Opposing powers at the helm and the immobilities of passenger-ferry governance in Vieques, Puerto Rico

Abstract

Almost 20 years have passed since Viequenses succeeded in their struggle to kick out the US Navy from their island, yet residents have been left stranded facing issues of the dispossession of the island's most poor, alongside slow clean-up efforts and deteriorating health outcomes. Drawing upon approaches from recent critical transportation geographies, this article uses a mobility justice framework to understand how the afterlives of over 60 years of direct militarised colonial violence continue to repeat through Viequense mobile life. I particularly focus on how Vieques' environmental injustices become mobility injustices through the poor ferry service. The article explores the governance of the maritime transportation service by disentangling its mobile politics, revealing the deeper impacts of coloniality on infrastructures of mobility. I do so through a critical policy analysis of legislative measures, plans, reports and grant proposals prepared by Puerto Rican state authorities from 1999 to 2021. Recognising the close relationship between debt and infrastructural landscapes in Puerto Rico, I use debt as an analytical tool to explain how it is constitutive of mobility regimes on the island. Through this analysis, the article centres on the creation of the Maritime Transportation Authority (ATM) as an institutional actor in charge of Viequense mobilities, detailing how it was enmeshed in fiscal and political tensions that resulted in extreme im/mobilities to its passengers. I find that the struggle for ownership over mobilities is a characteristic of the mobile politics of the ferry service, defined by an unequal power distribution between institutional actors and users, codified by public policies. This demonstrates how multiple dimensions of justice intertwine within mobility politics, aggravating existing environmental injustices into mobility injustices.