Farming and Importing Food: Colonial Racial Capitalism and Food Sovereignty in the U.S. Territory of Puerto Rico from 1919 to the Present

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The purpose of this research is to trace food practices in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico for the last century (1919-2018) and relate them to the processes of colonial racial capitalism. Since the mid-twentieth century, Puerto Rico went from being a mostly agricultural archipelago to an archipelago where there is barely any agriculture and that imports 85% of the food it consumes. This transformation was led by the development strategies that were initiated in 1947, under the political banner of bringing a better quality of life to the archipelago. However, there is a lack of specific knowledge of how agriculture was abandoned, and political narratives tend to put the blame on individuals who did not want to continue farming. Thus, here I will use archival data to explore food practice changes and how they relate to political and economic decision-making. I will use agricultural censuses to trace farming and landscape changes within Puerto Rico throughout time, and I will then visualize these changes in GIS maps. Moreover, I will look at importation and exportation records to graph food importation changes throughout time. Lastly, I will suggest possible avenues for change and the growing food sovereignty movement in the archipelago.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39752.0