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a film by Juan Carlos Dávila and yarimar Bonilla

Yarimar Bonilla, co-editor of the book Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket, 2019), travels through Puerto Rico to interview journalists, poets, photographers, visual artists, and cocommunity activists in this documentary film. The film explores the ongoing "aftershocks" experienced by Puerto Ricans in the wake of Hurricane María, which include state failure, social abandonment and disaster capitalism. Through thought-provoking interviews, affective readings, and representations of Puerto Rico’s decaying infrastructure and empowered community, the film explores both the unfolding crisis in Puerto Rico as well as the emergence of new political imaginaries.

Funding provided by: Hunter College-CUNY & Haymarket Books

Featuring

YARIMAR BONILLA is Professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Hunter College and in the PhD Program in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is also a prominent public intellectual and a leading voice on Caribbean and Latin-X politics. She writes a monthly column in the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día titled “En Vaivén,” is a regular contributor to publications such as The Washington Post, The Nation, Jacobin, and The New Yorker, and a frequent guest on National Public Radio and news programs such as Democracy Now!.

To learn more about Yarimar Bonilla, check out her page.

PATRICIA NOBOA ORTEGA is an assistant professor of social sciences at the University of Puerto Rico-Cayey the University of Puerto Rico-Cayey.

In the film, she is interviewed at San Isidro, in Canóvanas. She visited this community, largely composed of immigrants, with a medical brigade after Maria.

She speaks about the serious medical and psychological traumas she witnessed and how they led her to establish a legal and psychological clinic in this location. She condemns hegemonic discourses and psychoanalytic approaches that tend to place full responsibility on individuals.

She speaks about the serious medical and psychological traumas she witnessed and how they led her to establish a legal and psychological clinic in this location. She condemns hegemonic discourses and psychoanalytic approaches that tend to place full responsibility on individuals.

To find more information about the legal and psychological clinic in Canóvanas, check out their page.

BENJAMÍN TORRES GOTAY has worked for various media outlets and for the newspaper El Nuevo Día since 1997, where he is now a special topics writer and columnist. In the film, he explains his personal experiences as a journalist covering the recuperation after Hurricane María. In the interviews he conducted, he marked the difficulties people faced when articulating their hardships after Hurricane María. For him, these tentative answers have latent political motivations.

To read more by Benjamín Torres Gotay, check out his regular column in El Nuevo Día here.

SOFÍA GALLISÁ MURIENTE is a visual artist working mainly with video, film, photography, and text. She has exhibited internationally, most recently in ifa-Galerie, Berlin; the Getty PST: LA/LA, California; and Espacio El Dorado, Colombia. In the film, she describes her efforts to make lists and take note of things she experienced and heard in the months after the Hurricane. This documentation provides insight on the blurred boundary between personal and collective loss.

To see more of Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s multi-media art, check out her page.

ERIKA P. RODRÍGUEZ is a freelance photographer, her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, among other venues. In the film, she describes her experiences photographing Puerto Rico’s scenes of disaster. Addressing the politics and ethics of representation, she prioritizes Puerto Rican perspectives and challenges stereotypes of colonial suffering.

To see more of Erika P. Rodríguez’s photography, check out her page.

ADRIAN ROMÁN is a mixed-media artist focusing primarily on sculpture and drawing. Román's work is informed by issues of race, migration, and identity. Adrian's work has been exhibited in several solo and group shows in Puerto Rico and the United States. In the film, he describes his experiences and the people he met when forming part of solidarity brigades in Puerto Rico. These people, as well as the damaged personal objects they were discarding, later form an integral part of his art installations.

To see more of Adrian Román’s artwork, check out his page.

RAQUEL SALAS RIVERA is the 2018-19 poet laureate of Philadelphia and the inaugural recipient of the Ambroggio Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His fourth book, lo terciario/the tertiary 2018 National Book Award Longlist, and was selected Entropy, Literary Hub, mitú, Book Riot, and Publishers of the best poetry books of 2018. In the film, he explains how he experienced Hurricane María from the diaspora and the poems that this inspired. Raquel also draws a powerful comparison between the Puerto Rican community and the queer community: they both must invent ways to come together.

To learn more about Raquel Salas Rivera’s poetry collections and projects, check out his page.

GIOVANNI ROBERTO is a social justice organizer and the director of the Center for Political Development in Puerto Rico, an umbrella organization that set up community kitchens after Hurricane María and now has a number of mutual aid centers around the island. In the film, he is located in one of the community kitchens and expounds on the wide range of services it provides. He also discusses the desire for Puerto Rico’s community kitchens and organizations to come together for a unified vision and movement.

For more information on Los Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico, a social and activist organization that distributes food and provides diverse forms of aid, check out their page.

a film by Juan Carlos Dávila and yarimar Bonilla

Featuring

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