Beyond the Pen: Of Arrivals, Tricky Encounters, and Activism in Vieques, PR

Abstract

In “Beyond the Pen: Of Arrivals, Tricky Encounters, and Activism in Vieques, PR,” Dr. Torres-Vélez presents an ethnographic account of the United States Navy’s activities in Vieques, Puerto Rico, and the resulting environmental degradation and health crisis experienced by the island’s inhabitants. The author argues that the US Navy’s military occupation of Vieques for over 60 years, and the subsequent contamination of the island’s landscapes, represents a modernity that endangers human lives and health through “conspiracies of invisibilities.” These conspiracies obscure the links between environmental damage and human disease. The ethnography provides in-depth analyses of Viequenses’ struggles against the conspiracy of invisibilities that has created and maintained the conditions under which military and economic interests supersede the values of human life and health. However, the transformation of individual suffering into a potent transnational anti-militarization movement is a redemptive one. Dr. Torres-Vélez contextualizes Vieques within the broader historical and sociopolitical landscape of Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States, highlighting how late-stage colonialism continues to affect individual lives. The author reflects on his experiences and challenges in conducting research in Vieques as an Afro-Puerto Rican medical anthropologist trained in the United States, weaving together biographical and historiographical elements to explain the tensions and motivations that led him to go “beyond the pen.”

1. Introduction

1.1 Tainting the land is wounding the body

For over half a century, the United States Navy’s activities tainted Vieques’ landscapes into spaces of danger, pollution, and disease. Behind the idyllic beauty of this Puerto Rican island lies the story of modernity’s betrayal, a path of destruction that, unlike Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History [1], can only be seen from up close, as if examining a dark twist on Monet’s impressionist technique. Sickness lurks within every toxic pollutant—a scene of bullets, bombs, and war machines.

At the end of the 1930s, with the impending World War II looming large and fears of German incursions in the Caribbean, the United States Navy seized two-thirds of Vieques, Puerto Rico, to secure their continuing military dominance [2]. However, Vieques did not only offer a military strategic position in the Caribbean; by the 1970s, the US Navy expanded its use of the island for military training. It used the eastern part of the island for a shooting range that provided training capabilities for simultaneously launching sea-to-land and air-to-land missiles. From the 1970s until 2003, the US Navy conducted the most consistent and continuous testing of conventional and unconventional weapons anywhere in the United States, conducting military practices for an average of 281 days of the year, thus detonating and degrading weapons and their chemical components all within the meager 52 square miles of Vieques for more than 30 years. Although island residents had mounted significant opposition against this military occupation throughout the years, it was not until 1999 when a 500-pound stray bomb killed a Puerto Rican security guard inside the military base, causing public outrage and igniting the massive protests that eventually turned into a highly organized diasporic and transnational social movement [3]. While this tragic event galvanized Vieques’ social movement, the growing number of people dying from cancer and the subsequent organizing around health and the environment took center stage throughout the next 5 years. The health crisis was undeniable. By 2000 Vieques experienced a 40 percent increase in the overall mortality rate; a 34 percent increase in cancer mortality in a decade; a 253 percent increase in liver disease mortality; and a 12 percent increase in infant mortality [4, 5]. Neither the US Navy’s assurances that military practices were safe for people and the environment, nor official biomedical etiologic explanations arguing that individual harmful behavior (smoking, diet, and drinking) was the most likely culprit for the health problems confronting the community, could keep people any longer from organizing into the most influential environmental justice movement in Puerto Rican history to date [6].

Military activities across the world have torn apart natural and social landscapes. The scars left on environments and people’s bodies from Bhopal to Baghdad are unspeakable. Those responsible for such scars have profited not only from their infliction but also from keeping them hidden. In the specific context of Vieques, Puerto Rico, researchers have documented the profound environmental degradation caused by US military activities and the resulting sharp increases in chronic diseases such as cancer [7]. However, the links between the two had been consistently obscured: environmental damage and human disease. This ethnography provides in-depth analyses of Viequenses’ struggles against the conspiracy of invisibilities¹ that, across many decades, has created and maintained the conditions under which military and economic interests supersede the values of human life.

The story is also a powerfully—if paradoxically—redemptive one. It is the story of the transformation of appalling individual suffering into one of the most potent transnational anti-militarization movements yet seen [3]. In the late 1990s, after more than 60 years of military occupation, Viequenses led a broad-scale mobilization that cut across previously intractable political and religious lines within Puerto Rico and which succeeded in ending US military weapons testing on the island by 2003. After decades of intermittent and largely ineffectual anti-militarization action, the final success of the Vieques movement startled both the US Navy and global observers.

This ethnography reveals the mobilizing power of community health in rendering the movement focused, efficient, and ultimately successful. It documents how Viequenses’ making sense of health and disease brought them into deeply conflicted relationships with local agents of biomedicine, who provided etiological explanations that did not align with their own embodied understandings of the role of pollution and their health problems. This conflict delivers us an all too common yet utterly undertheorized phenomenon within the Environmental Justice literature: the biomedical’s role in maintaining “conspiracies of invisibilities,” which obfuscates linkages between toxic landscapes and public health crises. These biomedical institutions maintain “conspiracies of invisibility” by obscuring and denying people’s embodied connections about their health problems and the toxic landscape they call home. Sanctioned, “expert” models of disease etiology are invoked in everyday encounters with Viequenses, and alternative, popular understandings of causation are excluded. This social movement uncovered what until then was hidden—the fact that Viequenses were paying with their lives for the “unintended” costs of US military activities. Indeed, a far too high price to pay for an economic system and a polity that neither accepts them as full citizens nor acknowledges their profound suffering.

This work draws together the strands of critical medical anthropology, science and technology studies, and feminist standpoint epistemologies to assert fundamentally new ways of understanding the nexus between twenty-first-century capitalism, neo-colonialism, and the political ecology of health and disease in formerly militarized spaces such as Vieques. In a “postcolonial” world, Viequenses’ degrading health embodies, quite literally, a searing, visceral challenge to notions of the democratizing power of globalization. It reveals how the militarization of Vieques’ landscape functioned as an integral part of a global regime of capital accumulation in the Western Hemisphere and biomedicine’s role as a system of political legitimation for that regime. At the scale of the individual, the moments of multiple contradictions that Viequenses encounter—environmental, health, institutional, and existential—become moments in which “conspiracies of invisibilities” may be revealed and contested [6, 8].

The story of Vieques is thus the story of two dissonant realities: the reality fostered by economic theory and biomedicine and perpetuated in the sanctioned discourses of disease etiology versus the reality of people viscerally experiencing the long-term effects of environmental violence and exploitation. Ultimately, in documenting both the acute traumas and sustained diseases of Vieques’ history, as well as their collective resistances, this work not only makes visible the scars of military involvement and occupation but also mounts a powerful critique of the complicity of explicit and implicit forms of US hegemony in compromising Viequenses’ very lives and well-being. In this critique, my voice and praxis join that of other scholars [9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15] whose influential work in Vieques has made mine stronger.

In this chapter, I tell my story about conducting ethnographic research in Vieques, Puerto Rico, during the height of the social movement that eventually forced the United States Navy off the island in the early 2000s. In such a politicized context, negotiating my identity as an Afro-Puerto Rican medical anthropologist trained in the US proved more than challenging. In addition, I wrestled with the theoretical, methodological, and existential conundrums of researching in one’s homeland, in a place close to the heart, where sometimes one must take a stand. In this chapter, I explore these tensions, weaving together biographical and historiographical elements to explain why I decided to go beyond the pen.

This chapter is divided into four sections. First, in “Of Arrivals: Vieques, a Microcosm of Puerto Rico’s Colonialism,” I introduce Vieques Island within the larger context of Puerto Rico’s being the oldest colony in the world. The chapter continues with that all-too-familiar ethnographic trope of the first encounter with the research site. Second, in addition to documenting my naivete as a freshly minted anthropologist, it seeks to map out the political complexities of Puerto Rico and how they played out within the highly politicized space of activism within a colony with a long history of state oppression (local and federal) against people upholding an anti-colonial position on the island. Third, “The Gun and the Pen” briefly sketches the transition in the United States’ handling of Puerto Rico from a pre-World War II overt type of colonial government that relied on violence and assimilation to a post-World War II type of neocolonial government that obscured the colonial relationship by transforming Puerto Rico into a full-blown industrialized society. Finally, in “Beyond the Pen,” I acknowledge how anthropological work has historically been complicit in managing and disciplining the colonial world. I also make a case for going beyond simply documenting suffering. However, I illustrate how moving beyond the pen is often fraught with complexities and contradictions that deserve more attention. I conclude “Beyond the Pen” with first-person narratives illustrating what leaving my pen and field notes behind to take up activism meant. It was a small solidarity gesture which in and of itself was not much, but as part of thousands more throughout the years of sustained civil disobedience, it eventually tipped the scale against the Navy’s plans for Vieques.

2. Of arrivals: Vieques, a microcosm of Puerto Rico’s colonialism

This story originates between the cold winters of East Lansing, Michigan, where I pursued my graduate studies, and the hot summers of Vieques, Puerto Rico, where I conducted research. However, the roots of this story reach further back, encompassing significant historical events like the Spanish-American War, the US invasion of Puerto Rico, the Citizenship Act of 1917, the mandatory military service draft, and the Declaration of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 1952. These historical moments shaped Puerto Rico’s sociopolitical landscape—and the experience of being Puerto Rican—in an intimate relationship with the United States’ development as a dominant power in the Western Hemisphere. The story of Vieques serves as a small yet impactful narrative within the broader tales of collapsing empires and emerging ones, challenging the notion of colonialism’s decline in the twentieth century and highlighting how late-stage colonialism continues to affect individual lives.

Vieques, a small island off Puerto Rico’s east coast, had a population of around 9400 during my research in the early 2000s. Most of the population (78%) is concentrated in just 22% (24 miles) of the island’s 110 square miles. The remaining 78% is occupied by US Navy facilities, with the west serving as munitions storage and the east designated for military practices. This unequal development has resulted in alarmingly high unemployment rates in Vieques, reaching 60%. Of the employed population, nearly half are engaged in low-paying service jobs related to the predominantly foreign-owned tourism sector. The per capita income stands at $6562, while over 64% of the Vieques population lives below the US poverty line. Unfortunately, visitors to the island often overlook this harsh economic reality, captivated by the enchanting beauty of the seemingly idyllic place and the warm hospitality of its people, whose livelihoods depend on tourism.

The United States’ interest in Puerto Rico dates back to the mid-nineteenth century when the Monroe Doctrine established US dominance in the Western Hemisphere. However, it was not until after the Spanish-American War that the US could secure a military strategic position in the Caribbean with the acquisition of Puerto Rico. The Navy’s acquisition of Vieques in 1939 became even more critical during World War II; Nazi incursions into the Caribbean Atlantic were becoming more daring. With the end of World War II in 1945 and the fall of old European empires, US dominance became clear and Vieques remained firmly within its grip. In the 1940s, Don Pedro Albizu Campos, the president of the Nationalist Party advocating for independence, emphasized that Vieques served as a microcosm illustrating the detrimental effects of colonialism in Puerto Rico.

During my first visit to Vieques, while on the ferry, I serendipitously met Doña Isabelita Rosado, a remarkable 93-year-old former Nationalist political prisoner and a speaker at a commemoration event. She introduced me to Roberto Rabin and Nilda, who were vital activist figures to the social movement and who ran the now legendary “Campamento Justicia y Paz,” the principal hub of military resistance on the island and which I was hoping to make my focal research site. This camp was built in front of the military base’s main gates, a location meant to signal the relentless might of the movement.

I also met Miguel, an experienced activist who generously offered to become my guide, introducing me to various activist factions operating in Vieques. Additionally, Freddy, another Puerto Rican graduate student researching the island, connected me with “Los enmascarados,” a group engaged in civil disobedience activities within the shooting range. “Los enmascarados” were a faction of the social movement that conducted the most daring acts of resistance (such as in-and-out clandestine incursions in the shooting range), which required their identities to be veiled to protect them from military or police retribution. It was this group that I later joined to conduct civil disobedience in the firing range. We visited Campamento Justicia y Paz, and from there, we went on a march advocating for the Navy’s retreat from Vieques. Marching through the different neighborhoods, it quickly became evident how impoverished they were in relation to the tourist areas. The barrios in Vieques resembled Barrio Obrero, the one I grew up in, on the main island of Puerto Rico. Isabel Segunda and La Esperanza were the main urban areas, and I lived in Monte Carmelo, a squatting community without basic amenities.

Doña Rosados’ bridged two highly different but significantly poignant historical moments of anti-colonial resistance in Puerto Rico: the older Nationalists’ anti-colonial armed struggles of the 1950s (largely unsuccessful but incredibly brave and daring) and Vieques’ highly technologically and media-savvy nonviolent environmental justice movement. The last one standing in a bygone era, she served as the secretary of the Nationalism Party during Don Pedro Albizu Campos’ leadership and spent two decades in US federal prison. In the repressive 1950s, the Partido Nacionalista spearheaded the national liberation movement in Puerto Rico, with nationalists even attacking the Blair House in Washington, DC, which led to the imprisonment of their members.

Albizu Campos eventually realized that, in a colonial society, the electoral process only perpetuated colonial status rather than abolishing it. By 1946, the 24-year-old Partido Nacionalista abandoned electoral politics, opting for armed insurrection. This decision caused a split within the party, leading to the formation of the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (PIP), which ran against the Partido Popular Democrático (PPD) in the 1948 elections. Due to the political persecution suffered by the Partido Nacionalista, with its leaders incarcerated and their ideals criminalized, only a few members remained underground. The pro-statehood party, Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP), emerged in 1968. Since then, Puerto Rico has had a three-party system dominating the electoral process, with the PPD and PNP securing the majority of votes, while the PIP remains a marginal player, garnering between 4 and 7 percent of the electoral vote.

Regarding Puerto Rico’s political status, the PIP advocates for independence from the US, the PPD supports “free” association with the US (the current Commonwealth status), and the PNP seeks statehood, aiming to become the 51st state of the union. The political makeup of Puerto Rico’s electoral landscape perfectly sums up the liminal space Puerto Rico inhabits. It is a space where political affiliations divide the will for change, where choosing a side on issues affecting Puerto Ricans always follows the official party lines. This is why Vieques’ social movement was so puzzling. It is the only social movement in Puerto Rico that could transcend historically rigid political lines by equally engaging political subjects that it otherwise would not have attracted if the movement’s ethos was cast in anti-military or anti-colonial terms.

The activist landscape unfolding before my eyes was much more complex than I had ever imagined. Competing narratives, strategies, and tensions between the multitude of actors were sometimes difficult to process. Here are some field notes from that day:

Activists in Campamento Justicia y Paz were getting ready for a march, rallying for option two in the Referendum Criollo:² the immediate retreat of the U.S. Navy from Vieques. After handing out Puerto Rican flags, bumper stickers, and educational literature to those present, we went for an exciting and tiring four-hour march through the barrios.

Hundreds of people singing, a sea of Puerto Rican flags waving, people handing out pamphlets for the “El Referendum Criollo”—nothing new in Puerto Rico, a country with one of the highest electoral participation rates in the Western Hemisphere. And yet, something in the ambiance was very different. It was the intensity of how people were experiencing the rally. The march (and all the subsequent activities I attended) was charged — at times — with sentiments of solidarity and consensus, at other times with animosity, particularly around Navy supporters.

Floating like a leaf in the wind in the rush of the events, I realized that it was not a good idea for me to be seen in an anti-Navy rally on my first day on the island. But like a leaf, there was little I could do. Besides, I also wanted the U.S. Navy to leave the island.

In an effort to interview both pro- and anti-military activists, I tried to avoid drawing attention to my sympathies for the anti-Navy movement and my desire for immediate withdrawal from the island. Fortunately, attending anti-military rallies as part of my research did not preclude me from interviewing opposition members. However, the complex landscape of Vieques’ activism goes beyond a simple discussion of political parties on the island. We now turn to a cursory understanding of the United States’ imperial relationship with Puerto Rico to fully appreciate this complex activist landscape.

3. The gun and the pen: US hegemony in Puerto Rico

From the observation point (OP) of the civil disobedience movement, on the highest hill of the island, Monte Carmelo (the U.S. Navy is not the only one that has one with a vantage from which to gaze at the “other”), I see that Marines observe me from the other side of the fence, while I write these lines.

The unequal ground from which we stand –gun in one hand, pen in another– obliterates that too-brief moment of mutual recognition –two humans, without nationalities or anthems, staring at each other from opposite sides of the fence.

The US imperial gaze has been lingering over Puerto Rico for well over a century, and for much of that time, it has relied heavily on the explicit tools of coercion: military presence and military leadership. During the first 50 years of US explicitly colonial rule (1898–1948), about half of the governors appointed to Puerto Rico by the president of the United States were from the military. Not coincidentally, after the 1934 sugarcane workers’ strike, led by Albizu Campos at the height of nationalist popular support, the subsequent four governors—appointed between 1929 and 1941—were military officers: two generals, one admiral, and one commander. Meanwhile, US citizenship imposed on Puerto Ricans in 1917 “coincided” with the United States’ decision to participate in World War I. Between 1917 and 1973, which marked the end of the US military draft, over 200,000 Puerto Ricans were drafted into military service.

If the 1970s ended the obligatory draft, it also brought the realization among politicians and corporations that advertising and structural economic pressures were even more efficient mechanisms for guiding the poor into military service. Long after the end of the draft, the US military today continues to secure a handsome sum of recruits from high schools in the poorest neighborhoods of Puerto Rico. With few economic alternatives, joining the military becomes a path of upward mobility for the poor. To a great degree, this is the experience of Puerto Ricans at large and of Viequenses in particular. Census data shows that 8 percent of Vieques residents are US veterans.

However, pens have been complicit in perpetuating the colonial relation even more than guns. From art to literature to science, the tools of knowing, apprehending, and representing the “Other” also produce, intervene in, and discipline colonized bodies. Photographs, newspaper accounts, and novels widely circulated at the turn of the twentieth century painted a picture in the US popular imagination of the duty to save colonies like Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, both from Spain and themselves. Infantilized and racialized representations of colonial subjects were meant to convey to the American public that such subjects were unfit to govern themselves and, therefore, needed US political tutelage [16].

But if these cultural representations were needed to create an internal consensus for US expansionism, they were not enough to keep the colonial machinery going. Colonial rule in Puerto Rico needed to evolve from the gun to the pen: the kind of “expert” knowledge embodied in doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, economists, and urban planners, among others [17]. The “gun” refers to the period when the colonial government openly persecuted nationalist supporters and thus exercised its governmentality through the oppressive apparatus. On the other hand, the “white gown” refers to the period when experts (psychiatrists, economists, urban planners, social workers, etc.) produced disciplined subjects through expert knowledge. It is not that one governing strategy replaced the other one—indeed, they did overlap—but instead, there was a change in the emphasis. During the colonial period, there was a greater emphasis on violence, while during the Commonwealth period (still colonial), there was more emphasis on scientific management. This included the development of light manufacturing and, most importantly, the development of manufacturing consent itself [18].

The advent of Rexford Guy Tugwell as the last North American US-appointed Governor of Puerto Rico (1941–1946) signaled a change in colonial rule. Tugwell, a Columbia University agricultural economist, was one of the intellectual architects of Roosevelt’s New Deal. However, it was not until Luís Muñoz Marín became the island’s first elected governor under the newly established Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 1952 that a comprehensive shift to the pen in establishing and maintaining power took hold. New-Deal style policies (as well as monies) found their way into Muñoz Marín’s social platforms. Muñoz Marín was highly motivated to create, out of the peasantry, a well-trained and well-disciplined labor force that would attract to Puerto Rico the global postwar investment boom. With massive investments in infrastructure and manufacturing training, the Muñoz Marín administration radically transformed Puerto Rico—from an agrarian society into an industrial one. In fewer than 20 years, the so-called “Operation Bootstrap” achieved what it took England 500 hundred years to achieve in Puerto Rico: a full-blown industrial economy.

With these shifts in Puerto Rico’s mode of production came parallel shifts in modes of governmentality. In contrast to the openly colonial US rule of the first part of the century, with the advent of the Commonwealth in 1952, the “precise” and “scientific” modes of ruling that emanated from industrial labor models prevailed. An army of experts with pens in hand—including economists, urban planners, doctors, nurses, social workers, and social scientists—was poised to demonstrate how to become a “modern” society in Puerto Rico. At the same time that Muñoz Marín was using the figure of the “jibaro” (creole peasant) to rally support for Operation Bootstrap on the island, agrarian ways of peasant life were being dismantled [19].

The monumental scale of biopolitical power’s operation in Puerto Rico would have startled even Foucault, a French scholar who carefully documented eighteenth century state uses of expert knowledge in disciplining the unruly French working class. From family planning campaigns (exalting the American ideal of the small, nuclear family) and programs such as Operación Serenidad (“Operation Serenity,” helping people to adapt to modernity) to population control (where one-third of Puerto Rico’s child-bearing aged women were sterilized), the capillaries of biopolitical power ran deep. While initially hailed as an economic miracle, this drastic transformation’s negative environmental, social, and economic consequences have been considerable; more than 50 years of damage are still being cataloged and analyzed.

The pen has wrought as many casualties as the gun in Puerto Rico. Expert knowledge is authoritative because its producers are said to be objective—that is, the results of their findings are presumably untainted by personal ideas or subjectivities. The gaze of experts, therefore, is a gaze from nowhere: a gaze that, in its abstraction, abandons responsibility and accountability for what it sees and from whence it sees. It is a gaze that denies its corporeality—and, in doing so, denies the human condition itself. Seeing and writing are not unmediated processes; authoritative forms of writing tend to erase the cultural, political, and social filters from which they operate.

4. Beyond the pen: activism and the anthropologist

From an academic point of view, my initial interest in environmental justice was based on my research experience in Querétaro, Central Mexico. My work there between 1999 and 2000 revealed a clear correlation between disease prevalence associated with water contamination by a nearby transnational industrial complex. Although the health of community members was compromised by industrial water pollution, individuals could not make direct connections between their health and the environment. This inability to correlate environmental conditions with health afflictions minimized the community’s possibilities for collective mobilization. My research revealed that this collective myopia derived from a medical regime that concealed evidence of devastating relationships between the environment and health in the region.

While I was conducting this research in Mexico, Vieques’ anti-militarization movement exploded. In sharp contrast to the case of Querétaro, however, the people of Vieques successfully organized and mobilized around health and environmental concerns. These collective articulations of political will fascinated me, and I began my research in Vieques in 2001. The move, of course, brought me closer to my own life—to an exploration of how places like my childhood home of Barrio Obero and the still-unfamiliar island of Vieques embody the overt and covert relationships between poverty, twentieth- to twenty-first-century “globalization,” and communal disease and mortality. Since my field research ended, my mother’s experiences have given the concept of environmental inequality a new and painful meaning for me—one that continued to guide my personal and professional concerns.

Within the context of my fieldwork, my personal experiences did more than help me to understand how Vieques fits within the larger Puerto Rican and global context: They deeply informed my theories and methodology. The initial tension between my academic and biographical voices stems from a critical moral impetus: to observe and write or to go “beyond the pen” and act. When anthropologists become activists within their field sites, their academic credibility often suffers.

Returning home to Nigeria, Amadiume [20] grappled with what she felt to be the ethical imperative of actively engaging in local struggles for political participation among women while also remaining mindful of the necessary limits to her participation—defined by her various relationships to and within, the field site itself. Amadiume sought a way out of her impasse—the imperative of acting and the limits of participation in the field site—by taking the “political struggle with the pen.” I, too, understood my writing as taking the “political struggle with the pen,” but it soon became evident that keeping my participation within the limits of my field notes was not enough—perhaps it was not even an option. Given what I witnessed in Vieques, I had to participate in the collective mobilizations against the US Navy as an activist. However, this “activist” positioning did not depend only on me but on how people perceived me and placed me within their semiotic system and how I perceived myself in a context of political tensions and suspicions. Like field researchers such as Amadiume, I am not only an anthropologist studying forms of colonialism but a neocolonial subject myself. This presents its conundrum within anthropology, as anthropology was founded within colonial and neocolonial projects. As a Puerto Rican anthropologist working at “home,” I envisioned my work as part of the long tradition of critical Puerto Rican scholarly work. I came to realize, however, that my positioning is not as clear-cut as I thought. It is not enough to think that my work will fundamentally challenge the coloniality of power when the very existence of the discipline in which I am trained came about as a result of such colonialism. The methods I am using—most notably, participant observation—involve a “gaze” similar to that which has surveilled Puerto Rico from the US mainland for a century. This would be made abundantly clear to me early on in my fieldwork:

After several days of playing the anthropologist, with that obsessive habit of constantly taking notes, some faces became more familiar to me, and more curious about who I was. As usually happens while doing fieldwork, I — the anthropologist — was not the only one asking questions. After approaching me in Monte Carmelo, Eric — who identified himself as a Viequense—asked me without hesitation, “¿Quién carajo eres y qué haces aquí?” (Who the hell are you, and what are you doing here?). Some people were nervous about me, and many joked about me being an FBI agent. I also knew those jokes meant much more than that. These jokes marked me as an untrusted outsider. I understood why he questioned me, but knowing this did not make me feel better. My identity as a Puerto Rican was questioned. This questioning made me feel I was somehow an accomplice of the U.S. colonial project. I could only reassert my “Puerto Ricanness” through my working-class background: “Mano yo soy del Barrio y cómo dice la canción: de Barrio Obrero a la Quince un paso es” (Bro, I’m from the Barrio, like the song says).³

For not only the purpose of dispelling activists’ fears about me but also for my emotional well-being, I was impelled to establish rapport with the communities of my field site through my ethnic or cultural capital—even when my simultaneous positionality as a US-trained graduate student of anthropology made me feel I was inhabiting a paradoxical space. Although my cultural competence, in terms of my working-class origins, enabled me to attain a certain degree of acceptance within Vieques activists’ networks, my final decision to actively participate in the protests was also influenced by social pressures that included jokes, gossip, shame, and embarrassment, as the previous example of me being an FBI agent points out. My positioning as an “activist” in Vieques should therefore be understood as reflective of not only my Puerto Rican native-ness and accompanying political views—against the colonial situation and the US military presence in Puerto Rico—but also of the evolving contingencies, pressures, and negotiations of fieldwork among activists within complicated, late-colonial sites. Fortunately, for a newer generation of anthropologists, the complicated dynamics of conducting research as an engaged activist ethnographer are now receiving more attention within the discipline [21, 22, 23], and this writing is part of this contribution.

However, what did going “Beyond the Pen” mean for me? In what follows, I share a first-person account of my experience conducting civil disobedience in Vieques by sneaking into the US Navy’s military base, reaching the shooting range, and serving as a human shield against the sea-to-land and air-to-land missiles launched during one of the largest military practices ever conducted in Vieques. It is presented in three vignettes: “The Wait,” “The Rescue,” and “Sneaking In.” After this account, I will conclude the chapter with some final remarks.

4.1 The wait

The impending bombing had everybody on edge. The activists were getting ready to launch their civil disobedience at any moment. At the height of collective actions, there were three types of civil disobedience actors: public figures (artists, politicians, celebrities), regular folks, and the folks keeping it going. The first two groups’ primary purpose was to get into the firing range to get arrested. Public figures draw the media’s attention by getting arrested in front of the cameras, while regular folks’ arrests were about disrupting the federal court system– the more people detained, the more disruption there was. The mission of the folks keeping it going was to get in and out of the shooting range without getting caught. This was the most secretive group because they were at the forefront, cutting fences, guiding people within the firing range, and, at times, confronting the military.

I was not part of the well-known public figures’ group, as my only claim to fame was to be the youngest of ten siblings. And, although undeniably a regular folk, I did not necessarily want to contribute to collective actions by being arrested. If I were to become a “human shield” against the bombings, it had to be without getting caught. The logic behind this (besides the fact of fearing imprisonment) was that I had no funding for my research; I needed to take advantage of whatever time I had left that summer to conduct my research, and, given the long sentences for those arrested (from 1 to 6 months in federal prison), I feared such a hiatus would undermine my capacity to finish my graduate studies. My mother’s pleas that I not go into the shooting range (it was too dangerous, I could get hurt, and we did not have money to pay for lawyers or bail) also weighed heavily. Having avoided the fate of many of my childhood friends in Barrio Obrero who had chosen a more profitable, although dangerous career path within the underground drug economy, thus ending up locked up or dead, it was ironic that precisely that which had kept me away from trouble— namely, school —was now leading me into trouble.

Having overcome some of the to-be-expected distrust from the activists, I finally got into one of the secretive civil disobedience brigades. This would not have been possible without Freddy, another graduate student connected with the activist leaders, who vouched for me. Getting in, however, only partially dispelled the distrust. Until the last minute, they withheld the details of breaching the military base. Long hours passed after longer ones during the three nights I waited to be summoned.

The night was darker than usual; the moon was nowhere to be found. Nevertheless, right before departing from Campamento Justicia y Paz, our full names and personal information were taken and broadcasted on the radio to ensure that in case of any “accident,” there was a record of those protesting in the shooting range.

The wait for Godot was over. Time, until then still, suddenly unraveled. We needed to leave at once. With angst, an activist said, “The guides are trapped, surrounded by Marines inside the base. We need to get them out now.” Another activist, exasperated with the news, added, “Without them, we are screwed. We will get our asses caught before even finding our way to the shooting range at night.” The flickering reflection in people’s eyes was not the result of the lonely 60-watt-bulb attempting to guard us against the ominous dark. Instead, it was the unspoken mixture of anxiety and frustration shared by the group. Or perhaps I saw my own fears reflected.

One of the activists ran to get a couple of wandering journalists and their crew, who were hanging out in Justicia y Paz, to join us — who, I am sure, were also anxiously waiting for something newsworthy to happen. If the tree was going to fall, people would hear it. But I hoped not to be the fallen tree making the news that night. A few journalists were American freelancers doing a story for National Geographic. There was also a local TV news crew. After quick exchanges about the best course of action, about fifteen of us crammed ourselves, as best we could, inside two dilapidated pickups and one old jeep.

Moments before, I had made sure to have in my backpack everything I needed for the incursion: nine bottles of water, ten granola bars, a couple of apples, baby wipes, mouthwash, vinegar, and one big ol’ white fabric banner with “STOP THE BOMBINGS” written in red letters. I also packed another bag, for safekeeping, with anything that could implicate my research participants and activists were I to fall into the hands of the military. I departed from the things which were, until then, the constant appendixes of my persona: my field notes, recorder, and camera. Days before, I called my family in Barrio Obrero and a couple of friends back in Michigan to inform them of my plans to sneak into the shooting range.

As it turned out, the activists leading this mobilization were no less than “Los enmascarados” (a masked group that mass media always seemed to favor in the spotlight). Within the unspoken division of activist labor in Vieques, los enmascarados were the group that would carry out the riskiest tasks to make civil disobedience possible. For instance, one of the tactics to disrupt military operations was to systematically cut down the fences surrounding the base. This was serious business. Being caught in this action carries a sentence of up to ten years in prison for destroying federal property. This group organized the brigades meant to stop the bombings without getting caught; hence the secrecy, the masks, and my difficulties in gaining their trust. But the masks were not only about confidentiality. They were an attempt at symbolically linking Vieques’ struggle with the Zapatista struggle.

The exact location of where we ended up parking escapes me. Perhaps that was the point since knowledge of the routes to sneak into the base needed to be secret. We walked for about twenty minutes monte a dentro (into the woodland). With the guides surrounded by the Marines near the fences, the plan was to split into two groups: one would create a distraction, while the other would fetch the guides out of the base. Then, one activist told us, “Get ready because we are los enmascarados.” The cameras started rolling as we finished covering our faces with makeshift masks. Once masked, even I got fifteen seconds of fame when a local TV reporter interviewed me. The makeshift covering could not fool friends and acquaintances who saw me in the news that night. Luckily for me, assuming the identity of an “enmascarado” was a one-off. I doubt it could have lasted any longer than that!

4.2 The rescue

As soon as we arrived at the farthest part of the fence, right on the beach, we started screaming at the U.S. Marines. It was a strange symphony, the a-rhythmical sound of our voices overriding the peaceful rhythms of the waves. The cameraman was behind us, filming with a light almost as blinding as the military halogen lights beaming down on us from the top of the wired fences. I felt like an actor and a spectator simultaneously, in an impossible state, both roles canceling each other out at every step. I uttered insults, stumbling over my too-self-conscious recently acquired English, like reciting a poorly written script. I could not speak this language three years ago to save my life. I was profoundly uncomfortable speaking English in my motherland.

Eight or nine Marines showed up on the other side of the fence, and a tidal wave of adrenaline seemed to rise over all of us. We rode it –the three or four of us closer to the fence– with our fingers clenched hard to the wires; we pushed and pulled, trying to rip it right out of the ground. “Gringos get the fuck out of Vieques,” “Go back home,” “Stupid assholes,” we shouted. I could not help but think that it was very possible that among those Marines there were also Puerto Ricans in uniform serving in the military –like my absentee father 50 years ago and my brother more recently. Bilingual insults were now flowing like water from a dam about to collapse. It was scary, infuriating, and cathartic.

All of a sudden, we started hearing gunshots. Hell broke lose. We ran as fast as the sand allowed us to run, as fast as the pepper spray allowed us to breathe. Smoke curtains were rising everywhere. Rubber bullets were flying and barely missing our contorting bodies. Burning eyes. Cold sweat. Sickness. We kept running far enough that neither the bullets nor the tear gas could reach us anymore, where the ocean breeze could give us a respite. Still trembling from the commotion, I scrambled to find the vinegar in my backpack, not for salad, but to help us counteract the ill effects of the awful gas. Not all of us were lucky that night –a few trees did fall in the encounter after all. Although chance spared me from this, two in our group were shot. A UPR student got hit, “luckily,” on one side of his buttocks, and the American cameraman filming us suffered a most severe injury when he got shot on his left elbow. Very nasty and painful bruises, indeed. Hurting with rubber bullets⁴ an American journalist was probably not the best public relations strategy for the Navy’s already negative public image.

To my surprise, the plan did work –I have to admit I was skeptical of being able to fool people trained in military strategy, even more so when they were U.S. Marines. Although still shaky and drained –as if experiencing a sugar crash– I cannot deny having felt a shared moment of pride when we finally met with the guides. I was sure the flickering reflection of people’s smiles was not so fleeting or only in my head. We wanted to celebrate: eat, drink, and laugh. After that ordeal, I knew it made sense to postpone our incursion again until things in the military base settled down. In my mind, I was already savoring a warm “comida criolla” (local meal) and a cold beer. My bubble burst in the blink of an eye, and an activist quickly told us: “It’s now or never. They are not expecting us to return so soon; we must take advantage of that.” Digging deep in my backpack, resigned, my fingers groped until I found a nutritious but tasteless granola bar and a warm bottle of water.

4.3 Sneaking In

Soon after sneaking in, a premature sense of accomplishment settled in. The trees’ canopy, hovering over our heads and pierced only by the stars of a clear sky, added a sense of security. We walked deep into the woods without saying a word, hoping to find the dirt road to guide us to the firing range. Freddy, in his mid-thirties, and the three college students -no older than 19- were in the front, leading the group. Unlike me, this did not seem like their first time walking these beaten paths. Cheo, the physical education school teacher (also about my age), Don Moises, a man in his late sixties who described himself as el abuelo/the grandpa of the group, and I were towards the back, following Freddy and the others. One by one, I drank my water bottles; they seemed to leave my backpack more quickly than the hours passed. Midnight, one, two… by three a.m., I was already down to five bottles. I knew I needed to ration my water, but my thirst– like the canopy of trees– was too intense. Our false sense of security was wearing out as we could not find the marker for a secret route leading straight into the shooting range.

We finally stumbled upon the dirt road, but the marker on it, some inconspicuous rag hung from a tree, was nowhere to be found. Freddy and the college students franticly whispered, trying to decipher how off-track we were. Stopping for that second and watching them at a distance, I wondered how they had any energy left! After all this walking, all I could think about was sleeping. Even “our” grandpa seemed to be doing better than me. Unfortunately, sleeping at night was now, and for the next few days, a luxury we could not afford if we wanted to move forward undetected.

My ruminating about sleeping was abruptly interrupted. The loud sound of an engine was rapidly approaching. We ducked fast. So fast that the only glimpse we could catch was of each other’s unblinking, wide-open eyes. For that fraction of a second, we stared at each other like deer in headlights. Luckily, we reacted, and the tall grass along the dirt road took us refuge. We kept still. The jeep seemed to slow down almost to a stop; the loud engine was so close you could almost touch it. Bright lights, soldiers talking– from the ground, hidden behind two-foot-tall grass, I could see their silhouettes walking against the backlight like in a 1920s black-and-white movie. But I could not distinguish their words, for my heart was pounding so hard that I was sure they would hear it.

We remained still for what appeared to be an eternity. Eventually, the lights were gone, as well as the soldiers and the jeep. Or were they? We waited a little longer. Freddy finally told us it was safe to come out. Standing up was more challenging than I thought it would be. My forearms and elbows, full of fresh cuts from the razor-sharp grass, were pressed against the dirt. My arms were also numb from holding that awkward position for that long. We joked around about how quickly we reacted, about the funny faces we made, about shitting our pants from the scare. We laughed hard, but our attempts to muffle our nervous laughs were forced; behind that bonding moment, we knew too well how close we had come to a potentially fatal encounter. There were no cameras, reporters, or TV crews to shield our actions this time. Instead, there was an abundance of testosterone, youth with something to prove, and guns on the Navy’s side. It was a recipe for disaster. This encounter could have easily turned catastrophic.

We resumed our search for the infamous landmark. Besides Freddy, the college students knew where it was, or so they thought. With the impending sunrise nearby and without clues as to how quickly we would reach our destination, heading East was our best bet. Soon after deciding on this, as a blessing and a curse, a gorgeous sunrise snuck up on us and was made more gorgeous because, after a crazy sleepless night, I was probably in an altered state of consciousness– no controlled substances needed. A blessing because the sunrise meant we would finally get some sleep. It was a curse because it also meant that our arrival at the firing range would be pushed to the next day, given that walking during the day was out of the question. There was also the fact that this military training session was among the biggest in terms of artillery, type of target practice, and number of military personnel. According to the newspapers, over a thousand Marines were on the military base for these practices.

With the first rays of sun clearly showing us the East, we walked deeper into the woods and away from the dirt road. Perhaps because the sunlight was now perforating through the trees, I noticed the vegetation changing as we advanced. The deep green tones were shifting into yellowish and light brown tones. The abundant vegetation was now becoming patchy. Dry bushes and prickly cacti replaced the deep greens. A substantial number of craters also spaced out around us– and surrounding their immediate circumference, no vegetation at all. Some of them were deep and wide. Lead, arsenic, copper, manganese, cobalt, iron, aluminum, phenols, sulfates, benzene, dioxins, white phosphorus, depleted uranium: as if in an unholy litany, I could not stop my mind from going over the never-ending list of pulverized, dangerous heavy metals surrounding us. I could not stop thinking about the possible health consequences of such exposure could have been either. Possibly nothing, given that, unlike Viequeses, our exposure would be relatively short, but then again, depleted uranium is radioactive. There I realized that knowledge could be as poisonous as heavy metals and could not help but feel sick. As if this was not enough, many big bombs were unexploded. It suddenly hit me how silly of me was worrying about toxins when the more imminent danger was being blown up into pieces! We moved carefully, watching every step, hoping the next step would not be the last one. The last bit of adrenaline in our bodies shot through our veins to push us further into safety. At last, we found a well-hidden resting ground.

They told me I fell asleep right away. It was not as if they were watching over me; they knew this because I started snoring as soon as I lay down. My snoring was so loud that they feared the Marines would find us. That’s why they kept waking me up, or so they told me, since I don’t remember waking up. What really woke me up was the blasting sound of exploding bombs nearby. I don’t know how close they were, I could not see them, but I could feel the earth beneath us shaking violently. I had no frame of reference for this. Not even the 5.7 earthquakes (on the Richter scale) that hit Mexico in 1998 while I was conducting fieldwork compared to these tremors. Right then, at that precise moment, the seriousness of our situation became even more evident. As if in an out-of-body experience looking at myself from afar and understanding the fragility of our bodies against such unnatural forces, I came to confront my mortality. I could die; we all could die. “¿Qué carajos hago aquí?” (What the fuck am I doing here?) the question kept surfacing, but I— and not a Viequense questioning my loyalties— was asking.

The purpose of sharing these vignettes is not only to record my own experience but to share it as an example of the emotional texture surrounding civil disobedience. I hope that by sharing my story, others might better understand why thousands of people with no prior activist experience join together in nonviolent protests despite the risks involved.

5. Conclusion

In this chapter, I have woven historiographical and biographical elements together to place Vieques within the larger context of Puerto Rico. In maintaining the tension in my writing—expressed in the double paradox of authoritative and anecdotal voice, on the one hand, and objective observer and subjective activist on the other—I have illustrated the theoretical and methodological conundrums of doing research in one’s homeland, in a place close to the heart, where sometimes one must take a stand.

I first provided an overview of the history and consequences of the United States Navy’s activities in Vieques, Puerto Rico. It highlighted the environmental degradation and health problems caused by the Navy’s military training exercises and weapons testing on the island. The section also discussed the social movement that emerged in response to these issues and eventually succeeded in ending the Navy’s presence in Vieques.

In subsequent sections, I contextualized the story of Vieques within the broader historical and sociopolitical landscape of Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States. In Puerto Rico, the reality is that the majority of the population shuns political nationalism. The historical outline in this chapter is meant to provide a context from which to understand this rejection. In the light of this colonial history, Vieques activists’ over-caution around me is more than well-founded. My account of the misfortunes of nationalism is not meant to define the ethos of Vieques’ social movement either. It would be wrong to call this movement nationalist. This movement succeeded because it consciously avoided the pitfalls of political nationalist discourse. My point, however, is that colonialism has profoundly influenced the everyday life of Puerto Ricans on both the main island and Vieques.

I also sketched Puerto Rico’s evolving modes of colonial governmentality from the early twentieth century to the present. In the Gun and the Pen section, I explored the dynamics of US hegemony in Puerto Rico, emphasizing the interplay between the “gun” and the “pen” as tools of control and domination. While the early colonial period in Puerto Rico relied on the gun, the section emphasized that the pen has perpetuated colonial relations even more. Cultural representations, such as photographs and literature, were used to justify US expansionism and portray colonial subjects as unfit to govern themselves. The shift from the gun to the pen signifies a transition from overt violence to expert knowledge as a means of control. The introduction of experts in various fields, such as doctors, economists, and urban planners, aimed to discipline and govern the colonized population. The section also discusses the role of Rexford Guy Tugwell and Luís Muñoz Marín in implementing New-Deal style policies and transforming Puerto Rico into an industrial economy. The establishment of the Commonwealth in 1952 brought about a shift to “precise” and “scientific” modes of governance, with experts using their pens to shape Puerto Rico into a “modern” society.

In conclusion, the ethnography presented sheds light on the profound environmental degradation and health crisis caused by the United States Navy’s activities in Vieques, Puerto Rico. The US Navy’s military occupation of the island for over 60 years resulted in the contamination of landscapes, leading to increased rates of chronic diseases, including cancer and infant mortality. Despite the Navy’s safety assurances, the community’s organizing efforts and mobilization around health and environmental concerns eventually led to the end of military weapons testing on the island in 2003.

This research highlights the complicity of biomedical institutions in perpetuating “conspiracies of invisibilities,” denying the connections between environmental damage and human disease. The study also underscores the transformative power of community health in fueling the social movement and its success. By making the scars of military occupation visible and exposing the role of biomedicine as a system of political legitimation, the Vieques movement challenges the notions of democracy and globalization.

My experiences and identity as a Puerto Rican medical anthropologist add depth and complexity to the study. Negotiating my role as an academic observer and an activist within my homeland posed challenges but ultimately contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the issues at hand. The decision to go “beyond the pen” and actively participate in the protests reflected a commitment to solidarity with the community and a rejection of the complicity of academic work in colonialism.

This ethnography contributes to critical medical anthropology, science and technology studies, and feminist standpoint epistemologies, offering new perspectives on the intersections of capitalism, neo-colonialism, and the political ecology of health and disease. By revealing the dissonance between official discourses and lived experiences, the study denounces the US military’s disregard for human life and well-being.

Overall, this research emphasizes the importance of community mobilization, the need to challenge dominant narratives, and the potential for collective action to bring about meaningful change in the face of environmental injustice and systemic violence. The story of Vieques serves as a testament to the resilience and power of grassroots movements in challenging power structures and reclaiming agency over their own lives and landscapes.