
ricanes a more common occurrence in the Carib-
bean; (2) the second-class citizenship status of
many of the (post- and neo-)colonial locals further
marginalize and disempower the economic, politi-
cal, and long-term health viability of the popula-
tion; (3) the islands are vulnerable targets of the
global frenzy for beach-front property and leisure
geographies for the wealthy.
All these processes together create difficult sit-
uations for the region as a whole. I argue that as
long as the islands keep behaving in the frag-
mented and alienated ways set in motion during
the early colonization of the region by European
powers, they will continue to be disappointed and
harmed by the lack of responsibility and support
182 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 26(2)
from the colonizers. I propose the Antillean Lea-
gue as part of the solution for a new vision and
movement forward. First and foremost, the Antil-
lean League would be a concerted and systematic
regional effort at self-defense and self-care, and
allow the islands to join together in solidarity to
find communal approaches to prepare for and sur-
vive natural and human-made disasters. By re-pur-
posing the old idea of an Antillean Confederation,
this essay shows how we must understand the tra-
gedy of the hurricanes of 2017 within a longer his-
tory and context. Moving away from a “politics of
disaster” (Twigg 2012) to a politics of decoloniza-
tion (Mignolo 2005, 2011; Quijano 2000; Twigg
2012), it contends that residents of the islands
(and their diasporas) should be at the center of
their own political destinies. Only in this way will
they be better prepared to, literally, weather the
storms, and, as Stuart Schwartz (2015, 68) argues,
be able to seize the “opportunities to rebuild anew
for the common good.”
THE HISTORY OF A MORE PERFECT
UNION
The idea of regional confederations south of the
R
ıo Grande is an old one, having been around
since at least the struggles for South American
independence. According to Carlos M. Rama
(1971), regional unitarian projects like la Gran
Colombia (1819–31), the Confederaci
on Peru-
Boliviana (1836–39), and the Confederaci
on de
Centroam
erica (1842–45) are at the root of the
idea of an Antillean Confederation (Basadre 1977;
Fermin 2012; Salcedo 2014).
Yet, the dream of a confederation is not exclu-
sively confined to Latin American lands or Span-
ish-speaking islands of the Caribbean. During the
1950s and 1960s, some of the islands of the region
—then-forming part of the British Crown—were
involved, led by the Crown itself, in an effort to
unite their administrative and political institutions.
This effort culminated in the short-lived West-
Indian Federation (1958–62). It involved the
islands of the British Leeward and Windward
Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and
Jamaica (Fraser 1994; James 1975; Mordecai
1968). On the other hand, the idea of a Caribbean
confederation was born around the 1860s within
the context of revolutionary struggles that sought
to make Cuba and Puerto Rico independent from
the Spanish Empire. However, the idea was trun-
cated by the decisive American intervention in
Cuba and Puerto Rico during the Spanish
American War of 1898 (Buscaglia 2015; Chaar-
P
erez 2013; Rama 1971).
The proposal of a West Indies Federation was
made popular during the 1930s thanks to the writ-
ings of influential intellectuals like C.L.R. James
(James 1975) and Theophilus Albert Marryshow,
but it is mostly played out during the 1940s, 1950s
and early 1960s propelled by a desire of the British
Crown to streamline itself, and to centralize
administrative and political processes on the
islands.3 Within this context, the granting of these
territories a larger degree of self-government was
about severing colonial dynamics (Jacobs 2006).
Still, the short-lived West Indies Federation was
born weak, plagued from its very beginnings by
the primacy of island-specific interests. Opposing
ideas related to the level of centralization in the
Federation emerged. For example, Trinidad and
Tobago preferred a more centralized arrangement,
while Jamaica preferred a looser type of arrange-
ment. There were questions on the freedom of
movement of people within the Federation, trade,
and economic development. In addition, some
political leaders on specific islands refused to par-
ticipate in the Federation. Eric Williams of Trini-
dad and Tobago, and Norman Manley of Jamaica
both refused to run in the first elections of the fed-
eration in 1958. Lastly, the Federation’s problem-
atic, and rather complex, political and legal
relationship with the British Crown was an issue.
All of these factors served to fatally undermine the
potential of the regional political experiment
(Springer 1962; Wallace 1962).
The experience of the West Indies Federation
is relevant to those who are interested in the
potential of an Antillean League because while the
Confederaci
on Antillana was never implemented
at any official institutional level, some of the Bri-
tish islands of the West Indies did try to work out
the complexities of this type of region-wide
arrangement. The experience points out the com-
plex political, social, economic, historical, geo-
graphic, and ideological forces that are certain to
re-emerge in any future attempt to establish any
kind of regional effort towards Pan-Antillean
unity. The main overarching difficulty was, and
still seems to be, the island-centric forces, by
which local elites understand and portray the
interests of their own individual islands as trump-
ing over the interests of the larger league. Busca-
glia reminds us that Cubans call this condition
“insilio, an exile within the island as imagined
national community—it is to go live with the goats
like a modern Crusoe that orders the world from
its distant islet, without any possibility of being
rescued from abandonment and shipwreck” (Bus-
caglia 2015, 225; my translation).4
One salient ideological and political difference
between these two efforts (the Confederaci
on and
the West Indies Federation) is the role that their
leaders saw the Caribbean island/countries played
as opposed to the role that the “empires” played
in their specific plans for a regional union. In both
of these efforts, visionaries hashed out a number
of components that would entail different
approaches to federations. Discussions revolved
around the degrees of regional integration, the role
and importance of cultural heritage, and the rela-
tionship to previous colonial sovereigns of the dif-
ferent islands. As I discuss more later, the
Spanish-speaking advocates of the Confederaci
on
in particular seemed to exhibit a more explicit
vision to integrate all islands of the Antilles across
linguistic boundaries, whereas the English-speak-
ing islands seemed to have less of an interest. The
reasons as to why the Spanish-speaking revolu-
tionaries were seemingly more explicitly interested
in a pan-linguistic league, while the Dutch-,
French- and English-speaking territories where less
so, is in itself a topic for future research. That
being said, there are people and instances—such
as the scholarly work by Eric Williams—in which
we do see non-Spanish-speaking figures reaching
out across linguistic, cultural, racial, and territorial
“boundaries.”
From its inception, the leaders of the Confed-
eraci
on framed the idea of Caribbean unity as an
explicit and aggressive revolutionary decolonizing
struggle to wrestle sovereignty away, and to pro-
tect this sovereignty from North Atlantic powers
with interests in the region. Although the heritage
of the Spanish empire did seem to play a role in
the development of the idea of the Confederaci
on
in the thought, for example, of Jos
e Mart
ı, those
who thought about the Confederaci
on early on,
like Puerto Rico’s Ram
on Emeterio Betances and
the Dominican Republic’s Gregorio Luper
on, and
even Mart
ı himself later on, were mostly driven by
a shared ideal of laic republicanism and abolition-
ism (Arpini 2008; Buscaglia 2015; Chaar-P
erez
2013; Rama 1971, 1980). For example, Betances
and Luper
on used Haiti—the first independent
republic of the region built on the cinders of a
slave society—not only as a stage-ground for their
efforts to sponsor revolts in their respective coun-
tries/islands but also as a cornerstone within the
idea of an Antillean League. It is in Haiti, in fact,
that Betances pronounces his prominent “Antillas

pez-Santiago
Angel Lo 183
para los Antillanos” (The Antilles for the Antil-
leans) speech in 1872, in which he expounded on
the confederation idea as a protective measure
against colonial adventurism in the region, inviting
the region to “unite one with the other for our
own self-preservation; united we will triumph
against these [colonial] attempts; divided we will
be destroyed” (Arpini 2008, 132).5 The early pro-
ponents of the Confederaci
on not only saw the
arrangement as a logical next step in the march
towards more racial and cultural integration
between the islands but also understood the
geopolitical importance of Haiti as a fertile and
secure site from which to plot and spread their
ideas (Rama 1971).
Another fundamental issue in this desire/push
to include more islands and populations into the
Confederaci
on is, obviously, race. Ever since the
Haitian revolution, liberal and/or revolutionary
movements for independence from Spain were si-
multaneously and in almost all cases movements
for the abolition of slavery, and the enfranchise-
ment of Black populations into the political pro-
cesses of the different island polities. This is
explicitly the case with Mart
ı, Luper
on, Betances,
and most other political leaders in the islands of
Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, and Cuba. The move-
ments for political independence on these islands
were all intrinsically linked with the movement for
racial emancipation. The Confederaci
on never
came to be, but we could surmise that the race
issues that still plague the different islands today,
and the racial conflicts between the different
nations that call the islands home, would have cer-
tainly played a role in the development of the lea-
gue. Still, we can speculate that the way in which
the apostles weaved together the struggle for polit-
ical sovereignty with the struggle for racial emanci-
pation might have changed both the way in which
race operates in and between the islands, and the
way that political sovereignties are deployed
throughout the region.
As revolutionaries, the proponents of the Con-
federaci
on began by first considering the union of
the Spanish-speaking nations of Cuba, Puerto
Rico, and the Dominican Republic as staging
islands from which to spread the regional revolu-
tion. But in time their thinking “evolved.” By the
1880s, they were writing to the British Prime Min-
ister Gladstone, seeking the inclusion of the British
Virgin Islands within the Confederaci
on. By then,
they had already included Jamaica as part of the
project (Pantojas Garc
ıa 2001, 85). The most
urgent concern of the proponents of the
184 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 26(2)
Confederaci
on by that time was the bullying pres-
ence of the United States as an expansionist force
in the Caribbean (Arpini 2008). In short, for polit-
ical, geo-strategic, ideological, cultural, racial, eco-
nomic, and trade reasons, the Spanish-speaking
ideologues of the Confederaci
on reckoned that
more islands were better than less islands to assure
the success of the future league.
West Indies Federation leaders, on the other
hand, exhibited but a comparatively faint interest
in seeking a deeper and more substantial union
with the non-English-speaking Antilles.6 This
might be due to the fact that the colonial power,
the British Crown itself, was initially involved in
the push for a West Indies federative project,
whereas the leaders of the Confederaci
on from the
Spanish-speaking islands were revolutionaries
working against their imperial master (Spain). This
difference might help to explain why the latter saw
a political revolutionary need to spread the idea
within a wider frame of political action as to
include the whole Antillean archipelago, while the
former kept their federation experiment circum-
scribed almost exclusively to the British islands in
the region.
One important commonality between both the
Spanish-speaking Confederaci
on and the West
Indies Federation is the “balancing” role, in terms
of hemispheric and global geopolitics that the
main thinkers saw in their respective projects
regarding regional unity. Indeed, notwithstanding
the historical and political differences between the
two projects, federation proponents riffed on the
“Americas for the Americans” motif, in a kind of
Monroe Doctrine writ small for the region. They
also envisioned their “unions” as a balancing point
for the power dynamics and flows between Euro-
pean North Atlantic powers, South America, and
the United States. Thinking about Cuba in 1876,
Betances writes, “With the other Antilles this
island seems destined after independence to
become the key to the [North] American Gulf, and
because of its position, to serve as a column in the
balance between the two Americas” (Rama 1971;
26).7 This is precisely one of the meanings that
Buscaglia (2015) offers about the geostrategic posi-
tion of the Antilles when he writes about the
region as being “in between empires” (entre
imperios).
In conclusion, it can be argued, that while the
idea of a Confederaci
on was frustrated by the
decisive (and even now, permanent) military and
political intervention of the United States in the
Caribbean after 1898, the West Indian Federation
experiment temporarily exhausted itself after a few
tortuous decades of realpolitik wrangling, negotia-
tions, and disagreements. The radically different
demises of both the Confederaci
on Antillana in
1898, and of the West Indies Federation in 1962,
as well as the formidable obstacles faced by the
activists, leaders, and revolutionaries that have
since tried to rekindle the idea of an Antillean
union, offer invaluable warnings about the future
possibilities of an Antillean League. Indeed, they
provide important lessons about how to do things
differently in the future to optimize the chances of
success. As these projects show us, two continuing
obstacles to a future Antillean League include: (1)
the role of former colonial powers in the region
such as the United States, and (2) insilio/insularist
drives that lead to the ever-present island-centrism.
Just as before, these obstacles are still reasons as
to why a federation attempt to unify the Carib-
bean in a regional act of political, economic, and
cultural solidarity and mutual support could fail.
THE POLITICS OF NATURE OR
NATURAL POLITICS
Of course, hurricanes have not stopped visiting the
islands, at times with lethal and catastrophic con-
sequences. Indeed, while radical, sudden, and dras-
tic change lies at the very core of notions of
identity in the Caribbean, hurricanes are among
the few unchanging facts in the region. Sooner or
later, every island gets hit by a hurricane; and
sooner or later the ensuing devastation either exac-
erbates or initiates political changes of historic
island-specific or regional consequence.
Our understanding on how environmental and
natural factors in the region have historically
played a role in political matters is still in its rela-
tive infancy. Works like Sea of Storms (Schwartz
2015), Mosquito Empires (McNeill 2010), and Hur-
ricane of Independence (Williams 2008) offer a
promising view towards a deeper contemporary
understanding on how natural phenomena/trage-
dies and politics have mixed in the past to propel
momentous political changes, and even revolution.
Here, however, I posit that even with our rela-
tively limited knowledge on the layering of politi-
cal change and environmental factors, we can still
think in proactive ways about how to understand
and seize moments of tragic environmental reckon-
ing in ways that position the impacted populations
at the center of their own political processes and
not simply as the colonial victims of some unex-
pected tragic natural occurrence. More specifically,
I hold that the historical knowledge that we
possess about past political changes initiated or
exacerbated by natural phenomena—such as earth-
quakes and hurricanes—give us more than enough
reasons to reassess the idea of an Antillean League
in view of the recent hurricanes of September 2017
in the Caribbean, and the concomitant failed
responses of the North Atlantic powers with
neither legal nor moral responsibility to bring
relief in a timely manner to the affected
populations.
The main reason to reassess the idea of an
Antillean League is to explore possible ways
towards a regional push for a radical and lasting
decolonization of the islands of the Caribbean.
This process of decolonization is perhaps the best
strategy for a systemic effort at regional self-
defense. It is aimed at effective preparedness
against future hurricanes, as well as against the
global forces that threaten to restructure the whole
Caribbean geography into a sunny tropical mega-
resort where the fates and livelihood of local pop-
ulations are of little concern when balanced
against the potential high margins of investment
returns—that is, of a leisure economy that caters
to the wealthy.
As the hurricanes of 2017 have made painfully
clear, the current colonial, post-colonial, or neo-
colonial regimes of the region are not just a matter
of academic discussion and historical minutiae,
but more importantly are of life and death for mil-
lions. The diminishing interest of the United States
—the hemisphere’s geopolitical colossus—in the
region, and the emergence of China as a young
power with aspirations of global political influ-
ence, have created a historical and geopolitical “in
between empires” moment, according to Buscaglia
(2015).8 While it also offers a brief moment to
delink from centuries of coloniality and abuse
(Mignolo 2005), this “in between empires”
moment is full of risks. Chief among them is the
addition of a new colonial layer to the already
thick colonial histories of the region.
Colonialism as we understand it today started
in the Caribbean. It is in the Caribbean that we
see the birth and development of what the Peru-
vian thinker and sociologist Anibal Quijano (2000)
calls the “coloniality of power,” a concept that
helps us understand how most of our modern and
contemporary ideas about power and its deploy-
ment are rooted in a globally influential experience
of colonialism that started in the islands of the
Caribbean Sea. Hence, as the cradle of coloniality,
and after more than five hundred years of colo-
nialism in the region, it seems suboptimal to keep

pez-Santiago
Angel Lo 185
exclusively thinking and practicing a politics of
overt challenge to the empires invested in the
region. Five hundred years of colonialism has
turned coloniality into the almost absolute normal
in the region; legal independence/sovereignty is,
both quantitatively and historically, the exception.
SOVEREIGNTY
Decolonization in the Caribbean, I hold, must
begin by locally based sovereign practices within
the territories of the diverse islands, particularly in
the neighborhoods and communities. It must start
with the grassroots movements and organizations
that for decades have built spaces and practices
that delink and offer a critical vision of coloniality
of power. The hurricanes of 2017 have offered us
a clear vision of how these practices and actors
look, their areas of concern and action, and how
their praxes prefigure the decolonial power dynam-
ics that could conceivably form the backbone of a
push towards a new, more sustainable Antillean
League. In the specific case of Puerto Rico, many
of these grassroots organizations and movements
were able to bring relief and support to the most
affected communities after the storms, even before
the local government. The years of activist and
community organizing, as well as the record of
transparency, accountability, and trust, made
many of these small community-based local move-
ments and organizations a much more nimble and
wise delivery mechanism of relief than any effort
that the official government could summon right
after the storms. This type of activist, grass-roots
efforts are precisely the types of sovereign practices
I refer to as the basis of decolonization. Such
sovereignty is not an idealized state of being, but
rather an everyday practice that Caribbean people
do. Still, this bottom-up approach to sovereignty
is not our traditional understanding of the idea of
sovereignty, which—as we will see—was born in
the Golden Age of European monarchies.
Our most recognizable understanding of the
concept of sovereignty stems not so much from
Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), but rather
from the thought of another defender of monar-
chies, Jean Bodin, and his work Les Six Livres sur
la R
epublique (The Six Books of the Common-
wealth, published in 1576).9 Bodin’s theory of
sovereignty feels both archaic and eerily contem-
poraneous. There are three main characteristics to
it: (1) sovereignty is perpetual, (2) it is indivisible,
and (3) by force of logic, the sovereign is necessar-
ily above/beyond the law. Yet, sovereignty is not
unitarian, centralized, nor permanent except in
186 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 26(2)
idealized renderings of the intellectual history of
the West, about which we should be suspicious.
The concept of sovereignty has all the trappings of
what Michel Trouillot called “North Atlantic
Universals,” namely, how master concepts and
narratives “emerge as convenient fictions” of the
North Atlantic. These “master words” thus “pro-
ject the North Atlantic experience on a universal
scale that they themselves helped to create. North
Atlantic Universals are particulars that have
gained a degree of universality, chunks of human
history that have become historical standards.
They do not describe the world; they offer visions
of the world” (Trouillot 2002, 839–40, 847). North
Atlantic Universals, then, are not descriptive, but
rather, normative tropes. In other words, sover-
eignty is, among other things, a normative ideal.10
As Frances Negr
on-Muntaner (2017, 7)
argues, “whereas most Western theorizations of
sovereignty, particularly through the first half of
the twentieth century, accept the idealized version
of European history that emphasizes its achieve-
ment of an orderly interstate system following the
Peace of Westphalia in 1648, this is an ideological
illusion.” It is not that sovereignty does not exist
as such, but rather, that it has never really stuck
to the neat ideo-typical lines we usually assume it
does; not even conceptually. In fact, Bodin himself
is one of the earliest “modern” political thinkers
to thread around the idea that “there is no politics
independent of geo-historic conditions, of social
facts made of ethnic, geographic, and historical
elements” (Touchard 1993, 293).11
When read closely, even a canonical political
thinker like Bodin seems to agree with the idea
that sovereignty has taken many shapes, in differ-
ent places, and at different times. He would agree
that sovereignty is contextual and opportunistic,
and that it exists when exercised, meaning that it
is “relational”—a relationship between two or
more bodies. Absence the exercise of sovereign
“rights,” political voids come to be created, and
filled. Still, Bodin’s—and later Hobbes’s—efforts
to present a more organized and normative ren-
dering of sovereignty speak to the historical and
conceptual contingencies regarding sovereignty,
both at practical and conceptual levels. Both
Bodin and Hobbes wrote about sovereignty pre-
cisely in the wake of the “discovery” of the Ameri-
cas. Their novel ideas about sovereignty might be
considered, among other things, as efforts to map
out new and more effective forms of the exercise
of power, harmonious with the European discov-
ery and conquest of new territories around the
world, and the Americas specifically. Yarimar
Bonilla makes such an argument when she states
that, “Sovereignty as a legal concept is thus
grounded in concrete material practices of dispos-
session, the practical work of disenfranchisement,
and the creation of legal regimes of difference”
(Bonilla 2017). In short, and to paraphrase Tho-
mas Hobbes: sovereignty and colonialism “were
born twins together.”
Even these efforts to clean-up and bring coher-
ence and predictability to the idea of sovereignty
cannot obscure the fact that the idea of sovereignty
is still very much fluid and contingent. Indeed, the
idea itself was based in the fluid waters of the sea
and its relationship to the owners of the land. When
writing in the early 1600s about the freedom of the
seas for the purposes of commerce, the Dutch jurist
Hugo Grotius made room for an exception regard-
ing coastal states and “their” waters; namely that
states had sovereign rights to their adjoining
waters. But, adjoining waters to what limit? The
answer to this question is known in the body of
international law as the “cannon-shot rule”: sover-
eignty over the seas ended where cannonballs shot
from the coast could no longer reach. Initially, this
limit was three miles, but it was later expanded.12
Generally, sovereignty was very much seen as oper-
ational and effectual, and this was reflected in the
1730s by another Dutch jurist, Cornelis van
Bijnkershoek, when he wrote that “The ownership
over land ends where the force of arms ends”
(Terrae dominium finitur, ubi finitur armorum vis).
Contemporary notions of sovereignty, how-
ever, are part of the apparatus of what Quijano
calls “the coloniality of power” (Quijano 2000).
Indeed, the term sovereignty itself is constitutive
of “the grammar of coloniality” that needs
“delinking” from its constitutive historical colo-
niality (Mignolo 2007; Quijano 2000). The intrinsic
link between coloniality and our contemporary
acceptions of sovereignty have made some thinkers
involved in struggles for liberation assert that
organizing around the idea of sovereignty might
itself be politically counter productive altogether.13
Concerned with the depths of our colonial hang-
ups, some of these thinkers have “called for the
abandonment of state sovereigntist discourse in
First Nation politics because of its implication in
hierarchical power structures and origin in Euro-
pean colonialism” (Negr
on-Muntaner 2017, 21).
Ancillary to the idea of sovereignty is the idea
of recognition, a concept about which much has
been written (Coulthard 2017; Fraser and Honneth
2003; Taylor and Gutmann 1992). One of the
problems critics of recognition politics, like Glen
Coulthard (2017), see with the concept is that
recognition is at times deemed “an essential middle
step” between subjection and sovereignty. The pol-
itics of recognition, he suggests, “promises to
reproduce the very configurations of colonial
power” that it has “historically sought to tran-
scend” (Coulthard 2017, 82–83). For our purposes
here, however, at a very practical level, sovereignty
must be “recognized” by other international actors
in order to be legally operative or binding. It
stands to reason that under conditions of imperial
domination, for example, the metropolis will
almost certainly deny recognition of sovereignty to
any community or group seeking to alienate—if
only partially—sovereignty from the metropolis.
In other words, under this “scheme,” groups/com-
munities need to be recognized by the very appara-
tus that subjected them in the first place.
At a practical level, then, the politics of sover-
eignty and recognition present a formidable, and
perhaps insurmountable, obstacle for the idea of
an Antillean League. Given the “colonial stew” in
which most islands of the Antilles find themselves,
it seems rather naive to assume that imperial pow-
ers deeply invested in the region, such as the Uni-
ted States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and
France, will ever grant recognition of sovereignty
to any of their former or current “possessions.”
As I have discussed, sovereignty has never been as
unitary as it has been traditionally assumed. This
purported unitarian idea of sovereignty is, as I
have shown, likely a conceptual remnant of the
philosophical arrangements that Europe concocted
during the discovery and colonization of the
Americas. Unitarian ideas of sovereignty are thus
itself a form of coloniality. By recognizing,
instead, the historical contingency and fluidity pos-
sible in multiple and non-unitarian concepts, the
people of the Antilles could work to operate
within a more self-made, DIY idea that unite
around the practices that can enable sovereignties
that cross interrelated territories. Rather than dis-
carding, ignoring, or adopting the idea of a singu-
lar state of sovereignty, I suggest that it is more
productive to think and act in terms of a plural
and relational notion of “sovereignties.”
#SOVEREIGNTIES: DIASPORAS, LAND,
AND SEAS
A future Antillean League should be thought of,
and designed, taking into account previous discus-
sions regarding past historical experiences and
attempts at confederation. It is important to

pez-Santiago
Angel Lo 187
recognize the role of continued North Atlantic
interference in any attempt at unification and also
the insularist drives that would dampen the vision
of unity across island territories. In addition, the
Antillean League must keep in mind the practical
and conceptual fragmentation of the idea of sover-
eignty itself in order to recognize the historical
relationships of the Caribbean that are tied to the
lack of autonomy established with the colonial his-
tory of the Americas from its inception. The
deadly hurricanes of 2017 afford us the opportu-
nity to see where multiple sovereignties of action
are necessary and urgent in the Antillean islands.
For the purposes of this essay, I examine primarily
the case of Puerto Rico and hurricane Mar
ıa.
However, what follows could be applicable to
most islands in the region.
Three general areas of concern were immedi-
ately evident after the hurricane passed: food,
energy, and land. Food regimes, energy regimes,
and land regimes are all overdetermined by the
island’s relationship with its “legal” sovereign (in
the case of Puerto Rico, the United States), who,
in most cases, has imposed structures and depen-
dencies that benefit powerful metropolitan inter-
ests, rather than local populations. Most of the
time these decisions and dynamics are not a matter
of immediate life and death; yet, they can become
so in times of extreme hardship, such as in the
aftermath of a destructive hurricane like Mar
ıa,
when even properly counting (and burying) the
dead is a logistical challenge.
Although the loss of human life generally out-
weighs other concerns, in the aftermath of hurri-
cane Mar
ıa, other elements also became serious
considerations, such as loss of electricity and dire
shortages of food and other provisions. The hurri-
cane wiped out around 80% of the crops on the
island and 100% of the island’s population was
without power (Carro-Figueroa 2002).14 Indeed,
recovery efforts were direly impeded by restrictions
in the cabotage provisions of the Merchant Mar-
ine Act of 1920 (the Jones Act), which forbids for-
eign ships from mooring directly in Puerto Rico,
as it requires that all inbound merchant ships must
be American-built and arrive directly from main-
land US ports. Exceptional offers of recovery and
aid from Venezuela, Cuba, M
exico, and the
Dominican Republic were ignored because of this
provision, which is normally lifted during tragedies
and other natural disasters.15 This example poign-
antly demonstrates the deliberate colonial neglect
that Puerto Ricans suffered with its relationship as
a commonwealth that is neither treated as part of
188 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 26(2)
the United States nor allowed the autonomy of
sovereign territoriality.
In this context, feelings of despair, isolation,
and abandonment took a hold of the island (and
its diaspora) precisely after having experienced its
worst natural catastrophe in well over a century.
Indeed, the island’s inability to properly handle
the aftermath of the hurricane has been in the
making for decades. It is part of a growing trend
of material and economic dependency vis-a-vis the
United States. Puerto Rico has become less sover-
eign, not more, as its relationship with the United
States has “matured.” Reports indicate that Puerto
Rico imports anywhere from 80% to 85% of the
food that it consumes, which is part of a larger
trend of “delinking food production from food
consumption in the development path followed by
Puerto Rico since the 1950s” (Carro-Figueroa
2002, 96). This process has transformed the food-
stuffs available, the economics of food consump-
tion, and even the hours at which locals eat on the
island.
Similarly, the island has steadily moved away
from sustainable and renewable sources of energy.
In 1979, the Water Resources Authority (Autori-
dad de Fuentes Fluviales), which had traditionally
generated most of its energy from water sources,
changed its name to the Electric Energy Authority
(Autoridad de Energ
ıa El
ectrica). The electric
authority also phased out floating electric genera-
tors decades ago. As of September 17, 2017, the
federal government reported that 98% of the
island’s electricity was produced from non-renew-
able sources (47% petroleum, 34% natural gas,
17% from coal); only 2% of the island’s electricity
generation came from renewable sources, mostly
solar power.16 All of these non-renewable sources
of energy have to be imported by ship according
to the provisions of the Merchant Marine Act of
1920, with its attendant limitations, high costs,
and difficulties.
Of perhaps overarching importance is the issue
of land control, for it can be argued that control
of land can ultimately help determine both energy
and food regimes. Sovereignty games are ulti-
mately played on the land. When Puerto Rico was
a primarily agricultural country, land was of obvi-
ous fundamental value for the island’s economy
and vital subsistence. Today, land is of value in
radically different ways. Emilio Pantojas Garc
ıa
(2001, 2006, 2008) has written cogently about the
ways that the economies of the Caribbean islands
have both radically shifted and paradoxically
stayed the same since the early twentieth century.
Pantojas Garc
ıa (2006) describes this process of
economic readjustment as a transition “from the
plantation to the resort.” The Caribbean region,
he argues, has been assigned the “role of entertain-
ment center in the new global order.”17
Previously, the sugar cane plantation economy
was predicated on exporting the product to cater
to the needs and demands of the international
market for sugar. This model determined much of
the land use, land speculation, and land grabs in
the first half of the twentieth century in Puerto
Rico. Today, the leisure and recreation industry
described of as the “post work” economy, which
includes tourism and other services that cater to
the wealthy, are now determining current land
usages, land speculation, and land grabs (Pantojas
Garc
ıa 2006, 84).18 As with crop exports in the
past, the leisure and recreation industries are hard-
wired to service the needs of non-islanders—people
who consume the place itself. As Pantojas Garc
ıa
(2006, 84) describes, tourists transport “themselves
to the ‘exporting country’ to buy [entertainment
and leisure] with foreign currencies” as part of
their new pleasure consumption economies.19 This
new process, which looks so similar to the old
one, can be understood as a “reinvention of
underdevelopment” (Pantojas Garc
ıa 2006, 86).
The similarities between the “land grabs” of
today in Puerto Rico and other islands in the Car-
ibbean, and the gentrifying and displacement
dynamics seen in inner-city neighborhoods
throughout Western metropoles (London, New
York, Paris, Chicago, San Francisco, etc.) popu-
lated by the same demographics are not accidental.
Waterfront land that historically hosted the very
poor or the working-class populations at the
periphery of the island’s society is today prime real
estate “beachfront” investment property for the
very wealthy. I see a relationship between land
speculators in urban cities and Caribbean islands,
as part of a broader global appropriation of land
and space for the consumption of wealthy elites.
Whether for tourism and entertainment or for gen-
trification, the extraction of land from the hands
of the racialized and disenfranchised colonial pop-
ulations into the hands of the white and wealthy
cannot be disentangled. Conversely, although less
obvious, the hyper speculation that today pushes
families out of historically Caribbean and/or Black
neighborhoods all over major cities in the West to
make way for luxury condominiums can be under-
stood as intimately related to the resort-ization of
Caribbean lands. Gentrification and displacement,
then, I argue, are part of a wider global push
“from plantation to resort.”
Nevertheless, land concerns are not only about
tourism and the very wealthy. It is on the land
that agriculture and other key elements of the
island’s future food regime are bound and where
renewable energy projects must take place. In fact,
practical issues around land sovereignty can be an
optimal starting place to think about a future
Antillean League, for these issues encompass and
bridge both hyper-local and regional concerns of
sustainability.
Theoretically and practically, concerns about
land sovereignty cannot be understood as neatly
separate from food and energy sovereignty con-
cerns. The struggles around these issues in Puerto
Rico, for example, cannot be understood as dis-
tinct from similar dynamics in other islands in the
Caribbean. Similarly, these same concerns—partic-
ularly around land and food—in the whole Carib-
bean basin are linked to similar issues affecting the
Caribbean urban diasporas in major cities in the
West (New York, Chicago, London, Paris,
Madrid, etc.). The process of colonial delinking is,
ironically and significantly, also a process of mesh-
ing together and synthesis. Delinking entails the
simultaneous “tying up” of certain issues that
serve practico-political and heuristic purposes.
Sometimes issues are clustered around sites, while
at other times issues are clustered around popula-
tions. Future research on these dynamics can per-
haps offer a better understanding of the colonial
injustices that delinking produces, which itself
facilitates political action. At its most urgent, the
tragedy of the hurricanes posit itself as a guiding
question that might inform both theoretical under-
standing and political action: How can we stop
the process of “plantation to resort” that is turn-
ing both local neighborhoods and islands into
resorts for wealthy consumption?
Resorts cater by and large to transient visitors
with the means to enjoy these spaces. Today,
resort spaces are generally wired as sociopolitical
“exclaves,” geographies of exception, built or con-
quered by the forces of global capital in order to
cater to the tastes and pleasures of outsiders. The
interests of local communities rarely factor in at
all. As a general rule, the interests of local com-
munities are displaced and replaced by the inter-
ests of outsiders. It is in this sense that the local
process of gentrification and displacement, and the
turning of Caribbean islands into global vacation
resorts are eerily similar.

pez-Santiago
Angel Lo 189
 Metropolitan diasporas are a key component
in understanding the issues at hand. They also
form a key node in organizing political action
against what I call “the challenge of the resort.”
The involvement of diasporas in the political
struggles of their ancestral homelands is also not
uncommon. In fact, the well-documented history
of resistance and rebellion of Puerto Ricans (and
Cubans) from within the continental United States
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
against both Spanish and American colonialism
shows the fundamental role played by exiles and
diasporas in these struggles. Revisiting the idea of
a new Antillean League involves not only recog-
nizing the role the diasporas have historically
played in the political processes and evolution of
the islands but also an active and explicit commit-
ment to buttress those links in an ever-deepening
manner.
One practical way in which communities both
in the Caribbean homelands and the diasporic
neighborhoods in the continental United States
have pushed back against the land grabs that dis-
place their communities is through Community
Land Trusts (CLTs). The Community Land Trust
is a relatively old idea. Influenced by the politics
and vision of the kibbutz movement in Israel and
the community land grant “Gramdan” movement
of post-independence India, the idea was originally
developed and sharpened in the United States dur-
ing the Civil Rights era to help Black farmers pre-
serve their access to the land in the post-Jim Crow
Deep South (Davis 2010). CLTs help communities
organize in order to acquire land in perpetuity for
the benefit of the community. Through perpetual
community ownership, land is removed from the
speculative market, and decisions about what hap-
pens on the land are made by the community
through a unique voting process that includes
members living within the CLTs’ “catchment
area” (i.e., within the CLTs’ borders). This also
includes members leasing land owned by the
CLTs, and outsiders sympathetic to the commu-
nity land trust idea (e.g., academics, activists, non-
profit organizations, funders, etc.) Ultimately, this
unique institutional voting dynamic gives the com-
munity both control over the land in the present for
those living today, and the ability to steward the
land well into the future for the enjoyment and ben-
efit of future generations. CLTs help communities
avoid presentism, “a bias in the laws in favor of pre-
sent over future generations” (Thompson 2010, 1).
The triumphant globalized and globalizing
perspectives of the twenty-first century still cannot
190 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 26(2)
overshadow the striking links that unite Caribbean
populations to this day: a shared and never fully
digested genocide at the dawn of the imperial age,
the common bloody and racist history of the plan-
tation, miscegenation, their growing metropolitan
diasporas, the present common threat of their
lands becoming resorts, and the shared fate of
ancestral homelands lying in a “sea of storms.”
This common and living history, which has come
into sharper focus after the hurricanes of 2017,
can propel, as it were, the Caribbean and its dias-
poras towards a new Antillean League based on
#sovereignTies.
I propose the hashtag #sovereignTies as a strat-
egy that might begin to address the issues I have dis-
cussed in this article. Ideally, this hashtag plays on
the concept of pluralized sovereignties which I have
theorized here as a way to conceptualize an Antil-
lean League as a new imagined community. I also
propose it not only as an abstract idea that
advances our understanding about these land pro-
cesses but also as a banner of political action that
can facilitate communities tied together who are at
the receiving end of these processes. It is my hope
that the hashtag #sovereignTies will also serve to
link these communities in order to better support
each other. Through a politically motivated media
campaign, #soverignTies might amplify the plight
and augment the resources of these communities.
Among these challenges, a formidable one
surely is the racist history and racial divisions that
are constitutive of Caribbean societies. For cen-
turies, racial divisions have kept the islands
divided by an all-pervasive and naturalized ideol-
ogy of colorism. Yet, despite the racist history that
binds the islands together and the existence of
slavery and the sugar plantation as a common and
almost ontological/historical denominator, it will
be difficult to argue that this racist history will
necessarily overdetermine the fate of a future lea-
gue. For example, despite the history of slavery in
the Spanish-speaking islands, the writings and
actions of the leaders of the Confederaci
on give us
a rather clear idea about their sustained, conspicu-
ous, and aggressive efforts to stomp out what
Silvio Torres-Saillant has called “the tribulations
of blackness” (Torres-Saillant 1998). Politically,
Jos
e Mart
ı (Cuba), Gregorio Luper
on (Dominican
Republic) and Betances (Puerto Rico) saw Haiti
not only as central to the project of the Confed-
eraci
on but as the essential headquarters and the
example to follow in terms of the nation’s commit-
ment to the rights of non-Europeans. Indeed, Irm-
ary Reyes-Santos argues that Betances and
Luper
on “did not merely seek independence or the
abolition of slavery, but rather challenged white
supremacy in the continent” (Reyes-Santos 2013,
142). It was not the real existent racism in Puerto
Rico and Cuba that doomed the Confederaci
on,
but rather the emergence of the United States
as a new hemispheric hegemon hostile to a pan-
Antillean league.
Similarly, while there certainly exists colorism
and racism in the English-speaking islands of the
West Indies (just as everywhere else in the Carib-
bean), a post-mortem of the West Indies Federa-
tion done only four years after its demise
concludes that the main difficulty the federation
faced was not racism but the lack of a nationalist
passion/ideology uniting the islands in the project.
Samuel Hurwitz wrote in 1966:
“the West Indies have no tradition of resent-
ment or oppression by an alien power which
might bring them together against a common
enemy; there has been no movement to defend
or promote indigenous culture in face of
encroachment of an alien one. There is no legal
discrimination, and such expressions of racial
and color prejudice as do occur are attributed
not to external but to local influence”
(Hurwitz 1966, 140).
In other words, racism obviously existed, but
it was a non-issue in the failure of the federation.
The main issue was what in 1956 the Federation
of West Indian Students of Unions and Great Bri-
tain and Ireland called “the harmful influence of
insular prejudice, buttressed by geographical sepa-
ration” (Hurwitz 1966, 139–40). Significantly,
thirty-three years prior, C.L.R. James himself
wrote, while advocating for the federation project,
that “there is race prejudice” in the community
[the West Indies], but “there is no race antago-
nism” (James 1975, 31). Indeed, both before and
after the West Indies Federation project, critics
and advocates understood racism to be real,
although no one deemed this racism to be a deter-
mining obstacle for the success or failure of the
federation. This is, of course, rather common sen-
sical, for the fact that the Caribbean is a region
marked by a history of slavery, racism, and col-
orism, the residents of the islands are not defined
just by the region’s racial history and racial
dynamics. Class, gender, imperial and colonial
engagements, international politics, taxation, insu-
larist drives, and customs are all salient issues that
determined the fate of the federation in the years
1958–62 and will likely determine any effort
towards a regional league in the future.
#SovereignTies does not aim, naively, to
become a social-media magic bullet that will, by
itself, solve the challenges we’ve discussed so far.
On the contrary, #sovereignTies should serve as an
effort to cultivate a growing awareness of the per-
sistent and rancid racial issues that have hardened
the sense of national isolation and national excep-
tionalism, and precluded both the elites and the
working-class populations of the different islands
from seeing their plight reflected in the plight of
their neighbors in the region. The idea of #sover-
eignTies tries precisely to address the issue of how
struggles for practical sovereignties affecting popu-
lations in the Caribbean have to be understood as
cutting across national borders, and as being inti-
mately related to each other. Pan-Caribbean politi-
cal action in an Antillean League might similarly
take the form of beyond-local organizing, a league
that, although deeply rooted in local concerns,
would allow transparency and accountability to
take shape across islands and regions.
#SovereignTies can be a strategy for “unset-
tling sovereignty” that Bonilla (2017) proposes.
“Unsettling sovereignty” is a more realistic and
honest alternative to the idea of decolonizing
sovereignty, as Bonilla remains “skeptical as to
whether one could truly decolonize either sover-
eignty or anthropology, given that there is no pre-
colonial status to which either could return”
(Bonilla 2017, 335). #SovereignTies seeks to high-
light the political practices, the histories, and the
plights that tie the fates of residents of the Carib-
bean across the islands in what could one day be
an Antillean League. By linking them with their
diasporic communities abroad, an Antillean Lea-
gue could actively challenge the theoretical and
practical ambiguities and contradictions intrinsic
to the exercise of colonial exploitation. With the
hashtag, #sovereignTies, an Antillean League
might provoke a pan-Caribbean invitation towards
more political and cultural exchanges that could
draw on the fluid waters that already naturally
link the islands together. Nevertheless, an Antil-
lean League must be cautious not to exacerbate
the stress and colonial voids already in play. These
“weak links” such as insular thinking, racial divi-
sions, and external forces that privilege plantation-
style resort economies, all create political divisions
that could affect the bonds of solidarity and
union. Many of these issues rest on the anxieties
of a need for legal sovereignty. As I discussed, an
Antillean League would need to recognize the

pez-Santiago
Angel Lo 191
practical purpose of legal sovereignty in so far as
the recognition by other international actors
allows for the legally operative function of territo-
ries and states. Nevertheless, an Antillean League
must also affirm the relational multiplicity of vari-
ous forms of sovereignties that might occur across
a new political confederation. In this configura-
tion, sovereignty could be exploded into a process
that breathes, expanding and contracting accord-
ing to the depth and thickness of the ties and
networks of cooperation across territories, as well
as between residents of the islands and their
diasporas.
Angel Lo
pez-Santiago Department of Africana,
Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Hunter College,
New York City, NY, 10065
E-mail: monxolopez@gmail.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Michael Ralph, Michiko Tsuneda,
Aisha Beliso-De Jes
us, Libertad Guerra, Urayo
an
Noel, Frances Negr
on-Muntaner, and Yarimar
Bonilla, for their invaluable insight, inspiration,
criticism, and support. Thanks to the people on
the islands and in our diasporic neighborhoods for
their energy, fortitude, courageousness, and sun.
NOTES
1. In fact, as Schwartz (2015) convincingly
shows, throughout history islanders have been left
out to fend off by themselves, with not much sup-
port or no support from the metropolis.
2. White, Jeremy. 2017. “‘Something close
to genocide’: San Juan mayor Carmen Yulin
Cruz begs for more Puerto Rico relief.” The Inde-
pendent website, September 29. Accessed July 19,
2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/
americas/us-politics/puerto-rico-crisis-latest-san-jua
n-genocide-mayor-beg-carmen-yulin-cruz-aid-relief-
a7975021.html
3. Born in Grenada, Marryshow (1887–1958)
was the editor of the newspaper The West Indian,
“which carried the masthead ‘The West Indies
must be West Indian’” (Jacobs 2006, 2282).
4. “El exilio dentro de la isla como comunidad
nacional imaginada, es irse a vivir con las cabras
como un Crusoe moderno que da orden al mundo
desde su islote lejano sin posibilidad alguna de ser
rescatado del abandono y el naufragio.”
192 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 26(2)
5. The original reads: “Un
amonos los unos
con los otros para nuestra propia conservaci
on;
unidos venceremos contra estas tentativas; separa-
dos seremos destruidos.”
6. In Memoria P
ublica, former Universidad de
Puerto Rico professor and Senator, Jos
e Arsenio
Torres, briefly describes the efforts by political and
administrative leaders in Trinidad and Tobago,
Jamaica, and Puerto Rico to establish a deeper
partnership and some level of integration between
the main public universities in the three islands
(Torres 2000).
7. The original reads: “Con las otras Antillas
esta isla parece destinada con la independencia a
convertirse en la llave del golfo americano y por
su posici
on, a servir de columna en la balanza de
las dos Am
ericas.”
8. Buscaglia’s “in between empires” trope
refers both to (1) the objective space—the sea—
that separates one island from the other, or the
geography that is not fully under the sovereign
control of one Western power or another, and (2)
to the historical alternation of sovereign power
over the territory of most islands of the region; for
since the beginning of the colonial age in the late
1400s, most islands in the Caribbean have changed
colonial masters more than once.
9. Deborah Baumgold writes: “In a striking
departure from his usual practice of ignoring thin-
kers with whom he agreed, Hobbes invoked the
authority of Bodin in support of unified sover-
eignty: ‘If there was a commonwealth, wherein the
rights of sovereignty were divided, we must confess
with Bodin, Lib. II. chap. I. De Republica, that
they are not rightly to be called commonwealths,
but the corruption of commonwealths (xxvii. 7,
pp. 177–7)” (Baumgold 2003, 173).
10. I am deeply indebted to Yarimar Bonilla’s
important work on sovereignty and non-sover-
eignty in the Caribbean, Non-Sovereign Futures,
and her deft deployment of Trouillot’s ideas
(Bonilla 2015).
11. “Il n’y a pas de politique ind
ependante des
conditions g
eo-historiques, d’un donn
e social  a
composantes ethniques, g
eographiques et his-
toriques.”
12. Law, Jonathan, and Elizabeth A. Martin.
2009. “Cannon-Shot Rule.” In A Dictionary of
Law, edited by Jonathan Law and Elizabeth A.
Martin. 7th ed., Oxford University Press. Online
reference on the Oxford Reference website.
Accessed July 23, 2018. http://www.oxfordreference.
com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095546425.
 13. See Coulthard 2017.
14. Robles, Frances and Luis Ferr
e-Sadurn
ı.
2017. “Puerto Rico’s Agriculture and Farmers Dec-
imated by Maria.” New York Times website,
September 24. Accessed July 10, 2018. https://www.
nytimes.com/2017/09/24/us/puerto-rico-hurricane-
maria-agriculture-.html
15. For Venezuela and Cuba, see: “Cuba,
Venezuela Offer Puerto Rico Hurricane Help.”
TeleSur wesbite, September 26, 2017. Accessed
July 10, 2018. https://www.telesurtv.net/english/
news/Cuba-Venezuela-Offer-Puerto-Rico-Hurricane-
Relief-20170926-0007.html. For Mexico see: Halti-
wanger, John. 2017. “Mexico Slaps Trump in face
by offering aid to Puerto Rico after his disastrous
visit.” Newsweek website, October 4. Accessed July
10, 2018. http://www.newsweek.com/mexico-sending-
aid-puerto-rico-after-trumps-disastrous-visit-677754
16. United States Energy Information Admin-
istration. 2017. “Puerto Rico: Profile Overview.
Quick Facts.” EIA website. Accessed July 10,
2018. https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=RQ
17. “Al Caribe se le asigna el rol de centro de
entretenimiento en el nuevo orden global.” (Panto-
jas Garc
ıa 2006, 85).
18. The so-called “post work” sector
(“industrias post trabajo”) is—for Pantojas at
least—the industries and sectors organizing, and
monetizing, the leisure time that remains available
after people are done working, either for the day,
or while on vacation. The post work concept needs
to be understood in this context not as in “work
has been abolished,” but rather as in “after the
working day is over,” or “vacation or personal
time” (Pantojas Garc
ıa 2006, 84).
19. “Una porci
on mayoritaria de los servicios
y productos asociados a la ‘industria tur
ıstica’ son
consumidos por residentes del extranjero que se
transportan al ‘pa
ıs exportador’ para comprarlos
con divisas extranjeras” (Pantojas Garc
ıa 2006, 84).
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