Colonial challenges for a mobile commons: the case of the maritime transportation cooperative in Puerto Rico

Keywords: ferries, cooperatives, mobility justice, Puerto Rico
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Following recent calls for decolonial perspectives within transportation geography that argue towards three interrelated shifts in siting, epistemological, and empirical approaches (Wood, Kębłowski, Tuvikene, 2020), this paper seeks to expand on existing scholarship that examines transportation policies beyond techno-social issues through framing the deficient passenger ferry service of Vieques, Puerto Rico as a mobility injustice. This paper is part of a broader research project on the coloniality behind governance practices for the maritime transportation service in Vieques, Puerto Rico. The island of Vieques is one of two municipalities in Puerto Rico that is entirely reliant on a ferry service that was recently privatized under contested terms. This paper focuses on my third research question of what alternatives grassroots organizations and other advocates propose to challenge the mobility injustices they experience in their daily lives. I draw upon my documentary analysis of public policies as well as my ethnographic work to present the challenges island residents faced around organizing a maritime transportation cooperative. To do so, I frame the development in creating a maritime transportation cooperative as an effort to achieve Mimi Sheller's notion of commoning (2018) of Viequenses everyday lives. I argue that the coloniality within the power and politics supporting infrastructures of mobility is a deterrent for processes of commoning to occur.