Session #4: Mutual Aid as an Organizing Response to a Natural Calamity
Date: May 17, 2021
Key Topics: establishing cooperative structures; a weak state and alternative governance structures
Guest Speakers: Paola Aponte Cotto & Marisel Robles Gutiérrez, Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico.
2017 was a momentous year for Puerto Rico. After several decades full of austerity measures, Hurricane María reveals what already existed: a colonized people, poor and abandoned.
Organized communities and activists from all over Puerto Rico did not wait and began to work on the most pressing needs they were experiencing: community kitchens, reconstruction and cleaning brigades, coordination of transportation of supplies from the diaspora, among many other things. Many were able to understand the collective experience that “Only the People, Save the People.”