An Agroecological Response to the Militarized Urban in Vieques, Puerto Rico

Abstract

Between 1942 and 1950, the United States Navy forcefully occupied and constructed three military facilities, known collectively as the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Facility, on the Puerto Rican island-municipality of Vieques. In the process, the Navy dispossessed 70% of the land and displaced 50% of the population, artificially precipitating Vieques’s shift from a rural to urban society. After an errant bomb killed a local, intense grassroots mobilizations succeeded in ousting the Navy from Vieques in 2003, but the extensive ecological and social harm it generated was devasting and enduring. This thesis will contextualize within Vieques the production of what Palestinian urban scholar Abreek-Zubiedat (2023) novelly terms the militarized urbanism(s) and highlight the island’s contemporary agroecological movement in response to it. This thesis then traces how the militarized urban emerged and operated in Vieques vis-à-vis displacement- resettlement logics, the imposition of spatial prohibitions and ecocide, and the gamification of land and society. Finally, I offer possibilities for reimagining our ecological and urban spaces in Vieques and beyond. Complimenting my embodied, archival, and theoretical research methodology is an affective treatment of the island’s militarized history through Pedro Juan Soto’s novel Usmaíl, published and set in mid-20th century Vieques.