@tacha-rola,
Crear espacios de visibilidad, seguridad y resistencia es sumamente importante. La revolución es queer.
Queer Puerto Rican (Drag) Performer and Promoter
Summer of ’19 in Puerto Rico was spectacular for all the right and all the wrong reasons. After a contentious, storm-laden quadrennium; and after 889 pages of private (and unencrypted) text messages between former governor Rosselló and his closest political allies were leaked, the entire Puerto Rican community (insular and diasporic) was racked by two weeks of protests and police clashes centered on the governor’s mansions, La Fortaleza, in Old San Juan. The end result: the first ousting of a head of state in Puerto Rican history, without a single death. Both an achievement widely considered unlikely (if not inaudito or insólito) for any country in Latin America, let alone a US colony that has never once been a modern, independent nation state; and an exemplary feat of participatory democracy and political spectacle–from above and from below.
Puerto Ricans across the board had every excuse to feel outrage: the governor himself and his all-light-skinned-affluent-cismale cabinet, thinking themselves above private scrutiny, aired out there sincerest opinions–slaked with misogyny and homophobia, toxic machismo and macharranería, criminal activity, and political depravity–going as far as trumpeting nepotism and making fun of the deceased during hurricane María. The spectacle that La Fortaleza (metonymy for the Executive Branch, similar to The White House) unleashed as damage control deserves its own analysis: I would rather frame my analysis from the resistance itself, and the LGBT community that occupied a protagonist role as political actors vying for revolution. Yes, revolution. #RickyRenuncia became a viral trending topic on social media during the entire protest cycle.
For our purposes, I would rather hone in on the bottom-up (no pun intended) queer spectacles unleashed by the youthful resistance, and how a queer subject (usually out of time, out of place) occupies public spaces in protest and in solidarity with the larger normative cisgender community. The most marginalized and downtrodden communities on the island banded together for an ephemeral moment of plurality, of absolute power, in a frontal assault against tyranny. By creating for themselves a space of appearance in an Arendtian sense, they lay a claim for futurity by speculating over and embodying a new island they demand for themselves and for future generations–decidedly anti-neoliberal, anti-racist-misogynistic-homophobic, and anti-Rosselló. In the following three instances of queer resistance, the frame is occupied front and center by queer subjects, but gradually pans out to encompass, I dare say, every Puerto Rican on Earth.
La Resistencia Ball
If we consider that “hegemonic confrontation is not limited to traditional political institutions” (Mouffe 89), a queer ball inaugurates its own space of transgression by definition–even more so when it is held in Plaza de Armas, a main square in Old San Juan, a centuries-old symbol of colonialism and subjugation, steps away from La Fortaleza and City Hall.
One of our goals was to make people uncomfortable… Because we know if we’re making someone uncomfortable, we’re doing our job. We’re making ourselves visible.
Villano Antillano, quoted by Jhoni Jackson for Jezebel
Queer balls are spectacles in and of themselves, the campiest of gender performances steeped in traditions of queer resistance and creative expression, that is, critical art in how balls challenge the constitution and maintenance of a symbolic order (Mouffe 91). We could digress into the racial and gendered systems of oppression that pushed LGBT communities (particularly Puerto Ricans) to establish balls in the first place, but I would rather concentrate on the fact that the ball was not held underground, isolated from mainstream society. Through La Resistencia Ball, this young group of queers dared to create an agonistic public space in the heart of it all, in broad daylight, surrounded by a sea of protesters: they wished to, first and foremost, make people (muggles, rather) uncomfortable; to bring to the fore “conflicting points of view” concerning gender expression and transgressive sexuality (92); to expose “alternatives to the current political order” and add their voices to the maelstrom of creative protests and public demonstrations (93).
By naming themselves collectively as the Haus of Resistance, they are establishing for themselves parameters for open agonistic dialogue, inaugurating a space of queer appearance to disclose a futurizing discourse, speculating amongst the masses a possible nation, a different nation, in which systemic corruption is extirpated and queer bodies are celebrated. By naming themselves the resistance, they create an Us that exists in contraposition to a Them: the heads of the Puerto Rican colonial government. These queer youths embody the future they want to see and live, and by establishing this moment of appearance, they perform the equality and the respect they exige not only from the government against which they protest, but also from the popular masses protesting in tandem (and not in opposition, as would happen any other day, probably) with them.
Ricky Martin Leads the National Strike
On 22 July 19, the entire island shut down. The closest guestimates count over half a million islanders congregating on a huge twelve-lane highway in front of the largest mall in the Caribbean bopping rain or shine to the beat of #RickyRenuncia. With Ricky Martin spearheading the movement, the symbols have changed. After being mentioned by name in homophobic comments in Rosselló and friends’ leaked messages, he and other prominent members of the Puerto Rican artistic class, including rappers Bad Bunny and Residente, took on a protagonist role and convened the country’s most multitudinous political protest in its history. Furthermore, in a similar manifestation of critical art, Bad Bunny, Residente, and iLe released “Afilando cuchillos”, which calls for outright revolution and public displays of violence against La Fortaleza. Despite both Ricky Martin’s homonormativity and Bad Bunny’s consumer-friendly gender-bending deserve their own tangents–not to mention the despicable misogynistic (yet seductively rhythmic) reggeatón lyrics that Residente and others are known for–I would like to rescue that fact that thousands upon thousands of Puerto Ricans cheered (and not jeered) at a gay man waving a pride flag together with a Puerto Rican flag, two overtly political symbols of resistance unfurling proudly in the hopes of effectuating revolutionary change in our colonial administration.
Plurality has never been more closely achieved for the Puerto Rican community. Every single Puerto Rican living off the island would have wanted to be there–yet still made their presence known on social media, adding to the foray. At this point, Rosselló had been rejected by the highest members of his political parties, the calls for his resignation have turned unanimous, and he still holds steadfastly to his seat, unflinching and unwilling to become the Rosselló that failed (unlike his father, who was governor for two consecutive terms in the neoliberal nineties). Protected by the police force in La Fortaleza, utterly powerless in his isolation, he has become a tyrant: when the National Strike occurs, the power has shifted to the people–a plural mix of every social strata imaginable, of members of his own political party as well as his political antagonists, cheering and raging for his resignation. For Arendt, power in a political sense surges forth from the people when they are united for a common cause; public assemblies are powerful in that individuals make their senses and subjectivities known in a way that seems boundless, limitless, infinitely potential.
In a country wracked by homophobic and transphobic violence, in a colony steeped in political inertia if not indifference, the resistance is suddenly led by a light-skinned cis gay male and his allies. Under the ephemeral veil of public assembly, under the inebriating allure of infinity, queers and muggles walked as equals. For Butler, equality has to do with how we treat each other, and power comes from the bond. Equality does not come from The Rights of Man, but “from what is between us, from the bond we make at the moment in which we exercise freedom together, a bond without which there is no freedom at all” (52). Therefore, the political of equality (like emancipation) is different from the daily practice of equality; therefore, equality is an embodied practice, a performative. When Ricky Martin jumps on top of the 18-wheeler and waves the rainbow pride flag together with the Puerto Rican, a new nation is suddenly possible right then and there. If over half a million Puerto Ricans (and even more abroad) can all unite under the double banner of a gay (queer, rather) Puerto Rico, then Rosselló has lost all his power: his adversaries, united, have made a spectacle of themselves, and call for bloody justice.
Queers Host ‘Twerk-A-Thon’ on San Juan Cathedral Steps
Perreo Combativo Cuir en la Catedral de San Juan
(Images courtesy of Nahira Mancourt / Noticel.)
In a truly Caribbean spectacle, the masses were convened to Old San Juan for a twerk-a-thon event on 24 July 19, the fifteenth day of massive protests. This mingling of participatory democracy and cheerful festivities is in no way contradictory: when bodies assemble on the street, in the square, or in other forms of public space (including virtual ones), they are exercising a plural and performative right to appear, one that asserts and instates the body in the midst of the political field, and which, in its expressive and signifying function, delivers a bodily demand for a more livable set of economic, social, and political conditions no longer afflicted by induced forms of precarity
(Butler 11). If action (in Arendtian terms) occurs whenever humans come together in a concerted effort to appear to each other and to discuss the terms of a possible shared future, and if polis is not a localizable place but a queer spacetime phenomenon in which unequal bodies assemble to propose an embodiment of political equality, then it should be no surprise that a convocation for un perreo combativo (that is, a combative twerk-a-thon) would sprout various parallel manifestations all across Old San Juan. Including a queer one held on the steps of the Metropolitan Cathedral Basilica of Saint John the Baptist, the second oldest cathedral in the Americas, originally constructed in wood in 1521.
Butler claims that actions are invariably bodily, and needs supports to lay a claim at all: at this point, in neoliberal times, these supports are what we are all fighting for. The fortnight of protests were initially sparked by the leaked text messages, but it was the final straw in a long line of injustices committed against the population–which we will not get into for sake of time and space, but which also galvanized the people in opposition to the neoliberal precarity that Rosselló’s political maneuvering had caused on the island. Therefore, to understand political demonstrations, we need to better understand the bodily dimensions of action–what the body requires, what the body is allowed (or not) to do in public and in private. Puerto Rican queers, especially (queer) femmes, share with the rest of the population (though obviously in relative terms) precarity as a galvanizing force, as well as a penchant for perreo‘s power of convocation. Faced with generations of violence, the most precarious of bodies invite their fellow protestors to join them in dance, to break down the barriers that divide us usually and to bring down Rosselló once and for all. For the first time, all sectors of society can come as one plurality.
But the most spectacular and transgressive of the cuir interventions in Puerto Rico’s fortnight of protest was El Perreo Intenso, a kind of competitive dance-off that featured twerking contestants unashamedly flaunting their assets on the steps of Old San Juan’s most cherished Catholic cathedral. They left no doubt that Puerto Rico’s new political freedom could not happen without free sexual expression.
Ed Morales for The Nation
Perreo combativo is but another example of the creative power (that is, their potentiality for political action) that Puerto Ricans outraged are capable of summoning and utilizing: crisis breeds creativity. En masse, Puerto Ricans speculated over the meaning of political agency, of resistance, of national unity, and broke off into so many groups to establish their own spaces of appearance, spreading Arendtian action in its wake–jet skis, horse rides, queer balls, yoga classes, motorcycles and banshees, even twerk-a-thons. Every act was suddenly and unmistakably an act of resistance, every meeting a polis embodied. Power undulated all about us–even about those of stuck on the continent staring into their phones for live updates.
To twerk in front of a trans flag duct taped to the entrance of the oldest cathedral in the United States embodies a plural performativity which “seeks to produce a rift within the sphere of appearance, exposing the contradiction by which its claim to universality is posited and nullified. There can be no entry into the sphere of appearance without a critique of the differential forms of power by which that sphere is constituted, and without a critical alliance formed among the discounted, the ineligible–the precarious–to establish new forms of appearance that seek to overcome that differential form of power” (Butler 50-1). Arendt claims that politics requires a space of appearance, the very space which makes politics possible. Therefore, plural action creates space for dialogue. To paraphrase a common queer chant, “La revolución será afro-trans-cuir-feminista, o no será“. Queer bodies force the muggle masses to face their difference, to watch them create an agonistic public space of the very space which rejects and condemns them, the seat of power upon which La Fortaleza founds its paternalistic authority. In the whirlwind of twerk-a-thons, feminists took to the streets with trans and queer activists, queer bodies touted their difference with showmanship, and the spectators embodied a newfound equality which–despite being later rejected because of the the supposed desecration of religious symbols–was nonetheless celebrated as a spectacle of the bodies coming together for a common purpose.
Needless to say, the governor resigned that same night. Perhaps twerking has more political power than it ever could have anticipated.
The Im/Possibility of a (New?) Nation
The Boricua Summer of ’19 is a prime example of the spectacle of emancipation. And here spectacle takes on its ultimate performativity as an ephemeral performance of national sovereignty by a nonsovereign nonnation. After the governor resigned, his cabinet pretty much stayed the same. Instead of open elections, Rosselló’s same political party (pro-statehood) suddenly turned constitutionalist and vied to activate the constitution’s line of succession (yes, line of succession) in order for the highest seat on the island to stay within the same party. There was never a complete shift of circumstances, no relief to the precarity: it was three-hundred and sixty degrees of revolution in fifteen days.
Despite this, a substantial percentage of the population waded in the life-giving spring of emancipation, an explosive first step towards liberation of the island and the subjects who inhabit it from the shackles of neocolonial neoliberalism. Even though the main goal of the protests was to oust Rosselló himself and his closest allies (some of whom have not resigned to this day), the leaked messages were the final drop in a generation’s-worth of neoliberal policies and criminal public debt and austerity. In the meanwhile, the entire population (not just the queers) managed to recover the smallest glimpse of the prideful nationality that they were denied, which according to Fanon is at the root of colonialism. This possible new island already feels a lot more open than the one depicted by the former governors’ leaked messages. These images of a burgeoning queer emancipation are revolutionary spectacles in and of themselves, and will be studied and remembered for a long time. As Butler mentions, power can spring forth at any moment, at any time, from the people. It’s only a matter of time.
(As an extra, I attached a video of former governor Rosselló just before midnight on 24 July 19. Notice how many bullets he sweats. You can almost hear, in your heart, the crowd scream to the heavens when he announces his resignation.)