Biography
Alex’s professional background is as varied as her wardrobe, including work and study related to public health, violence prevention, disaster response management, socioecological analysis, social determinants of health, qualitative research methods, statistics, and the history of empire. As a proud Boricua from Central Florida, Alex’s current work has a particular focus on the different iterations of a colonial apparatus the United States has used to maintain colonial control over Puerto Rico and what the movement waves of resistance to and independence from US colonization have looked like in the archipelago and the diaspora. Alex has a gorgeous, willful cat named Toast and loves to eat ripe mango. ¡Qué viva Puerto Rico libre!
Research
This policy investigation aims to highlight how the US colonial apparatus, and its myriad devastating impacts, thrives in Puerto Rico today. To do so, I will compare the structure, purpose, and outcomes of corporate tax exemption policies operating in Puerto Rico since 2012 (i.e., Acts 20, 22, 60) with the 2016 Puerto Rico Oversight Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), a piece of US legislation focused on resolving Puerto Rico’s debt crisis. I will analyze the policy documents themselves, related government statements, environmental & human health data, public and private revenue data, and scholarship on the range of outcomes produced by PROMESA and the tax policies. I expect this information will allow me to connect the economic structures in question to deepened social austerity and inequality, environmental pollution, poor health outcomes, disaster vulnerability, and economic instability in Puerto Rico. I will reframe the seemingly beneficial or benign economic policies as part of an explicitly harmful apparatus designed to reinscribe and advance Puerto Rico’s status as a US colony, primarily for the benefit of wealthy US mainlanders at the expense of poor Puerto Ricans. This project identifies the stark disparities between the archipelago and mainland as a result of US coloniality.
