In this talk, Rivera examines how Puerto Rican Governor Muñoz Marín’s administration during its first two terms triggered the social death of civil rights attorney Pedro Albizu Campos through fabricated mental incompetence. Counterintuitively, social death—the rhetorical incapacitation of nationalist principles—animated Albizu Campos’s personhood status as a criminally liable activist of sound strategic mind. Alongside prison abolitionists, Rivera interrogates the ramifications of psychiatric harm induced by misdiagnosis, while also stressing that psychosocial debilitation is a direct corollary of detention. This case study, she contends, compels us to adopt an antiableist framework that abstracts mental illness from the precinct of falsehood and broadens our understanding of torture.

This talk will be in English