Hilda Lloréns, Associate Professor, Anthropology

Decolonizing Feminisms: Antiracist and Transnational Praxis, University of Washington Press.

Forthcoming, Fall 2021.

MotherLand brings to life the histories and testimonies of Afro-descendant women of Puerto Rico’s coastal communities, for too long marginalized in historical and anthropological accounts of the archipelago. Through life-affirming practices, Afro-Puerto Rican women challenge poverty, racism and environmental degradation, and build more meaningful lives for themselves and their families. As an “ethnographer of home,” Lloréns does not take for granted her cultural adjacency to the people from whom she learns but enacts an ethical responsibility of care toward the people who entrusted her with their stories. Written through Indigenous decolonial lenses, MotherLand argues that Black women will never be fully equal in Puerto Rico and in the rest of the Americas as long as anti-Black racism is not confronted along with sexism. It positions the Puerto Rican archipelago and its diaspora as a centuries-old first line of Black and Indigenous decolonial thought exemplified in hitherto taken-for-granted knowledge drawn from Afro-Puerto Rican women’s lives. The knowledges and practices described are not just a response to the present complex crises but are modes of resistance to gendered and racialized exploitations that run generations deep. Demands for environmental justice are rooted in reaction to the threat of ecological ruination and deepening capitalist extractivism. But the individuals, collectives, and communities documented are not just making demands—they are also creating restorative alternatives to dispossession. Solidarity, reciprocity, and an ethics of care are at the center of the lives and communities detailed in this book.