In a previous blog (The Port that Transformed Barrio Playa’s Shoreline),I examined the physical transformation of Barrio Playa, Ponce, through a hydrocolonial lens. The discussion attempts to illuminate how U.S. colonial expansion and port development reengineered the coastline and displaced vulnerable communities in the name of progress. This post continues that inquiry by examining how dominant discourse in archival documents and government plans is contested in social science literature about Playa de Ponce and in oral histories.
Through environmental policy, media portrayals, and urban planning rhetoric, Playeros were painted as social problems to be cleared, rather than people with rooted histories, cultures, and communal bonds. Here, I turn to the heuristic framework of the “logic of elimination” (Wolfe, 1999) to enhance the analytical lens of hydrocolonialism. Wolfe’s framework pinpoints the logic and mechanisms of settler colonialism (1999) and holds analytical resonance for the case of Playa. While it may lack some of the nuances needed for application to Puerto Rico (Carrillo Rowe, 2016; Bonilla, 2017; Negrón-Muntaner, 2017), its emphasis on power relations, violent removal, and spatial restructuring offers a valuable interpretive framework, particularly when paired with hydrocolonialism. Crucially, the logic of elimination extended beyond material interventions. It can be found in discourse in which narratives of blight, danger, and disorder served to legitimize displacement and redevelopment.
Displacing Playeros
In the Playa case, settler colonialist discourse is apparent in documents describing American and economic interests. Interestingly, these are also evident in capitalist logics from stakeholders at the Ponce Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club, and the Municipal Legislature. These institutions pushed heavily for port intensification (House Documents, 1922). The initial plans involved dredging the bay, reclaiming 353 acres of marshland, and constructing bulkheads and sea walls to shape what became the port’s deep-water terminal.
Puerto Rico’s mid-70s Comprehensive Water Quality Management Plan noted that industrial and urban sewage discharged directly to the Ponce Bay, tuna and tannery factories, as well as the Municipality’s raw sewage made La Playa’s coastal waters among the most polluted in the region (PR EQB, 1976). Residents recall the terrible stench. Governor Rafael Hernández Colón noted that by the late 1960s, Playa settlements were immersed in unemployment, drug addiction, high crime rates, and disease (Hernández Colón, 1989).
Caption: Plans approved in 1925 for transforming land and sea show both transformation of land and sea (USACE, 1974, p. 34). Areas to the east marked “fill” were settled by the 1970s, thus requiring “relocation of about 1,000 persons from a depressed waterfront to improved, subsidized housing” (USACE, 1974, p. 20).
If you can convince the public that a place is broken, its removal becomes not just acceptable but necessary. Beginning in the late 1930s, Puerto Rico’s housing policy agenda linked social improvements to blight elimination, a tool of racialized urban planning (Rodríguez, 1994; Dinzey-Flores, 2007). Policy is among the instruments of power-knowledge in dominant discourse that legitimize as truths the moral observations and characterization of people (Foucault, 1976, 1977).
Local newspaper articles from the mid-to late-20th century were saturated with narratives that cast Playeros, residents of Barrio Playa, as delinquents, “guapetones” (tough guys), and social burdens. Young men were branded as threats, women as morally suspect, and children as wild.
Caption: Throughout a series published in the daily newspaper “El Mundo,” reporter Nelson Gabriel Berrío critiqued the dominant media and societal tendencies to judge youth gangs with stereotypes of criminality and moral failure (Berrío, 1986).
Challenging the official narrative
These narratives, however, were contested, as Berrío’s series in El Mundo demonstrates. Social science research and oral histories from former residents of these communities also provide counterfactuals to the official record. For example, Playa’s hazard-exposed communities produced levels of satisfaction among residents, according to Lopez de Gracia et al.’s 1971 study on Barrio Playa communities La Boca and Barriada Haití. The surveyed 32 families in Barriada Haiti and the 27 families in La Boca, 62.5 percent and 51.8 percent, respectively, reported positive relations with their neighbors and a strong attachment to the place of residence. Thirty percent attribute their problems to the government.
My own conversations with longtime Playeros echo this positive memory about place and the community practice of mutual care. While the Playeros with whom I converse say there was some truth to the official, disparaging narrative, the other story is that these were places of belonging. Playeros who lived in these communities tell me about neighborliness, and practices of caring and reciprocity, such as food shared between homes. If a widow had no income, neighbors made sure she had something to eat, recalled several long-time residents who still live in the barrio.
Caption: Photo by Frank Méndez entitled “Doña Elvira Rodríguez. 73- Years Old. Haití, Playa de Ponce, Puerto Rico” (Méndez, 1974)
When Progress Means Removal
Yet this deeply rooted sense of place did not shield Playa’s communities from removal. The drive to expand port infrastructure in Ponce required not only physical transformation but the displacement of people whom elites deemed unproductive, unclean, and undesirable. By the early 1980s, Puerto Rico’s housing agenda was aligned with the Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Policies Act of 1970 (Public Law 91-646), a foundational U.S. federal law that established minimum standards for relocation and compensation when people are displaced due to federally funded land projects. Local authorities used HUD CDBG moneys to erase La Boca community entirely, its muddy flats filled and elevated to make way for flood mitigation projects and a fisherman’s marina. Archival documents confirm that 80 families benefited from federally funded public-interest housing that displaced La Boca. Under the banner of “blight elimination,” HUD money relocated families into new housing at what is today known as Urbanización San Tomás, an urbanized area built on filled land of the former slums Los Meritos, Santo Tomás, and Las Latas (Departamento de Vivienda y Desarrollo Comunal, Gobierno Municipal de Ponce, 1977).
During the same period, the government evicted the residents of Barriada Haiti and Santo Domingo, among others. Though offered payouts of just a few thousand dollars, perceived as a fortune to some, residents once “bought out’ had few rehousing options. Subsequently, some moved into public housing. Others crowded into relatives’ homes. Some disappeared into cycles of housing insecurity, according to informal conversations with residents.
Caption: El Mundo, January 16, 1970, article announcing the elimination of 709 “irregular” structures with no sanitary services and payoffs of $5,000 to evicted residents.
The Port Today: Whose Progress?
A community unrooted through gentrification, disaster, infrastructure projects, or forced relocation experiences lasting psychological and communal trauma (Fullilove, 2016). This web of social ties, cultural practices, memory, and collective identity isn’t easily regrown. Oral histories speak of disorientation, depression, and loss. The city didn’t just take houses; it took place, memory, and belonging.
Today, environmental injustices continue to threaten well-being in La Playa communities. In April 2025, a secretive agreement between the Port of Ponce and New Fortress Energy to transfer Liquid Natural Gas between ships in the open waters of Ponce Bay came to light and was quickly scuttled due to public outcry and political pressure. I share the dynamic in my next article that will be published called, “What’s that Russian Oligarch’s Yacht Doing in the Port of Ponce? Which discusses how hydrocolonialism continues to cast a shadow over Playa’s future. It suggests that a more equitable way forward includes consultations with communities historically sacrificed for the benefit of others.
I share the dynamic in my next article that will be published called, “What’s that Russian Oligarch’s Yacht Doing in the Port of Ponce?” Which discusses how hydrocolonialism continues to cast a shadow over Playa’s future. It suggests that a more equitable way forward includes consultations with communities historically sacrificed for the benefit of others
