Coffee Hour with Joaquin Villanueva

Enjoy a free catered lunch, a presentation by Joaquin Villanueva with the Department of Geology, Geography, and Environmental Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College, and conversation with students, staff, and faculty from the GES Department. Lunch will be available starting at 12:30 p.m. and Dr. Villanueva will present from 1:00-2:00 p.m. 

Lecture: Making Space for Empire in Mid-Twentieth Century Puerto Rico

In this presentation Villanueva will offer a historical-geographical account to describe how mid-twentieth century Puerto Rico was transformed from a mixed-race, tropical, plantation-based, Caribbean colony of the United States into an industrial, urban, and modern society attractive to whiteness, empire, and its capital. He will demonstrate how planning became a key arena through which the structure of empire reproduced itself by guiding, managing, and constructing the extractive landscapes that have since defined the present and future development of Puerto Rico. Villanueva will trace how dominant conceptions of space, whiteness, and the tropics came together under midcentury Puerto Rican planning ideology. He will follow these ideas through the work and life of Rafael Picó, a professional geographer who became the first president of the Puerto Rico Planning Board (PRPB). For Picó, the objective of planning in Puerto Rico was to transform a “tropical climate” into an “industrial climate” to attract US capital investments. Picó was part of the country’s intellectual and political elite, a select group of white criollos whose supposed racial superiority afforded them the privilege to define what Puerto Rico ought to be and to administer those futurities. Villanueva will chronicle some of Picó’s most influential geographical contributions to planning ideology in Puerto Rico to show how geographical debates and practices deeply contributed, and continue to contribute, to the ongoing colonization of Puerto Rico by both local and US imperial elites.

Joaquín Villanueva is a critical human geographer based at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota. A graduate of the University of Puerto Rico and Syracuse University, he has conducted research on urban political economy and carceral geographies in Paris, New York, and San Juan. Currently, Joaquín is working on a book that documents the origins of the Planning Board and the urbanization of US imperialism in Puerto Rico from 1930 to 1950. Drawing on archival material, the book explores the politics of intimacy, race, gender, and class that have historically tied Puerto Rico’s elites with US imperial institutions, a relationship that has narrowly shaped Puerto Rico’s futures according to criollo sensibilities and anxieties. His work has been published in Antipode, Society and Space, NACLA, and Centro Journal. He is editor of ACME: An International Journal for Critical Human Geographies and is Series Editor of the Critical Geographies of Latin America and the Caribbean Book Series at the University Press of Florida.