2025 Theses Master's

Santurce for Whom? Understanding Resistance to Colonialism and Gentrification in Santurce, Puerto Rico

Kaplan, Jaron

Over the past decade, Puerto Rico has faced a wave of economic and political change driven by PROMESA (a US law establishing colonial oversight of Puerto Rico’s government), mounting debt and austerity measures, a suite of new neoliberal policies, and natural disasters like Hurricanes Maria and Fiona. A wealth of media and academic literature followed, analyzing this polycrisis through siloed perspectives on gentrification, politics, or economic crisis, often failing to identify solutions to the problems they diagnosed.

In response, this thesis leverages advocacy planning as an interdisciplinary tool to combine understandings of gentrification and colonialism in the Puerto Rican context. By taking a holistic approach, it develops networked understandings of power structures to identify effective strategies for future resistance. To do so, a comprehensive review of the existence of crypto, disaster, and settler colonial structures contextualizes the present political economy of the island. In-depth community surveys and a case study developed from a site visit to Santurce – an island in San Juan – help contextualize the everyday experience of gentrification and colonialism, referred to here as “gentrification-powered colonialism.”

These testimonies frame the relationship between Boricuas (Puerto Ricans), their government, and the US government. Reading existing resistance movements through these colonial and gentrification-based power structures reveals effective strategies for political resistance to these unjust systems. Findings identify colonialism and gentrification as inherently linked through government policy, effectuating community resilience as an effective tool for resistance against political corruption, dispossession, and cultural erosion.