Epilogue: Envisioning Caring Futures Available to Purchase

The epilogue provides a final analysis of how the history of Puerto Rican women’s struggles around social welfare, care, and social reproduction show how Puerto Ricans have fought for their rights for generations. It draws a connection between the activism traced in each chapter of the book and more contemporary struggles over the extension of social policy to Puerto Rico. It also underscores how the continued partial and provisional coverage under the US Social Security Act in Puerto Rico continues to result in colonial inequality in the archipelago and its diaspora. However, it shows how Puerto Rican women activists continue to organize in Puerto Rico to contest the forms of inequality enshrined in unequal social policy. It argues that Puerto Rican women’s leadership in organizing around care, in the past and the present, demands recognition within political histories in Puerto Rico and the United States.