“‘¡Esto No Sale de la Nada!’: AgitArte’s Radical Infrastructures of Feeling”

Puerto Rican politics is rapidly changing, with growing opposition to colonialism reflected at the ballot box, and moments of wider acceptance of confrontational tactics on the streets—including the 2019 Uprising that unseated then-governor Ricardo Rosselló Nevares. For many, the protests seemed to “come out of nowhere”: a new, generational phenomenon, “auto-convened” if not spontaneous. Even historically-minded observers struggle to find significant precedents dating back more than ten years. In contrast, my research among veteran activists reveals a longer trajectory of sustained agitational work around many of the issues voiced during the Uprising. Drawing on my conversations with key members of AgitArte, a Santurce-based radical arts collective founded in Massachusetts in 1997, I show how, during the two decades leading to the Uprising, this and other groups reinvented and mobilized much older radical repertoires to challenge the prevailing emotional habitus. When, in the summer of 2019, the legitimacy of the colonial elite became temporarily unmoored in the wake of disaster and corruption scandals, confrontational tactics and their related emotional registers were immediately available and read as appropriate by many among the disaffected—surfacing seemingly “out of nowhere.”