Available From UC Press

Energy Islands

Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico
Catalina M de Onís

Energy Islands provides an urgent and nuanced portrait of collective action that resists racial capitalism, colonialism, and climate disruption. Weaving together historical and ethnographic research, this story challenges the master narratives of Puerto Rico as a tourist destination and site of "natural" disasters to demonstrate how fossil fuel economies are inextricably entwined with colonial practices and how local community groups in Puerto Rico have struggled against energy coloniality to mobilize and transform power from the ground up.

Catalina M. de Onís documents how these groups work to decenter continental contexts and deconstruct damaging hierarchies that devalue and exploit rural coastal communities. She highlights and collaborates with individuals who refuse the cruel logics of empire by imagining and implementing energy justice and other interconnected radical power transformations. Diving deeply into energy, islands, and power, this book engages various metaphors for alternative world-making.

Catalina M. de Onís is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver. She coauthored of the book "¡Ustedes tienen que limpiar las cenizas e irse de Puerto Rico para siempre!”: La lucha por la justicia ambiental, climática y energética como trasfondo del verano de Revolución Boricua 2019.
"This is a must-read. Catalina de Onís offers conceptual tools that will inspire energy and environmental-justice actors for years to come while providing models for community-action scholarship. Energy is broadly construed in her analysis: the energy spent by humans creating 'energy infrastructures,' the emotional labor of those advocating for energy justice, the physical labor of producing energy, and the energy mobilized by coalitional politics. She provocatively reframes Puerto Rico's place in worldwide energy-justice advocacy. The archipelago is simultaneously Global North and Global South, a heterogeneous place in terms of class and race. Onís centers the work of black-identified, women, feminist, and queer environmental organizing and is deeply invested in Latin American notions of horizontal solidarities."—Alaí Reyes-Santos, author of Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles

"I absolutely love this book! Catalina de Onís delivers an expansive articulation of the politics of energy. She explores the electrifying power of rhetoric, imagination, language, and action that grassroots community leaders in Puerto Rico engender every day, outside of the confines of capitalism's brutal value system. Drawing on a wide range of literatures and innovative research methods, this study advances scholarship at the intersections of energy, environmental, and climate justice and demonstrates how decolonial theory and action can be centered in debates and struggles against empire, 'natural' disasters, and racial capitalism. The author asks, 'What gives you energy?' My response? This book!"—David Naguib Pellow, author of What Is Critical Environmental Justice?

"This book addresses very timely topics related to energy and colonialism, especially in how they intersect with race, ethnicity, language, and gender. Onís's personal experience and extensive fieldwork in investigating Energy Islands make this work innovative and unique. It's an important examination of how activist communities are working to address these subjects."—Stacey K. Sowards, Mark L. Knapp Professorship, University of Texas at Austin
300 pp.6 x 9Illus: 23 b/w photographs, 1 map
9780520380615$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Jun 2021