Ortiz Díaz on Lebrón, 'Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico'

H-LatAm Ortiz Díaz on LeBrón, 'Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico' Review published on Monday, July 27, 2020 Marisol LeBrón. Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. xv + 301 pp. $29.95 (paper),ISBN 978-0-520-30017-0. Reviewed by Alberto Ortiz Díaz (University of Iowa)Published on H-LatAm (July, 2020) Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University) Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54245 In recent years, scholars across fields have developed a rich literature on policing in the United States, and increasingly, the world over. Historians, social scientists, activists, and others are interrogating the violence of the carceral state along racial, class, gendered, immigration status, and political lines at an exponential rate. The growth of this scholarship reflects the urgency of our times, namely massive protests unfolding in the US and elsewhere in response to racialized police and broader structural violence. Marisol LeBrón’s gripping book, Policing Life and Death, traces the rise and excesses of punitive governance in contemporary Puerto Rico, and powerfully contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on policing and state violence. Policing Life and Death is an ambitious study about how different constituencies—including housing project residents, rappers, university students, community activists, and others—have narrated racialized policing and attempted to problem-solve policing inequalities. LeBrón argues that “punitive governance has left an indelible mark on how life and death are understood and experienced in Puerto Rico and has done so in a way that reinforces societal inequality along lines of race, class, spatial location, gender, sexuality, and citizenship status” (p. 3). Decades of violent policing in poor communities of color have conditioned Puerto Ricans to equate poverty, blackness, and spatial location with crime and danger, and exhibit how harm and death are distributed according to prevailing hierarchies. However, far from being mere victims, Puerto Ricans have also resisted deadly punitive logics and practices by forging alternative understandings of justice, safety, and accountability. LeBrón understands punitive governance in the archipelago of Puerto Rico as a form of crisis management and situates its growth within ongoing US colonization, especially the US-led development efforts that accelerated after World War II.[1] Despite some initial success, Operation Bootstrap, which transformed Puerto Rico’s economy from one based on sugar to one based on manufacturing, displaced rural workers and spurred massive migration to the US mainland. The collapse of manufacturing, and then the petrochemical sector by the 1970s, helped propel Puerto Rico’s informal economy in the 1980s and beyond. LeBrón claims that the rise of a drug economy, specifically, was the product of failed colonial economic planning. The drug economy thus became one way for marginalized young people to address the socioeconomic woes impacting their everyday lives. Punitive solutions imagined and materialized by the state emerged as another response, only Citation: H-Net Reviews. Ortiz Díaz on LeBrón, 'Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico'. H-LatAm. 07-27-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/23910/reviews/6285963/ortiz-d%C3%ADaz-lebro%CC%81n-policing-life-and-death-race-violence-and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-LatAm these promised to shield the middle and upper classes from the vulnerability and insecurity introduced by the informal economy. According to LeBrón, the Puerto Rican state strengthened its security apparatus in the late twentieth century to “suture the ruptures of colonial capitalism” and maintain preexisting political, economic, and social relations of power (p. 11). Punitive governance has also produced and reinforced discriminatory understandings of race in Puerto Rico. LeBrón shows how dark-skinned Puerto Ricans are associated with crime and frequently exposed to disproportionate levels of exclusion and harm. She asserts that although Puerto Rico is imagined as a harmonious racial democracy (which is true of many Latin American societies), race and racial formation there have been structured by histories of violent conquest, enslavement, and colonization. Puerto Ricans are positioned as racially and culturally mixed, but a white, Hispanic identity is often invoked to create a unified Puerto Rican identity under continued US colonization. Therefore, blackness is policed in Puerto Rico, but how exactly it is policed can be hidden in plain sight given “adherence to color-blind, racist discourses and ideologies in the public sphere” (p. 13). What is more, race is interchangeable with class and space. Police racialize black Puerto Ricans through perceived and real connections to the informal economy, public housing, and other low- income communities. This racial common sense can be so powerful that it annuls racial self- identification or actual differences in skin color. Class and space complicate how many Puerto Ricans understand and discuss race by becoming coded extensions of race. Policing in contemporary Puerto Rico, LeBrón vehemently contends, operates as a cannibalistic structure. The vulgarity of this structure, not the multitude of nuanced individual agencies comprising it, is her focus. LeBrón makes clear that Policing Life and Death is less about rank-and-file police officers and “more about how policing functions as a structure” that shapes Puerto Rican social institutions, relationships, and norms (p. 16). The book does not intend to map the race and class positions of police officers, their narratives, or their justifications. Instead, LeBrón explains how policing functions as a “race-making institution that upholds white supremacy” and “creates, maintains, and reinforces deeply exclusionary structures” (p. 17). In casting policing as mechanistic and emphasizing a structural repression-popular resistance dichotomy, however,Policing Life and Death largely sidesteps the interpersonal policing dynamics and power relations at work within marginalized communities. LeBrón recognizes that such fault lines and tensions exist. She just does not subject them to the same scrutiny as the police structure. To shed light on the experiences of people often silenced in official narratives, LeBrón deploys a transdisciplinary approach, making deft use of interviews with activists, participant observation of protests, and informal conversations with locals about how they view policing. She also relies on external investigations and evaluations of the Puerto Rican police department, internal police memos, government and legal records, political speeches, demographic data, song lyrics, news outlets, and social media, among other materials. LeBrón maintains that the transdisciplinarity of her work, and “the secretive nature” of police and her position as a research “outsider,” obligated her to integrate “incongruous sources” to document punitive governance and its effects in modern Puerto Rico (pp. 18-19). The result is a creative “alternative archive of policing” that clarifies how Puerto Ricans experience punitive measures, how policing works through cultural ideologies and social inequalities, and how locals adopt, negotiate, or spurn state forms of justice and safety (p. 20). LeBrón organizes Policing Life and Death chronologically. The first three chapters trace the Citation: H-Net Reviews. Ortiz Díaz on LeBrón, 'Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico'. H-LatAm. 07-27-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/23910/reviews/6285963/ortiz-d%C3%ADaz-lebro%CC%81n-policing-life-and-death-race-violence-and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-LatAm emergence and consolidation of mano dura contra el crimen (iron fist against crime) in the 1990s. The remaining four chapters cover the afterlife of mano dura and more recent bottom-up visions for the future of policing in Puerto Rico. As LeBrón illustrates in chapter 1, mano dura was refined by the New Progressive Party (PNP) Pedro Rosselló administration and sought to eliminate drug trafficking by deploying police and military forces in public housing and other low-income communities. The implementation of mano dura rendered “marginalized populations vulnerable to harm and premature death through logics and practices of dehumanization and criminalization” (p. 25). The police occupation of public housing complexes marked residents as both vectors of harm and “unruly subjects,” which hardened existing prejudices and made it more difficult for them to access opportunities (p. 50). In chapter 2, LeBrón examines how mano dura traveled between Puerto Rico and the US, as well as between Puerto Rico and other corners of Latin America and the Caribbean. As neoliberal trade and continued hostility toward Puerto Rico’s full incorporation into the US nation- state weakened its privileged status vis-à-vis the , the Rosselló administration projected itself as a facilitator of US capital expansion and a model for policing and public housing policies across the Americas, especially in the realm of privatization. In chapter 3, LeBrón explores how underground rap music and the drug economy were mutually constituted. The circulation of people,

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