Opposing powers at the helm: The production of (im)mobilities of maritime transportation in Vieques, Puerto Rico

At the twenty-year anniversary of the Viequense success in their struggle to kick out the US Navy from controlling and harming their land, residents remain stranded facing issues like dispossession through real-estate speculation affecting the island's most poor, alongside slow clean-up efforts, and deteriorating health outcomes. This thesis uses a mobility justice framework to understand how the afterlives of over 60 years of direct militarized colonial violence continue to repeat through Viequense mobile life. I extend the concept of a mobility regime through a twofold effort of exploring policies and practices surrounding the maritime transportation system, and residents’ construction of meaning and representation of their advocacy strategies and desired alternatives. I gathered and analyzed public policies from 1999 until 2022 covering the two decades in which the Maritime Transportation Authority was the main institutional actor responsible for providing the ferry service for the municipal islands. Then, to understand the continued struggle for participation in the decision-making processes, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Vieques and interviewed ten ferry advocates from Vieques during the summer of 2022. I focus on the creation of the Maritime Transportation Authority as an institutional entity in charge of Viequense mobilities, detailing how it was enmeshed in fiscal and political tensions that resulted in extreme im/mobilities to its passengers. By dividing my findings into two chapters, the first discusses how the struggle for ownership over mobilities is a characteristic of the politics of mobility of the ferry service, defined by an unequal power distribution between institutional actors and users, codified by public policies. In the second chapter, I discuss that it is the interrelatedness of the effects of the poor ferry service across the other conditions of colonial neglect in the islands which makes the access barriers so dire and what has historically guided ferry advocacy and visions of governance alternatives. I conclude by arguing that while it is an important demand to ask to be listened to in decision-making, it has also become important for Viequenses to engender a dignified life beyond improvements to the maritime transportation system through solidarity efforts that broadly redress mobility injustices.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Geography

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Pimentel Rivera, Andrea

Contributors dc:contributor

• Cidell, Julie
• Novoa, Magdalena
• Alvarado, Nikolai

• Critical Transportation Geography
• Mobility Justice
• Maritime Transportation
• Ferries
• Vieques

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Andrea Pimentel Rivera

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121514

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F121514