 Today, I would like to talk about a project that changed my life, and that of many people who worked on it, called Valori Cambio, Value and Change. It was piloted in Puerto Rico, which has been subject to U.S. colonial capital's rules since 1898, and increased neoliberalization since 2006. Valori Cambio is an interactive installation that combines art, storytelling, and just-economy principles to facilitate a conversation about what we call the economy. Its goals are to provide a platform for participants to consider the question of value, experience a non-extractive exchange economy, and introduce the notion of a community currency. In this case, our currency was called personas de pesos Puerto Rico, or pesos for short. A community currency is a type of non-market money that is created and adopted by groups to value collective skills, knowledge, and talents, and facilitate their exchange. In general, community currencies do not replace the main currency, but offer ways to strengthen local activity and build economies that are not based on profit and accumulation. There are close to 5,000 community currencies in the world. One of the most known is Ithaca Hours in upstate New York, but here's from Spain, Brazil. The need for such a project arose from the intensification of suffering in Puerto Rico over the last three years. As global capital and U.S. interests devised new mechanisms to extract exorbitant profits from these island people. In 2016, a year after the governor of Puerto Rico announced that the island's government amassed a public debt of $72 billion, and this debt, in addition to $50 billion in pension obligations, was unpayable. Congress passed the PROMESA Act, which returned Puerto Rico to direct form of colonial rule. This federal law created a fiscal control board composed of people with deep ties to banking, including entities directly involved in producing the debt, and granted them broad powers to extract payment by privatization and cuts to all of life's fundamentals, including health, education, infrastructure, and pensions. These trends accelerated after September 16, 2017, when a massive Category 5 hurricane named Maria destroyed the archipelagos that terrorized electric and other infrastructure, leaving half a million residents with damaged or destroyed homes, and an electricity blackout that lasted a year for many people. This also ushered a disaster capitalism, and a calculated necropolitics by the federal and island governments that resulted in hunger, homelessness, the death of at least 4,645 people, and the migration of another 100,000 residents, 4% of the population to U.S. cities. Poverty rates in general soared to nearly 50%. Such pain led me to ask myself questions that I had not considered before, as a scholar or artist, including, what is money? How does it acquire value? Can it be a disruptive tool? Those questions led me not as an academic article, but to my first public art project. To set Balori Cambia in motion, I collaborated with a visual artist, Sara Bel Santos Negrón, to design an initial series of six banknotes, ranging from 1 to 25, that feature images of Puerto Rican historical figures and an iconic community. Together with a team of designers, computer engineers, and solidarity economy advocates, we reconfigured a donated ATM machine, which we named VIG, acronym for Balori Cambia, to record people's stories and dispense the bills. To obtain a bill, the VIG asked participants to tell us about what they valued, how their communities can support what they value, and what people or groups are already doing that. Participants could then exchange the bill for items at partner businesses and organizations. In this way, Balori Cambia created an economy where the main unit of value was storytelling. In exchange of the story that participants told the VIG, they received a bill with a QR code that could be used to access the currency stories through their cell phones. In exchange for the establishments accepting the pesos, the project promoted their stories on social media. Starting on February 9 and over the course of eight days, the project visited five locations, two public schools, and a youth program. From the first day in the Averduda restaurant in Old San Juan, the responses to the project surprised everyone. Hundreds of participants stood in line every day for hours until evening, rain or shine, to obtain a bill. A number of people came every day, and others every time they could. On the last day of the project, the VIG was open for 14 hours until midnight to honor the petition of people who worked as cooks, waiters, and bartenders in the area to participate after their shifts ended. Immediately, the response begged the question. As the line to obtain the bills was not to access fuel, a job, or even a concert ticket, the most immediate question was why? Why made this wait worth it? One thing became immediately evident. It was not for the money. At least it was not for the exchange value of the bills. In a country suffering from profound austerity crisis, the vast majority of people who participated more than 1,000 did not spend the money. Of the 1,600 bills that circulated, which totaled thousands of dollars, less than 100 bills totaling 150 pesos were actually used. That the majority of participants opted to keep the bills may appear as a form of hoarding, but the politics of keeping the money is more complex. As I engage with participants in today, I heard a host of reasons for the response. They retained the pesos because the bills represented works of art, and both the project and the bills were beautiful, because the bills affirmed their identities or represented a new beginning. In this regard, the bills were a signifier of hope for a more just, inclusive, and equitable Puerto Rico. Moreover, Puerto Rico has never had a national currency in its entire 520 years of modern history, and is subject to U.S. colonial capitalism, whose symbol is the dollar. In addition, this currency is not only that of another country and a colonial power, it also enshrines what could be called the coloniality of power, or the patterns of power that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the limits of colonial administrations. This is evident in that the dollar only contains figures of men who identify themselves as white, representatives of the state, and are holders of racist, genocidal, and heterosexist ideas and policies. In this regard, the idea of a local currency created for communal well-being, and which circulates images and stories of women and blacks, Puerto Ricans, migrants, and children of immigrants, writers, doctors, educators, athletes, thinkers, feminists, union organizers, individuals, but also families and communities disrupted the ways Puerto Ricans are discounted daily by the U.S. currency, including politically, economically, and culturally. To rejoice at the currency was then to challenge multiple layers of this possession. The peso was not only beautiful, but literally a piece of each participant's personal and collective history that people refused to part or transact with. The project also surprises in another way. It brought tremendous joy, and it yielded a new concept to consider the role of joy in politics, the colonial joy. Day after day, I noticed that joy generally appeared when participants received the bills, particularly when they obtained the figure they hoped for. One of the most compelling examples was that of a young artist and teacher, Eduardo Paz, who made the line for hours for several days because he wanted to receive one particular bill, the one featuring the Cordero siblings. When he finally did, on February 18, I asked him why this bill brought him so much joy, and he said, basically, the bill represents who I am, an Afro-descended man fighting, educating, and showing their roots through the different situations that like him present itself. It's worth a lot. At times, I distrust that this joy might include it. All joy is not good or means good. Some may rejoice at another misfortune or take pleasure in it, yet during Valori Cambio, joy appeared at the precise moment when many, myself included, felt the possibility of a different now. One where neither colonialism nor coloniality ruled over our lives. In this, joy is political. Joy sets itself tacitly against the features of the world which one cannot or should not rejoice, and does so without resentment or judgment, which is perhaps why this joy is contagious, leading to another unexpected outcome, the immediate emergence of community currencies and solidarity projects. One is taking place in El Caño, Martín Peña. A month before the big touch the ground, I visited El Caño to ask permission to tell their story in our 25 peso bill. After a brief conversation, they proposed that we bring the project to the community's farmer market. Last October, too, El Caño launched its Tienda Solidaria Solidaria Store and Puerto Rico's first community currency, the Pasos del Caño Martín Peña. Some names, since they will be initially circulated to recognize those people whose actions allow the community to step closer to their collective goals. A second project is that of Just Exchange in New York, a collaboration with Libertad Guerra, Loida, SIDA Center and the Ford Foundation that emerged after Valori Cambio visited the Lower East Side as part of the Pasal y Presente Art After the Young Lords exhibit in May. Just Exchange aims to create a community currency and solidarity economy networks among three communities in the city, starting in 2020. Of course, not all was joyful. The fact that our project was greeted by joy is directly related to the sufferings of austerity, Maria, and mass migration. Also, while joy was widely shared and collectively experienced, what made people joyful was often different, leading to conflicts. For instance, a small number of people who participated in the project did so with the main objective of cashing in on the colonial joy. Not surprisingly, in less than 48 hours, at least two people were selling the pesos on eBay for as much as $125, leading to intense arguments. Joy was likewise not the only response to Valori Cambio. Comments in relation to the two most visible press and broadcast items on the project showed that conservatives did not experience the colonial joy, but colonial capitalists discussed. Of the more than 400 comments left on the Valori Cambio coverage, the overwhelming majority were insults to the artists, mockery at the idea that Puerto Ricans could ever have a valuable currency or have a thriving economy without the United States. Yet, although questions and challenges remain, as these words on my presence here today can attest, for those of us that felt that joy, all we have wanted to do since is to pass it on. And on. Thank you so much.