• Flashbacks and Foreshadows at the Ends of Empire:Lessons from the Periphery to a Collapsing Center
• Evelyn María Dean-Olmsted (bio)

Eli eli borícua. By Evelyn María Dean-Olmsted.

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August 17, 2017. I drafted this version of Hannah Szenes's famous Hebrew poem from a sweltering apartment in the overgrown, semi-abandoned faculty housing at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. ¹ Playing in my head was the popular melodic version composed by David Zahavi, a staple of Holocaust commemorations. I was recovering from illness and a devastating semester of huelga, a student-led strike that paralyzed the university and shuttered my young children's affiliated schools for over 70 days. The students' protest actions were more than justified. Earlier that year, a federally imposed fiscal control board threatened to halve the university's already shrunken budget in order to satisfy the Wall Street bondholders that held most of the island's 74-billion-dollar debt. Such a move was also in line with the anti-university proclivities of local right-wing political sectors, including the now disgraced, then Governor Riccardo Rossello. But the strike took heavy tolls. The macho bungling of the non-faculty employee's union, coupled with an administration that evaporated into silence, created an experience that even my therapist labeled traumatic. After scrambling to make up the semester—improvising distance learning while catching bronchitis on a research trip to Mexico—I was depleted: not just from the strike, my illness, and the new mode of teaching (sound familiar yet?), but from the stifling weight of perpetual calamity that is life in twenty-first-century Puerto Rico. "The crisis generation" is how political scientist Mayra Vélez Serrano dubbed our students, because it is all they've known. ² Having only arrived in Río Piedras four years earlier in 2013 to start my first full-time academic position, it felt like I'd arrived at the end of the party. It felt like a lot of beautiful things were ending.

Not a month later, the situation would come to a head (one of many, monstrous heads) with Hurricane María in September 2017. The compounded crises eventually compelled my family, like hundreds of thousands of others, to leave Puerto Rico a year later, in summer 2018. ^{3 4} The parallel crisis in academia compelled me, like thousands of others, to exit faculty life altogether.

Now, as I watch the coronavirus disaster unfold from my new home in Miami—including the falling of centuries-old dominoes of racial injustice, in the words of Trevor Noah ⁵ —I and all who lived in Puerto Rico during this time experience an uncanny sense of déjà vu. In May 2020, I shared a meme on Facebook created by a local Puerto Rican artist. ⁶ The caption reads, "Puerto Ricans, looking at how Americans are being left to die by their own government during a national emergency." ⁷ The image, drawn from a still of the film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, features a noosed cowboy (played by James Franco) grinning [End Page 157] from the gallows and asking the man weeping next to him: "First time?" "Second time if you count New Orleans as America, although most of America didn't at the time," my colleague Edie Wolfe from Tulane chimed in. ⁸

The gaslighting. The victim-blaming. The demands to get back to work at all costs. In the rush to reopen economies, we hear the slogan screamed from government-sponsored radio spots and billboards: ¡Puerto Rico se levanta! Puerto Rico rises! Meanwhile, the bodies pile up in the hospitals. Anyone from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) could have told you how states would treat their universities; administrations, their employees; and some faculty, their students. We could have told you what would happen to women's careers. And we could have told you how police would react to protests. ⁹ (Though in the competition for brutality, the US officers can certainly put their Puerto Rican counterparts to shame.) A disaster novice, I once concluded that such blatantly inhumane responses were...

• 帝国尽头的倒叙与预兆：从外围到崩溃中心的经验教训
• 伊夫琳·玛丽亚·迪恩·奥尔姆斯特德（生物）

Eli eliBorícua。伊夫琳·玛丽亚（EvelynMaría）教务长奥尔姆斯特德（Dean-Olmsted）。

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2017年8月17日。我从波多黎各大学里奥彼德拉斯大学半生半熟的教职工宿舍里闷热的公寓中起草了汉娜·塞内斯着名的希伯来诗这首诗。¹由大屠杀纪念活动的主唱大卫·扎哈维（David Zahavi）创作的流行旋律版本在我的脑海中发挥着作用。我从疾病和休尔加毁灭性的一个学期中恢复过来，这是一场由学生主导的罢工，瘫痪了大学，并关闭了我的幼儿附属学校超过70天。学生们的抗议行动是没有道理的。那年早些时候，一个由联邦政府强加的财政控制委员会扬言将大学已经缩水的预算减半，以偿还持有该岛740亿美元债务中大部分债务的华尔街债券持有人。这一举动也符合地方右翼政治部门的反大学倾向，包括现在已经失职的时任州长里卡多·罗塞洛。但是罢工造成了沉重的损失。非教职员工工会的猛烈抨击，再加上行政部门陷入沉寂，创造了一种经历，甚至我的治疗师也称其为创伤性经历。在努力补习了一个学期后（在去墨西哥进行研究旅行时发现了支气管炎的同时改善了远程学习）后，我的资源耗尽了：不仅因为罢工，我的病情和新的教学模式（听起来还很熟悉？），还因为令人窒息的永久灾难的重量，即二十一世纪的波多黎各生活中的生命。政治学家MayraVélezSerrano将“危机一代”称为我们的学生，因为这是他们所知道的一切。² 2013年，我才四年前才到达里奥·皮德拉斯（RíoPiedras），开始了我的第一个全职学术职位，感觉就像是我参加了晚会。感觉很多美好的事物即将结束。

不到一个月后，2017年9月飓风“玛丽亚”（MuríaMaría）陷入了困境（许多可怕的头中的一个）。复杂的危机最终迫使我的家人像成千上万的其他人一样，在一年后离开波多黎各，在2018年夏季^{。3 4}学术界的平行危机迫使我像成千上万的其他人一样，完全退出了教师的生活。

现在，当我看到冠状病毒灾难从我在迈阿密的新家中蔓延时-包括用特雷弗·诺亚⁵（Trevor Noah ^5）的话说，种族不平等的百年历史骨牌的倒塌—我和这段时间住在波多黎各的所有人都经历了一种不可思议的经历déjàvu的感觉。2020年5月，我在Facebook上分享了一个由当地波多黎各艺术家创作的模因。⁶标题写着：“波多黎各人，研究美国人在国家紧急状态下如何被自己的政府杀死。” ⁷图像取自电影《巴斯特·斯克鲁格斯的民谣》的静止图像，其中一位牛仔（詹姆斯·弗兰科饰演）no着嘴[End Page 157]从绞刑架上问，那个在他旁边哭泣的人说：“第一次？” “这是第二次，如果您将新奥尔良视为美国，尽管当时美国大部分地区都没有，”我来自图兰的同事埃迪·沃尔夫（Edie Wolfe）表示^。8

引人入胜。受害人责备。不惜一切代价恢复工作的要求。在急于重新开放经济的过程中，我们听到了政府赞助的广播电台和广告牌尖叫的口号：“波多黎各se levanta！波多黎各崛起！同时，尸体在医院堆积。波多黎各大学（UPR）的任何人都可以告诉您，各州将如何对待他们的大学；主管部门及其雇员；还有一些老师，他们的学生。我们本可以告诉您女性职业将会发生什么。而且我们本可以告诉您警察将如何对抗议活动做出反应。⁹ （尽管在残酷竞争中，美国军官当然可以羞辱波多黎各人。）作为灾难的新手，我曾经得出这样的结论：这种公然不人道的反应是……