Being-in-the-world embodied and affect(ed)

[Our activism] arose not only out of our disappointment with a government that doesn’t care; it also arose from not wanting to die … from not wanting any more of our women to die (Jésica 2003).

“From not wanting to die.” This deceptively simple, yet emotionally charged statement, points to something rather profound. It at once links the utterly individual instinct of self-preservation with the inescapably collective space of sociopolitical life. This is a story about a group of women battling against formidable odds. The story is neither complete, as all stories are partial, nor final, as for these women it is still unfolding. The story retells Viequense women’s struggle against many foes. These include illness, disease, toxicity, pollution, death, loss, neglect, lack of access to health care, patriarchal traditions that demand silence, and the military power of the US Navy linked to all of this. This story captures the first few years in the early 2000s. It certainly does not pretend to speak for, or about, all Viequense women. Its scope pertains mostly, but not exclusively, to interviewed women from the activist group known as “la Alianza de Mujeres.” This activist group, based on Vieques, an island part of the archipelago of Puerto Rico, concerned itself with mobilizing their community around the disheartening health problems so many were facing on the island at that time (and sadly, almost twenty years later, still confront today). And yet, although a partial story, this essay contends that the embodied experience of these women can shed some light on the role affect plays in igniting people into passionate politics.

Jésica’s political consciousness “arose” from the material/semiotic conditions that made her life untenable. Material refers, among other things, to the physical state of ruins Viequenses’ landscapes and bodies were reduced to during the long decades in which military practices exposed them to thousands of pounds of highly toxic pollutants, wreaking havoc on the islands’ ecology and peoples’ health. Semiotic, on the other hand, refers to the fierce struggles over meaning that ensued after the military’s staunch denial of responsibility in relation to the island’s environmental and health crises. However, Jésica’s statement was not about her suffering alone, it was about women realizing their suffering was both shared among themselves and also widespread among the population. Their pain was at once situated in the flesh, and thus individual, as it was collective in its sharing. Undoubtedly, their pain offers us an entry point into a world that is both spoken about, and thus signified, and felt in the body, and thus constantly overflowing with meaning. Because sometimes, when “las palabras no bastan” (words aren’t enough), to convey the profundity of suffering, action becomes the only meaningful way of moving forward. Her statement offers us a contingent and tentative glimpse into a complex affective landscape.

Jésica was in the midst of organizing a health campaign when I interviewed her in 2003. In her mid-thirties, dark-complected and soft-spoken, she was an active member of La Alianza de Mujeres—a coalition that also advocated for women’s health on Vieques. Her at-times-trembling voice, briefly hinting at her Promethean attempts of suppressing her indignation after losing a teenage daughter to cancer, made evident how important the Viequenses’ struggle was for her. What was at stake was nothing less than forcing out of the island the most powerful military in the world, to stop the ongoing toxic pollution of their homes and the death of their loved ones. Her gesturing hands could not mask what seemed to be a perpetual state of alertness. Reflecting on her advocacy, Jésica explained that, the “process of liberation has allowed me to free myself of all of those taboos and fears that before didn’t allow me to speak out.” Drawing on ethnography conducted during the height of anti-military struggle in the early 2000s, this article examines Viequense women’s intense forms of suffering and correspondingly powerful forms of collective action. In this article, I explore how the affective dimensions of Vieques women’s dolor (suffering) and rabia (indignation) became catalysts for their politicization.

Academic work seeking to explain social movements rarely engages affect and emotions as analytical concepts. More often, the social movement literature remains within the confines of the cost–benefit analysis of the rational subject. As Goodwin et al. (2001) suggest in their seminal book Passionate Politics, within academia, emotions have no place, neither within its walls nor between its pages. Only level-headed, rationalist and objective academic analysis is valued and praised. Not surprisingly, in today’s liberal societies, only reason, not affect, is the dominant model of legitimation. At least since Max Weber, social scientists have associated emotions with irrationality in a binary and hierarchical framework that devalues women’s experiences and the category of emotions.

Building on and expanding the work of Goodwin et al. (2001), I define emotions as somatic and narrative responses that enable women (and others) to react, process, evaluate and make sense of both quotidian and extraordinary challenges to everyday life. However, although culturally determined, socially codified emotive responses are not monolithic. Often social agents, in this case activist women, can resignify not just the meaning of an emotive reaction but the very definition of whether it is socially sanctioned or condoned. This essay argues that resignifications of affective reactions have the power of subverting gender, class and racial hierarchies. In other words, it is not simply that emotive, and thus embodied, reactions socially mediate how women and others respond to and make sense of their world, but that such emotive reactions have the potential to change the very social definition of what is accepted and what is not. It is a sort of feedback loop process wherein socially expected reactions fall short and require recalibration to properly address the utterly unexpected nature of what is confronted. This is especially true when women are confronted with not just everyday challenges but with extraordinary, difficult challenges. What I mean by extraordinary challenges is the dissonance that arises between women’s embodied knowledge and the unsatisfactory institutional and gendered responses (both local and federal) addressing their concerns about health and environmental risks. These extraordinary challenges often require women to improvise and modify their emotive, embodied and narrative responses to rise to the occasion, thus introducing change. These responses, which form a repertoire of durable predispositions, is what Pierre Bourdieu (1977) called “habitus.” The mechanism that explains social change through improvisations in the reproduction of social structures, on the other hand, is what Marshall Sahlins (1985) called “practice theory.” By introducing an ecofeminist perspective such as that of Ariel Salleh (1997) and Vandana Shiva (1989), I build on and hope to move forward from Sahlins’ (1985), Bourdieu’s (1977) and Clifford Geertz’s (1973) interpretative approaches. Geertz famously once said that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun (1973, p. 5).” The women of this story not only have seen through men’s poorly woven webs, they have also cut through the threads to disentangle themselves from such limiting webs of meaning. And they have for sure spun their own. Better. Stronger.

By now it should be clear that my definition of embodiment relies neither on the decontextualized eighteenth-century conception of the body as an organism, that launches biomedicine (Foucault 2009), nor on the interpretative approach that reduces the body to a text (Csordas 1988, 1994). Building on Csordas, I define the body, and thus embodiment, “as a generative source of culture and self rather than as a tabula rasa upon which cultural meaning is inscribed” (1994, p. 17). In this sense, the constitution of subjectivity, far from being understood as exclusively taking place through discourse, emerges from a historically situated body entangled in complex gendered and environmental relations. Thus, subjectivity cannot be separated from the experiential body because it is in the body that environmental contradictions get expressed and from the body that any awareness of, and action against, such contradictions might emerge. I propose the body—always entangled in definite ways of being-in-the-world (Ingold 2000)—as a trope through which to understand the sociopolitical implications of rapidly changing environments. I base this proposition on the simple fact that in the face of polluted environments the body becomes the ultimate register of epidemiological changes by becoming “sick.” In other words, the coming-into-being of the world becomes central in the coming-into-being of people’s selves and well-being. Hence, if in contexts saturated with hazardous substances people’s etiological explanations depart from that suggested by traditionally atomistic biomedical accounts, it is because of the difference in their positioning in relation to the complex assemblage that produces militarized landscapes.

Drawing on Ana Ramos-Zayas’s work (2012), I engage “affect” here as the emotive structuring that guides quotidian interactions. Like Ramos-Zayas, I understand affect to be central to the dynamics of social life. Embodied expressions of affect allow women (and others) to reassess their own position within institutional and cultural structures of power and subordination. Given the aforementioned marginalization of affect and emotions within academic work seeking to explain social movements, this work argues for the analytical centrality of these concepts.

Despite women’s significant contribution to social mobilization, very few scholars have examined their role in Vieques anti-military struggle. The exceptions are, of course, McCaffrey, Cruz Soto, and Vélez Vélez. In their rigorous ethnographies, these three scholars have independently addressed (1) articulations of gender consciousness and collective memory in the women’s mobilization (Vélez Vélez 2010, 2013; Cruz Soto 2008a, b), and (2) the collapsing between gendered and feminist agendas to mobilize “traditional roles” in new spaces of social action (McCaffrey 2002, 2008). My work contributes to this body of literature by placing women’s affect at the center of the analysis. In my time with the women of La Alianza and El Comite, what I came to observe was the very specific, catalytic power of embodied pain, frustration, and marginalization. While Vélez-Vélez observed women’s specific forms of activism to constitute what he calls a new “female logic,” which presumably encompasses cognition and emotion in a nonessentialist fashion, I observed a third space of consciousness-origin: that of the gendered body.

Viequense women found themselves tending to growing numbers of ill family members and were forced into increasingly frequent contact with a biomedical establishment that refused to investigate more critically this escalating disease prevalence. Simultaneously, they found themselves in the middle of a growing social movement that accepted their labor but did not incorporate to any significant degree their perceptions or agendas. Thus, this article contends that Vieques women’s expression of dolor y rabia catalyzed not only female-led collective organizing but feminist discourses of social action through which women, as they explain, “freed themselves” from the “taboos and fears” keeping them from having a voice.

At the intersections of medical anthropology, environmental justice and postcolonial studies, this article proposes affect as an analytically important framework from which to understand the empathic, emotive and gendered articulations of collective action. But before further expanding on what precisely are Viequense women’s expressions of dolor y rabia, a brief historical account, and a brief word on methodology, are in order.

Neocolonialism and toxic legacies

In 1941, forty-two years after the acquisition of the island from Spain and amid fears that its borders might be threatened by World War II, the United States established a network of military bases in Puerto Rico.Footnote 1 Vieques island—a Puerto Rican municipality located six miles off of Puerto Rico’s northeastern shore—became a strategically important naval base (Baver 2006; McCaffrey 2002; Vélez-Vélez 2010). When German submarines sank three hundred commercial ships and tankers in Caribbean waters during the first 8 months of 1942 (Ayala and Bolívar 2011), the ensuing disruption of trade made salient to the United States government Vieques’ importance as a gatepost for not only territorial security but also commercial interests. Although the fall of the old European empires subsequent to World War II meant the beginning of decolonization for most countries around the globe, it signified for Puerto Rico the initiation of a neocolonialFootnote 2 stage of occupation by the United States. In the Cold War era that lasted into the early 1990s, the number of military bases in Puerto Rico grew, with the island becoming the largest military complex outside the continental United States.

Vieques became the exclusive training ground for the US Navy from the 1970s on (Wargo 2009a). Military activities in Vieques reached an average of 280 days of the year of shooting practice, including air-to-ground and ship-to-shore bombing at close proximity to the 9,000-person civilian population.

Infant mortality rates have decreased in all industrialized countries, including Puerto Rico, since the middle of the twentieth century. Yet on the tiny island of Vieques, the infant mortality rate increased by 12% just between the early 1990s and the late 1990s (Cruz Nazario 2001). Vieques also experienced a 40% increase in the overall mortality rate, a 34% increase in cancer mortality rates and a 253% increase in liver disease mortality during this same period (Ortíz-Roque et al. 2000).

Despite the US military’s continuous denial between the 1970s and 2000s that it was using its base on Vieques as a missile testing ground, in 2003 it was officially acknowledged that the navy had during this time conducted on Vieques the most consistent and continuous testing of weapons anywhere in the United States. Wargo has explained that “Vice Admiral John Shanahan … estimated that between 1980 and 2000 the Navy dropped nearly 3 million pounds of ordnance on Vieques every year” (2009b, p. 96). If we add up the amount of said ordnance for the total span of military practices on the island, it tops out at a staggering “200 million pounds of weaponry deposited on or near Vieques during the US occupation” (Wargo 2009b, p. 96). These weapons were all detonated within the meager fifty-two square miles of Vieques, and their chemical components were left to degrade and leach into soil, water and air.

In addition to conventional weapons, the US Navy tested highly toxic nonconventional weapons on the island (Wargo 2009a). Soil and plant samples collected by environmental scientists who gained access to the naval base during activists’ occupation in 2000 revealed evidence of, among many other dangerous pollutants, radioactive depleted uranium—a known carcinogen. Although the navy eventually admitted to its use of armor-piercing depleted uranium shells, it dismissed the gravity of the admission by arguing that the amounts of ammunition used were negligible (Wargo 2009b). In the waters off Vieques, traditionally relied on heavily for seafood, toxic substances such as inorganic arsenic persist (Cruz Nazario et al. 2013). Meanwhile, on the island, cancer incidences continued their meteoric, multi-decade rise (Wargo 2009a; Cruz Nazario 2001).

This profound environmental degradation wrought by US military activity in Vieques between 1970 and 2003 has been well documented (Massol-Deyá et al. 2005; Massol-Deyá and Díaz 2003; Massol Deyá and Díaz de Osborne 2013). Similarly, the articulated roles of environmental degradation and disease in catalyzing public anger and action on Vieques have been discussed by those broadly theorizing the island’s mobilizations. Although other events played a fundamental role in this movement—for instance, the death of security guard David Sanes by a five-hundred-pound stray bomb during target practice, causing public outrage and igniting the initial massive protests against the navy (Wargo 2009b; McCaffrey 2008)—it was women’s persistent organizing around health and environment that ignited and propelled the movement to its eventual success, when in 2003 the US Navy finally withdrew from the island. This startling triumph in the unending struggle for environmental justice would not have been possible without newly sharpened critique and persistent collective action of Vieques’ women, who, in confronting the ubiquity of dolor y rabia in their own and their families’ bodies, found the strength to fight back against the most powerful military in the world.

Map of the territory, or, how did we get there?

The narratives explored in this article represent a subset more than 50 in-depth interviews I conducted between 2001 and 2003 with Viequenses, the majority of whom were women. Particularly, I am drawing from the narratives of six key interviews with leaders and members of the all-female La Alianza de Mujeres. During my research I also interviewed seven leaders and members of the mixed-gender El Comité Pro Rescate y Desarrollo de Vieques, which organized most of the civil disobedience carried out in Vieques between 2001 and 2003. Forty additional interviews were conducted with Vieques residents to investigate, more broadly, whether experiences of health and disease were similar to those of the leader-activists. From these interviews it became evident that discourses on indignation, disease etiology and causation circulated widely among the general population—although they were articulated with varying degrees of sophistication. Even among “pro-navy” supporters, some of whom worked within the military base, it became impossible to deny that the health problems they themselves, and many others, were confronting had to be related to the military’s toxic pollution.

The environmental justice literature has shown that in toxic environments, such as the one in Vieques, women’s embodied experiences are often not taken into account by governmental and health institutions until it is too late (Christen 1998; Di Chiro 1998; Szasz and Meuser 1997). Women’s perceptions are underestimated, at best, and utterly ignored by the biomedical establishment, at worst—this despite the fact that, as this literature has extensively documented (Charkiewicz et al. 1994; Brown and Ferguson 1995; Harding 1991, 1998; Krause 1993; Merchant 1995), women feel acutely the brunt of environmental problems. Not only must women cope with their own afflictions, but they often are charged with the care of unwell family and community members. The literature also suggests that women, as some of the first to viscerally experience the ill-effects of toxic environments, tend to be at the forefront when it comes to organizing collective actions (Bevington 1998; Di Chiro 1998; Epstein 1997; Mellor 1994; Moore and Head 1993; Sze 2007). Only recently has scholarly attention to women’s important role within environmental justice in Puerto Rico surfaced. For instance, the work of Llorens (Lloréns and Santiago 2018; Lloréns et al. 2018; Lloréns and Stanchich 2019; Lloréns 2019), has documented women’s leading role against post-hurricane María environmental degradation in Puerto Rico’s southeast. With a long history of hosting oil refineries and coal-power plants, communities near Guayama’s Jobos Bay have endured high rates of air, water and land contamination and the subsequent increase of health problems associated with this. Women’s activism in Vieques is no doubt a precursor to present-day environmental justice women’s activism in Puerto Rico.

In scholarly accounts of Vieques, however, scant attention has been paid to the affective bridge between women’s visceral experiences of disease and political mobilizations toward environmental justice. Thus, in this article, I explore the situated relationships between environmental degradation, disease prevalence, identity and social mobilization.

I build on the work of Linda Hunt (2000) who documented how, by narrativizing illness, Mexican cancer patients transformed the devastation of this disease into a source of empowerment. Hunt explains that chronic illness introduces what she calls a “biographical disruption,” a moment in which social norms and roles are profoundly altered. Norms of reciprocity, challenged. Professional, social, kinship and other types of identities are stripped. The subject is reduced to the bare existence of a biological organism. This existential stripping into a biological minimum, an illness, is experienced as an abject condition. For some, however, this bare minimum offers the unexpected opportunity for reconstituting anew one’s sense of self and place in the world. Confronted with life-altering circumstances, such as chronic illness, people reenvision, reimagine, re-account their life story, and by doing so, they mediate and rearticulate their disrupted identity into something else.

According to Hunt’s framework, first a traumatic event disrupts a person’s sense of self and place in the world. In the case of Vieques, women’s “biographical disruption” began when their world was torn apart by getting sick and/or caring for the sick within their families. Hunt’s framework then posits that, after such disruption, cancer patients often reframe their experience, their sense of self and place in the world through narratives that seek to provide control in an otherwise uncontrollable situation. In Vieques’ case, I argue that a similar, but more complex, process is the catalyst of women’s politicization. Unlike Hunt’s case study, in Vieques this process is expansive, in that it moves beyond the personal. It is not only about negotiating and adapting to a new set of roles as a patient, but instead is also about changing the very conditions perceived to be responsible for their health problems. This transformation of the self is at once personal and social. The intersubjective experience of confronting illness, in a complexly rendered social and physical landscape, impelled Viequense women to pose questions about disease etiology and social justice that led them to the collective development of new political identity(ies).

What precisely this disrupting topology of pain is made of is the subject of the next section. In it, Viequense women’s voices convey—in their own words and with as little obstruction on my part as possible—what the source of their dolor (suffering) is. The last part of the essay also extensively showcases Viequense women’s voices, while addressing how their dolor (suffering) and rabia (indignation) become a transformative force for social change.

El dolor: Confronting life and death

Women in Vieques, particularly mothers, are at the front lines of battles against chronic diseases plaguing the island. Considering the fact that Vieques has the highest incidence of cancer and other chronic diseases in Puerto Rico, this is not a small challenge (Ortiz-Roque et al. 2000). This is how Jésica, the activist from La Alianza whom we met at the beginning, explains the process that led to confronting the most terrifying news a mother could have:

I’m going to tell you how it affected me. My daughter was diagnosed as a juvenile diabetic since at 11, but she never had to be hospitalized for this condition. Not long after, on April 16, 1995, two days after my oldest son got married, my daughter woke up with abdominal pain. We spent the whole day at the local clinic trying to figure out what was wrong with her. At 6:00 p.m., with some labs in hand, the doctor sent us to the mainland. After taking the ferry, three hours later, we were at the pediatric doctor in [the coastal town] Fajardo. They were also unable to diagnose her, so they referred us to the Pediatric Hospital of Centro Médico in San Juan. At 3:00 a.m., the oncologists and hematologists told me that it was not leukemia. Two days later, a battery of labs proved them wrong. It was leukemia. We went to three different hospitals just to have a diagnosis. We started radiation and chemo treatment that same day. We put up the fight for two years, going to Centro Médico every two weeks.

I quit my job and devoted myself to tending to her. It was the only way to keep her alive. In March 1997, two months before finishing the treatment protocol, her body could not take it anymore. She died. I was devastated. This tragedy happens to too many in Vieques. (Jésica 2003)

What is most remarkable about Jésica’s experience of frustration, death and grief, then, is how extraordinarily prevalent it is. As Jésica pointed out, many others in Vieques experience such tragedies. In fact, none of the people I interviewed were exempt from having a family member or close friend affected by chronic diseases: in my more than fifty in-depth interviews and countless conversations with people on the island, stories of illness and loss constantly emerged. To be clear, none of the women I interviewed were exempt from being sick and/or caregiving for sick family members. Adding insult to injury, accessibility of health care to Viequenses is particularly challenging. Mónica, another activist from La Alianza de Mujeres in her mid-thirties, explains the particular challenges cancer patients face to get access to health care, given the lack of treatment in Vieques:

How about cancer patients? They have to receive treatment in [mainland] Puerto Rico. How is that? They have to take the ferry before dawn. Once in Fajardo, they take a public bus to get to Centro Médico in Río Piedras [San Juan]. Then they get their radiation and chemotherapy, throw up three or four times, and catch the bus back to Fajardo. Often, they don’t get back on time to catch the last evening ferry. What do they do? They don’t go. … It’s terrible. The simplest things become overwhelming. If your self-esteem is not strong, if you don’t have the economic resources, then you say: “Whatever becomes of me is God's will.”

The treatment-seeking journey described both by Jésica and Mónica (and experienced by anybody on Vieques in need of medical service) involved a minimum of 4 hours on public transportation: 2 hours on the ferry between Vieques and Fajardo, a coastal town, and another 2 hours between Fajardo and the nearest large city, San Juan. Women’s caregiving work within these circumstances positions them in the incredibly precarious and challenging situation of simultaneous patient and community healer: it requires of them a nearly heroic ability to manage their own illness and embodied traumas while caring for the disease and trauma ravaging their families and communities.

Sadly, withstanding the weight of health-care neglect was often the lightest of the burdens shouldered by Viequense women. Far more insidious, no doubt, was the psychological traumas that, day in and day out, without respite, wore them down. They lived with the knowledge that noxious military contamination, lurking everywhere, could trigger malignant, deadly cancers, or the thought that death could come instantly, the same way that it happened to David Sanes, the civilian guard who was killed by a bomb that missed the target. They lived with the knowledge that no one was exempt. That you could be next. Worse yet, your kids could be next. These fears were of course not limited to parents and the general population. In the following account, Mónica illustrates how these fears also plagued children:

So that you can understand the impact of bombings in the range zone: My seven-year-old son fell into an emotional crisis. Every time he would hear bombs exploding, he would pee on himself. He entered into a regression in which he would continue peeing and peeing and peeing. We took him to pediatricians, urologists and other specialists. What was their conclusion? He was fine. The pediatrician told me: “You have to take Rubén out of Vieques until the military practices are over. This is an emotional condition.” But that’s very hard because he lives here! He used to pick up the phone to talk to his grandma in Patillas and he used to tell me: “Take me to grandma’s, I don’t want to live here. I don’t want to hear any more bombs exploding.” That’s very hard in terms of emotional health. Sometimes you don’t realize it, but I suffered—I cried with my son every time he would enter into his regression. He would tell me, crying: “Mom I can’t control it.” Just like I have to deal with this, many moms have to deal with this too. What about those moms that had to withstand this emotional turmoil for fifty years? (Mónica 2003)

Even the most fervent supporters of the navy’s military presence on the island, military career personnel and civilians who worked on the military base, were not exempt from anxiety and fear. This was the case for Ana, a stay-at-home mother and grandmother in her late fifties, whose civilian husband had worked on the military base for more than 20 years. Conveying the emotional angst she went through when finally realizing that many of their family’s health problems might have been linked to military practices, Ana stated,

How can you explain the majority of my husband’s coworkers dying from cancer? You know, if maybe one or two died from cancer, but all of them! We were traumatized because we even belong to a pro-navy organization. We were psychologically affected, you know, not having the money for health expenses. I was sitting right there, when I heard on television that it was true; people were getting sick [from the pollution] with heavy metals. I called [my husband]; I screamed: “Pepo!” Because until that moment I never thought that all our health problems, including those of our four daughters and our nine grandchildren, were a result of [heavy] metals’ [poisoning]. Last Saturday, I had to rush my third daughter to the ferry to go to the hospital. We have been going from doctor, to doctor, to doctor. Psychologically this has affected us. The baby, she is seven months old, is the only one who we don’t know may be contaminated like the rest of us. We are waiting for the lab results. I was sitting right there listening to the news. (Ana 2003)

Ana’s case captures some of the most complex and poignant elements of the struggle of Viequense women, as her family’s livelihood was built on her husband Pepo’s work for the military—one of the very few employers on the tiny island. Pepo worked inside the base’s shooting range as a carpenter, repairing target signs and cleaning up the debris in the shooting range. Thus, at the same time that military activities were devastating Pepo’s health, his family’s economic well-being was reliant on his employment at the military base. As her husband fell ill, and many other family members became diseased, Ana became aware that something was terribly wrong.

As it is for many others, Ana’s difficulty in acknowledging the links between military activity and environmentally borne disease was due not only to her family’s reliance on military contract work, but also to the biomedical establishment’s role in diminishing such links. Biomedical etiologic models typically locate the source of illness within the biological organism—in organs, tissues, or cells—without considering more fully the relationship of the body with its physical environment. As Viequenses’ health crises have brought them into frequent contact with the atomistic and hierarchical world of medical institutions, biomedicine came to mediate everyday life for many. Taussig argues, of biomedicine, “The sick person is an anxious person, malleable in the hands of the doctor and the health system. … This gives a powerful point of entry into the patient’s psyche, and also amounts to a structuration of the patient's conventional understandings” (1992, pp. 86–87). This structuration of patients’ conventional understandings occurred in Viequenses’ repeated encounters with medical personnel who reinforced an atomistic model of disease causation. This model reduced causation to the biological organism or, oftentimes, to the realm of individual behavior, placing the blame for disease on bad eating habits, poor exercise, or other personal choices such as smoking or drinking.

When biomedical sources fail to provide explanatory power for individual’s embodied sufferings, however, a form of “legitimation crisis” occurs: in this case, the ill and their advocates began to interrogate disease etiology tropes, as well as the “expert” sources producing them. Viequense women, in particular, began to publicly wonder about links between weapons testing on the naval base and disease prevalence. As Demeritt has said of environmental justice movements in the mainland US, the public is increasingly uneasy and skeptical of experts telling them that there are no causal connections between toxic environments and individuals’ health: “Assurances from the … men in white lab coats are no longer sufficient to ease public concern about toxic chemicals, nuclear contamination, and the other environmental side effects of industrial society” (1998, p. 172).

As interrogation of biomedical institutions and etiologies intensified in Vieques, individuals’ search for meaning transformed into a popular debate of unprecedented magnitude. Tired of experts disregarding their claims that in fact Vieques was undergoing a health crisis, La Alianza de Mujeres developed and conducted a questionnaire in which they interviewed 209 families from Vieques. This “lay” research found that one-third of the families surveyed had at least one family member with cancer. This was one of the first attempts at engaging their etiologic model with scientific methodology—at claiming the power to “expert” knowledge about illnesses’ origins and manifestations. Biomedical formulations of disease etiology, in diminishing the impact of militarization and environmental degradation, had consistently disregarded people’s embodied understandings of disease and health.

Such “expert” sources, further, tend to disproportionately diminish the experiential knowledge of women—as feminist authors have observed (Brown and Ferguson 1995; Di Chiro 1998; Epstein 1997; Gilbert 1994; Krause 1993). Despite the power of biomedical structurations, however, individuals who are suffering tend to search for meaning in their suffering (Hahn 1995; Mattingly and Garro 2000; Scheper-Hughes 1992). Conflict arises when sources attributed with explanatory power—in this case, biomedical institutions—fail to account for the embodied experiences and knowledge of the suffering. As Vieques women became increasingly aware of the dissonance between established causation models and their own embodied experiences, they became correspondingly skeptical of biomedical experts and institutions. This new critical stance adopted by the women can be understood as a manifestation of the affective qualities of dolor (pain), from confronting loss, agony and death, and rabia (indignation), from being institutionally disregarded and neglected. In the collective, “dolor y rabia” became the catalyst for women’s political awakening and the foundation for their social action. La Alianza de Mujeres began to interrogate atomistic models of disease etiology publicly and explicitly, and in turn to formulate and advocate for the correlation of environmental degradation with communal disease. For instance, María and Milagros, both in their early fifties and members of La Alianza, stated that.

[the US federal government and the US Navy] and other federal agencies such as CDC—all of them did studies that said that everything was fine. They say that there is no contamination; that the water is drinkable; that the food is edible. Obviously it is in the navy’s best interest that such studies say that because then we would not be able to proceed with the class action lawsuit. But it is absurd to think that after sixty years of bombing Vieques there is no contamination. If my house, my car, and those of many others are covered with [the] Sahara’s dust and [the] Montserrat’s volcano’s ashes, then what about the dust coming from the firing range? (María 2003)

The navy does a thousand scientific studies; they can show them or hide them. But we have it right in front of us: our own family, our own people are dealing with disease in our everyday life. This cannot be hidden. [Vieques] is too small and everybody knows each other and we know when somebody gets sick. If you go to a bigger place, maybe you could hide, but maybe not. Here we are like a big family. (Milagros 2003)

Similarly Mónica, mentioned above, adds,

The Department of Health used to have something dealing with environmental health. But that does not mean that they work with health conditions tied to the environment. In “environmental health,” they work with septic tanks and their regulations; they work with the restaurant’s hygiene and things like that. But they don’t work with the relationship of health and environment. In other words, health is one thing and the environment is another; there is not a connection between pollution and a sick person. But this disconnection also happens within the EPA; it also happens with Fisheries and Wildlife [the US Fish and Wildlife Service]. They might look at the impact on soil, air and water but disconnect from the people. People are on one side of the equation and the environment is on the other side. Somehow they have to understand that they coexist. (Mónica, 2003)

The disease etiologic model that emerges from these narratives is one that counters hegemonic models by drawing from the affective experience of suffering, illness, pain and loss in a social environment rife with such experiences. Theirs is a model that demands attention to the relationship between individual and communal health and environmental degradation. As their consciousness developed and transformed into collective action, women activists skillfully supplemented their experiential knowledge with information from sources they recognized would augment the explanatory power of such embodied understandings. References to the spread of Sahara’s desert dust and ashes from the Caribbean island of Montserrat’s volcano, for instance, derived from televised weather forecasts for Puerto Rico: during the summer, the US National Weather Service issues air pollution alerts for Puerto Rico when dust from the Sahara is expected. It similarly alerted Puerto Ricans about air-quality hazards when Montserrat’s volcano became active in 1997. In utilizing such forms of sanctioned discourse about environmental hazards, Alianza activists developed a critique of Vieques’ health crisis and its causal models that was catalyzed by the affective and further developed through critical engagement with “authoritative” sources of knowledge. María concluded,

Common sense tells you that if a place like Vieques has been used for testing all kinds of destructive military weapons for sixty years—weapons like uranium and NAPALM—and if you also see the impacted areas totally devoid of life, then you know that the navy’s military practices are responsible for the pollution. We know that pollution is carried by the wind; we know that all of those particles get to our residential areas; we know that we are still breathing them. Everybody is getting hair samples tested for heavy metals. When you see that everybody getting tested has heavy metals in them, tons of heavy elements such as aluminum, uranium, and cadmium, then you know that metals are not only in the environment or in the air. These heavy metals are in people’s bodies. These contaminants make your body more susceptive to illness.

When institutions and the discourses they manage fail to account for people’s embodied understandings, spaces are opened in which inscriptions other than the institutional ones acquire greater relevance. In these cases, the power that biomedical and sociopolitical institutions have over people to normalize certain ways of seeing and being becomes less effective (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). At the point at which Vieques women could no longer tolerate the absence of answers, their accumulated door and rabia began to transform into collective action.

“La rabia”: Illness, identity and action

For many of the women, losing a loved one meant spiraling down into a long period of mourning, depression and despair. But for some, coming out of this existential pit meant transforming their pain and transforming themselves into something else altogether. Something that allowed them to move forward. To take charge. To feel that something not only could be done but ought to be done. And it needed to be done by them. This is how Jésica and Mónica explained it:

After my daughter’s death I entered into a depressive stage. Many people have become depressed after losing a loved one. When my second granddaughter was born, though, I decided that something needed to be done. Things could not stay the way they were. I needed to help somehow. Thank God I got involved in La Alianza de Mujeres. There I’m working directly with health issues. (Jésica, 2003)

My son’s condition, the suffering, the pain, gave me the courage to act. This rage gave me more energy to put into the protests.” (Mónica 2003)

Whereas chronic illness is most often associated with “biographical disruptions” (Hunt 2000) that challenge individuals’ identity and capacity for self-determination, confronting chronic diseases in Vieques enabled women, in particular, to reformulate existing roles and identities toward critical collective action. In the collective, their embodied understandings of disease and their critical stance gained strength and momentum.

In the discussion that follows I include a longer excerpt of one of my open-ended interviews with Teresa, a woman in her late sixties. Although she was neither part of La Alianza nor had the same educational background as its members (she had only elementary schooling) her conversation pointed to how widespread this embodied and critical stance was among other women in Vieques. From the rocking-chair in her balcony she passionately reacted to my questions:

Teresa: The only thing that the navy has left us is disease. I know that some of my health problems are because of the US Navy, but that’s not proven yet.

Víctor: What do you mean by, “that’s not proven yet”?

Teresa: I know there have been some studies done and all that, but people are shady; now big chiefs say that [health] problems are because of pollution, later they say that they are not. Whether they are manipulating the studies in favor or against Vieques, I see little hope. But I know there is something here.

Víctor: What do you mean by, “I know there is something here”?

Teresa: Well because of what we are confronting; the people of Vieques are confronting serious diseases. I say this because I’m confronting illness, my family is confronting illness as well as all the people that died or are dying of cancer. It’s rare knowing of people dying from other diseases. In other words, there is something in the environment. I cannot say it because I’m not a scientist, but I know that there is something evil. They say that cancer is hereditary, but my dad died of tuberculosis, my mom died a natural death when she was ninety-four years old. My brothers, my grandchildren and I are the ones that have cancer.

Víctor: So do you think that a scientific study might …

Teresa: I think that if a scientific study is done to look for the truth, many cases are going to come out of that.

Víctor: What if the study says that there is no relationship?

Teresa: Then I will not trust it because I know there is something here. There is something here. (Teresa 2003)

Teresa’s explicit rejection of expert knowledge is rooted in the experiential knowledge that there is something “here” —in the inhabited space of her everyday life. Rather than undermining her sense of self, the frustration deriving from Teresa’s illness powered her critiques of prevailing discourse.

Thus, political awakening often came through women finding their voices. From finding the strength to speak truth to power. To speak louder. To be heard in public. From the conviction that something needed to be done. This is how Jésica describes it:

Believe it or not, my first trip abroad was to Washington as a representative of the people of Vieques. I had never before left Vieques. That’s how you can see how things changed around here, how [Vieques’] circumstances took me to unexpected places. Having to go there and see that many people didn’t even know what Vieques was, God, gave me a stronger desire to keep the struggle. I also went to Philadelphia to speak about Vieques, and guess what? I had never spoken in public before, much less in English. But circumstances force you to do these new things; things come out of you that you didn’t know you were capable of. I sat down and I wrote a message because I knew that in writing, the message was going to be delivered. I did not want my message to fall on deaf ears.

Monica’s and Jésica’s stories of politicization through suffering illustrate how Viequense women came to actively challenge the political, social and medical structures that delegitimized their forms of knowing and silenced their voices. In a context in which women have traditionally been thought to have passive social roles, women’s mobilization contests dominant discourses and institutions. In doing so, women’s mobilization also challenges the fundamental patriarchy from which such authority and expertise emerge. Mónica concluded,

The process of recognizing our bodies has liberated all of us because we grow up in a culture where recognizing and taking care of our bodies is not well regarded. So maybe five years ago I wouldn’t dare, but now I have to take care of myself, I have to know my body. Maybe five years ago I wouldn’t dare to develop a program for girls and adolescents on how to manage their sexuality. Nonetheless, now I feel the strength, the energy, the social compromise and the support to do so. We have decided that if these girls are going to be the future of Vieques, then they need to grow up healthy in physical, emotional and spiritual terms. We are putting all of our energy so that these girls don’t have to go through what we went through.

Through their interactions in protests, in women’s groups, in hospitals—essentially, through the collective process of making sense of endemic illness—women connected narratively “the cause and effects of their illness to their ongoing lives convert[ing] the liminality of [disease] into a social resource. In a process of inversion weakness becomes power” (Hunt 2000). In this process of inversion, activist women in Vieques challenged biomedicine’s distrust of their senses, and in so doing reasserted their own embodied knowledge. Women’s bodies became the locus of politicized identity and the source of political action. Challenging the status quo through these politicized bodies meant, however, that many women put themselves at odds not only with doctors and governmental representatives, but also with their husbands, as well as with other activist groups and community members in general. Mónica explains,

There is always criticism from those who don’t understand the kind of work we are doing here. There have been moments in which not all of our husbands have agreed with our way of doing things. They have called us loonies, witches, lesbians, a little bit of everything. Sometimes my husband tells me, I mean he is supporting us, but sometimes he tells me: “So when are the lesbians going to meet again? It’s been a while.” You know, he is joking around, but he is still calling us names like that.

I have had to brave things in here. For instance, the other day I was sharing a situation I had with a guy with Father Andrés. Father Andrés told me: “That's odd, because he didn’t tell me anything about it.” I told Father Andrés: “Well, you are Father Andrés, but I’m a young, black and a woman. It is ok to yell at me, but it is not so to yell at you.” Of course, I don’t allow anybody to do that to me. In that sense, in emotional and mental health terms, I have had to work with myself. I remember this time when I had to stop, go to my place and stay there trying to relax. I had to look for professional help, because after that incident it became harder to continue the struggle. After that it was heavy to continue. To be able to be here telling you this is not easy either. For many women it is not easy. It is not easy to deal with issues of health, participation and many other things of which everybody has an opinion.

Vieques women’s activism—while particularly powerful—was simultaneously particularly trying. The women confronted adversity by building and maintaining various social networks. Nevertheless, Mónica explains how women’s self-assertion within women’s groups paradoxically opened the doors to collaboration with men from the community:

We also have some male partners that openly say: “I am from La Alianza de Mujeres.” When other activist groups organize something, these groups of male partners always volunteer to work with us. They say, “We are going to be with ‘el grupo de La Alianza.’” In other words they feel they belong to our women’s group; they support us. Even when facing the worst criticisms, they have been the first ones defending us. Of course, they always say: “[These women] know how to take care of themselves alone.” But just in case, they are there to help us.

All in all, owning and asserting their situated worldview as women from Vieques allowed some women to reach beyond health and environmental concerns to share with the larger community their feminist perspectives. Mónica concluded,

Vieques’ struggle has been a beautiful and a liberating experience for me. I feel very strong. For instance, in March, we presented something that was never shown in Vieques before. It was widely applauded, for it represented our liberation from many things and fears that are tied to Vieques’ situation: We dared to bring to Vieques The Vagina Monologues. Initially many women were like: “Oh my God! We don’t speak about that in our communities.” Can you believe that more than two hundred people went to the show? Two hundred people donated $30 for La Alianza de Mujeres. To me, this was one way in which the community showed us their support for our work. Moreover, they were able to surpass their fears daring to see a piece that almost never makes it to places like Vieques. In this sense, we have also been part of this liberating process. It was like when the producer gave us The Vagina Monologues shirt. I told her: “Look, if you would have given me this shirt five years ago, I would not have dared to go outside of that door.” Now, we walk the entire town with our shirts on. Sometimes people ask us: “Don’t you have anything else to wear?” With this what I mean is that we have grown, we have liberated ourselves.

After more than sixty years of collective actions, this sense of liberation propelled women to take center stage in the struggle by broadening the field of what was considered action. As McCaffrey explains, women’s activism, “develop[ed] a community presence at the gates to Camp Garcia. With its pot-and-pan protest and ribbon campaign at the gates to base, Alliance effectively opened another front in the battle and broadened Vieques’ struggle. ‘Not everybody can be so macho, not everyone can be out at the bombing range’” (2002, p. 168). Vieques’ women also developed powerful embodied narratives of suffering and loss that catapulted the movement to international attention. These narratives brought to Vieques’ social movement the power of testimonies without which the movement’s success would not have been possible (McCaffrey 2008, p. 171).

Coda

This article has explored how the profoundly transformed ecological and epidemiological landscapes of Vieques have been experienced and critically engaged with by a cohort of activist women. Viequense women were the first to notice changes in ecology and disease prevalence and felt particularly acutely the brunt of environmental problems, coping with both their own afflictions and those of family members. Although the prevalent narrative is that fishermen were the first to notice the pollution, Viequense women were the first to embody the environmental and health devastation created by the US Navy’s military practices. Similarly, although the gendered David versus Goliath public narrative of fishermen’s tiny boats confronting destroyers was a headline-grabber circulating globally, it was women’s implosion of the private/domestic sphere that eventually led to Vieques’ victory over the navy. Despite the well-developed literature of collective mobilization on Vieques, the pivotal role of affect in women’s politicization has been largely missed. Yet we’ve seen herein that, during a politically pivotal time in the island’s history, Viequense women transformed their unenviable position on the frontlines of disease into a vanguard of collective contestation. Drawing on the affective experiences of pain and indignation, dolor and rabia, Viequense women posited new questions and challenged dominant scripts of disease etiology, collectively awakening their political potential. In this way, women’s struggles to contend with and find meaning within quotidian experiences of endemic disease catalyzed their political awakening and highlighted the synergistic possibilities of affect and action.

The documentation of Viequense women activists’ story serves a second purpose: it reorients an analytical gaze that has consistently privileged men’s leadership and activist approaches in Vieques and has left unexamined the catalytic bridge between traditionally “female” roles and traditionally “male” activist roles. Although other collective actors played important roles throughout the Vieques struggle (both pre- and post-1999), it was women’s persistent organizing around health and environment that sustained the last stance leading it to its eventual success. Undeniably, Viequenses’ struggles have a long and complex history that includes leftist anticolonial movements (pro-independence and nationalist), arguments for access to and protection of natural resources (fishermen), and finally health and environmental concerns (led by women). However, what made women’s activism so different from previous mobilizations on the island was that, because they were painfully aware of how bankrupt anticolonial arguments were to build cross-political and ideological alliances, environmental justice became the banner (via embodiment, health and affect) to transcend the deeply political lines that historically have separated Puerto Ricans in the archipelago and beyond. To be sure, avoiding anticolonial arguments was a strategic move on their part that shows just how deeply women knew the inner workings of colonialism in the oldest colony in the world. After sixty years and many different types of mobilizing, the US Navy finally withdrew from the island of Vieques in 2003. This startling triumph in the unending struggle for environmental justice would not have been possible without newly sharpened critique and persistent collective action of Vieques’ women, who in confronting the ubiquity of dolor y rabia in their own and their families’ bodies found the strength to fight back against the most powerful military in the world.