José A. Laguarta Ramírez

“Riding the Perennial Gale: Working-Class Puerto Ricans and the Involution of Colonial Capitalism”

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017, deepening an already dire economic situation and amplifying an ongoing wave of out-migration. In the age of permanent man-made climate change, hurricanes, like extended economic crises, are “big events” produced by the capitalist despoiling of nature and labor, further exposing the dispossessed and displaced to structural violence. A colony of the USA since 1898, perhaps Puerto Rico has now once again “changed forever,” as the popular belief goes in the wake of Maria. If so, these changes will continually be experienced and enacted differently by subjects unevenly positioned in terms of unequal relationships of power and privilege. I propose an empirically informed research orientation that examines the situation of contemporary working-class Puerto Ricans in terms of their strategic responses to the involution of colonial capitalism. As a dimension of social life, working-classness is not contracting but expanding, in the context of an ongoing “debt crisis” better understood in terms of the self-consumption, or involution, of the modality of colonial capitalism established in Puerto Rico in the 1940s. In this light, strategic actions of working-class Puerto Ricans such as migration, informal labor, and subsistence/domestic production are not evidence of alternate modes of being, but part of the very conditions of working-classness today. I conclude by briefly identifying three areas for future research to flesh out the proposed orientation, focusing in the immediate term on responses to Maria by working-class communities in the island and the diaspora, in interaction with local and US elites.

“‘A More Colorful Picture of my Own Vision’: Expansive Learning in Puerto Rico’s Student Anti-Austerity Movement”

Social movement scholars have long been aware of leadership competition or ‘factionalism’ as one of the mechanisms within the longer process of polarization. As such, competition is often discussed as a harbinger of demobilization, and rarely in the context of movement emergence or growth. In turn, education scholars have examined social movement learning primarily as a cognitive process of identity formation, with rare and oblique references to the literature on movement dynamics. The first phase of the 2010–2011 student strike at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) is a useful counterintuitive case for re-examining these conventional wisdoms, as existing studies and first-hand accounts suggest a pattern of intimate connections between factional competition and movement learning. In this article, I propose Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as an alternative framework for analyzing that sequence. By recasting competition and other movement dynamics as aspects of the internal contradictions of nested activity systems, themselves crucial to the emergent process of expansive learning, CHAT may help bridge the gap between fields and approaches.

“‘¡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.”