Despite enduring a decade of economic decline, disasters, and population loss, Puerto Rico’s auto market has demonstrated remarkable resilience, with new vehicle sales consistently surpassing 120,000 units since 2021. This phenomenon reflects more than consumer preference—it reveals a systemic dependence on automobility shaped by colonial political, logistical, and financial structures. Defined as the interlocking system of cars, infrastructure, policy, and culture, automobility in Puerto Rico functions as a privatized, debt-driven mode of transportation, deeply embedded in the island’s colonial economy. In the absence of reliable mass transit, car ownership has become a costly necessity, with transportation now representing the largest household expense.
This dissertation investigates how car commerce has spatially organized Puerto Rico’s contemporary automobility regime, using the car dealership as a strategic entry point. Drawing on the critical logistics research agenda, as well as scholarship at the intersection of law, political economy, and economic geography, the project positions the car dealership infrastructurally as a key node where regulatory, institutional, and logistical arrangements converge. Using historical methods, including archival research and document analysis, alongside semi-structured interviews, the project pursues three core aims: 1) to historically situate the emergence of car dealerships in Puerto Rico as central infrastructures to the automobility system; 2) to examine the legal, economic, and logistical conditions that enabled the development of the car shipping segment as part of a broader imperial reorganization of capital accumulation strategies in the region; 3) to document the contemporary financial pressures produced by car dependence under Puerto Rico’s neoliberal austerity regime. I seek to demonstrate how the car dealership as an infrastructure created both a spatial framework and institutional structure through which Puerto Rican merchants could pursue entrepreneurial ventures and mobilize the rhetoric of “el progreso motorizado” (motorized progress), while actively engaging with the shifting political economy and logistical logics of the mid-twentieth century centered on attracting U.S. industrial capital. The project also traces how these infrastructural roles have become reconfigured at present under Puerto Rico’s current neoliberal austerity regime.
By analyzing the dealership’s entanglement with elite interests and its role in shaping mobility infrastructures, the project reveals how automobility operates as a colonial mechanism that privatizes infrastructural precarity and redistributes governance failures onto individuals. Ultimately, this research contributes to critical logistics and political economy scholarship by foregrounding the car dealership as a key site of colonial extraction and infrastructural power in Puerto Rico’s contemporary automobility landscape.