Paper short abstract:

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Paper long abstract:

This paper will address the social contests that arose out of a series of tourism development projects on the Caribbean island of Culebra. I will discuss how the development debates not only produced contrasting aesthetic values of the island's landscape but also placed at stake the limits of what constitutes the Culebra space. I will show how the arguments deployed during the development controversy constructed a mobile and insular island at different times and simultaneously. I will further argue that, while the protagonists of development debate represented contrasting political agendas, the constructions of Culebra as mobile and insular were mutually informing arguments that constituted Culebra's political discourse. I believe that the seemingly contradictory position of Culebra islanders towards their island represents a positive tension from where islanders construct a political identity and that the understanding of this paradox is key for further understanding the complexities of Caribbean politics in general and Culebra politics in particular.

Local authorities, in coordination with the Puerto Rico national government, set in motion an aggressive development policy under the justification of "bettering the quality of life" for the people of Culebra. The idea that the quality of life of Culebra had to be improved through tourism development was based on a discourse that constructed Culebra as poor, marginal and insular alongside with an imagery of the island's landscape as inhospitable, harsh and unproductive. Proponents of the development agenda argued that Culebra's historical insularity had worked against it and had left the island on the margins of the Puerto Rico national project. To develop the island for tourism, the argument went, would alleviate the issue of marginality and insularism by bringing Culebra into the national fold. However, local supporters of tourism development used their platform to also argue for Culebra's uniqueness and separation from the Puerto Rico national project. This uniqueness and separation from the national space was based on a discourse of mobility that represented Culebra society as mobile and operating in relation to a variety of spaces that lay outside of the national framework.

In a similar way, resistance to the development project parted from the premise that the Culebra landscape was beautiful, pristine and untouched and that a development agenda would threaten the paradisiacal quality of the landscape. Development resistance valued Culebra's insularity and marginality in relation to the Puerto Rico national project and saw the Puerto Rico sponsored development program as an antidemocratic scheme forced on to the island. Such an aggressive development program, the argument went, would affect the intimate, insular, social relations that characterise the island's way of life. It drew on imagery of Culebra being a traditional fishing community under threat by neo-liberal policies and capitalist investment groups. However, the anti-development discourse also drew from mobile practices and discourses by lobbying the support of North Americans that lived on the island, who were involved in their own transnational network of movement. The anti-development argument also drew from experiences and connections that Culebra has historically maintained with the neighbouring islands of the region that do not correspond to Puerto Rico's nor Culebra's national, racial, linguistic and academic discourse of identity.

I will examine how narratives of insularity and mobility gave shape to Culebra's current political debates. I will show how people of Culebra deployed arguments that assumed insular, national, regional and global understandings of the island in order to produce political strategies during the most aggressive development projects carried out in Culebra up to date. This paper will focus on the tensions created between national, global and insular understandings of modern development discourse and their articulation with island identities. I will specifically address the ways in which people in the Caribbean island of Culebra negotiate, appropriate and produce strategies of identity in a process that promises to affect the physical landscape of the island, people's relationship to the landscape and affect the patterns of consumption that identify Culebra.

E-paper: this Paper will not be presented, but read in advance and discussed

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