Radical Care Is Recovery: Maneuvering Climate Displacement in New York City

Decked out in our Christmas attire my daughter and I arrived at the “Santaland” extravaganza at Henry Street Settlement in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to assist with set-up. Three disaster case managers, Esperanza, Beatriz, and Raquel, were bustling around the space ensuring the food was set up, that there was an area for face painting, and that Santa (Pablo, also a disaster case manager) would be ready before the children arrived. Although it was cold, a line began to form out front. Excited, kids pressed their curious faces up against the glass. A few folks asked to wait in the lobby; most did not have winter coats. I was reminded that thick winter coats made no sense in the Caribbean, just one way that climate powerfully signified people’s displacement from Puerto Rico to New York City. 

My daughter and I checked in families against an RSVP list. This record-keeping was crucial to determine how many families attended and it provided evidence to boost disaster case managers’ advocacy to extend disaster relief program funding due to outstanding need. After check-in families made their way downstairs to a large, open event space. Round tables were decorated with white cloths, and Christmas-inspired centerpieces along the right and left walls ensured the center served as a walkway for children to meet Santa. Rectangular tables against the back wall with Christmas-inspired paper plates were stacked for people to grab and then line up for homemade Puerto Rican and other Caribbean food. Aluminum steam trays full of arroz con gandules (rice and pigeon peas), pernil (roast pork), mac n’ cheese, white rice, salad, cornbread, sweet Hawaiian buns, and many other delicious options filled the room with familiar smells. Behind each tray stood a volunteer in Christmas attire ready to serve meals. This was a celebration. The event was in full swing, kids eagerly lined up to get their faces painted while music played in the background. Beatriz and Raquel played games with some of the kids, including freeze dance, while Pablo made his special appearance. At the end we were happy but exhausted, joking that it was time to sit back and “un-wine.”

Disaster case managers (DCMs) frequently worked beyond a strict forty-hour work week to piece together resources to host events for Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane María (2017) to New York City. DCMs reached out to other organization and local political officials, such as Carolina Rivera, a NYC Council Member, to request gifts and monetary donations while also organizing for their neighborhood and the broader Puerto Rican population. These actions were always understood as “stepping in and stepping up for our people” and preceded by lengthy conversations regarding inadequate disaster recovery.¹ DCMs do not consider themselves social workers nor care workers, yet in many ways they engage in social work — a field that expects its workers to adopt a detached professionalism that simultaneously links them to the state.² Such endeavors — personalizing gifts or driving around the city to acquire donations — subvert notions of a detached neoliberal professionalization. Although DCMs were overwhelmed by their work, they committed to hosting this event (and others) and ensuring, as Beatriz said, that it is “fancy . . . These kids deserve a Christmas. Parents are struggling and feel ashamed that they can’t buy much for their kids. The least we can do is make this happen.” Esperanza rallied her “sisters” (fictive kin), all community activists from the Loisaida, and they collectively combined their skills and employed various strategies to navigate structural inequalities on a shoestring budget. This crucial labor remained hypervisible and concurrently erased by state recovery efforts. 

Puerto Ricans who experienced structural violence in the archipelago and were displaced to New York City following Hurricane María often turned to city-run agencies for assistance where they encountered limited services, bureaucratic paperwork that determined deservingness, and racial discrimination. These forms of violence are part of the longer history of colonial subject-making through migration. While the entangled history of the United States and Puerto Rico grants a level of mobility to Puerto Ricans as nominal US citizens, this same mobility is limited by unequal power relations that position Puerto Ricans as foreigners despite their citizenship. As colonial subjects, US citizenship — and therefore mobility — does not protect them from discrimination because it is tied historically to the creation of an expendable and disposable low-wage workforce that was incorporated into the US labor market throughout the twentieth century.³

This article considers the possibilities presented by the concept of “radical care” as a response to climate-induced displacement — a primary manifestation of the ongoing violence of coloniality — by considering the relationship between social reproduction, racial capitalism, and state-sponsored recovery aid in New York City.⁴ I build on feminist theorizations of radical care to focus on how DCMs — the first point of contact for displaced Puerto Ricans — mediated bureaucratic ambivalence within state-sponsored disaster relief programs to create alternative forms of recovery. This focus guides my use of radical care to illuminate how recovery was experienced and felt. Radical care thus refers to the material and affective strategies and solidarities co-created by diasporic women to mitigate immediate crisis and the potential for precarious futures set in motion because of climate displacement. Events like Santaland were opportunities for Esperanza and the other DCMs to shift away from rationalist neoliberal disaster recovery interventions that promote self-responsibilization. Instead, they forged a shared intimacy through radical care that guided their understanding of and approach to what displaced Puerto Ricans and their families needed. They routinely relied on their social networks and in some instances personal finances to ensure displaced Puerto Ricans were supported in meaningful ways, both material and affective. Guided by radical care, DCMs navigated coloniality, mobilized support, and provided friendship for one another and many displaced Puerto Ricans. In this way recovery efforts immersed in radical care extend beyond solely material improvements offered by the neoliberal state and illuminate the distinct ways that DCMs care for themselves, each other, their broader communities, and displaced Puerto Ricans as they attempt to redress long-standing structural inequalities. Their labor captures the manifold tactics used by paid care workers who enact unpaid forms of care, grounded in a belief of “showing up” even in times when they experienced self-described burnout. Animated by radical care, their labor thus takes a myriad forms to assist displaced populations with the everyday work of daily living: connecting and supporting residents in securing food, employment, free childcare, legal services, and school enrollment, to name a few.

I begin by describing the ethnographic project, the New York Relief Center (NYRC), and the disaster case managers who are at the heart of my understanding of radical care. Next, I situate my work within feminists’ theorizations of the concept of care to ground my analysis of climate displacement, recovery, and gendered labor. Throughout the article I include ethnographic vignettes and direct quotes from the DCMs because their experiences and theorizations of displacement, recovery, care, and Puerto Rican subjectivity guide this research. I end by returning to the DCMs in the hopes of highlighting the possibilities that radical care reveals; the alternative, relational, and embodied affects that mitigate colonial violence, poverty, and ecological devastation.

Note on Method

My analysis draws on ethnographic data gathered during fieldwork and as a volunteer at New York City’s Relief Center (NYRC) in New York City between 2019 and late 2020. As an ethnographer and volunteer at NYRC, which provided disaster case management to Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane María from 2017 to 2020, I came to understand how state forms of care show up as violence and exclusion, particularly in the form of climate displacement. In 2018 then-Governor Andrew Cuomo announced $2 million in state funding to support the more than 11,000 Hurricane María survivors displaced to New York. NYRC was one of seven organizations that received funding to continue to provide needs assessments and case management services. The long-term efforts emphasized affordable housing and employment as essential services to recovery. By prioritizing housing and employment, people who required mental health services, clothing, food, childcare, and other services were left to fend for themselves. I witnessed how, despite state funding, displaced Puerto Ricans largely remained unhoused, unemployed, and disconnected from social services. 

Twice a week I commuted to the main office in Manhattan and engaged in tasks ranging from data entry to outreach. I attended monthly planning meetings, fundraisers, engaged in informal conversations, and attended non-work-related events with DCMs. Volunteer work allowed me to familiarize myself with the organization and cultivate relationships with DCMs over the course of eleven months (2019–2020).⁵ At NYRC, disaster case management was under the purview of Gregory Martin, the executive director, and Jeremy Brown, the chief of staff. Esperanza’s team consisted of three DCMs: Beatriz, an archipelagic-born Puerto Rican displaced to New York City by Hurricane María; Raquel, a Brooklyn-based Dominican with extensive experience as a case worker within NYC’s foster care program and who was at the time completing a Master’s degree in social work; Pablo, a Brooklyn-based Chilean completing a degree in Latino Studies and a background in disaster recovery since Hurricane Sandy; and Esperanza herself, a proud diasporic Boricua and long-time resident of the Loisaida as well as a single mother. Esperanza had begun recovery work in her neighborhood when it was devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Their unwavering efforts show how caring labor and political work are entangled.

Esperanza consistently blurred the boundaries between community organizer and professional care worker/case manager in ways that mirrored her political priorities. She partnered with her sisters and long-time fellow community organizers to host events for displaced Puerto Ricans that not only provided material relief in the form of clothing, school backpacks, food, and Christmas presents but also created affective spaces full of joy, mutual care, and laughter. DCMs like Esperanza thus reveal how care labor is fundamental to understanding the limitations of institutional forms of disaster recovery, institutional forms of care, and the power hierarchies that exploit and obscure women’s care labor. Centering working class women’s lives and work offers insight into how women, particularly diasporic women, are critical to mitigating the uncertainty and unsettledness of climate displacement. 

What’s So Radical about Care?

Care is difficult to define because it generates multiple approaches and practices which may or may not be in tension with one another. Genocide and slavery have long set the conditions for who has been perceived and constructed as a legitimate subject of care and who was conscripted into providing care’s labor.⁶ Care is therefore frequently performed by those in society who occupy the most socioeconomically constrained and racialized or disadvantaged positions, or who are often struggling under regimes of exploitation.⁷ As Parvati Raghuram describes, the different valuation of care labor is based on and shaped by “racialized encounters” found in 1) the ongoing racialization of care workers, 2) the mobility of care workers (i.e., immigrants), 3) the extraction of care from a racialized majority population by elites, and 4) the globalization of the care industry.⁸

Social reproduction theory and Marxist feminist scholars have pushed the analysis of care toward understanding care as a labor practice and political theory. This has allowed for an extended analysis of state care systems through governance intended to limit access to social benefits (e.g., welfare, Medicare, etc.) while continuing to extract the (care) labor of oppressed peoples, highlighting the disproportionate power dynamics that have feminized care work. In short, as Tithi Bhattacharya argues, social reproduction is important because it produces the workers who produce the products.⁹ Without the paid and unpaid labor of cooking, cleaning, healthcare, education, birthing, and childrearing, there would be no workers. Thus, capital relies on the labor of social reproduction — paid but extractive — to create labor power, which is then used in the production of commodities.

Perhaps most relevantly for my analysis here, Premilla Nadasen’s work draws our attention to the care economy and how capitalist profit accrues from the basic human need to care for ourselves and community.¹⁰ Nadasen offers insight into how discourses about care work in recent years are “sanitized” because they obscure the power hierarchies that feed off and translate some people’s pain into other people’s profit.¹¹ Care thus is a site of economic extraction that profits off the lives and labors of racialized low-wage workers, immigrants, women of color, and poor people. The concept of care work has been used on behalf of neoliberalism to uncouple the paid labor of social reproduction from the history of racial capitalism. In this new stage of capitalism, the care economy requires a dismantling of the welfare state to absolve the state from responsibility to provide for the poor, creating the rationale for state and individual reliance on the market to fulfill care needs. This institutionalization (and privatization) of care demonstrates how state policies and labor practices have systemically excluded poor and working-class people from accessing the same care they provide on a paid and unpaid basis. DCMs are part of this broader history of working-class poor women of color hired by state institutions as care workers who are also members of the community they serve.¹² However, DCMs have rejected claims that their work was merely exploitative. Rather, as scholars of care labor have shown, DCMs, having demanded paid compensation for their labor, offered a critique of state (capitalist) forms of care, engaged in activism that demanded independence for Puerto Rico, and cultivated transnational anti-colonial solidarity.¹³

Several key texts document how domestic workers, social workers, and migrant workers are labor organizers as well as paid and unpaid care workers who develop strategies for social change.¹⁴ Through alliances, bonds of solidarity, and the creation of horizontal networks of care, these workers extend their collective reach beyond state institutions, biology, and temporal moments. My analysis of care work grapples with the limitations of care labor but also the possibilities it presents when politicized in ways that reflect DCMs own political agendas. Increasingly, anti-racist activists and Black, Indigenous, and transnational feminists are reclaiming the power of care as everyday and mundane but with a revolutionary, transformative potential. An early example by Audre Lorde states that, for those who are marginalized, care is a form of political warfare: to engage in care is to uphold the right to survive.¹⁵ Similarly, Saidiya Hartman argues that the labor of care produced through the violent structures of slavery and subsequently exploited by racial capitalism is not exhausted by either of these violent formations. Such care enables those who were never meant to survive to do just that, even in the most brutal circumstances.¹⁶ These scholars integrate an intersectional understanding of care as always racialized, gendered, highly classed, and deeply entangled in histories of colonialism and imperialism but nevertheless equipped with world-making possibilities.¹⁷

I build on this rich scholarship to understand the care work DCMs have performed as radical care. I understand radical care as a multidimensional concept that is enduring, that captures the many ways people create under constraint. While care is a complex set of practices embedded in relations of power, radical care can be an anti-capitalist resource, a relational practice accompanied by collective strategies for survivance. Radical care embodies an alternative, even if it cannot completely disengage from structural inequalities and normative assumptions regarding social reproduction, gender, race, class, sexuality, and citizenship.¹⁸

Radical care holds revolutionary potential because it undercuts the individualism inherent in neoliberalism and institutions charged with “caring” for populations. Furthermore, radical care when understood as relational — the way we are together — can present an “otherwise,” a force constitutive of a radically different world.¹⁹ While scholars have long demonstrated how care can be a political force that reproduces the hegemonic world order, a site for economic extraction that devalues labor and obscures the racial, gendered, and classed relations that underpin inequalities and power dynamics,²⁰ I am interested in the concrete ways the practice of radical care allows for analysis of modes of care that move beyond normative understandings of obligation and expands solidarity to include mundane everyday practices that are sustainable.²¹ DCMs testimonies are crucial to this analysis because they tell a different story about the afterlife of colonialism, migration, and climate vulnerability. By focusing on DCMs’ enactments of radical care to mitigate immediate crises and potential precarious futures, I argue that these modes of caring reveal the future-oriented, complex strategies climate migrants and diasporic populations enact to exist, while exposing the fallacy that being a US citizen provides equal protections for racialized colonial subjects. Emphasizing DCMs’ radical care offers insight into the role of diasporic women in mitigating the consequences of climate-induced disasters. These modes of radical care are part of a larger affective support network that extends beyond the local and present day.

The Coloniality of Hurricane María

Within two weeks after María made landfall near Yabucoa on the island’s southeastern coast, displaced Puerto Ricans began to arrive in New York City. The Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños estimated over 133,000 Puerto Ricans relocated to the US in 2018 while a little over twenty thousand returned to Puerto Rico, for a net migration of over 112,000. Moreover, the Centro’s survey estimated that New York’s Puerto Rican population increased by more than 26,700 between 2018 and 2019.²² This is unsurprising given the unprecedented damage caused by back-to-back hurricanes (Irma and María) to the archipelago’s infrastructure in September 2017. Hurricane María made landfall as a category four storm system, with wind speeds of 155 mph — the most intense storm since Hurricane San Felipe Segundo in 1928. The immediate impacts were extreme rainfall which caused widespread flooding and mudslides. Residents were left without electricity for nearly a year. The Puerto Rican healthcare system remained on the verge of collapse; rates of leptospirosis, a bacterial blood infection that is transmitted through the consumption of untreated water, soared as people struggled to find water, in some cases resorting to drinking water from Superfund sites.²³ It is estimated that Hurricane María caused $90 billion in damage.²⁴

There is no definitive accounting of the death toll. Eventually the local government accepted 2,975 as the official number of victims, which led to widespread outrage by residents. A study at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, published in May 2018, estimated “a total of 4,645 excess deaths” in the four months after the hurricane, a 62 percent increase over the everyday mortality rate in 2016.²⁵ Hurricane María is thus an example of the intensification of ecological catastrophes, an aspect of human-driven climate disruptions. Extensive research documents the social dimensions of disasters, illuminating how there is no such thing as a “natural” disaster.²⁶

Disaster recovery models, moreover, cannot account for how Puerto Rico’s relationship to the United States — as a non-voting territory that is subject to US economic and political policies — shapes its vulnerability to climate change and migration, nor how coloniality and racialization act as social determinants to resettlement. Referring to disasters as natural depoliticizes what is essentially a political economic problem. Further, disasters are not singular, sudden events; rather, they are produced temporally through a process of slow violence.²⁷ These inequalities, structured along racial, gendered, classed, able-bodied, and sexual hierarchies, generate differential disaster experiences which often exacerbate existing inequalities.²⁸ The temporality of disasters and recovery is entangled with the longue durée of US colonialism. The erosion of Puerto Rico’s public utilities, political infrastructure, and human and civil rights (such as disaster aid) emerged from a colonial extraction that relied on unequal citizenship and labor exploitation under the Spanish (1493–1898) and the US (1898–present). These compounding conditions shape climate vulnerability and force many to migrate to the US.

Prior to hurricanes Irma and María, Puerto Rico’s economy was struggling with $72 billion in debt and $53 billion in pension obligations, which then-Governor Alejandro García Padilla declared in 2015 as “unpayable.”²⁹ This debt was precipitated in part by the ten-year phaseout by the US Congress (1996–2006) of Section 936, which exempted all US companies who relocated to Puerto Rico from paying federal taxes.³⁰ As a result, 50 percent of jobs associated with Section 936 were lost between 2005–2012, and Puerto Rico fell into a deeper recession.³¹ Rather than support debt relief solutions, the US Congress passed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) in 2016. This federal bill created a seven-member Fiscal Oversight and Management Board with individuals who have ties to the banking and investment industry. La Junta, as the board is locally referred to, was granted broad powers to manage Puerto Rico’s finances and ensure debt repayment through privatization and harsh austerity cuts to essential services such as education, healthcare, and infrastructure.³² In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane María debt repayment was prioritized by the US Congress, then-President Donald Trump, and Puerto Rican officials. In fact, Trump framed Puerto Rico as being “beyond hope” and declared that the debt must “sadly be repaid” mere weeks after María made landfall.³³

Displacement is not new to socially and economically disadvantaged Puerto Ricans, who historically have been compelled to follow the flows of the job market or live in political exile in the continental US. Even so, the aftermath of María marks a shift. For many residents who previously considered leaving Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria solidified that decision. Grassroots organizations as well as everyday people engaged in do-it-yourself recovery as Puerto Ricans in the US collected and shipped much needed supplies. This period is characterized as one of inaction and abandonment by the federal and local government but also culminated in El Verano, the largest protest on the archipelago, which ousted then-Governor Ricardo Roselló.³⁴ Marta, the intake coordinator at NYRC and a mother of three displaced to New York City, bluntly stated, “The government purposefully treated us like shit for years. What was I supposed to do with three teenagers? One having mental [health] breakdowns all the time . . . I can’t be responsible for Puerto Rico, that place had a lot of problems before the hurricanes . . . People left because they were scared of dying or their families dying.”³⁵ Marta marked her displacement as the final straw in a history of colonial violence and uncertainty.

State-Sponsored Recovery in New York City 

I met Esperanza, a fellow Boricua, in the spring of 2019 at La Marqueta in Brooklyn. We were attending an event organized by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) intended to explain the proposed renovations to the Moore Street Market, one of four surviving public markets built by NYC mayor Fiorello La Guardia in 1941. The market was historically and is today composed of Spanish-speaking Caribbean merchants that serve the majority Latinx/é residents of Williamsburg with goods such as fruit, vegetables, crafts, candles, and other Caribbean and Latin American products. Esperanza, the supervisor of disaster case management at the NYRC and a community organizer, was concerned that “renovations” was just another phrase for gentrification. A long-time resident of Manhattan’s Loisaida, she was aware of the inherent contradictory promises of development for low-income Black and Latiné residents, the assertion seldom borne out that urban renewal could stimulate economic growth and improve living conditions without displacing residents.³⁶ Her early experiences within social welfare programs exposed her to the failures of state welfare, from the unequal allocation of resources, to degrading encounters with caseworkers, to endless requests for documentation. This informed Esperanza’s radical care politics, motivating her to gather with a cohort of women who sustain each other through communal childrearing, food preparation, vital sharing of information for navigating NYC’s social service agencies, fundraising, event planning, community organizing, and life-long friendships filled with joy.³⁷

Today Esperanza’s concerns are for the few families from Puerto Rico displaced to the neighborhood by Hurricane María, noting, “the last thing these people need is to be displaced again.” While she described NYRC as one of the only city-funded programs “doing anything for our people,” she connected dwindling funds and understaffing to Puerto Rican racialization. She continued to explain that during Hurricane Sandy (2012), white people “were provided ten years of recovery aid,” “but because we are brown, the government places limits on our recovery.”³⁸

NYRC functioned on a skeleton crew of three DCMs; one supervisor (with active cases); one person charged with career services, clothing, and MetroCard distribution; and one person who processed intake forms — a role I would eventually take on as a volunteer. In total they serviced over two thousand families with the occasional and short-lived volunteer. Faced with funding constraints which influenced the type of recovery services NYRC offered, Esperanza increasingly worked outside of the program to assist displaced Puerto Ricans resettle in New York City.

The NYRC received a long-term recovery grant in 2018 (from the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City) to provide disaster case management services for newly arriving displaced Puerto Ricans. Through the mayor’s grant NYRC provided the following: payment of first month’s rent and security deposit once housing was secured; furniture assistance; clothing for job interviews; school uniforms for children; referrals for employment development at job training centers throughout New York City; and contact information to apply to programs such as Medicare/Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).³⁹ NYRC functioned as a bureaucracy, so documentation was central to ensure cost-effective interventions, avoid so-called fraud, and determine eligibility.⁴⁰ To qualify, displaced Puerto Ricans had to demonstrate they were in fact displaced by María by producing the following documentation: 1) FEMA application number, 2) copy of an airplane ticket, and 3) valid identification. Several applicants were unable to produce this evidence because their documents had been lost due to heavy flooding or the destruction of their homes. As the DCM manager, Esperanza instructed me to document these cases anyway since they (DCMs) could perhaps provide some form of assistance off the books. This often meant that DCMs invested time to locate additional resources outside of the scope of the program, typically from the community network Esperanza had built over decades as a community organizer. NYRC did not assist displaced Puerto Ricans in their search for housing, despite this being understood as fundamental to recovery. Instead, people were left to navigate a complex and unaffordable housing market alone. State recovery efforts were underpinned by the neoliberal logic that disavows government handouts and favors those who become “social entrepreneurs of their own lives.”⁴¹ This strategy is understood as empowering individuals to engage in their own capacity-building rather than become dependent on social services.⁴²

When I arrived in 2019, over two hundred displaced Puerto Ricans, some with families, remained in the shelter system after being waitlisted for public housing and/or dealing with a landlord who refused to accept their housing vouchers.⁴³ DCMs were vocal at monthly meetings, explaining how landlords refused to accept housing vouchers due to associated stigmas and weaponized eviction to force residents to move out.⁴⁴ Further, DCMs highlighted the shortage of full-time employment opportunities for those without childcare and English language fluency. Despite these factors, Esperanza’s concerns regarding the lack of meaningful recovery were minimized by senior management through scapegoating Puerto Ricans as “unwilling to settle” for mediocre living conditions and employment. For example, in response to Esperanza’s report that language barriers barred displaced Puerto Ricans from locating permanent employment, Jeremy, the chief of staff, stated:

Language is not a barrier. I have been to plenty of places that have Spanish-speaking staff. There are tons of Spanish-speaking cooks, dishwashers, and construction workers. I have seen it myself. It’s not an issue. People just can’t be picky, if they want a job, they will take it. Please revise the report and remove this.

DCMs were aware that this disregard for their experiential knowledge resulted from their gendered and racialized position; however, they characterized their labor as presenting the possibilities to disrupt the immediate crises and precarious futures that displaced Puerto Ricans faced. While several displaced people and DCMs expressed gratitude for the limited services, I argue that city bureaucracies, to a significant degree, produced rather than mitigated disaster migrants’ deepening precarity. I witnessed how DCMs consistently worked around insufficient funding, navigated the dubious Medicaid and Medicare application process, and maneuvered shelter policies that did not support clients’ transition into permanent affordable housing. Esperanza’s knowledge regarding NYC’s social service programs made up for the lack of resources she had no control over. On numerous occasions Esperanza and other DCMs went “off-script” to support displaced Puerto Ricans’ needs.

Radical care materialized in many forms in these women’s hands. It included direct cash assistance and the purchase of formula, diapers, food, and school textbooks — all out of pocket.⁴⁵ For senior management the long-term recovery program functioned as well as could be expected, but DCMs’ care work reflects an urgency that those institutional forms of care under capitalism were not and are not intended to ameliorate. Moreover, DCMs, all working-class Latinas, mobilized personal networks and invested countless unpaid hours to secure services and materials given a low priority by NYRC.⁴⁶ DCMs organized weekend community events such as Santaland, a charity baseball game, a Thanksgiving Turkey distribution at a local barber shop, an art auction, a winter clothing drive, a co-organized back-to-school backpack giveaway, and food distribution with local community groups in Loisaida. They connected people to free legal services, fought against eviction and pernicious landlords, advised people on securing access to universal pre-K programs, and attended and co-organized panels regarding the conditions displaced Puerto Ricans faced. This says nothing of the hours invested in deep listening with displaced Puerto Ricans who just needed someone to hear them. This additional care work was necessary because institutional forms of care function ambivalently when directed at racialized, immigrant, poor, and working-class populations. 

During monthly meetings senior administrators Jeremy and Gregory articulated concerns and frustrations with continued under- and unemployment as well as housing insecurity, yet the conversation typically emphasized encouraging Puerto Ricans to remain in Puerto Rico or return to the archipelago, promoting FEMA as a resource. Other times, DCMs were scapegoated as falling behind on their cases. Jeremy reprimanded DCMs for “laughing” frequently as the work piled up. Rather than attribute a backlog of work to minimal staffing, laughter was scrutinized as an indicator of “slacking off” and unprofessional behavior. Pointing behind Esperanza’s desk, the DCMs described to me how Jeremy surveilled them through his office window, noting that in the future they would be mindful of their laughter. Though they took this reprimand in stride, laughter and being loud served as racial and gendered markers of aggression since — for women and particularly as women of color — this behavior was not considered in line with the respectability politics expected by the all-male, all-white senior management. The leadership’s simplistic understanding misses how, through laughter, DCMs created a space of temporary reprieve from stress, self-described trauma, and burnout. In fact, DCMs reminded me on multiple occasions that humor was a crucial form of communication and meaning-making. The punitive view also delegitimizes one popular affective form of expression while validating others as part of a process of US professionalization and social reproduction. Humor that seemed “out of place” to management often articulated DCMs’ frustration with the lack of financial support NYRC received, the disjuncture between the services needed and the services provided, and lack of empathy and compensation for the additional labor these women performed. However, humor cannot be reduced to a coping mechanism. Rather, it provides a glimpse into the complicated ways the DCMs’ lives were structured by asymmetrical power relationships within the racial, class, gender, and sexual hierarchies that inform their social world. 

What’s Data Got to Do with It?: How Care Work Obscures Reality

Housed between Beatriz and Raquel’s desk was a large file cabinet with handwritten case files for each person displaced to New York City. The thickness of each file reflected the number of documents collected to prove need and the services provided. As NYRC prepared to discontinue services for displaced families due to lack of funds and the perception that Puerto Ricans no longer required disaster case management, all case files were uploaded to a database to create a digitized archive. DCMs focused on closing as many cases as possible before transferring them to another agency that provided basic case management to New Yorkers in poverty. Many were skeptical that another overwhelmed and underfunded New York City agency had the means or political will to meet the needs of the displaced Puerto Ricans DCMs had spent countless hours fighting for. I used most of my time entering notes and transferring files. In some cases, a handwritten transcript of the client’s first visit to the Julia de Burgos Center, the initial disaster relief center, was included.

The descriptive notes taken by the DCMs, especially Beatriz and Raquel, captured the moment people made the painful decision that life in Puerto Rico was no longer viable. As I read through these pages, a picture emerged regarding the uncertainty and unpredictability of the post hurricane period. While the notes reveal a diversity of experiences and migration strategies, instances of uncertainty are representative of the broader experience of Puerto Ricans historically forced to leave the archipelago for the US. DCMs documented stories of flooded homes, scarcity of food and medicine, lack of access to healthcare, ill children and adults, intimate partner violence, people’s attempts to “make it work,” and the ubiquitous phrase, “we [or I] lost everything.” These stories disrupt the narrative that emerged in the post-disaster period which uncritically praised Puerto Ricans for their resilience. Ignoring that resilience not only absolves governments of their responsibilities but imposes an expectation of endurance, Puerto Ricans are expected to endure racial-colonial violence and enact self-recovery through individualism. Radical care as a practice of relational witnessing therefore sheds light on how institutional care is often violent because of its inherent ambivalence. Decisions regarding program eligibility and the types of questions asked had no negative consequences for senior management, who acknowledged there were continued unmet needs but satisfied themselves by saying that they were doing the best under the circumstances. For DCMs knowing the details of these stories remained a powerful motivator to fight and organize collectively long after the long-term recovery program ended. 

I was struck by how, once digitized, these stories would merely be data points. Lost are the nuances of recovery — how people narrated their displacement and the extensive labor DCMs invested. After all, bank withdrawals from personal accounts to purchase formula and diapers will never find their way into the digitized record. There is no field to input comments that detail the numerous occasions they drew from their knowledge of New York City’s public services to address clients’ unmet needs or the countless additional hours they worked to organize events. Well-being check-ins with residents that could not leave their home or the shelter are unaccounted for in the digital archive. Instead, the database used to input the type of services’ clients received records the following: demographic information, such as age of each household member, race and ethnicity, home address in Puerto Rico, and their new address in New York City; a drop-down menu with predetermined causes for migration; whether their home was designated uninhabitable; if they applied for FEMA assistance; the services already provided by NYRC; and a blank field for DCMs to record each date the client was contacted. This data generated monthly reports that aggregate the number of households serviced, how many clients remained in shelters, and which clients seemingly disappeared. This provided NYRC with data to request additional funding, evaluate the programs’ efficacy, and determine with quantitative metrics where their efforts should be concentrated.

Although data input required DCMs to complete additional forms, these forms were often redundant or did not provide additional insight into the plight of displaced people. Instead, they were bureaucratic paperwork disguised as efficiency. Intake forms that assessed displaced people’s eligibility for case management allowed only for a “yes/no” response and a small text box, making it difficult to record the circumstances, extent, and urgency of people’s actual needs.⁴⁷

During one intake call, for example, Iris shared that she was on the verge of homelessness due to eviction. There was not much NYRC could offer beyond the first month’s rent and security deposit once Iris secured housing on her own. This was not Iris’s first displacement. In 1998 she lost her seaside restaurant and savings when Hurricane Georges hit Puerto Rico. She moved to Florida to stay with a relative and eventually made her way back home in the mid-2000s intent on reopening a restaurant. Hurricane María displaced her again, this time to New York City. The chronic stress associated with multiple displacements and loss of economic stability contributed to a decline in Iris’s health and impacted her ability to maintain full-time employment. Although we were in the process of closing cases, within two weeks Esperanza sorted out payment of Iris’s back rent and connected her to an organization that assisted people struggling with severe mental health issues. 

The new digital platform no longer captures these stories. The case reports include that Iris fled Puerto Rico for New York City, required housing assistance, which was resolved, and that the case was closed. There is no description of Esperanza’s negotiations with the landlord, legal outreach, or time spent securing mental health services. Data consolidation concealed the complexity of struggles that displaced Puerto Ricans grappled with as well as the labor DCMs performed to mitigate the harm of ineffective bureaucratic programs. In effect this gave the impression that the program functioned well, rather than relied on unpaid, gendered, and racialized labor to meet people’s needs. The fact that DCMs’ first-hand experiential knowledge that corresponds to the community they serve was being overlooked and even unseen only further contributed to the inevitable burnout that comes from unreasonable workloads and the structural inequalities built into the work.

Burnout as Refusal: A Conclusion of Sorts 

Fall is in full swing: it is a cool October day in 2020. As I enter the office to silence, I am immediately ushered into Esperanza’s office by Raquel where Beatriz is seated. Sitting at her desk in the back of the office with the glass door closed, Esperanza explained to us that she is “tired, worn” and that while she wants to remain active in “the fight,” it has become unsustainable to “split herself into so many pieces.” Esperanza was conflicted about resigning at a time when families remained in homeless shelters with a continued need for outreach and a lack of office support. I must admit I was stunned and turned to see Beatriz and Raquel’s reactions. They implored Esperanza to remain until the program closed or negotiate part-time hours to avoid income loss. Esperanza shook her head and described the difficulty of being away from home, the continued needs within her neighborhood, and the desire to spend more time with her children. She noted that it’s not just displaced Puerto Ricans struggling, that every day she witnesses the impact of urban neglect on people in her neighborhood.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore in her work on mothering and incarceration demonstrates the arduous labor involved in “trying adequately to switch among the many and sometimes conflicting roles required of caregivers, waged workers, and justice advocates.”⁴⁸ This is not meant to reproduce the work/life balance that undergirds discussions about the care crisis. Rather this point draws attention to how the care market requires racialized care workers to leave their own families to meet the needs of others.⁴⁹ At the same time, resigning did not close off radical care. Instead, Esperanza focused on securing work that was more compatible with the life she wanted to live and her community activism. In all these instances DCMs’ organizing efforts refused the ways NYRC, the broader publics, and the US and Puerto Rican governments framed displaced Puerto Ricans (and Puerto Ricans in general) and their families as undeserving, lazy, and disposable. DCMs worked against the increasingly punitive systems implemented under the guise of “care” while relying on various strategies — protest, community political education forums, food distribution and more — to demand truly equitable disaster recovery and an end to US colonialism. DCMs are acutely aware of the intricacy of navigating state bureaucracy and structural violence, not least because of how coloniality defies geographic and political boundaries to shape diasporic life in profound ways.

DCMs’ quotidian lives in New York City meant they were not only versed in how social service programs exacerbated uncertainty but also in the racialized, gendered, and classed hierarchies that shaped their own lives. As Latinas, their knowledge was often undermined by senior management even though DCMs were at the forefront of providing recovery aid. In their neighborhoods they dealt with the pressures of gentrification and the subsequent rising costs of basic needs. As a resident of Loisaida, Esperanza also contended with the consequences of climate change and the uneven realities of state-based climate disaster recovery.⁵⁰ Yet diasporic women continued to collectively advocate for improved housing, employment, and environmental conditions for displaced Puerto Ricans and their broader communities. DCMs made it clear to me that their additional unpaid labor was their decision, and they theorized this work as necessary and fulfilling. While historical and contemporary burdens of racism and sexism mean that struggle is undoubtedly an aspect of the lives of Puerto Ricans and other women of color, these burdens only reflect a snippet of our story. DCMs are agentive in their determination to mitigate the harm of uncertainty, instability, state neglect, and disaster recovery. The many women in my life and those at the heart of this work were not and are not solely governed by the violence inherent in the care system in which they work.

DCMs asserted radical care as a praxis of relationality: a rejection of the exploitative relations of racial capitalism and colonialism — a rejection which is critical to enacting alternative forms of recovery. This does not mean that DCMs escaped exhaustion or self-described burn-out, but rather they created the conditions and possibilities to engage in new socialites. DCMs demonstrate how precarity gives way to life-affirming practices such as community activism, the dissemination of vital information to maneuver bureaucratic red tape and other institutional violence, and the creation of networks of collective radical care often filled with joy and laughter. Care in this way is no longer solely a burden but rather a means through which people maintain their human connections and make agentive decisions. DCMs did not merely engage in radical care due to state failure. Rather their care work was grounded in a shared solidarity and anti-colonial understanding that the current conditions are untenable.

Endnotes

1. All names in the article are pseudonyms. I include interlocutors’ names for direct quotes but in some instances if there is no name this indicates a general comment that was made during an informal conversation with multiple people (essentially chatting while working or over lunch break). The majority of informal conversations took place during the workday in the office. However, quotes are included from events that took place outside of the office. For example, the Santaland event that the article opens with was hosted at Henry Street Settlement in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in December of 2019.[↑]
2. John Gal and Idit Weiss-Gal, “Policy Practice in Social Work: An Introduction,” Social Workers Affecting Social Policy: An International Perspective, ed. John Gal and Idit Weiss-Gal (The Policy Press, 2013).[↑]
3. On Puerto Ricans contested subject and citizenship status, see among others: Ismael García-Colón, Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire: Puerto Rican Workers on US Farms (2020); and Ramon Grosfoguel, Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective (2003).[↑]
4. Coloniality is understood as an ongoing racialized structure that endures beyond the archipelago to shape life in the diaspora. While colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, coloniality refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged because of colonialism. Maria Lugones’ important work expands the concept to describe how colonialism imposed Western gendered structures. Lugones, Peregrinajes/Pilgrimages: Theorizing Coalitions Against Multiple Oppressions (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).[↑]
5. As a result of the Coronavirus pandemic and subsequent quarantine period, NYRC moved to remote work in March 2020, and eventually the program that provided long-term recovery for displaced Puerto Ricans shut down as the program focused on COVID-19 relief. I do not elaborate on the pandemic period in this article.[↑]
6. Joanne Barker et al. “Catastrophe, Care, and All That Remains,” Social Text, 39, no. 4 (2021).[↑]
7. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work (University of California Press, 2003); Elena Buch, Inequalities of Aging: Paradoxes of Independence in American Home Care (New York University Press, 2018); Andrea Muehlbach, The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2012).[↑]
8. Raghuram, “Race and Feminist Care Ethnic: Intersectionality as Method,” Gender, Place & Culture 26, no. 5 (2019).[↑]
9. Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Pluto Press, 2017).[↑]
10. Premilla Nadasen, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2023).[↑]
11. Nadasen, Care, 4.[↑]
12. Ethel Tungohan, Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement Building, and Communities of Care (University of Illinois Press, 2023); Premilla Nadasen, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (Beacon Press, 2016); Mary Romero, Maid in the USA. (Routledge, 2002); Emma Amador, The Politics of Care Work: Puerto Rican Women Organizing for Social Justice (Duke University Press, 2025).[↑]
13. Karrieann Soto Vega, “Puerto Rico Weathers the Storm: Autogestión as a Coalitional Counter-praxis of Survival,” Feral Feminisms 9 (2019); Sara Awartani, “In Solidarity: Palestine in the Puerto Rican Political Imaginary,” Radical History Review 128 (2017); Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times,” Social Text 38, no. 1 (2020).[↑]
14. Nadasen, Care, 4; Emma Amador, The Politics of Care Work: Puerto Rican Women Organizing for Social Justice (Duke University Press, 2025); Ethel Tungohan, Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement-Building, and Communities of Care (University of Illinois Press, 2023); Martin F. Manalansan IV, “Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm,” The Scholar and Feminist Online 6, no. 3 (2008).[↑]
15. Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: Essays (Firebrand Books, 1988). Lorde’s well-known quote that “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” was written during her cancer diagnoses and recounts how the struggle for survival is also a political struggle. Self-care for Lorde is an anti-capitalist collective endeavor that demands a dismantling of a racist system that inflicts harm on Black folks. However, self-care has been coopted by capitalist consumption that centers luxurious pampering to momentarily feel better. These remedies are commoditized in the form of specialized diets, gym memberships, self-help apps and more. This model of care — a moralized self-management — focuses on the individual rather than the sustainable collectives Lorde espoused and reinforces the very structures Lorde devoted her life to dismantling. Yet, Lorde’s self-care remains a salient feminist praxis.[↑]
16. Saidiya Hartmann, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors,” Souls 18, no. 1 (2016).[↑]
17. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (Routledge Classics, 2000); Shellee Colen, “‘Like a Mother to Them’: Stratified Reproduction and West Indian Childcare Workers and Employers in New York,” in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction (University of California Press, 1995); Dorothy Roberts, “Spiritual and Menial Housework,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 9, no. 51 (1997); Evelyn Nakano Glen, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Harvard University Press, 2010).[↑]
18. Hobart and Kneese, “Radical Care.”[↑]
19. Hobart and Kneese, “Radical Care”; Deva Woodly and Rachel H. Brown, eds., “The Politics of Care,” Contemporary Political Theory 20, no. 4 (2021).[↑]
20. Joan Tronto, “The ‘Nanny’ Question in Feminism,” Hypatia 17 (2002); Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004).[↑]
21. Hobart and Kneese, “Radical Care.” [↑]
22. This number provides some sense of the magnitude of displacement; it is a severe undercount and does not capture that Puerto Ricans left at various points in time (for example, many Puerto Ricans arrived in late 2019). Nor does it account for the numbers of Puerto Ricans displaced following the successive earthquakes that began on December 20, 2019. See Centro Brief, “Enduring Disasters: Puerto Rico Three Years After María,” Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (September 2020): 11.[↑]
23. Arelis R Hernández and Brady Dennis, “Desperate Puerto Ricans Line Up for Water — at a Hazardous-waste Site,” Washington Post, October 16, 2017.[↑]
24. NOAA, “Costliest US tropical cyclones tables updated,” Miami: National Weather Service, 2018.[↑]
25. Nishant Kishore et.al., “Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane María,” New England Journal of Medicine 379 (2018).[↑]
26. Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna Hoffman, eds., The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective (Routledge 1999); Kathleen Tierney, The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2014); Lei Sun and A. J. Faas, “Social Production of Disasters and Disaster Social Constructs: An Exercise in Disambiguation and Reframing,” Disasters Prevention and Management: An International Journal 27, no. 5 (2018); Vincanne Adams, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina (Duke University Press, 2013).[↑]
27. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011); Thom Davies, “Toxic Space and Time: Slow Violence, Necropolitics, and Petrochemical Pollution,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108, no. 6 (2018); Maricarmen Hernández, “Putting Out Fires: The Varying Temporalities of Disaster,” Poetics 93 (2022).[↑]
28. Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017); Jeremy Scahill, “Hurricane Colonialism: The Economic, Political, and Environmental War on Puerto Rico,” The Intercept, September 19, 2018; Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón, “Introduction,” in Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm, eds. Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón (Haymarket Books, 2019); Hilda Lloréns and Maritza Stanchich, “Water is Life, but the Colony is a Necropolis: Environmental Terrains of Struggle in Puerto Rico,” Cultural Dynamics 32, no.1-2 (2019).[↑]
29. Suzanne Gamboa, “Puerto Rico Governor: We Can’t Let Our Debt Bring Us to Our Knees,” NBC News, June 29, 2015, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/puerto-rico-governor-we-cant-let-our-debt-bring-us-n384121.[↑]
30. Zadia M. Feliciano and Andrew Green, US Multinationals in Puerto Rico and the Repeal of Section 936 Tax Exemption for US Corporations, (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2017).[↑]
31. Zadia M. Feliciano, “IRS Section 936 and the Decline of Puerto Rico’s Manufacturing,” Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 30, no. 3 (2018).[↑]
32. Pedro Caban, “Puerto Rico and PROMESA: Reaffirming Colonialism,” New Politics Journal 14, (2017).[↑]
33. Izzie Ramirez, “The Real source of Puerto Rico’s Woes,” Vox, October 10, 2022.[↑]
34. Jacqueline Villarrubia-Mendoza and Roberto Vélez-Vélez, “Centro de Apoyo Mutuo: Reconfigurando la assistencia en tiempos de seastre,” Centro Journal 32, no. 3 (Fall 2020); Aurora Santiago-Ortiz and Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, “La Calle Fortaleza in Puerto Rico’s Primavera de Verano,” Society & Space, Feb 25, 2020, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/la-calle-fortaleza-in-puerto-ricos-primavera-de-verano; Marisol Lebrón, “Policing Coraje in the Colony: Toward a Decolonial Feminist Politics of Rage in Puerto Rico,” Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society 47, no. 4 (2021). [↑]
35. Informal interview with Marta, October 2019.[↑]
36. For those of us, me included, born and raised in this area, we refer to the Lower East Side as Loisaida[↑]
37. Here, “community organizing” refers to a broad-based movement that included supporting women running for local political positions on the school board, attending town halls regarding public housing policy and the Mayor’s PlanNYC’s sustainability[↑]
38. Informal conversation with Esperanza and other organizers at La Marqueta in April 2019.[↑]
39. Referrals in the form of the program website or main phone number.[↑]
40. To avoid fraudulent claims, DCMs were tasked with collecting proof of displacement in the form of a copy of the boarding pass or plane ticket as well as FEMA application number.[↑]
41. Adams, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith, 195.[↑]
42. Eric Klineberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2002); Paige West, Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea (Columbia University Press, 2016).[↑]
43. New York City offers several housing voucher programs to help low-income, elderly, and disabled people. The primary program is Section 8 Housing Choice administered by the New York City Housing Authority and Housing Preservation & Development under the Community Development Act of 1978. These vouchers subsidize rent with tenants paying a portion (usually 40% of their adjusted monthly income) and the voucher covering the rest. Eligible families receive vouchers and must locate an apartment/landlord that accepts Section 8. The program has been marred by long waitlists — an average of ten months to find an apartment which is arduous especially when recipients must reapply every one hundred and twenty days to maintain their eligibility. See “About Section 8,” NYCHA, https://www.nyc.gov/site/nycha/section-8/about-section-8.page.[↑]
44. These were explained to me by Esperanza and Raquel as assumptions that poor people of color cause trouble, do not pay their rent on time, bring around suspicious people, and engage in crime.[↑]
45. These were paid for by DCMs using their personal funds.[↑]
46. I use the word Latina because this is how disaster case managers self-identify.[↑]
47. For example, one question asked applicants if someone in the household had a preexisting medical condition. The form did not allow for additional information such as the type of preexisting condition or if the applicant required medical services.[↑]
48. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “You Have Dislodged a Boulder: Mothers and Prisoners in the Post Keynesian California Landscape,” Transforming Anthropology 8, no. 1-2 (1999): 12.[↑]
49. Premilla Nadasen, Care, 4.[↑]
50. Esperanza’s neighborhood was devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. She described the disproportionate funding her area received in comparison to wealthier neighborhoods and the rodents that, while a feature of urban neglect, seemed to proliferate post-Sandy. At the time of my fieldwork Esperanza along with other NYCHA residents opposed then Mayor Bill de Blasio’s sustainability plan. The $1.45 billion East Side Coastal Resiliency Project (ESCR) bulldozed the entire 57.5-acre East River Park and cover it with eight to ten feet of landfill; atop this landfill will be new recreational spaces. What Esperanza described as “not for us” NYCHA residents. See “East Side Coastal Resiliency Project,” NYC.gov, https://www.nyc.gov/site/escr/index.page.[↑]