Making Livable Worlds

"For those designing undergraduate and graduate courses in Puerto Rican Studies, Latinx Studies, and Ethnic Studies and seeking readings that present innovative methodological and epistemological contributions, Hilda Lloréns' Making Livable Worlds is highly recommended. The work invites spirited and engaging classroom discussions that promote expanded thinking in written work. Beyond the classroom, Lloréns's methodology and nuanced treatment of too often simplified contested concepts make all-important contributions to these fields of study. Her serious attention to the daily work and interventions of Black and Afro-Puerto Rican women to make livable worlds in the here and now and for coming generations addresses gaping holes in environmental justice-minded Puerto Rican Studies, Latinx Studies, and Ethnic Studies"—Latinx Project, New York University

"The primary strength of Lloréns's book rests in the intimacy that she brings to excavating the troubling environmental injustices Black Puerto Rican women have to live under even as they struggle against marginalization...Making Livable Worlds is a timely and necessary examination of the growing crisis in environmental justice and other cultural issues such as gender, race, and the effects of colonialism."—Lateral, Journal of the Cultural Studies Association

"Powerful and beautifully written, Making Livable Worlds opens an ecofeminist archive that invites researchers to extend this kind of study to other islands. It also provides inspiration on how to undertake this task with such methods as autoethnography, which will hopefully become more ingrained in the toolbox of young Caribbeanist scholars. One of the most important attributes of this work is that we hear through Lloréns myriad voices presented not as heroines or victims but as women making the best out of their imposed dispossession."—H-Environment

"Lloréns' ambitious book skillfully weaves her personal and her family history with the histories of other Black Puerto Rican women in the coastal southeast part of Puerto Rico."—Latino Studies

"By centering her own experience and the voices of the Afro-Puerto Rican women, Lloréns makes an essential empirical and theoretical intervention."—Miranda Martinez, Ohio State University

"A remarkable book, firmly grounded in ordinary—yet extraordinary—Black Puerto Rican women's everyday eco-feminism, and informed by important interventions that diverse Afro-descendant feminists have made in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States."—Faye V. Harrison, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign