When Hurricane María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, it left no part of the archipelago unscathed. The hurricane triggered floods and mudslides, washed out roads, destroyed tens of thousands of homes, farms, and businesses, caused the largest blackout in US history, knocked out communications, led to widespread food, drinking water, and gasoline shortages, and caused thousands of deaths. The seventeen oral histories collected in Mi María: Surviving the Storm share stories of surviving the storm and its long aftermath as people waited for relief and aid that rarely arrived. Zaira and her husband floated on a patched air mattress for sixteen hours while floodwaters rose around them. The road washed out in front of Emmanuel as he desperately tried to drive his pregnant wife who had begun labor to the hospital. Luis and his father anxiously counted the days that the dialysis clinic remained closed and lifesaving treatment was unavailable, while Miliana’s mother was sent home from the hospital —undiagnosed— only to fall critically ill in her own home. Weaving together long-form oral histories and shorter testimonios, the book offers a multivocal peoples’ history of disaster that fosters a greater understanding of the failures of governmental disaster response and the correlating perseverance of the people impacted by these failures, highlighting the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. Ultimately, the ways in which these oral histories demonstrate the strength of community response to disaster in Puerto Rico are pertinent to other parts of the world that are being impacted by our current climate emergency.

"In 2017, Puerto Rico was hit hard by Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island, buildings, and people, and knocked out power. Based on the experiences of many hurricane victims, this fictional story follows Antonio and his family who fled to a safer part of the island, then returning to their village where they struggle to rebuild with little help. Interspersed with facts and case studies about what causes hurricanes, this narrative tells a story common to many people who have had to flee and rebuild their lives after losing their homes, possessions, and sometimes, loved ones"--

Micah D. Renicker, a second-year medical student, was living a dream-come-true with his wife Carmen on a small Caribbean island, Dominica, when Category 5 Hurricane Maria ferociously devastated the tropical paradise. Surviving eight hours in the very teeth of one of the most violently powerful storms on earth, Micah shares the gripping details of their experience in this romantic, heartbreaking, hopeful tale of their ultimately epic adventure of a lifetime.

Framed by the stories of Hurricane Maria evacuees, Tossed to the Wind is the gripping account of the wreckage, despair, and displacement left in the wake of one of the deadliest natural disasters on U.S. soil. It is also a story of hope and endurance as Puerto Ricans on the island shared what little they had and the diaspora in Florida offered refuge. Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico as a high-end Category 4, and the storm surge, flash flooding, and countless landslides created widespread devastation. One hundred percent of the island lost drinking water and electricity. More than 3 million U.S. citizens lived for months without power, making it the worst blackout in American history. The slow recovery led to a mass evacuation. Thousands gathered what they had left and traveled to Florida—already home to 1 million Puerto Ricans. In Tossed to the Wind, María Padilla and Nancy Rosado interview Puerto Ricans from all walks of life who now live in Orlando and Kissimmee, who fight every day to pick up the pieces of their world after Hurricane Maria. In their own words, evacuees describe families living temporarily out of motels, parents anxious about providing for their children, children starting new schools, and everyone worried about the families and friends they left behind. Told from the midst of chaos and incomprehensible loss, these are the stories—filled with pain and wisdom, sadness and laughter—that showcase the strength and resolve of Puerto Ricans.

The politics of grief, in an era marked by loss, shows us how we can find our humanity once more. From one of our most vital and far-seeing social critics. Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, yet we barely have time to acknowledge it. The losses range from the personal grief of a single COVID death to the planetary disaster wrought by climate change. We are in an age of unraveling hopes and expectations, of dreams curtailed, of aspirations desiccated. What can we do? This is capitalism’s death phase. It has become clear that the cost of wealth creation for a few is enormous destruction for others. The marginalized and the vulnerable have been feeling the crisis for a long time, but it is increasingly coming for all of us. At the same time, we are denied the means of mourning the futures that are being so brutally curtailed. At such a moment, taking the time to grieve is a radical act. Through in-depth reporting intertwined with memoir, Sarah Jaffe shows how public memorialization has become more than a refusal or a protest: it is a path to imagining a better world. When we are able to mourn the lives, the homes, the worlds we have lost, we are better prepared to fight for a transformed future.

For ten years, Voice of Witness has illuminated contemporary human rights crises through its remarkable oral history book series. Founded by Dave Eggers, Lola Vollen and Mimi Lok, Voice of Witness has amplified the stories of hundreds of people impacted by some of the most crucial human rights crises of our time, including men and women living under oppressive regimes in Burma, Colombia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe; public housing residents and undocumented workers in the United States; and exploited workers around the globe. This selection of narratives from these remarkable men and women is many things: an astonishing record of human rights issues in the 21st century; a testament to the resilience and courage of the most marginalized among us; and an opportunity to better the understand the world we live in through human connection and a participatory vision of history.

September 20, 2017 changed Sandra's life forever. She survived category five Hurricane Maria at her home in Puerto Rico, but for the following three months she has to use every ounce of creativity, patience and perseverance to survive without power, water or access to most basic services. Her concern for family and friends in the United States encouraged her to write a journal, many times on her cell phone, to keep them aware of her situation. Her journal entries opened doors to opportunities for humanitarian aid, but unbeknownst to her, it also becomes a catalyst that will allow her to heal from the worse catastrophe her country has ever experienced. Her diary of survival will inspire you to move on and find a way to overcome your personal storms.

They are a mass migration of thousands, yet each one travels alone. Solito, Solita (Alone, Alone), shortlisted for the 2019 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, is an urgent collection of oral histories that tells—in their own words—the story of young refugees fleeing countries in Central America and traveling for hundreds of miles to seek safety and protection in the United States. Fifteen narrators describe why they fled their homes, what happened on their dangerous journeys through Mexico, how they crossed the borders, and for some, their ongoing struggles to survive in the United States. In an era of fear, xenophobia, and outright lies, these stories amplify the compelling voices of migrant youth. What can they teach us about abuse and abandonment, bravery and resilience, hypocrisy and hope? They bring us into their hearts and onto streets filled with the lure of freedom and fraught with violence. From fending off kidnappers with knives and being locked in freezing holding cells to tearful reunions with parents, Solito, Solita’s narrators bring to light the experiences of young people struggling for a better life across the border. This collection includes the story of Adrián, from Guatemala City, whose mother was shot to death before his eyes. He refused to join a gang, rode across Mexico atop cargo trains, crossed the US border as a minor, and was handcuffed and thrown into ICE detention on his eighteenth birthday. We hear the story of Rosa, a Salvadoran mother fighting to save her life as well as her daughter’s after death squads threatened her family. Together they trekked through the jungles on the border between Guatemala and Mexico, where masked men assaulted them. We also meet Gabriel, who after surviving sexual abuse starting at the age of eight fled to the United States, and through study, legal support and work, is now attending UC Berkeley.

Unheard Voices of the Pandemic reveals through first-person narratives what happened the year the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the United States. The seventeen stories included in this collection speak to the precarity, uncertainty, and injustice of that year, but also to bravery, solidarity, and generosity. Although the shadow cast by the COVID-19 pandemic is long, the insights gleaned through listening can last longer.

The volume asks how the literatures of the Americas and the Caribbean present multiple or internally differentiated spaces and how these are distinguished or traversed by different temporalities. The historical and (post)colonial experiences of these areas turns them into especially fertile ground for the exploration of the connections between landscape/geography and historical/temporal palimpsests as well as the specificities of literary form. The contributions are dedicated to individual, yet conceptually interconnected studies of staggered, multiple, non-simultaneous temporalities in modern and contemporary literature. The volume adopts a comparative perspective throughout and intends to foster the dialogue between the study of Latin/American and Caribbean literatures—in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Therefore, the individual essays are not grouped according to geographical or linguistic areas, but follow a trajectory from spatiotemporal constellations of the 19th century to ruined/catastrophic landscapes and the geopoetic inscriptions of time in regions. The essays should appeal to all readers interested in World Literature, Hemispheric Studies as well as temporal approaches to space and geography.