In her exciting new book, Marisol LeBrón traces the rise of punitive governance in Puerto Rico over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present. Punitive governance emerged as a way for the Puerto Rican state to manage the deep and ongoing crises stemming from the archipelago’s incorporation into the United States as a colonial territory. A structuring component of everyday life for many Puerto Ricans, police power has reinforced social inequality and worsened conditions of vulnerability in marginalized communities.
This book provides powerful examples of how Puerto Ricans negotiate and resist their subjection to increased levels of segregation, criminalization, discrimination, and harm. Policing Life and Death shows how Puerto Ricans are actively rejecting punitive solutions and working toward alternative understandings of safety and a more just future.
Marisol LeBrón is Assistant Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
"In this extraordinary book, Marisol LeBrón does a brilliant job of helping us see the everyday activism and cultural inventiveness of Puerto Ricans figuring out how to respond to state repression and colonial capitalism. It’s a genuinely thrilling read."—Laura Briggs, author of How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump
"Policing Life and Death deftly illuminates the long historical presence of 'punitive governance' in Puerto Rico, demonstrating the depth to which gendered, racist state violence defines the US colonial/neocolonial relationship with the island and its people. This indispensable study not only focuses on the normalized, cross-generational violence generated by the policing and criminological regimes, but also pays rigorous attention to the ways Puerto Rican activists, artists, community leaders, and others respond to—and potentially transform—this punitive condition."—Dylan Rodríguez, author of Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the US Prison Regime
"LeBrón's rigorously researched, trenchant examination of how everyday life is sectioned, monitored, and controlled is an essential read for understanding modern-day Puerto Rico and all communities and societies negotiating and defending themselves from the layered execution of power."—Zaire Dinzey-Flores, author of Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City
320 pp.6 x 9
9780520300170$29.95|£25.00Paper
Apr 2019