Vol.:(0123456789) Latino Studies https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-022-00403-1 BOOK REVIEW Making livable worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican women building environmental justice Hilda Lloréns, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2021, 224pp., $30.00, ISBN: 978-0295749402 (paperback) Víctor M. Torres‑Vélez 1 Accepted: 30 October 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022 I was tasked with reviewing Hilda Lloréns’s book, Making Livable Worlds: Afro- Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice. Reading this auto-ethnog- raphy was like looking at a mirror and having a homologous refection of myself staring back in awe. Homologous because, while her work and life were diferent to mine, we also shared so much in common. Not only are we both Afro-Puerto Rican anthropologists, trained in the United States, who also conducted feldwork at home, but our area of specialization is environmental injustice. Like Lloréns, I too had to wrestle with the methodological and existential conundrums of doing research in one’s homeland, in a place close to the heart, where sometimes one must take a stand. The homologous poetics and politics of mirror images staring back from the depths of memory do not end here. We both survived, not unscathed, the deadly grip of poverty, homelessness and racism that our provenance imposed on us. We both continue to struggle with being racialized colonial subjects, hailing from the oldest colony in the world. Lloréns’ ambitious book skillfully weaves her personal and her family history with the histories of other Black Puerto Rican women in the coastal southeast part of Puerto Rico. Lloréns engages in an “autobiographical example” (p. 13) to illus- trate how her intergenerational family life is representative of the larger condition of blackness as experienced by Afro-Puerto Rican women in the Puerto Rican archipel- ago and in the United States. What allows her to bridge her auto-ethnography with the ethnographic counterpart is the theoretical notion of “matriarchal dispossession” (p. 15). This provocative concept excavates deeply into the pervasive and long-last- ing historical and structural conditions that explain the systemic dispossession of Black Puerto Rican women in the archipelago of Puerto Rico. The roots of such dis- possession are found in settler colonialism and the patriarchal and racist cultural and * Víctor M. Torres-Vélez Vtorres-velez@hostos.cuny.edu; dr.torres.velez@gmail.com 1 Eugenio María De Hostos Community College, City University of New York, New York, USA