The shipping cranes and cargo terminal at Puerto Rico’s Port of Ponce are linked to a powerful, official discourse that can be traced across a century. Less visible is the dispossession required to create port infrastructure, dispossession that is largely absent from academic and planning texts. Scholars working within critical theory argue that dominant narratives often obscure fuller accounts that include sacrifice, violence, and trauma. This blog examines those absences and traces through discursive evidence about the way the port and its surrounding communities were imagined, remembered, and contested. Remembering what was lost honors the past in ways that might open the door to more just and inclusive futures.
Caption: Aerial view of the Ponce Port Authority. Photo from the Port Authority’s Website.
In recent years, scholars across critical geography, postcolonial theory, and the environmental humanities have paid increasing attention to how water—long treated as a neutral backdrop or resource—has been central to colonial and capitalist projects. This shift in focus challenges land-centered narratives of empire-building and development by interrogating how oceans, rivers, coasts, and ports have been discursively constructed and materially reshaped to serve systems of domination. Within this growing body of work, a concept has emerged that helps us name these transformations: hydrocolonialism.
Hydrocolonialism, or colonization by water, is the process whereby water and habitats are forcibly compromised to enable commercial extraction (Szabó, 2015; Bystrom, 2017; Hofmeyr, 2020, 2022). Hydrocolonialism is a theoretical framework that expands our understanding of postcolonialism, drawing our attention to water as a central element of empire-building, capital accumulation, and domination. It isn’t just land and people that are conquered through engineering, but also the oceans, the shorelines, and waterways. Using the hydrocolonial lens, scholars have used various cases to examine colonial relations between subjugated people and their rights to water and the wherewithal to survive: Shell Oil’s degradation of Nigerian water supplies to the Ogoni tribe (Szabó, 2015), the development of the Colombian El Cercado dam and the subsequent lack of water for the indigenous Wayúu peoples (Vidal Parra, 2019), Canadian-US transboundary governance over traditional indigenous waters in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Ontario (Strube & Thomas, 2021), Taiwan’s commercial fishing interests vs. those of migrant and indigenous fishermen (Lu, 2024), and the influence of colonial hierarchies at Durban, South African on literary authority and race (Bystrom & Hofmeyr, 2017; Hofmeyr, 2019, 2022). Ports are spaces invented through social and material processes, products of discussive imagination and mobility (Hofmeyr, 2020) that enabled colonialization through reclaiming land from the sea (Goudie & Viles, 2016).
I employ the hydrocolonial framework to examine how power was and continues to be exercised over land, sea, and people in the port settlement of Barrio Playa, Ponce, Puerto Rico. Drawing on informal conversations, archival records, and public documents, I analyze the discursive mechanisms through which thousands of Playeros (people from the beach communities) were demonized, contaminated, and ultimately erased to make way for a version of “economic progress” that continues to echo through the Port of Ponce today. The hydrocolonial framework enables an interpretation of the Port of Ponce and Playa as a physical site of commerce and as a space of historical violence, silenced memory, and contested belonging.
In the next section, I trace the arc from internal migration to settlement, systematic displacement, and the ecological destruction that followed. This interrogates the enduring colonial logics still at work in Barrio Playa’s development.
Mobility and US Colonialization
Community erasure unfolded over decades for Playeros. First, American businesses grabbed Puerto Rico’s farmlands, forcing sustenance farmers to resettle to Playa and other communities in the search for work. In a previous blog, I recount U.S. colonial land grabs between 1898 and the 1940s, following the U.S. invasion and annexation of Puerto Rico in 1898 as a result of the Spanish-American War. The action disrupted the rural labor of small-scale agriculture. Well-researched accounts of the structural forces behind displacement explain how subsequent large-scale migrations within Puerto Rico brought internal migrants to Barrio Playa and other metropolitan areas in the search for work (Bergad, 1978; Monk & Alexander, 1979; Ayala & Bergad, 2002). These dynamics are further explored in the documentary How the US Stole Puerto Rico. These broader patterns of displacement and internal migration converged in Barrio Playa, where the unmet housing needs of new arrivals were addressed not by state intervention, but by informal settlement.
The spatial imprint of this migration is evident in historical records and visual materials that document how newcomers made lives for themselves at the edge of land and sea. U.S. Department of Interior Geological Maps of Playa de Ponce (1945) and aerial photography illustrate that Playa’s newcomers occupied the maritime-terrestrial zone, land along river banks, pastures, and mangrove forests.
The spatial transformation required to expand the port is made visible in aerial images from 1967 and 1983; Ecological brutality coupled with violent land clearance accompanied development of the Port of Ponce’s modern infrastructure. It sliced through wetlands, mangroves, and the ocean floor through dredging. The bay had to conform with the economic vision for a port that would “serve as a central pillar of socio-economic growth in the southern region of Puerto Rico” (Autoridad del Puerto de Ponce, n.d.). Through a birds-eye view we can observe the injustices embedded in land, ocean, and the built environment, and tied to hydrocolonial power that reshaped both the coastline, and the lives tethered to it.
Caption: USGS aerial photography illustrates dramatic transformations of the Ponce Playa shoreline through port intensification and the eradication of multiple neighborhood.
In the next article, I discuss the discourse of displacement. The transformation of Barrio Playa into a commercial port zone required the deliberate erasure of communities whose histories, relationships to water, and sustenance strategies were deemed incompatible with the imperatives of global trade and development.
