Marisol LeBrón

Policing Coraje in the Colony: Toward a Decolonial Feminist

Politics of Rage in Puerto Rico

S cholars, journalists, and other social commentators are increasingly

turning to the realm of the affective to make sense of Puerto Rico’s pro-
longed descent into crises resulting from colonial capitalism. Political
and economic indicators alone don’t seem capable of capturing the effects
of multiple successive crises experienced by Puerto Ricans in the archipelago
and its diaspora. This is especially true following the federal imposition of a
Fiscal Control Board to oversee the archipelago’s finances in 2016 and the
devastating effects of hurricanes Irma and María in 2017. After more than a
decade of slow-motion economic collapse, two back-to-back hurricanes came
to wash away any remaining illusions that progress and prosperity were possi-
ble under the conditions dictated by colonialism.
After Hurricane María devastated the archipelago’s infrastructure, accel-
erated thousands of premature deaths, and caused tens of thousands to mi-
grate northward, words like fear, hopelessness, exhaustion, numbness, anger,
resignation, abandonment, isolation, and depression circulated in popular
discourse to characterize the general affective tenor of those in the archipel-
ago as well as the swelling ranks of the diaspora. Anthropologist Yarimar
Bonilla notes, following Hurricane María, that Puerto Ricans were “forced
into an affective reckoning with the kinds of structural violence that they had
been enduring for decades” (2019). In particular, Puerto Ricans seemed to
be full of negative affect. Following the storm, an entire culture industry
sprang into action to save Puerto Ricans from their own bad feelings. Social
media campaigns proclaimed #PuertoRicoSeLevanta (#PuertoRicoRises)
and #PuertoRicoStrong, hoping to shift the emotional register away from de-
spair and resignation toward resilience and a bootstrap, can-do mindset. As

Thank you to issue editors Carla Kaplan, Durba Mitra, and Sarah Haley, as well the two
anonymous peer reviewers, for their thoughtful engagement with this essay, which greatly
strengthened my arguments. Thank you also to Miranda Outman for the keen editorial eye.
This essay grew out of a paper I first presented at the incredibly generative Antipode Founda-
tion International Workshop, “Policing Rage in the Urban Age of Crisis and Extremes,” orga-
nized by Tyler Wall and Parastou Saberi. I also presented earlier versions of this essay at UC
Davis and Dartmouth, and I am thankful for the feedback offered by Lisa Materson, José Juan
Pérez Meléndez, and Jorell Meléndez-Badillo. My deep gratitude to Jennifer Lynn Kelly for
talking through this essay’s central claims on countless occasions over the past two years.

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2021, vol. 46, no. 4]
© 2021 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2021/4604-0002$10.00
802 y LeBrón

psychoanalyst Patricia Noboa Ortega points out, however, “These discourses

emphasize individual responsibility, but they do not necessarily reflect the
government’s responsibility toward us. When we identify with these dis-
courses, they become exigencies in our mourning process” (2019, 274). While
Puerto Ricans were constantly urged to harness an optimism that can only be
described as cruel (Berlant 2011), given the struggles that marked everyday
life for wide swaths of the population, many rejected the injunction to be con-
tent and put on a brave face.
While overwhelming and potentially consuming, negative affect is in
many ways the emotional response that seems most appropriate given the sit-
uation confronting Puerto Ricans. As theorist Sianne Ngai suggests, nega-
tive affect often arises due to “the predicaments posed by a general state of
obstructed agency with respect to other human actors or to the social as
such” (2007, 3). In Puerto Rico, the obstructed agency created and sustained
by structural relations of domination such as colonialism, and racial capitalism
more broadly, generate a range of negative affective responses. While they are
borne of an obstructed agency, we should understand these affective condi-
tions as generative rather than stunted. In other words, Puerto Ricans don’t
need to get over the negative affect generated by colonial crisis. Nor do they
need to demonstrate how well equipped they are to withstand the onslaught
of death and destruction that makes up the colonial quotidian—what many
people actually mean when they say Puerto Ricans must be “resilient.”
In this essay, I want to think through the terrain of possibility created by
the coraje that hangs thick in the air in Puerto Rico these days. In Spanish,
coraje has a dual meaning referring to courage as well as anger or rage. De-
rived from the Latin root “cor,” meaning heart, coraje in both senses of the
word “comes from the heart and you feel it,” as writer Mara Negrón puts it
(2011).1 Here, I will focus on the latter, more “negative” meaning of the
word to order to show how and why coraje has emerged as one of the most
potent responses to the ongoing crisis of colonial capitalism in Puerto Rico.
Building from feminist, particularly Black feminist, theorizations of rage and
anger, I understand coraje as an essential political emotion necessary for
structural transformation. Of course, the radical potential of coraje is pre-
cisely what makes it a target of both formal and informal forms of repres-
sion. Throughout this essay, I trace the state’s preoccupation with the rising
coraje being articulated by Puerto Ricans against the current political eco-
nomic situation marked by the debt crisis. Tellingly, women have over-
whelmingly become the face of this political repression as they are among

1
All translations from Spanish are by the author unless otherwise noted.
 S I G N S Summer 2021 y 803

the most affected by US and Puerto Rican austerity policies. Feminists have
been at the forefront of an insurgent activism on the Puerto Rican Left,
making up both a large part of the rank and file as well as more visible figures
and leaders in antiausterity and anticolonial organizing.
In this essay, I analyze how Puerto Ricans narrate and perform their
coraje toward a deadly colonial relationship that is nourished by debt exploi-
tation. In order to show how Puerto Ricans mobilize coraje in an attempt to
overturn the colonial debt regime, I look to accounts that appeared in social
media, interviews with journalists, statements of solidarity from supporters,
and, occasionally, my own participant observation of protests. I focus on
three examples that show how activists are mobilizing coraje in their efforts
to upend extractive and unequal social relations: the case of Nina Droz, the
Enciende Tu Coraje (Ignite Your Rage) protest organized by Jornada: Se
Acabaron Las Promesas (Campaign: The Promises Are Over), and the case
of Elimar Chardón Sierra. As I show, these examples not only illustrate the
transformative potential of coraje but also the anxieties of the state that are
provoked when people organize for social change through a politics and
performance of rage. I conclude by reflecting on the central role of feminist
decolonial coraje in the protests during the summer of 2019 that resulted in
the ouster of Governor Ricardo Rosselló and members of his cabinet. Ulti-
mately, these examples provide us with an opportunity to consider what an
explicitly decolonial, antiracist, anticapitalist, and feminist politics of rage
might look like.

Coraje as a political emotion

In his essay “On Violence” in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), Frantz
Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and decolonial theorist, expresses con-
cern with the ways that colonial violence often causes colonized subjects
to react with rage, which has the potential to turn inward or become dis-
placed, causing further harm against colonized subjects. For Fanon, one of
the challenges of decolonization then becomes centered around how colo-
nized subjects can move beyond rage, which he suggests either keeps col-
onized people semi-immobilized or causes them to lash out. Fanon notes
that while decolonization cannot occur without a revolutionary violence
that seeks to utterly remake the world, rage can be a potential impediment
to that change. A product of colonialization, rage can thwart political trans-
formation and, thus, must be managed and overcome. In this, arguably one
of the most canonical decolonial texts, we see that rage is positioned as a
psychological liability that, if left unchecked, is likely to harm colonized sub-
jects and their movements for freedom. By looking to the work of feminist
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theorists, however, we can recuperate rage an essential component of an

intersectional decolonial praxis.
Rage can be volatile and dangerous as Fanon suggests, but that energy
is part of what also makes it so potentially transformative. Feminist theorists
have insisted that, while rage can explode and destroy much like a combus-
tible fuel (Traister 2018), it can also be used to drive movements forward
on a path of transformation. Through its force and urgency, rage indexes
an “intrinsic social and public demand” (Chemaly 2018, xviii) that helps
articulate not only what is intolerable in our society but also what kinds
of relationships, institutions, and structures we need and desire instead. As
Brittney Cooper puts it, “The clarity that comes from rage should also tell
us what kind of world we want to see, not just what kinds of things we want
to get rid of ” (2018, 273). In this way, we can think of rage as a key ele-
ment in both decolonial and abolitionist praxis that works toward freedom
and repair.
Feminist scholars, particularly Black and Indigenous feminists, have ar-
gued that rage functions as an optic that reveals both existing harm as well
as paths forward grounded in justice and healing. For these scholars, attempts
to dismiss or quell rage, particularly those grounded in notions of respect-
ability and appropriate political address, serve to uphold oppressive structures
and relationships. Indigenous feminist scholar Rachel Flowers positions In-
digenous peoples’ anger and resentment as a legitimate and necessary re-
sponse to ongoing colonialism and state violence (2015, 44). Flowers notes
that this decolonial rage is not irrational or all encompassing; rather, it is
aimed at the very structures and techniques that brought it into being
in the first place (47). For Flowers, “to disregard anger and resentment
as destructive emotions is an uncritical move to absolve the unforgiven,
whereby blame is placed on the injured party, who is seen as an irratio-
nal ‘blockage’ blinded by their rage compared to the ‘reasonable’ apologist”
(42).
Black and Indigenous feminist scholars have maintained that the sup-
pression of rage is part of a colonial tactic of subjugation. According to bell
hooks, “To perpetuate and maintain white supremacy, white folks have col-
onized black Americans, and a part of that colonizing process has been
teaching us to repress our rage, to never make them the targets of anger
we feel about racism” (1995, 14). We must understand the radical praxis
embedded in a politics of rage as stemming from a desire not for inclusion
in an unequal and unjust system but in a desire to completely upend and
destroy the structures that generate feelings of rage among the oppressed
and marginalized (Lorde 1997). In this way, feminists have shown us that
an intersectional and decolonial politics of rage helps rather than hurts the
 S I G N S Summer 2021 y 805

work of “blow[ing] the colonial world to smithereens,” as Fanon (1963, 6)

puts it.
Although it has not received sustained scholarly attention, rage/coraje
has undoubtedly served as a long-standing response to colonialism in Puerto
Rico. Although coraje might form a through line of anticolonial struggle in
Puerto Rico, it has come to occupy a much more prominent position within
the political sphere over the past two decades and has done so in a way that
is deeply raced, classed, and gendered. The deepening of a debt crisis pro-
voked by the collapse of colonial capitalist development during the late twen-
tieth century, on the one hand, and the attendant rise of regimes of austerity
and repression to manage the fallout, on the other, have unleashed a wide-
spread discontent and rage among Puerto Ricans, particularly those who oc-
cupy the most vulnerable positions within society.
Debt, as philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato argues, is above all else a rela-
tion of power that redistributes risk, responsibility, and harm (2012, 24).
For Lazzarato, debt is “the expression of an asymmetry of forces, a power
to prescribe and impose modes of future exploitation, domination, and sub-
jection” (34–35). Debt essentially functions to rob the indebted subject of
their individual and collective future in service to the market. Of course, these
relations of force expressed through debt are not evenly distributed (despite
the abstract figure of Lazzarato’s “indebted man”) and are more acutely
experienced by those who are already marginalized as a result of coloni-
zation, race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship status, and dis/ability. Debt
regimes create not only economic entanglements and obligations but also
collective and individual subjectivities as people are called upon to inter-
nalize and enact the logics of the very political and economic processes that
brutalize them. Speaking about how indebted subjectivity is deployed in
Puerto Rico, feminist philosopher Rocío Zambrana explains: “The indebted
is disempowered when established as culpable, in need of heeding an in-
junction to pay with life itself—through austerity, debt restructuring deals,
taxation. The indebted colony is summoned to pay with life itself through
raised utility costs, lost pensions, foreclosed homes, evictions from private
and public housing, unaddressed gender violence” (2020). With this in mind,
we should understand coraje as an affective condition stoked by the violence
of debt colonialism that has been imposed upon Puerto Ricans for over two
decades. Coraje demands the abolition of the contemporary creditor-debtor
relation as well as the colonial capitalist, white supremacist, and hetero-
patriarchal structures that birthed it.
If, as anthropologists Ulla D. Berg and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas argue,
racialization processes have been not only integral to but constitutive of how
we conceptualize the affective, at the same time that affect has been used to
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justify and expand racial hierarchies (2015, 645), then we can understand coraje
as a form of racialized affect resulting from the violent processes of subjuga-
tion engendered by the debt crisis as the most recent instantiation of colonial
capitalism in Puerto Rico. The debt crisis in Puerto Rico makes material the
ways in which Puerto Ricans are racialized vis-à-vis the United States as co-
lonial subjects who always owe and are never owed. At the same time, the
debt crisis exacerbates racial hierarchies at work in the archipelago that force
Black and dark-skinned Puerto Ricans to bear the brunt of the state’s mea-
sures of repression and austerity. An awareness of this racialized, colonial sub-
jugation that functions through debt and a desire to dismantle it fuels the
coraje felt by many on the streets and around kitchen tables throughout
Puerto Rico.
While coraje is a racialized affect, it is also a deeply gendered one because
the debt crisis weighs most heavily on women, particularly those with mul-
tiple intersecting marginalized identities. Debt intersects with, facilitates,
and strengthens heteropatriarchal violence and creates additional forms of
precarity in the lives of women. As the Argentinian feminist activists and
scholars Verónica Gago and Luci Cavallero make clear, “Debt is what doesn’t
let us say no when we want to say no. Debt binds our future us to violent re-
lationships that we want to flee. The debt forces us to maintain bonds that are
broken but that continue to be tied to financial obligation in the medium or
long term. Debt is what blocks economic autonomy, even in strongly femi-
nized sectors of the economy, led by women” (2019, 15–16). The uneven
way in which debt aterizza, or lands on women (Gago and Cavallero 2019),
has led to an explosion of feminist-led resistance against debt throughout
the Americas, including in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rican activists, especially fem-
inists, have embraced a politics of coraje in order to assert a personhood that
is not defined or bound by debt. Coraje is a full-throated rejection of attempts
to expand structures of colonial and capitalist capture in Puerto Rico.

The girl who breathed fire

On May 1, 2017, tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans took to the streets of
San Juan for May Day demonstrations called by labor unions, student activ-
ists, religious groups, and human rights organizations. While May Day dem-
onstrations in Puerto Rico are often able to gather hundreds if not thousands
of people together in opposition to the latest assault on the working classes,
May Day 2017 was a little different (Meléndez-Badillo 2019). This was the
first May Day following the federal imposition of a Fiscal Control Board. In
response to the archipelago’s deepening debt crisis, US President Barack
Obama signed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic
Stability Act or PROMESA bill into law in June 2016. PROMESA, which
 S I G N S Summer 2021 y 807

means promise in Spanish, promised little more than a deepening of the co-
lonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States under the
guise of economic recovery.
The PROMESA bill created a federally appointed Fiscal Control Board
to oversee the archipelago’s finances. The Fiscal Control Board, or la junta
as locals call it, has the power to override the commonwealth government
and implement austerity measures in order to service the debt. By the time
workers and leftists in Puerto Rico were preparing for May Day, la junta
had announced a number of austerity measures attacking the public good,
including massive cuts to the University of Puerto Rico system. As a result,
May Day 2017 was one of the largest protests in the archipelago’s history,
with nearly a hundred thousand protesters. Protesters demanded a citizen’s
audit of the debt, an overall restructuring of the debt, the protection of pub-
lic intuitions from privatization, and an end to austerity measures that dis-
proportionately impact the archipelago’s poor and working classes—de-
mands that remain to this day.
Although starting from various locations in San Juan, the marchers all
converged at the Milla de Oro, or Golden Mile, in Hato Rey, the archipel-
ago’s financial district. The Milla de Oro is not only the heart of the banking
industry but is also (unironically) where the offices of la junta are located.
The Milla de Oro seems to be a site where much of the coraje being felt by
the people that day was produced. There, along the wide boulevards of the
Milla de Oro, sat buildings belonging to the local and international banks
and funds profiting off of Puerto Rico’s debt—banks like Banco Popular,
whose CEO is the cousin of Jose Carrión III, the then chairman of the Fiscal
Control Board. That kind of overt elite control—the kind when the fate of an
entire people is in the hands of a few powerful families—te da coraje (fills you
with rage). People poured into the streets on May Day to express their anger
and utter frustration with the way that the archipelago’s banking elites were
assisting in the pillaging of the public good and ensuring profits for US and
international financial interests at the expense of Puerto Rican society’s most
vulnerable. People marched to protest the closure of hundreds of public
schools, the shuttering of hospitals, cuts to employee benefits and protec-
tions, and the cloak and dagger nature of la junta’s decision-making processes
regarding how to repay and restructure the debt.
Once in la Milla de Oro, the march took a turn as protesters encountered
walls of police in riot gear. The police initiated a series of violent confron-
tations when masked protesters started to break the windows of financial in-
stitutions and spray-paint messages on their walls. Police attacked protes-
tors with batons, rubber bullets, and tear gas in order to protect the
insured private property of multinational banks directly implicated in Puerto
808 y LeBrón

Rico’s debt. Those protesters who tried to escape the clouds of chemical ir-
ritants and the impact of weapons on their bodies were chased, corralled, and
arrested. According to federal authorities, in the midst of this chaos, two in-
dividuals approached the broken windows of the Centro Popular, the head-
quarters of Banco Popular, and unsuccessfully tried to set fire to some paper
on the other side of the bashed-in windows (U.S. Attorney’s Office, District
of Puerto Rico 2017). Police arrested Nina Droz Franco for the attempted
arson as she was lying on a street blocking a line of riot police. Local police
reportedly identified Droz by her clothes and shock of bright pink hair. Al-
though twenty people were arrested that day, Droz was the only one charged
with federal crimes carrying heavy minimum sentences.
The day after the May Day protest, Droz was transferred to federal cus-
tody and charged with “damaging or attempting to damage by means of fire
a building engaged in activity affecting interstate commerce, in violation of
Title 18, United States Code, Section 844(i)” (U.S. Attorney’s Office, Dis-
trict of Puerto Rico 2017). The full weight of the local and federal security
apparatus came down on Droz, threatening to prosecute her to the fullest
extent of the law, which could mean a twenty-year prison sentence. The au-
thorities framed Droz’s arrest and subsequent federal prosecution as part of
the state’s efforts to protect the rights and freedoms of all Puerto Ricans.
As Wanda Vázquez-Garced, secretary of justice of Puerto Rico at the time,
said following Droz’s arrest, “The deplorable, reprehensible, and shameful
acts of vandalism committed yesterday shall be thoroughly investigated and
prosecuted to the full extent of the law. We warned that this administration
would guarantee the rights of freedom of expression of all citizens, however
those who violate the law shall not go unpunished” (U.S. Attorney’s Office,
District of Puerto Rico 2017). Similarly, Rosa Emilia Rodríguez-Vélez, US
attorney for the District of Puerto Rico, told the press, “We cannot, and will
not, tolerate these actions to go on in a civilized society” (U.S. Attorney’s
Office, District of Puerto Rico 2017), assuring both privileged Puerto Ricans
and an international capitalist class, in so many words, that Puerto Rico was
not and would not be allowed to become a bankrupt third-world country
prone to riots and all manner of political upheaval.
Federal prosecutors positioned Droz as a dangerous political figure whom
authorities were fortunate to intercept before she was able to do more serious
damage. Droz’s appearance and lifestyle were repeatedly used by prosecutors
to alienate her from a potentially sympathetic public fed up with la junta and
the vulture capitalists circling the archipelago. Six feet tall, covered in tattoos,
and striking, Droz was a fixture of the punk scene and worked steadily as
an alternative model under the name “Nina Riot” (Crabapple 2018). Droz
had a small role as a fire breather in the 2013 film Runner Runner, and
 S I G N S Summer 2021 y 809

authorities latched on to this, often referring to her as “the girl who breathes
fire” to cement her in the minds of the public as simultaneously seductive
and destructive. Artist Molly Crabapple, who wrote about the case for The Baf-
fler, noted that Droz’s story quickly became “the lurid saga of a bikini-model
arsonist who had tried to burn down a bank.” Droz was presented as a dan-
gerous terrorist, on the one hand, and, as attorney Ramon Acevedo put it,
a pro-independence “pervert and degenerate,” on the other (in Crabapple
2018). This conservative, misogynistic signposting succeeded in focusing pub-
lic attention on Droz—her appearance, her personality, and her lifestyle—and
away from the reason why she and tens of thousands of other Puerto Ricans
were in the streets on May Day armed with a burning coraje directed at the
institutions of colonial capitalism.
Throughout the trial, Droz was denied bail and held in federal custody.
While detained, Droz spoke against the medical abuse she suffered as fed-
eral authorities withheld medication needed to manage her chronic pain and
anxiety (ProLibertad Freedom Campaign n.d.). Droz also reported experi-
encing harassment, abuse, and arbitrary punishment at the hands of her
jailers, including extended solitary confinement and isolation (Crabapple
2018). In an interview with Radio Sin Censura, Áurea Franco, Droz’s mother,
shared that Droz had experienced repeated sexual aggression at the hands of her
jailers at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Guaynabo, including forced
nudity and being filmed while naked (Torres Torres 2019). Droz’s experiences
of gendered violence in detention illuminate the consequences that women po-
tentially face as a result of their activism against the colonial state and capital.
Against this backdrop of repression, Droz entered into a plea agreement
with prosecutors in order to avoid the lengthy federal prison sentence that
seemed all but assured. On June 12, 2018, Droz was sentenced to thirty-
seven months in prison and three years of probation. Droz would be trans-
ferred to a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, to serve out her sentence.
Her exile to a federal facility on the US mainland was part of an effort to dis-
tance and isolate Droz from her base of support in order to keep her coraje
contained.
Droz became a high-profile example of what happens when people ex-
press their coraje against the current regime of colonial debt governance and
call for change. On February 8, 2018, the Comité de Amigos y Familiares de
Nina Droz Franco (Committee of Friends and Family of Nina Droz Franco)
issued a press release that read: “The unequivocal goal of this prosecution
has been of a political and repressive character to teach a lesson to people
who seek to exercise their constitutional rights to freedom of expression and
others in the face of a panorama of increased austerity” (Rivera 2018). On
the whole, Droz’s prosecution functioned to shift the attention away from
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the role of colonial officials in the immiseration of the local population. Droz
was a convenient scapegoat because her physical appearance activated a range
of misogynist and anti-Left sentiments. As critical geographer Javier Arbona
argues, the framing of Nina Droz as a “psychologically-damaged female ob-
ject” who behaved in irrational and excessive ways was “deployed to tarnish
the causes of the opposition to the junta” (2018). These popular renderings
of Droz sought to hide just how widespread the feelings of coraje that she
carried with her that day were for many Puerto Ricans. Coupled with the dis-
reputable image of Droz circulated by media and political elites, her aggres-
sive prosecution functioned to warn people that their displays of coraje would
cause the full weight of the law to come crashing down on them.
Throughout her incarceration, local activists and supporters have joined
to support Droz and denounce not only the severity of her prosecution but
also the conditions of isolation imposed on her. On signs at rallies and in
petitions, supporters announced that Nina Droz Franco was not alone and
that the people were with her in their coraje at an unjust system. El Comité
de Amigos y Familiares de Nina Droz sent out regular updates about Droz,
and supporters were encouraged to write to her while she completed her
sentence, actions that were meant to combat attempts to isolate her. Two
years after her arrest, at the 2019 May Day protest, I saw a contingent of
supporters marching against the debt and calling for her freedom. For these
protesters, their support of Droz was about denouncing the repression of
antidebt activism that made them all potential targets.
Nina Droz returned to Puerto Rico on November 26, 2019, to compete
the remaining three-year probationary portion of her sentence. Droz was
returning to a Puerto Rico that had been transformed by the 2019 summer
protests, which had exposed widespread government corruption and suc-
ceeded in removing Governor Ricardo Rosselló from power. Indeed, the
cancellation of the debt and removal of la junta, along with the resignation
of Governor Rosselló and other members of his cabinet, were central de-
mands of the summer protests. Prior to her arrival, El Comité de Amigos y
Familiares de Nina Droz issued a statement that tried to situate Droz within
the struggles that continued while she was incarcerated. Droz’s incarcera-
tion, however, had disconnected her from the work that people were doing
on the ground and caused her to view these efforts with skepticism. Upon
landing in Puerto Rico, Droz immediately distanced herself from the summer
protests, criticizing them as little more than a “summer virus” that wouldn’t
actually change things (Noticel 2019). Despite her disavowal of the summer
2019 protests as a powerful rebuke of colonial capitalist violence, Droz’s ex-
perience still helps us to understand the long-simmering and widespread
coraje that explodes with periodic starts and stops to demand a different future
 S I G N S Summer 2021 y 811

for Puerto Ricans. Coraje in its duality serves as a means of survival for
colonized subjects. Whether it is the spark animating protests in the streets
or a source of steadfastness and resistance behind bars, coraje is a refusal
of the grinding punishment of colonial violence in all of its forms. As Droz
told journalists who met her at the airport, “The thing that most kept me
alive was the coraje that I have inside me to be better and to make ourselves
better. That coraje to see things in a way that people don’t even see them.
Because you don’t believe in yourself, because you have a fear of I don’t
even know what. . . . We are destroying ourselves because we are cowards”
(Noticel 2019). While Droz was using coraje in the sense of courage, I like
to think that there is a coraje, a powerful rage inside, that drives a desire to
see—and confront those things—that are destroying us.

Historia de un atropello
The group Jornada: Se Acabaron Las Promesas called for members of the
public to join them at the Milla de Oro on February 20, 2018, for a protest
to set fire to their coraje. The protest, Enciende tu Coraje, aimed to make
manifest the anger and frustration that people felt at the proposed privati-
zation and austerity measures being called for by the Fiscal Control Board
in order to service Puerto Rico’s debt. La Jornada, which came together fol-
lowing the imposition of PROMESA in order to call for its repeal and the
removal of la junta, planned to go to the symbolic heart of the crisis—the
Milla de Oro. They planned to set fire to effigies of Control Board Chairman
Jose Carrión III, US President Donald Trump, and Puerto Rican Governor
Ricardo Rosselló in front of the headquarters of the Fiscal Control Board.
The action pinpointed the source of the coraje felt by a multitude of Puerto
Ricans, directly indicting the colonial relationship and its agents in the United
States and Puerto Rico. The action made real and visible the feelings of coraje
that so many carried inside of them as a result of these colonial functionaries
and institutions, and suggested that if Puerto Ricans harness that coraje—
igniting those feelings and directing them outward—these relations of power
and subjugation could be destroyed.
In the late afternoon, La Jornada and their supporters began to gather in
the Milla de Oro. As Scott Barbes, a spokesperson for La Jornada, told re-
porters, they were in the streets that day to protest the antidemocratic pol-
icies of la junta as well as the local and federal governments (Noticel 2018).
According to Barbes, La Jornanda wanted to make clear who was responsible
for the attacks on the Puerto Rican public—to put faces and names to state
violence. For protesters that day, all of these actors were implicated in the im-
miseration of Puerto Ricans through their support for austerity measures that
were slowly eroding the public good. This action was particularly necessary,
812 y LeBrón

coming as it did after Hurricane María, when people experienced in the

flesh how the local and federal government fostered death in order to ex-
tract profits. Puerto Ricans were still reeling from the devastation of Hurri-
cane María yet felt the grip of austerity tightening daily. Barbes explained,
This is a call for us to ignite the coraje that we Puerto Ricans feel. There
is a lot of coraje. . . . The government is walking around blaming María
for everything when the things we’re living through are not due to
María. These are political and economic decisions that the government
is making. . . . Those who have been governing and those who want
to block us in order to separate us from the rest of the world are to
blame for what happened after María because they want to keep us
from being a part of this whole world. Those are the criminals. Those
are the ones who have attacked us. We’re just trying to create net-
works of solidarity around the island, centers for mutual aid, construct-
ing homes . . . and we do that with nothing. . . . This experience after
María has shown us that, yes, we can govern ourselves. We need to
govern ourselves rather than be governed. That’s the call we’re mak-
ing to mobilize the people. That coraje needs to be shown. (Noticel
2018)

The action that day sought to remind Puerto Ricans that the disaster they
were still experiencing was man-made. La Jornada pointed to a longer his-
tory of austerity and debt exploitation in order to argue that it is not hurri-
canes alone that cause entire power grids to collapse and thousands to die.
For Barbes and La Jornada, political and economic elites used Hurricane
María as cover for the damage that they were, in fact, responsible for in-
flicting on Puerto Ricans.
With this longer history of organized abandonment and state violence in
mind, the burning of effigies that day was not only an expression of outrage,
frustration, and anger—coraje—but also a symbolic gesture calling for self-
determination and self-governance of the people by the people. What María
taught Puerto Ricans, according to Barbes and others from La Jornada, was
that the government is not there to serve the needs of the people. Instead,
it’s only the people who will save the people. Through this public display cen-
tered around people’s growing coraje, La Jornada hoped to ignite a praxis
of radical solidarity. The potential to spark anticapitalist and anticolonial con-
sciousness and organizing is exactly what made the Enciende Tu Coraje dem-
onstration a target of police repression and violence.
The Puerto Rico Police were in full force, appearing to outnumber the
group of protestors that day, approximately two to one, for most of the
demonstration. Outfitted in full riot gear, the police formed a protective
 S I G N S Summer 2021 y 813

shield between the protesters and the headquarters of the Fiscal Control
Board. About an hour into the demonstration, people associated with La
Jornada and other activist groups made a series of remarks speaking out
against the closure of public schools, the introduction of charter schools,
and the attempt to privatize the electric authority, among other austerity
measures. Many of the speakers also criticized the role of the police in re-
pressing the population at the behest of colonial elites. An LGBTQ activist
identified as José addressed the police directly and called out their complic-
ity with colonial systems of violence and subjugation.2 José started off his
remarks by welcoming all in attendance as well as the police and infiltrators
surveilling the event. He noted that, because of the disproportionate impact
of the debt crisis, individuals who are marginalized as a result of gender
and/or sexuality and the ways that poverty and economic instability inter-
sect to compound that marginalization experience intense political repres-
sion at the hands of the authorities. According to José, the massive police
mobilization that day was indicative of “the political persecution of human
beings who live in the colony. The political persecution of human beings
who are poor, homosexuals, women, lesbians, bisexuals. And we deserve the
right to decide what we want and how we want to live in our country.” José’s
remarks sought to illuminate how the debt crisis resulting from the failures
of colonial capitalism was intertwined with and, ultimately, strengthened sys-
tems of heteronormativity, homophobia, sexism, and machismo. Any fight
against the current colonial austerity regime also had to have an attentiveness
to gender and sexuality at its heart.
Jocelyn Velázquez of La Jornada made a similar call for an intersectional
approach to combating the deadly effects of colonial capitalism on Puerto Ricans’
lives. She noted that the government was engaged in a “campaign of terror”
that deployed austerity against teachers, public sector employees, and retir-
ees. Threats made by la junta and the local government to cut pensions, lay
off longtime workers, and implement large-scale privatization were part of
an effort to fracture and subdue the population in order to facilitate greater
wealth extraction from the archipelago and its people. This multipronged
attack on Puerto Rican workers and vulnerable populations required a multi-
sectorial response. According to Velázquez, “We have to stop thinking of
these as separate struggles. There is only one struggle: the struggle for the
Puerto Rican people to survive. The struggle for all of us to live in a dignified

2
Unless noted otherwise, descriptions of the Enciende Tu Coraje protest are reconstructed
from a Facebook Live video shot that day by La Jornada. The video can be accessed at https://
www.facebook.com/284251645265374/videos/552882811735588.
814 y LeBrón

place and to have a healthy and beautiful life with our families. This is the
time to unite our forces.”
The display of coraje that La Jornada organized was crucial because it
recognized the intransigence of the colonial capitalist state. In the face of
the people’s resistance—their refusal to accept more abuse—the state de-
ployed the police as a form of crisis management. Velázquez shared her an-
ger and frustration with the crowd, telling them, “These people don’t want
to sit down with us. They don’t believe in dialogue. They want to squash
dissidence. And that’s what we see here today [pointing to police]. We
don’t have a government that wants to talk to the employees of the electric
authority, or the teachers, or the workers, or the retirees. We have a govern-
ment that when you take to the streets to tell them what’s going on, about
the reality that we have to swallow every day, they unleash the police to re-
press us.” Here, Velázquez highlights the intimacy between police violence
and colonial capitalism. That Puerto Ricans could expect police violence if
they spoke out about austerity and that police violence was the extent of
the response that Puerto Ricans could expect from the state during a moment
of intense crisis, was a major source of the coraje that brought people to the
streets of Hato Rey that day. The collective performance of igniting their
coraje signaled the limits of what Puerto Ricans were willing to swallow just
to make things easier for people who were making life-and-death decisions
from the comfort of their air-conditioned, high-rise offices.
Eventually, protestors set fire to the effigies, which caused the police to
move in and form a perimeter around the protesters and members of the
press. Firefighters extinguished the fires while Scott Barbes made a speech
directed at the police, imploring them to join them in protest since they
too were experiencing the effects of austerity both at home and on the
job. Barbes continued to address the crowd imploring them to join and sup-
port the #8M women’s strike on March 8. For La Jornada, it was necessary
to recognize the centrality of women’s labor and struggle against debt co-
lonialism. It was women, for instance, especially single mothers and Black
mothers, who were rescuing schools shuttered as a result of austerity for
use by the community. It was also women who were on the front lines of
the fight to protect public sector employment due to their overrepresenta-
tion in certain public sector jobs such as K–12 public education. Barbes also
brought up the incarceration of Nina Droz, encouraging the crowd to draw
inspiration from her example. “During her sentence she has been tortured
and she continues to resist with dignity just the same as you all from the
depth of the federal prison. She’s there being abused. She remains combat-
ive [combativa]. . . . We must protest with the same force, and energy, and
 S I G N S Summer 2021 y 815

combativeness, as our comrade does from the hellish conditions of the

federal prison,” Barbes told the crowd. In various moments throughout
the protest, speakers reminded the crowd that women were, in many ways,
leading the fight against debt colonialism in Puerto Rico. Women not only
bore the brunt of austerity’s impact on Puerto Ricans but also were increas-
ingly targeted by the state for speaking out and expressing their rage at the
system as Droz had.
After Barbes’s comments, the crowd started to disperse as the demon-
stration came to a close. As the crowd was walking away from the offices
of the Fiscal Control Board and toward Roosevelt Avenue, they noticed
that a van that they had used for the protest was on the back of a police
flatbed about to be towed away. According to police, the vehicle was sup-
posedly being impounded because of fake registration tags (Cyber News
2018). According to Nelson Escudero, an activist with La Jornada who wit-
nessed the events, “We followed the officer to ask what was going on and he
didn’t respond. The driver got into the truck and when people were walking
in front, he floored it. At that moment, Alejandro Medina ended up under
the police flatbed” (in Legarreta 2018).
Police accused the poet Alejandro Medina of throwing himself at the
police truck while it was already in motion, but witnesses deny this. Although
the exact sequence of events remains unclear, what is clear is that when peo-
ple rushed to help Medina as he lay bloodied on the ground, the police closed
in on protesters and started to shove and hit them with their batons, effec-
tively making it difficult for Medina to receive first aid. Police arrested four
individuals after Medina was hit with the police flatbed, and Scott Barbes was
arrested while attempting to aid his comrade. Medina was also reportedly
hit by police batons once he was already hurt on the ground awaiting med-
ical care (Cyber News 2018). Police handcuffed an injured Medina before
he was finally taken to the Centro Médico in Río Piedras (Inter News Ser-
vices 2018).
Puerto Ricans will often refer to their experiences of injustice and in-
equality as an atropello. Puerto Ricans discuss things like the imposition of
PROMESA, the undemocratic whims of the Fiscal Control Board, round
after round of austerity cuts, the kleptocracy of local elites, and police re-
pression as akin to being run over or steamrolled—atropellado. The police
actions at the end of La Jornada’s Enciende Tu Coraje demonstration made
literal the atropello contra el pueblo that fueled so much of the coraje being
expressed that day. The policing of La Jornada’s action that day demon-
strates the extent to which the police function to maintain a colonial cap-
italist order and eliminate social dissent through violence (LeBrón 2019a).
816 y LeBrón

“I hope you die, bitch”

Puerto Rico’s colonial status means that it cannot access traditional Chap-
ter 9 bankruptcy protections available to many US jurisdictions in order to deal
with its massive debt. Instead, Congress has authorized Puerto Rico to re-
structure its debt through a process known as Title III. The Puerto Rican
government and its public corporations owe $123 billion to both bond-
holders and public employee pension systems, making the Title III proceed-
ings in Puerto Rico the largest debt restructuring case in US history (González
2017). As journalist Juan González (2017) notes, Title III grants an immense
amount of power and discretion to a federally appointed preceding judge,
further removing power from the hands of Puerto Ricans. Judge Laura Tay-
lor Swain from the Southern District of New York was appointed to over-
see the debt restructuring proceedings. Swain, an African American woman,
had been appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton and was perhaps
best known as the judge who presided over the Bernie Madoff trial. The fact
that Judge Swain was a woman of color and seemed to have a liberal record
on the bench caused some to hold out hope that she might be sympathetic
to the plight of Puerto Ricans and find the debt unconstitutional, allowing for
parts of it to be discharged. However, when Judge Swain allowed for the re-
structuring plan to go forward despite the unconstitutional appointment of
the Fiscal Control Board that filed those cases, it was clear that she too would
just be facilitating the sacking of Puerto Rico’s public coffers in order to pay
out profits to Wall Street.
The first and potentially most devastating debt repayment measure that
Swain would be ruling on was the COFINA agreement drawn up by la junta.
Obligations to Sales Tax Financing Corp. (Corporación del Fondo de Interés
Apremiante, or COFINA) bondholders represent about 24 percent of Puerto
Rico’s public debt (Comisión Ciudadana 2019). The COFINA debt, which
carries a $17 billion principle, has never been audited despite serious challenges
to its constitutionality (Comisión Ciudadana 2019). The COFINA credi-
tors are made of two classes: “junior” bondholders, most of whom are local
bondholders and pensioners, and “senior” bondholders, most of which are
vulture hedge funds. The coalition that claims to represent COFINA bond-
holders in the Puerto Rico government’s Title III case is mostly made up of
these “senior” bondholders. According to the Center for Investigative Jour-
nalism, “the known members of the group are mostly vulture funds: invest-
ment firms registered as hedge funds and that are dedicated to buying debt
at a discount and then demand 100% payment” (Cintrón Arbasetti and Minet
2017). The COFINA agreement before Judge Swain would create a financial
bonanza for these vulture capitalists on the backs of Puerto Ricans already
experiencing the effects of austerity and infrastructural collapse.
 S I G N S Summer 2021 y 817

The COFINA agreement would pay back bondholders by raising the

IVU (Impuesto sobre Ventas y Uso), a local sales tax, for the next forty
years. The COFINA agreement carries disastrous consequences for Puerto
Ricans, especially the most vulnerable, by diverting funding from health
care, education, and disaster recovery, for instance, and levying an 11.5 per-
cent sales tax, which is higher than any of the fifty states (Dennis and Con-
ner 2019). The vulture capitalists reaping the highest yield from the agree-
ment had invested the least, in many cases investing in Puerto Rican debt on
the cheap for pennies on the dollar. The agreement was also concerning be-
cause it created a back door for the government to once again accumulate
debt beyond constitutional limits, which is what caused the crisis in the first
place (Comisión Ciudadana 2019). Puerto Rican activists created outreach
campaigns, including petitions and phone and letter campaigns, to convince
Swain to reject the COFINA agreement because the bondholders’ claims
were in direct conflict with the funding for essential public services.
On February 4, 2019, Swain approved the COFINA agreement, calling
it “a significant step on the path towards Puerto Rico’s financial recovery,
economic stability, and prosperity” (Reuters 2019). Swain’s approval ignited
the coraje of many Puerto Ricans, including that of Elimar Chardón Sierra.
Chardón, a local music teacher and artist, called Swain to express her disap-
proval of the judge’s COFINA ruling and to give her a piece of her mind.
According to Chardón, “I called the trashy judge Swain because she passed
the law. I had participated in an artistic campaign about the consequences of
COFINA. After she approved the law, I called her enraged. And I told her
that I hoped she found herself homeless, without health insurance, and that
she died. And I said, I hope you die, bitch. I also said that I knew that they
would investigate me because of what I said, because I know that freedom
of expression does not exist for the colonies” (De León Soto 2019).
Chardón was right. A week after she called Swain, on February 22, 2019,
three FBI investigators showed up at the school where Chardón worked
to interview her about her comments. They arrested her and charged her
with making harassing telephone calls in interstate communication, which
carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison.
Chardón’s arrest for making threats against Swain was curious in that she
never intimated that she would kill the judge, but in her anger she did ex-
press a desire for Swain to experience the death and destitution that the
COFINA restructuring had in store for Puerto Ricans. Her call expressed
a wish for Judge Swain to get a taste of her own medicine, but Chardón
never said she was the one who would administer it. As in the case of Nina
Droz, federal authorities attempted to embed Chardón within a larger ter-
rorist network. According to Chardón, “And what most piqued my interest
818 y LeBrón

was that they insisted that I tell them if I knew macheteros or other insur-
gents. That makes me think that they are still afraid of Puerto Ricans claim-
ing their rights. And much less the human right to independence. They
asked me if I knew of someone planning an attack. And I answered I do
not know. It’s true. I cannot lie. They asked me about organizations that
I thought were dead” (De León Soto 2019). It was not Chardón calling
Swain a bitch and telling her that she wished for bad things to befall her that
concerned the authorities; it was fear that the coraje that pushed Chardón to
call Swain and curse her out might turn into the kinds of radical praxis men-
tioned by La Jornada and embodied in the long history of anticolonial
armed insurgency in Puerto Rico.
Of course, Chardón’s rage is not uncomplicated when we consider that
her rage was directed at a Black woman. The colonial capitalist process gov-
erning Puerto Rico’s debt restructuring created a situation that positioned
two women, both occupying tenuous positions within a racialized hierar-
chy, directly at odds with each other. It is crucial, therefore, to keep in
mind that Swain not only represented a system of colonial capitalism in
Puerto Rico but also that she acted as an agent on behalf of structures, in-
stitutions, and individuals enacting harm in the everyday lives of many
Puerto Ricans. This is what Chardón’s rage targeted. Due to Swain’s federal
appointment, an appointment that was unilateral with no local input, Swain
was empowered to decide matters of life and death from a court miles and
miles from the populations directly impacted. As Chardon noted following
her encounter with the FBI officials, “They told me that they were trying to
save lives. I asked what lives. Because it’s obviously not lives here. Here
we’re fucked” (De León Soto 2019). The structural inequality set up by
the system, which aimed to disempower Puerto Ricans from having a say
over major decisions governing their lives, could only induce feelings of
rage. I read Chardón’s message for Swain as directed less at Swain as an in-
dividual and more at Swain as a functionary of a larger system of inequality
governing life in the archipelago.
Civil rights organizations and antiausterity groups rallied in support of
Chardón and denounced her prosecution as politically motivated state re-
pression. On March 6, 2019, representatives from a number of civil rights
and legal advocacy groups held a press conference to alert the public to
the implications of Chardón’s case. Annette Martínez Orabona, executive
director of the Instituto Caribeño de Derechos Humanos (Caribbean Insti-
tute for Human Rights), said, “If freedom of expression does not protect
the right to be outraged, then it is useless. The absolute defenselessness in
which Puerto Ricans find themselves is aggravated when the judicial sys-
tem, instead of protecting the population, persecutes it. Elimar’s case reflects
 S I G N S Summer 2021 y 819

precisely how broken the system is that the state does not provide the mini-
mum protections it owes to the most vulnerable people” (Metro Puerto Rico
2019). For civil rights advocates, Chardón’s case represented a dangerous
rollback of the basic right to protest and dissent, rights that are always sus-
pended or under attack in colonial contexts.
Other advocates drew attention to the sense of obstructed agency asso-
ciated with colonial rule that was behind Chardón’s remarks. In a statement
titled “We Have a Right to Coraje,” Mari Mari Narváez, executive director
of Kilómetro 0, a civilian group fighting for law enforcement transparency
and accountability, writes, “Is it harassment to call a public official who has
not been elected or appointed by the people of Puerto Rico and who makes
decisions about the future of that people? What happens when, in a time of
extreme crisis, citizens have no role in decision making processes? Social
peace is broken” (2019). Mari Narváez declared that “Elimar Chardón’s
case is the case of all of Puerto Rico,” as many in the archipelago find them-
selves under the thumb of colonial strictures. For Mari Narváez, Chardón
was expressing the only power that Puerto Ricans have in the midst of the
current moment of extreme undemocratic decision making, which is “the power
of protest and complaint.” The state, Mari Narváez argues, has a responsibil-
ity to protect the right of protest and complaint, particularly because “it is
one of the few that the people of Puerto Rico have left to exercise collectively,
after having been usurped of their right to political participation, housing,
education, and self-determination, among others” (2019). Here, we see a close
relationship between coraje and a sense of frustrated or constrained agency
that is endemic to relations of domination. In this sense, coraje is not only a
release but a form of necessary protest within a terrain shaped by colonial
capitalism. Additionally, and this is what makes coraje such an intense object
of law enforcement concern, it lays the groundwork for solidarity and mo-
bilization as more and more individuals are subjected to the effects of ob-
structed agency. It is in the collective where the potential to mobilize coraje
into a potent and efficacious political emotion is found.
On August 30, 2019, Chardón rejected a plea deal where she would have
had to plead guilty in exchange for no jail time and a year of supervision.
Mariana Nogales Mollineli, a prominent movement lawyer who was co-
counsel for Chardón, told the press following her client’s rejection of the
deal, “The content (of the call was) discourse against the COFINA agree-
ment, the dire consequences that this agreement would have on the lives of
Puerto Ricans, and, in particular, on her since she is a teacher” (Quintero
2019a). Indeed, Chardón’s rage, as she noted, stemmed in large part from
her experience as a teacher seeing firsthand the effects of the debt crisis on her
students and colleagues. Working in a sector uniquely impacted by austerity
820 y LeBrón

as a teacher, but especially as a music teacher, is what created the sense of

urgency and explosiveness behind Chardón’s attempts, along with others,
to stop the passage of the COFINA agreement. When those efforts failed,
Chardón refused to play the role of the proper colonial subject who silently
accepts deadly violence and exploitation in the name of “progress.” Instead,
she shared her fantasies of revenge with the most direct source of her coraje.
Nogales Mollineli and her cocounsel, Manuel Moraza Ortiz, maintained that
Chardón’s speech, disagreeable as some might find it, is protected by the con-
stitution and that her prosecution was politically motivated.
In October 2019, the federal prosecutor offered to drop the charges
against Chardón as part of a diversion program, which would allow her to
complete one hundred hours of community service without having to plead
guilty (Quintero 2019b). Although Chardón was not found guilty, the De-
partment of Education still considered sanctioning the teacher on moral
grounds, a step that colleagues felt set a dangerous precedent. On Octo-
ber 15, 2019, teachers gathered in front of the Department of Education
to support Chardón and call out the agency’s hypocrisy (Figueroa Cancel
2019). After all, how could an agency that doled out contracts based on po-
litical connections at the expense of the archipelago’s children be expected to
assess morality? As teachers, who knew full well the coraje that came from
having their livelihoods threatened by austerity, Chardón’s supporters posi-
tioned her speech as vital for addressing the conditions of abandonment and
precarity affecting Puerto Ricans’ everyday lives. On December 16, 2020, the
charges against Chardón were dismissed “with prejudice” after she comp-
leted the agreed upon diversion program (Figueroa Cancel 2020). Chardón
did not have to allocate or apologize to the court for her phone call to Judge
Swain, and her record is completely clean. The disastrous effects of the
COFINA agreement, however, is sure to leave a mark on Chardón and other
Puerto Ricans.

Conclusion: ¡Renuncia!
In the summer of 2019, the air in the streets around La Fortaleza, the gov-
ernor’s mansion in Old San Juan, hung heavy with rage and frustration. For
almost two weeks, tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans had gathered to de-
mand that Ricardo Rosselló vacate the governorship and take his corrupt
administration with him. On July 13, 2019, the Center for Investigative Jour-
nalism leaked to the public 889 pages of a chat between the governor and
high-ranking members of his administration that had been hosted on the en-
crypted messaging service Telegram. The messages, dubbed #TelegramGate
and #RickyLeaks, showed the governor and others in the chat using derogatory,
 S I G N S Summer 2021 y 821

especially misogynistic, language and mocking political rivals. Fed up, people
took to the streets en masse to make it clear that they would not tolerate fur-
ther disrespect.
Feminist and queer activists in particular took a leading role in the pro-
tests demanding Rosselló’s resignation. This is due in part to the fact that the
Telegram chats mocked queer people and feminist activists, with La Colectiva
Feminista en Construcción (The feminist collective in construction), or La
Cole, appearing as a specific object of ridicule. La Cole, “an intersectional po-
litical organization, with an explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-racist, pro-queer and
trans agenda from its inception” rooted in Black feminist traditions, had been
working to address the ways in which women and femmes are affected by
state and interpersonal violence in Puerto Rico (Santiago-Ortiz 2019). Two
of their biggest campaigns have been around calling for an audit of the debt
and for an end to austerity, as well as working to end femicides in Puerto Rico.
In one of their best known actions, La Cole camped outside of La Fotaleza in
November 2018 as part of a plantón feminista (feminist sit-in) in order de-
mand the declaration of a state of emergency in response to misogynist vio-
lence. The governor and his administration repeatedly refused to engage with
the feminist protesters and used police to violently dislodge them (Primera
Hora 2018). As Vilma González, who joined La Cole’s plantón said, “He
did not come out to ask why we’re so concerned, why we are so angry” (Guz-
man 2019). While La Cole and other feminist groups were protesting outside
of the governor’s mansion, demanding that the state stop doing nothing while
women were killed in Puerto Rico because of sexist violence, the governor and
his closest advisors were cracking jokes and dismissing them as a few gatas
(cats), a sexist phrase that at once marks them as harmless kittens with no im-
pact and sexualized objects for men to comment upon and assess.
Women and queer folks were fuming after the chat was released and
made evident the Rosselló administration’s disdain and bullying mentality
toward marginalized and vulnerable people. Feminist and queer activists
called on others to join them in the streets and express their dissatisfaction
with the incompetent and cruel men literally killing them with their indiffer-
ence. The situation was intolerable, and the protests became a matter of life
and death aimed not only at getting Rosselló and his cronies out of office
but at sending a clear message that things could not continue as they had
(LeBrón 2019b).
La Cole, in collaboration with a number of other activist and civil society
groups, called for a massive general strike, or paro nacional, on July 22, 2019,
to demand Rosselló’s resignation. The #RickyRenuncia paro was the largest
protest in Puerto Rico’s history, with over half a million participants (De Jesús
Salamán 2019). While coming together to demand that the governor step
822 y LeBrón

down, protesters demanded so much more. They demanded accountability

and transparency. They demanded the elimination of the Fiscal Control Board
and a citizens’ audit of the debt. They demanded an end to austerity, an end to
the extraction of profits and resources, and an end to colonial violence. Fem-
inist rage rooted in an intersectional, antiracist, and decolonial politics was the
spark to ignite a people’s revolution demanding a fundamental transformation
in Puerto Rican society.
A little before midnight on July 24, 2019, governor Ricardo Rosselló re-
signed his post, the first Puerto Rican governor to do so. When, through
unconstitutional chicanery, Rosselló tried to appoint Pedro Pierluisi, the
former resident commissioner who now worked for the law firm that repre-
sented both la junta and AES, a company dumping toxic coal ash in poor
and Black communities in Puerto Rico, the people took to the streets again
and said: not one step back. Wanda Vázquez-Garced, the former secretary
of the Puerto Rico Department of Justice, was appointed to the governorship,
and protests continued against la junta, against austerity, and against new
and compounding crises arising from a series of earthquakes that struck the
archipelago’s southern coast and from the global COVID-19 pandemic. Puerto
Ricans continue to face mounting frustrations as colonial capitalism seeks to
destroy horizons of futurity for the archipelago and its people.
The summer 2019 protests built from the momentum of individuals and
groups that have sought to abolish the system of debt colonialism govern-
ing the everyday lives of Puerto Ricans. The work of Puerto Rican feminists,
particularly Black feminists, has been essential to creating an understanding
of the ways in which debt functions to reinforce social hierarchies and worsen
conditions of vulnerability in the archipelago. Feminists have also been at the
forefront of theorizing and conjuring into being antidebt futures (Molinari
2020) beyond the limitations of the colonial present in Puerto Rico. For these
feminists, coraje has been key to the decolonial praxis that this historical con-
juncture requires.
The examples I discuss throughout this essay demonstrate the ways that
activists and ordinary citizens mobilize coraje in order to navigate the ob-
structed agency created by the constraints of colonial capitalism in contem-
porary Puerto Rico. Coraje has emerged as a key target of state repression be-
cause it has the potential to create networks of solidarity grounded in a refusal
of the current order—a shared understanding that this current situation
should not and cannot continue. Police and local elites target expressions
of coraje in the hopes of appealing to colonial respectability politics and
norms around emotional decorum. One is not supposed to try to set fire
to the vestibule of the Centro Popular, one should not burn political effigies
in the streets, one should not call a sitting judge a bitch and tell her that you
 S I G N S Summer 2021 y 823

hope she dies, one should not shout and bang on pots refusing to leave the
streets until the governor resigns, and one should not march through the
streets with a guillotine demanding the governor’s head, as we’ve seen in pro-
tests against Governor Wanda Vázquez, but these are less indicators of polit-
ical irrationality and incivility and more an indicator of the limitations placed
on Puerto Ricans’ ability to challenge the colonial structures governing their
everyday lives and accelerating their deaths. Given the constraints placed on
Puerto Ricans, coraje can be understood as a weapon of the weak (Scott
1985) that unmasks colonial state violence and ignites strong networks of
transformative solidarity. In their collective coraje, Puerto Ricans who have
felt silenced by colonial capitalism, misogyny, queer antagonism, and racism
have found a way to push back and articulate a different way of living in
Puerto Rico. Coraje, then, is not just about destruction but rather about hope
and a commitment to the creation of new worlds out of the ashes of the old,
despite the repression and violence that seems all but guaranteed.

Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies

University of Texas at Austin

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