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

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, practices, and technologies between the US diaspora and Puerto Rico accelerated the growth ofreggaetón . Like housing project raids, the policing of underground rap in Puerto Rico orbited racialized and classed notions of crime, poverty, and space, which further stigmatized and harmed young people of color during the mano dura era. The hypersexual and violent but also astute cultural expressions of Puerto Rican rappers were used to scapegoat them and other marginalized young people instead of confronting the root causes of social supremacies and societal insecurities in the late twentieth century. LeBrón uses the lyrics of artists like Vico C, Ivy Queen, Daddy Yankee, Eddie Dee, Tempo, and others to show how rappers narrated their circumstances and talked back to power, and how state and moral authorities appropriated rappers’ cultural artifacts to triangulate drug trafficking, deviant behavior, and underground music. A major consequence of such policing was that it entombed young people of color within the carceral system. LeBrón emphasizes the implicit solidarity of Puerto Rican rappers and their police abuse activism in this chapter, not the street ethnographies or the friendly and confrontational competition that characterized underground music at the time. Nor does she account for transformations in some artists’ thinking, a case in point being Vico C, who became a born-again Christian in the 1990s and challenged Puerto Rican rappers, reggaetón consumers, and marginalized youth to reflect on how they are complicit in their own destruction.[2]

Chapter 4 explains the trajectory of mano dura policing in the 2000s during the administrations of the two Popular Democratic Party (PPD) governors who succeeded Rosselló. Sila María Calderón and Aníbal Acevedo Vilá rejected the militaristic and punitive style of mano dura and pledged to focus on rehabilitation, education, and community empowerment, but once these leaders entered office their administrations propagated the public safety and security approaches of the Rosselló administration. Calderón promoted mano firme (firm hand), which prosecuted government corruption and high-level drug trafficking while stressing rehabilitation and prevention for low-level offenses. Vilá instituted a hardline approach known as castigo seguro (certain punishment), which relied on hot-spot policing in low-income communities and increased surveillance of public housing residents via security cameras. Despite criticizing mano dura, both Calderón and Vilá depended on the same logics and practices, further entrenching a violent state presence in low-income areas and making tough-on-crime policies

In chapter 5, LeBrón showcases how police brutality, harassment, and surveillance were enacted against middle- and upper-class university students in Río Piedras during the strikes of 2010 and 2011, exposing long-standing forms of police repression and violence in impoverished parts of Puerto Rico. Fleeting displays of cross-class and -racial solidarity transformed many of the activists who participated in the strikes and challenged the agenda of the student movement. In chapter 6, LeBrón investigates the responses to violence and death that have flooded Puerto Rican social media in recent years. Antiviolence activists have strategically used social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to question punitive logics, convert nonbelievers, and change public policy. LeBrón underscores two high-profile cases—the brutal murder of José Enrique Gómez by a group of young men and women of color in late 2012 and the hit-and-run death of singer Ivania Zayas Ortiz at the hands of a young man of color in early 2015—to highlight the micro-power clashes that ensued and the counternarratives about policing that were imagined on social media. These, in turn, paved the way toward some activist victories, such as the dismissal of a major television personality of color (Kobbo Santarrosa, who has since returned to the airwaves but was recently once again mired in controversy) and gender-inclusive education. LeBrón finds that Gómez’s “whiteness helped to render his premature death as unfair and undeserved” (p. 193), while in Ortiz’s case, gender—not her whiteness or local celebrity—was enough to confirm that she was responsible for hers.

Chapter 7 illustrates how policing and power more broadly function from below. LeBrón assesses the security experiences and visions of people in the mostly black town of Loíza, the territorial gang activity there, and the violence reduction and prevention work of Taller Salud, a feminist public health organization based in Loíza since the late 1970s. LeBrón considers Taller Salud’s Acuerdo de Paz (Ceasefire) program, which operated in the mid-2010s and was modeled after a Chicago-based public health program called Cure Violence. Acuerdo de Paz employed community members to work with potential victims and perpetrators of violence, one of whom even traveled to El Salvador—a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world—to spread the gospel of decentralized policing. The organization countered the police’s interpretation of violence in Loíza as mostly related to drug trafficking, and pursued a “radically intersectional praxis” by deploying a “feminism that seeks to ameliorate gender violence” and the structural “violence of racism, poverty, and spatial segregation” (pp. 229, 231). Acuerdo de Paz and locals hoped to restore community relationships rather than fracture them. Their alternative culture of justice, safety, and community, however, can also be described as a form of policing. It did not intend to police loiceños in a punitive fashion, but did aspire to advance a Foucauldianesque self-discipline that would reshape the collective consciousness of young men of color who had to be taught how to correctly interact with and treat one another, women, and the community. LeBrón concludes Policing Life and Death by scratching the surface of how disaster recovery was policed in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

Policing Life and Death is an impressive study. The mark of a great book is its ability to generate questions and critiques, and Policing Life and Death does this and more. I will only speak to a few additional areas here. For instance, a deeper contextualization of the roots of modern policing in

Puerto Rico would have sharpened LeBrón’s argument about necrocolonialism. This requires, at the very least, a discussion of the founding of Puerto Rico’s modern police force at the turn of the twentieth century and how the logics and practices informing it evolved or did not after Puerto Ricans became US citizens in 1917.[3] Engaging the work of local scholars can help excavate this history and establish when and how the US shaped policing in Puerto Rico before its well-known bouts with radical nationalists, students, and other dissenters in the 1930s and 1950s.[4] This history can also be contemplated in pan-Caribbean context, as scholars have long recognized that the US military facilitated security-oriented state-building processes across the Caribbean world (everywhere from Nicaragua to Hispaniola) in the early to mid-twentieth century.

Scholars, journalists, and others are increasingly producing rich local studies and accounts of racialized and alternative policing south of the US border. The racialized policing of poor youths of color and the grassroots articulation of alternative power structures in Brazilian shanties, for example, offer potentially illuminating points of comparison, especially given that much of the scholarship on Puerto Rico looks toward the US rather than Latin America. The racialized violence associated with contemporary Brazilian policing and the oppositional cultures, plural orders, and problem-solving regimens that have emerged in shanties are reminiscent of patterns identified by LeBrón for the Puerto Rican case, although on a much larger scale and with different activist and spatial implications.[5] Considering these cases together demonstrates how violent policing integrates the Latin America world region in ways that both connect and disconnect it from other parts of the world—on the one hand by showing that black deaths at the hands of police and police impunity transcend national and world regional borders, and on the other hand by drawing attention to diverging histories of socioeconomic mobility, centralization, and regionalism within the modern global order. Finally, the growing field of memory studies in Latin American history affords different tools with which to reconcile conflicting impressions of policing and analyze the politics of credibility. Since memory is fickle and gray, evaluating it across groups and generations will surely corroborate some of LeBrón’s findings while complicating others.

US-Americanists, Latin Americanists, and criminologists will discover much of value in Policing Life and Death. Scholars active in several other subspecialties will as well, as LeBrón masterfully blurs latinx, black, carceral, feminist, queer, and critical ethnic studies. She disrupts the sanitized self- image of the police and state but also reveals that similar posturing can emanate from below. LeBrón gathers voices and experiences typically silenced in official narratives and imparts original insights about racialized and gendered policing in what is often considered a docile and white corner of the Caribbean. Policing Life and Death will be the standard for contemporary studies of policing in Puerto Rico going forward. Future researchers have plenty to critically build on, and I for one eagerly anticipate what comes next.

Notes

[1]. LeBrón uses the term “archipelago” as a synonym for Puerto Rico and its diaspora throughout the book. She suggests that archipelago is a more inclusive and accurate term, as it acknowledges the geographic fluidity and historical realities of contemporary Puerto Ricans (p. 241n7). The bulk of the book, however, is indeed about Puerto Rican urban spaces on the big or main island, so in this reviewer’s estimation utilizing the term “island” would have been, in many instances, just as appropriate.

[2]. For example, Vico C’s 1998 song “Quieren” and its accompanying music video suggest that personal responsibility and preferences are central to the life or death of a people/nation as well as individuals.

[3]. There are important points of reference in this vein in Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, eds., Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), “Part 2.”

[4]. José E. Martínez Valentín,La presencia de la policía en la historia de Puerto Rico: 1898-1995 (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1995); andMás de cien años de carpeteo en Puerto Rico (Caguas: J. E. Martínez Valentín, 2003).

[5]. For example, see Jeff Zimbalist and Matt Mochary, dirs.,Favela Rising, DVD, eighty minutes, produced by Sidetrack Films and VOY Pictures (Los Angeles: Magnolia Home Entertainment, 2010); Robert Gay, Lucia: Testimonies of a Brazilian Drug Dealer’s Woman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005); Enrique Desmond Arias and Nicholas Barnes, “Crime and Plural Orders in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,” Current Sociology 65, no. 3 (October 2016): 448-465; Jaime Amparo Alves, The Anti- Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); and Manuela Andreoni and Ernesto Londoño, “‘License to Kill’: Inside Rio’s Record Year of Police Killings,” New York Times, May 18, 2020.

Citation: Alberto Ortiz Díaz. Review of LeBrón, Marisol, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. July, 2020.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54245

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.