New Books In American Studies

Marking the two year anniversary of Hurricane María making landfall in Puerto Rico, the September 2019 release of the anthology Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books, 2019) brings together a collective of artists, journalists, and scholars to reflect on the multiple disasters that have hit the island and how the people of Puerto Rico have responded. Marisol LeBrón and Yarimar Bonilla, the editors of the anthology, in their editor’s introduction foreground the history of Puerto Rico’s continual state failure. Social abandonment, capitalization, and collective trauma were not simply a result of María, but instead, María revealed the systemic failures of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Government. “Long before María, Puerto Rico was already suffering the effects of a prolonged economic recession, spiraling levels of debt, and deep austerity cuts to public resources,” wrote Bonilla and LeBrón (5). María and its aftermath was not only a disaster in itself but an aftershock of bo