SoulsVol. 17, Nos. 1–2, January–June 2015, pp. 113–134

FREEDOM SUMMER

Policing Solidarity: State Violence,Blackness, and the University ofPuerto Rico StrikesMarisol LeBrón

This article examines the use of racialized and classed forms of policing during the 2010 and2011 strikes at the University of Puerto Rico. I demonstrate how university and policeofficials solicited the labor of low-income and Black youth to police the student movementin an attempt to frustrate the development of solidarity and shared aspirations betweenthese groups. Enlisted as police proxies, I argue that these racially and economicallymarginalized youth were asked to reproduce the violence and repression directed at themagainst other youth in the service of the state. I trace how student activists worked to buildalliances with these young people in the face of the divisive machinations of the state.

Keywords: Puerto Rico, University of Puerto Rico, activism, policing, violence, youth,solidarity, race, class

On February 9, 2011, in the midst of an ongoing student-led strike against state anduniversity officials’ efforts to shrink and privatize the University of Puerto Rico (URP)system, students at the university’s flagship campus in Río Piedras (URP-RP) orga-nized a “pintata,” or paint-in, as an artistic protest against administrators’ attemptsto silence them with police intervention. An event in which students planned to spendthe afternoon painting messages of resistance on the street in front of the universitylibrary unexpectedly ended as one of the most violent moments of the strike. With thepintata underway, students became outraged when they spotted a police officer video-taping the activity. A group of students approached the officer and asked why she wasrecording them and what the police planned to do with the recording. Almost

Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/usou.

ISSN 1099-9949 print/1548-3843 online # 2015 University of Illinois at ChicagoDOI: 10.1080/10999949.2015.998579

immediately, the situation grew tense as the students demanded answers and morepolice arrived on the scene. Eventually, one of the students attempted to take the cam-era from the policewoman and the situation turned violent. Metal-tipped batons,boots, and fists started to rain down upon the protesters, some of whom respondedby throwing paint at the police turning their dark blue riot gear white. As a numberof students ran to try and escape the violence, police officers tore through the campus’streets trying to catch them, swinging their batons wildly and hitting anyone in theirpath. Both blood and paint stained the pavement that afternoon. Video and photo-graphic footage shows police officers using excessive force, pepper spray and otherchemical irritants, unrelentingly beating students with batons, and applying illegalchokeholds and pressure techniques on students.1

Although the pintata flashed across television screens in Puerto Rican householdsas a shocking spectacle, the violence that police forces enacted that day was not theexceptional event that that many positioned it as in its immediate aftermath. Aneditorial in the Puerto Rico Daily Sun, the island’s English language newspaper,the following day compared the police attack on students to “the acts of the dictator-ships we all denounce and reject” and then went on to ask readers, “Is this to be thenew institutional order? Police every 100 feet? The right to free speech reduced to the100 square feet between the two police officers? Has the UPR become the testinggrounds for this new institutional order?”2 Rather than evidencing new contoursof policing and state repression, the pintata, and the other moments of state violencethat punctuated the student protests at the University of Puerto Rico, demonstratedthe extent to which policing on the island draws upon histories of race- and class-based violence in order to maintain neocolonial and capitalist “order.”3 This articleexamines the violence that that marred the strikes and protests that occurred acrossthe University of Puerto Rico system in 2010 and 2011, especially during the secondstrike, which occurred from December 7, 2010 to March 7, 2011. Using the secondstrike as a case study, and contextualizing its emergence on the island, I show howpolicing in Puerto Rico is indelibly shaped by anti-Black racism and also howpolicing both reifies and strategically deploys racialized exclusions.4

The violence directed at student protesters at the University of Puerto Rico put onfull display forms of police repression and violence that had been long tested,deployed, and confined within public housing and other low-income, racialized areasaround the island.5 In what follows, I demonstrate the ways in which the policerepression and violence that students and their supporters experienced duringthe second strike at University of Puerto Rico drew upon forms of containmentsolidified, in part, through the policing of racially and economically marginalizedpopulations living in the island’s public housing residences and low-income barrios.6

In particular, I describe how police and university administrators solicited the laborof low-income racialized youth in the policing of the student movement in anattempt to frustrate solidarity between these groups. State officials and universityadministrators attempted to use marginalization and disenfranchisement to theiradvantage by offering low-income youth from the predominantly Black municipalityof Loíza wages to participate, as police proxies, in the repression of the student

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movement. In essence, these young people were asked to reproduce, against the stu-dent strikers, the violence and repression they witnessed and experienced in theirown neighborhoods. As I will show, student activists responded to the violent anddivisive machinations of state and university officials by highlighting the parallelsbetween the policing of racially and economically marginalized populations andthe repression of the student movement. Historicizing the violent policing that stu-dents and their supporters experienced at the University of Puerto Rico, and notingthe ways in which these practices drew upon established raced, classed, and spatializedpractices of containment, and particularly anti-Black racism on the island, disrupts anynarrative that positions what happened at UPR as anomalous or an indicator of a “newinstitutional order.” By remaining attentive to the strikes’ place within a history of raceand class-based violence on the island, we see that the state responded to the studentmovement’s struggle for an accessible public university system as a solution to inequalityand insecurity with very familiar tactics of division and distraction.

Strike One

The battle for accessible and affordable public education that occurred at the Univer-sity of Puerto Rico in 2010 and 2011 emerged within a context of growing concernover the destruction of the public employment sector, the privatization of publicresources, protracted economic recession, and a seemingly hard right turn in theisland’s politics. On March 9, 2009, operating under the threat of having PuertoRico’s credit rating be demoted to junk status by Wall Street credit houses such asMoody’s and Standards & Poor’s, the island’s republican and pro-statehood gover-nor, Luis Fortuño, introduced Ley 7, or Public Law 7, a “special law declaring a stateof emergency and establishing a plan for fiscal stabilization to save the credit ofPuerto Rico.”7 Scholars Yarimar Bonilla and Rafael Boglio Martinez note that Ley7 enabled Fortuño to “‘restructure’ public employment in ways that would otherwisebe illegal: unilaterally suspending union contracts, overriding labor laws in order todismiss public-service workers, and denying those who remain employed the jobprotections guaranteed in their union contracts.”8 This was particularly devastating,as the public sector had emerged as the largest employer on the island following thecollapse of the island’s industrial economy during the 1970s. Students mobilizedagainst Ley 7 not only in solidarity with public sector laborers, but also becausethe law dramatically slashed university funding. The government used Ley 7 to alterthe formula used to allocate funds to the university, with UPR’s percentage of thestate budget going from 9.6% to approximately 8.1%. To make up for the shortfallin funding, university administrators announced that they would be increasingtuition, decreasing scholastic and athletic scholarships, and doing away with feeexemptions for university employees and their families.9 Students argued that theseefforts by university administrators would make it significantly harder for many low-income and working-class families to be able to afford an education at the Universityof Puerto Rico, harming its mission as a public institution. Further, they argued thatLey 7 and the budgetary cuts at the University of Puerto Rico were examples of how

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the island’s poor and working classes were being asked to shoulder the costs of theisland’s economic crisis.

Months of organizing following the implementation of Ley 7 culminated with stu-dents at the UPR-RP calling for a 48-hour strike on April 21, 2010 asking the admin-istration to stop tuition hikes, reinstate fee waivers, and guarantee that none of theUPR campuses would be privatized.10 The students told administrators that, if uni-versity officials failed to meet their demands, the students would go on indefinitestrike. The administration failed to take the students’ demands seriously and, as aresult, students at the UPR-RP announced an indefinite strike on April 23 to forcethe administration into negotiations. On April 29, the Association of Puerto RicanUniversity Professors staged a one-day walkout in support of the strike and agreedto respect the picket line. Likewise, the Brotherhood of Non-Teaching Employeesof the University of Puerto Rico also urged their members to respect the picket line.By May 4, ten out of eleven campuses had joined the indefinite strike.11

Police were immediately stationed to the perimeter of the UPR-RP campus follow-ing the announcement of an indefinite strike on April 23, 2010. Although the policecould not enter the campus due to the Política de no Confrontacion, or Non-Confrontation Policy, an informal agreement between university administratorsand the Puerto Rico Police Department that did not allow police to intervene in cam-pus affairs, the threat of police brutality and harassment remained real.12 Heavilyarmed riot police looked on as UPR-RP students created sustained encampmentsat each of the seven portones, or entrance gates, occupying the space and controllingaccess to the university campus, while university administrators called in additionalprivate security guards to monitor and control the protesters. Sensing the potentialvolatility of the situation, parents, alumni, professors, university employees, andother Puerto Rican civilians stationed themselves at the campus gates in order toshow solidarity and act as observers.

On May 13, 2010, during a campus assembly, students voted to continue thestrike. With the strike’s ratification, state officials and university administrators grewincreasingly concerned and police became more aggressive in their approach to thestrikers and their supporters. Although the police could not enter the university, theytried to prevent necessary provisions from reaching students. Tactical OperationsUnit officers, known as the Fuerza de Choque, or Strike Force, were stationed in frontof the portones, and attempted to prevent parents and supporters from giving food,water, or medicine to the students on strike inside the campus. On the morning ofMay 14, a father attempting to bring food to his son on the inside was brutally beatenand arrested by police. Onlookers caught the violence with their camera phones andimages and videos of this police brutality quickly circulated on social media and inthe mainstream press. According to student activist Waldemiro Vélez Soto, “Withthat, by midday we had dozens and hundreds of people bringing us food at all thedifferent portones.”13 Laughing, Vélez continued, “we never had as much food aswe did after the police tried to prevent it from reaching us. People identified withthe father or mother trying to get water to their child at the same time that all thelaid-off workers identified with the students.”14 Vélez’s description of the

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identification and solidarity Puerto Ricans of different segments of society had forone another is precisely the kind of solidarity between the student movement andthe laboring classes that we will see the state actively working to foreclose monthslater during the second strike.

Taking their demands beyond the portones, students joined union leaders, publicemployees, and other activists in protesting a political fundraiser at the SheratonHotel on May 20, 2010 that was to be attended by Governor Fortuño. As the studentand their supporters had moved beyond the campus grounds, they were beyond thereach of the university’s Non-Confrontation Policy. When students and laboractivists attempted to disrupt the fundraiser, police responded by unleashing tremen-dous violence upon the protestors. Images and videos from the Sheraton showedpolice punching, kicking, and hitting students and protestors with batons as wellas applying illegal chokeholds. A particularly shocking image showed the Puerto RicoPolice Department’s second-in-command, José A. Rosa Carrasquillo, kicking UPRstudent José “Osito” Pérez Reisler in the genitals as he lay restrained and defenselesson the floor. Following the incident at the Sheraton, conservative politiciansattempted to paint the student protestors as instigators determined to plunge theisland into anarchy rather than condemning police violence against protesters.Jennifer Gonzalez, president of the Puerto Rican senate, said that the police violenceseen at the Sheraton was provoked by “a group of radicals” seeking to “destroydemocracy through violence.”15 Governor Fortuño similarly denied police culpabilityfor the violence that took place at the Sheraton by characterizing activists’ attempt todisrupt the fundraiser at the Sheraton as “an act of violence and intolerance,” which“deserves everyone’s condemnation.”16 This effort to criminalize the protesters,however, was largely unsuccessful. The violence that occurred at the Sheratongenerated even greater support and sympathy for the student strikers; hundreds ofPuerto Ricans joined them at the portones following the incident.

With more Puerto Ricans joining the strikers in solidarity with their demands andstruggle, university administrators were forced to meet students at the negotiatingtable. After two months of protests and with ten out of the University of PuertoRico’s eleven campuses shut down, the strike came to an end on June 21, 2010.Administrators met many of the students’ basic demands, including reinstatingcanceled tuition wavers, stalling the imposition of tuition hikes and fees, andprotecting the student leader from reprisal.17 The agreement between strikers andthe university was rightfully regarded as a historic victory for the student movementand a serious blow to the Fortuño administration’s anti-working-class, neoliberalagenda. The victory, however, was short-lived as state and university officials quicklyworked to begin reversing the hard-won achievements of the student movement.State and university administrators would attempt to frustrate solidarity betweenthe student movement and poor and working-class sectors of the island bycapitalizing on racial and economic differences between the student strikers and theirpotential allies. Policing would play a central role in manipulating and deployingthese significant fissures within Puerto Rican society in order to violently advancethe neocolonial and neoliberal agenda of the state.

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Proxy Violence

In the aftermath of the successful strike, state officials and administrators quicklytook steps to reverse the gains of the student movement. The legislature added fournew appointees to the UPR’s Board of Trustees in an attempt to stack the board infavor of the then current administration and neutralize opposition.18 The new Boardof Trustees lost no time imposing an $800 student fee, which would go into effect inJanuary 2011. The university administration also made substantive cuts to facultybenefits and a number of academic programs were eliminated or put on “pause”across the university system. Students responded to this duplicity on the part ofuniversity and state officials with threats that they would once again paralyze theuniversity system with a strike.

Students began a 48-hour stoppage on December 7, 2010 demanding that theadministration overturn the imposition of the $800 student fee scheduled to go intoeffect in January. If the administration did not comply with the students’ demand torepeal the $800 fee, they vowed to once again go on indefinite strike. In response tothe 48-hour stoppage and looming second indefinite strike, university administratorscontracted the private security firm Capitol Security for approximately $1.5million.19 On the evening prior to the 48-hour stoppage, the firm, on orders fromuniversity administrators, demolished the iconic entrance gates to the Rio Piedrascampus in order to prevent student strikers from once again shutting down theuniversity. According to student activist Xiomara Caro, “when the portones weretaken down… that was the moment when we knew this is war. Capitol Securitywas, for sure, the first time that we knew esto va a ser una huelga de mano dura [thereis going to be an iron fisted response to the strike].” While the removal of the gateswas an unanticipated move on the part of the administration, the individuals thatshowed up wearing t-shirts with the word “SECURITY” emblazoned with yellowletters on the front were even more unexpected. Young, inexperienced men andwomen from Villa Cañona in Loíza, a predominantly Black and low-income munici-pality, had been hired by Capitol Security to tear down the portones and act as secur-ity personnel during the stoppage and potential strike. According to some of theyouth recruited to work security at the university, a municipal employee approachedlocal youth offering $10 an hour to “work” at the University of Puerto Rico.20 “Theytold us: ‘get in the van, we have work for you.’ No one trained us for that,” remarkeda 25-year-old from Villa Cañona who worked security during the 48-hourstoppage.21 On an island with official unemployment statistics hovering above16% and where the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, it is not surprising thatyouth from one of the poorest municipalities on the island would jump at theopportunity presented by Capitol Security.22 The encounter between student activistsand the mostly low-income, young Black men from Loíza illustrated not only theways in which policing manifested itself through and further entrenched extantinequalities operating on the island, but also the ways in which the victims ofthe state’s violence are sometimes conscripted to enact violence against otherpopulations marked as dangerous and threatening to the imperatives of the state.

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Youth from Loíza, untrained and without much information about what exactlythey would be doing on the university campus, were brought in, in lieu of police,to subdue the students. The youth from Loíza represented a way around the univer-sity’s Non-Confrontation Policy that would allow state and university officials toviolently repress the student movement and reestablish control without formal policeintervention. Although the youth were not provided any form of training for thesituation they were about to encounter at the university, some youth reported beingexplicitly told to use violence against the protestors in order to maintain order.23

Shortly after the destruction of the portones, the youth contracted by Capitol Securitywere seen “patrolling” the campus, some armed with wooden 2 × 4s, metal pipes, andknives, and getting into verbal and physical confrontations with protestors. A videoof one of the confrontations that went viral on social media outlets showed a youngman contracted by Capitol Security threatening a female student who had askedhim about his qualifications.24 The video’s rapid circulation was accompanied bya rhetoric that students were being threatened by a gang of violent thugs hired by theuniversity, a rhetoric which played to a history of racialized and classed representationalpractice directed at low-income youth, particularly those from spaces like Loíza.

A news segment that aired on WAPA-TV’s news program Telenoticias on theevening of December 7 further cemented this notion. In the segment, correspondentJosé Esteves approached two Capitol Security guards sitting in a parked car and asked“What kind of experience do you have?” to which one of the guards responded “We’refrom Loíza. We do this almost everyday.” “You do what everyday?,” asked Esteves.The young guard then responded, “Kicking, punching.” When Esteves asked why,the guard coolly replied, “There [Loíza] because it’s fun, here [UPR] because theypay us.” Approaching another guard, Esteves asked what he thought about the workhe was doing to which he replied that he liked it so far because he liked to hit people[“me gusta dar cantazo”].25 The circulation of this news segment along with othervideos capturing hostilities and altercations between students and the youth workingfor Capitol seemed to confirm for many racist and classist notions about the inherentviolence and criminality of low-income and Black Puerto Ricans generally, and Loízaresidents specifically. While some students saw the young men in the video as merelyperforming toughness for the camera, other students and members of the public sawthis “performance” as a very real indicator of the kind of violent pathology allegedlyendemic to spaces like Loíza. These assumptions about poor and Black youth hadbeen historically solidified through the spectacality of almost two decades ofintensified, targeted police raids in public housing complexes and low-income barriossuch as Villa Cañona. The enclosure and militarized policing of economically andracially marginalized communities marked these spaces as zones of violence, or inpolice parlance, zonas calientes [hot spots], characterized by deviance and immoralityand, which, therefore, needed to be controlled and contained through state inter-vention. The sight of low-income and Black youth on the grounds of the UPR campus,prompted columnist Benjamín Torres Gotay, in his blog for El Nuevo Día’s onlineportal, for instance, to note that the youth contracted by Capitol Security “look morelike thugs from the corner than security guards.”26 Student activist Giovanni Roberto

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heard fellow students using similarly racist and classist language to describe the youthfrom Capitol. According to Roberto:

In the Fine Arts porton the interaction between the students and the peoplecontracted by Capitol Security began to turn increasingly tense. There were peoplewho wanted to prevent them from removing the portones, and with much indig-nation they shouted; they shouted at “those people.” That same night I startedto hear one or another racist or classist comment. “Where did they find thesemurders?” or more blatantly “What slum or project did they get them from?”27

The violent antagonism that emerged between the student protestors and the youthfrom Loíza unleashed responses that played upon prejudices about Loíza, Blackness,and poverty that have long been a feature of the Puerto Rican popular imagination.These responses replicated the narrative produced by the state through dispropor-tionate police intervention in low-income and predominately Black areas of theisland, which rendered these areas and populations as dangerous and threateningwith a natural propensity towards, and even enjoyment of, violence. The universityadministration, acting on behalf of the state, then hardened existing prejudicesagainst these young people from Loíza based on their racial, spatial, and economicbackground and pitted them against university students in the hopes of frustratingany form of alliance or solidarity between them.

Furthermore, these prejudices, particularly around Blackness, allowed the machi-nations of the state and its security apparatus to remain hidden. The racist andclassist interpretations of these tensions functioned to occlude the ways in whichthe state was enacting violence by proxy. As the state could not send the police intothe university without violating the Non-Confrontation Policy and threatening itslegitimacy, it instead subcontracted its security functions to marginalized youngpeople, many of whom were themselves intimately familiar with the violent tenden-cies of the state. It is no mistake that the youth of Villa Cañona were conscripted tomimic and enact the routine violence that they had experienced or witnessed duringpolice raids on friends, neighbors, and family members. In 2007, police occupiedVilla Cañona under the auspices of dismantling the drug points that operated there.Rather than reducing drug dealing and drug related violence, the police occupationof Villa Cañona in 2007 resulted in dozens of reports of police brutality and mis-conduct prompting investigations from the Puerto Rican Civil Rights Commissionand the local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.28 Disturbingly, BenjaminRodríguez, a supervisor at Capitol Security who helped to recruit the youthfrom Villa Cañona as guards during the UPR stoppage, played a central part inthe occupation and raids that occurred in Villa Cañona as the Puerto Rico PoliceDepartment’s then Assistant Superintendent of Field Operations. According to VillaCañona community leader Maricruz Rivera Clemente, Rodríguez “takes the Blackpeople of Loíza like all they’re good for is to beat people up and they don’t recruitus for other work.”29 Rivera Clemente added, “They take them to give the students atthe university a beating. Instead of giving them scholarships so they can be students, theywant them to reproduce the suffering of their communities of origin.”30 Throughtheir recruitment by Capitol Security on behalf of the state, these youth from Villa

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Cañona were in some respects made victims of police violence twice over—first, bywitnessing and experiencing rampant police brutality in their community and,second, through the dehumanizing expectation that they would enact a similarviolence against others as police proxies.

Furthermore, these youth were subjected to the pyschologically violent realizationthat the only way they would be allowed to step foot on the UPR campus was if theywere there as violence workers.31 Many of the young loiceños [residents of Loíza]reported that the first time they had visited the Rio Piedras campus was when theyshowed up to take down the portornes.32 As the student movement tried to createa UPR accessible to all Puerto Ricans, state and university officials relied upon thedisenfranchisement and marginalization of low-income Black youth from Loíza tomanage and discipline student protestors in exchange for wages. University officialssought to exploit the marginalization of populations long excluded from theuniversity in order to enforce an agenda that would only further deepen theirseparation from the University of Puerto Rico.

The situation between students and the youth from Loíza came to a head on thenight of December 7, at the end of the first day of the 48-hour paro, or stoppage,resulting in skirmishes between the two groups. Additionally, leaders within thestudent movement struggled with how to respond to the young guards recruitedby Capitol and the racist and classist responses that their presence on campusgenerated among some students. They simultaneously struggled with how to forgea connection with the young loiceños in order to convince them that the studentstruggle was also their struggle. Student leader Giovanni Roberto, himself a youngBlack man from a low-income family, was incredibly troubled by the racist andclassist sentiments he heard within the student movement. At the same time, hewas disgusted by what he saw as an overt attempt on the part of the administrationto play upon racial, spatial, and class cleavages in order to prevent solidarity betweenyouth who were all experiencing different manifestations of the effects of economicand social crisis on the island. One moment in particular crystalized for Roberto theneed for the student movement to reach out to the young people from Loíza ina sincere and earnest way. On the evening of December 7, watching coverage ofthe paro on the local news, Roberto spotted a former student of his from when heworked as a teacher in Loíza in 2008. “One of the students from that school wasthere, on the other side, on behalf of the administration and the government.I was disheartened seeing him on the television. I felt rage and sadness, but I confessthat I had no idea how to deal with the situation,” he recalled.33

Later that night, troubled by what he had seen, Roberto had a long conversationwith fellow student activist Xiomara Caro about how to respond to the situation.According to Roberto, he and Caro debated whether one had to be full of “hate—desprecio—toward the system, towards capitalism, towards what capitalism is, whatcapitalist systems do all the time to people” in order to be an activist and effectchange or if what a successful movement needed was “a feeling of love, to be united,to have human connection.”34 Roberto notes that in his conversation with Caro theycame to an understanding that a hatred of capitalism and inequality alone cannot

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fuel social transformation; rather, social movements must be driven by solidarity andconnection with others feeling the effects of an oppressive system.35 This recognitionof the importance of love and solidarity in social movements informed Roberto’ssubsequent approach to the youth contracted by Capitol Security. Roberto added thatthe racial composition of the student movement also made him conscious of the needto respond to the situation with love and understanding for the youth from Loízarather than with the class and racial hostilities that university and state officialshoped to exploit. “The fact that part of the movement were white boys” that “haven’tlived the life that young Black, mostly male, people live,” according to Roberto, cre-ated an inability for many within the student movement to identify with the youngguards.36 He continued, “So when they saw Black people, the way they were dressing,the way they were acting and talking, I felt that a lot of people were rejecting them ina negative way. I heard comments and I felt bad. I felt angry. I’m part of a movementthat does not understand this situation. The situation that causes those young peopleto be scapegoats, in a way. Or be divided against other young people.”37 Recognizinghis commitment to the student movement and, simultaneously, having an intimateunderstanding of its blindspots, Roberto worked to conceive of ways to connect bothgroups of youth subjected, in radically different ways, to the violence of the state.

At 7:45 am on the morning of December 8, after a night of violent altercations andvandalism on campus, Giovanni Roberto addressed the young people contracted byCapitol in front of students, supporters, and the press (see Figures 1 and 2). Robertobegan his address to the guards by letting them know that he and the student move-ment did not consider them enemies. He said he wanted to clarify for the guardswhat exactly the student movement was struggling for. Roberto related to the guards,saying:

Figure 1 Giovanni Roberto addressing youth employed by Capitol Security. Video still taken from http://youtu.be/xXzpbYB7Ndo.

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Part of my personal story, and what explains why I am so convinced of what were aredoing here, is that I am also from a poor barrio and I am also Black just like you all.When I was young, my parents couldn’t find work, just like you all who don’t findwork now. And I lived for many years on cupones [federal assistance]. I lived until Iwas sixteen-years-old on cupones. Until I was sixteen. Almost my whole life.38

Roberto explained that he was on strike, in part, because ever since he was a smallchild his mother had taught him that everyone has a right and should aspire to beequal. Continuing, he told the guards:

But what’s wrong? In this world we are not all equal. Why is Loíza un pueblo denegros [a Black town]? Why is Carolina un pueblo de negros? Why are Doradoand Condado considered pueblos de blanquitos [towns full of rich whites]? It’scalled racism. It’s called institutionalized racism. It’s been called racism for manyyears. Decades. They don’t want us to leave. Those born in Loíza stay in Loíza.Those born in Carolina stay in Carolina. When we come here to fight everyday,it’s so that all of you also have an opportunity to break that cycle.39

Roberto urged the young guards to leave their posts and join the students in strug-gling for a more accessible educational system, and by extension more equitablesociety.40 “I think that all of you, who today are standing on that side, tomorrowshould be on this side. On this side. Know that what we want is for you all to havean opportunity to study here. That is what we are fighting for,” he said before extend-ing his hand to one of the young security guards.41 When the young guard refused toshake Roberto’s hand, another guard approached him to shake his hand and thenhugged him. After a night of violence between students and guards, Roberto’s speechto the guards ended with a remarkable sight: students and guards shaking hands andhugging one another (see Figure 3).

Figure 2 Young guards listening to Giovanni Roberto. Video still taken from http://youtu.be/xXzpbYB7Ndo.

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The embraces and words exchanged between the guards and students signified anunderstanding that, though the state was attempting to exploit their differences, theyneeded one another in order to challenge the differently felt systems of oppressionthat structured their lives and opportunities. State officials and university adminis-trators hoped that the youth in the student movement and the youth living in theisland’s economically and racially marginalized areas did not see each as connectedin a shared struggle and, accordingly, attempted to deepen the perceived differencesbetween these two groups. On the morning of December 8, Giovanni Robertosucceeded in cogently outlining for both students in the movement as well as theyoung guards the ways in which the state benefited from the antagonism betweenthem. Simultaneously, Roberto challenged the UPR students, in particular, to notreject the youth contracted by Capitol, but to remember that the student struggleis in fact meant for them.

Unfortunately, yet predictably, Capitol replaced the young guards addressed byRoberto moments later with another group of older guards in the hopes of short-circuiting any potential identification or solidary with the student movement.According to an executive from Capitol Security, the guards were replaced “becausethey suffered from Stockholm Syndrome.”42 State and university officials thenprepared to implement a new security regime on campus after the student movementhad seemingly won over the young guards working for Capitol. For the first timein the thirty years since the implementation of the Non-Confrontation Policy, policewould officially enter the Rio Piedras campus to “reestablish order.” The violenceexperienced by students following the installation of the police on campus, andthe circulation of images of that violence via both traditional and social media, wouldprovide for many Puerto Ricans a glimpse of police power and practice that had long

Figure 3 Guards and students embrace. Video still taken from http://youtu.be/xXzpbYB7Ndo.

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occurred, largely out of public sight, in the island’s low-income barrios and publichousing residenciales.

“In the Flesh”

University administrators and government officials pointed to the acts of violenceand vandalism that occurred on the evening of December 7 in order to demonstratethe need for police on campus in order to keep the situation from escalating, not-withstanding students’ attempts to diffuse the tense situation. After Roberto’s speechwent viral on the island and in the diaspora, it became clear that some of the youthfrom Loíza were unwilling to carry out the violent will of the state. Simultaneously,many students within the student movement understood that the police werebrought in to replace the young guards with the specific intent to frustrate thisnascent sense of solidarity. The police officers in riot gear that had been outsidethe portones during the first strike and the 48-hour stoppage were suddenly insidethe gates to ensure “order.” As has often been the case in Puerto Rico when policeforces occupied a space under the auspices of guaranteeing public safety, theirpresence generated greater fear and violence. Police officers harassed, abused, andarbitrarily arrested students participating in strike-related activities. The administra-tion placed a ban on political protest on campus immediately following the 48-hourstoppage, and as a result police were able arrest students for small acts of resistancesuch as handing out pro-strike pamphlets on campus.

On December 10, 2010, a group of community leaders issued a statement denoun-cing the police presence on the UPR campus. Representing a number of low-incomeand working-class barrios and public housing complexes, these community leaderscalled for an end to police aggression and announced their solidarity with the studentmovement and its goals.43 The statement, in part, read:

They’ve cornered them, they imposed a fee that they can’t pay, they prevent themfrom protesting anywhere, they surveil them, they deny them dialogue andsolutions. The police and University administration treat our young people likeanimals, like lesser humans, without rights. These students are our children, ourgrandchildren, neighbors in our community; they are people who do not havethe money to pay this fee and are seeking a decent public education for all PuertoRicans. We’re going to support them, there is no doubt.44

These community leaders also linked the brutality being experienced by the studentmovement to the police repression of their communities creating connections andsolidarity between their two struggles. They highlighted the ways in which violentand discriminatory policing which had been perfected in low-income communitieswas now on full display at the university, noting, “Our communities are familiarwith police brutality. We have experienced in the flesh the discrimination andviolation of the rights of our residents on multiple occasions. In a country wherethe state disproportionately abuses its power, there is no choice but to mobilize,university and community, to address these abuses that are now daily.”45 Similarly,following attempts by university and government officials to paint students and

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protesters as responsible for the violence taking place on campus, José García,a student and spokesperson for the Organización Socialista Internacional[International Socialist Organization], issued the following call for solidarity topublic housing residents: “You know who the violent ones are who come to clubpeople. You know it’s the police. We must remind the country who the violent onesare.”46 In these moments, we see clear attempts on the part of students, activists, andcommunity organizers to build bridges of solidarity between low-income communi-ties and the student movement in the fight for a more just and equitable PuertoRican society. These pronouncements of affinity and mutual respect were crucialin revealing a shared struggle between populations often viewed in isolation fromand even in opposition to one another. Without minimizing the differences betweenthem, students and community leaders attempted to highlight the parallels betweentheir struggles in order to illuminate larger patterns of repression, discrimination,and violence on the part of the state. As Xiomara Caro put it, “resistance, whereyou see it most, is in the caseríos [public housing]… and what we did in la iupiwas a resistance… so there’s a parallel there because we’re both, in a way, tryingto resist what the system is trying to turn us into.”47

As students and activists from low-income communities were working to chal-lenge the discriminatory agenda of the state, government and university officialswere working equally hard to frustrate any kind of alliance between the two.For instance, on December 20, 2010, the university administration announced thatit would be summarily suspending Giovanni Roberto. There was no question formany within the student movement that his suspension was politically motivatedand had to do with his success in building bridges between the student movementand Black and low-income communities on the island.

Equally, if not more, insidious, state and university officials would employ theinfrastructure created through disproportionate police action in public housingcommunities in order to deepen racial and economic animosities and to preventcross-coalitional organizing. During the second strike, police initially took arrestedstudents to minicuarteles, or mini police stations, in nearby public housing com-plexes. One of the lasting features of mano dura contra el crimen, or iron fist againstcrime, a series of joint police and military raids carried out in public housing duringthe 1990s, is an archipelago of mini-police stations and holding cells built in publichousing complexes across the island.48 These minicuartels were built, in addition tothe perimeter fences around public housing complexes, in order discourage drugtrafficking and ensure a permanent police presence within public housing. Duringthe second strike, police would arrest students and separate them by sex, with themen being taken to the station in the Monte Hatillo public housing complex andthe women taken to the station in the Manuel A. Pérez public housing complex.The sheer number of arrests taking place at the UPR-PR campus ensured a steadystream of police, students, and supporters entering and disrupting the lives of thesepublic housing communities. Pedro Lugo, a student activist and reporter for RadioHuelga [Strike Radio], suggested that the police brought arrested students to MonteHatillo and Manuel A. Pérez to create conflict and resentment between students and

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residents. Lugo recalled, “The police took them to the project jails because theythought that the community would reject the solidarity of the supporters that wouldshow up to support the jailed students.”49 The presence of community outsidersentering public housing to support arrested students, along with the increased policepresence, resulted in tensions between students, their supporters, and communityresidents. According to Lugo, at one point, some residents threw rocks at studentsand their supporters in order to express their resentment with the growing policepresence in their community. Following the incident, student activists approachedresidents and discussed the ways in which police forces were trying to create conflictbetween them and asked for their support. “Some people talked to them and theyunderstood the problem, a couple of days passed without any incidents with thecommunity, so the police decided not to take them [there] anymore. The police saidthat they moved them [to new locations] because those headquarters have the biggestcells.”50 The communities of Monte Hatillo and Manuel A. Pérez have been subjectto ongoing raids by police forces since the early-1990s; it is no surprise, therefore,that a sudden influx of increased police forces in addition to community outsiderswould lead to tension and resentment between the residents and students and theirsupporters.

Knowing this history, one must consider the degree to which this was a deliberatetactic on the part of the police to distance UPR students from public housing residents.Did police hope that this tactic, placing university students in holding cells in publichousing complexes, would make arrested students feel even more isolated since theassumption was that these two populations were disconnected and even hostiletowards one another? Did police purposefully attempt to disrupt the lives of publichousing residents by bringing arrested students, and subsequently their supporters,to Monte Hatillo and Manuel A. Pérez in order to breed resentment between thesegroups? Given that, once residents, students, and activists were able to reach an agree-ment with one another to end hostilities and try to support each other, the policestopped bringing arrested students to Monte Hatillo and Manuel A. Pérez, it is hardnot to see this as a deliberate attempt on the part of the state to exploit and exacerbateracial and class cleavages in order to once again prevent solidarity between low-incomecommunities and the student movement. The use of public housing minicuartelesalongside the employment of young men and women from Loíza to act as policeproxies highlights the vulgar and intentional ways in which the state attempts to bothfrustrate political alliance and manage populations through difference.

“¡Fuera, Fuera, Fuera Policía!”

In the wake of the pintata that began this piece, a broad-based movement formed on theisland to censure police violence against students and their supporters. While this move-ment culminated, swiftly, with the ejection of the police from campus, it simultaneouslyshifted the focus of coverage on the strike away from the goals of the student movementand toward calls, instead, for an end to police brutality. This shift in focus, simul-taneously, and to the student movement’s detriment, worked to foreclose a discussion

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about the student movement’s role in the larger struggle for racial and economic justiceon the island. In response to the state violence against the student movement, thousandsof Puerto Ricans aligned themselves with the students and demanded an end to thepolice occupation of the university. The pintata marked a tipping point as it signaledto many Puerto Ricans that there was no possible justification of the police violence thatwas occurring. Professors and employees of the University of Puerto Rico announceda 24-hour work stoppage in solidarity with the students following the pintata.51 OnFebruary 12, 2011, approximately 10,000 Puerto Ricans marched through the streetsof Río Piedras in solidarity with the students and calling for a complete withdrawalof the police from campus. The march, “Yo amo la UPR” [I love UPR], was filledwith people from different sectors of Puerto Rican society, including many parents ofcurrent UPR students and alumni. A constant refrain shouted through out the marchwas “¡Fuera policía, fuera!” [Get out police, get out!] and “¡Fuera, fuera, fuera, policía!”[out, out, out, police!]. On February 14, heeding these calls, the police withdrew fromcampus. At a press conference following the massive march in support of the studentsand against police brutality, Governor Fortuño said that he would be withdrawing policefrom the Río Piedras campus. Fortuño admitted that the events of the pintata weighedheavily in his decision to remove the police from campus before adding, “The Policeshould not be inside the university; they need to be in the streets.”52 Although Fortuñodid not position the massive civilian protests against police violence as the reason for theremoval of the police from campus, the message was clear to the thousands of PuertoRicans who marched under the banner “Yo amo la UPR” that their dissent had helpedto halt the violent repression of the student movement.

Although the strike did not officially end until March, the removal of the policefrom campus effectively ended the strike at the University of Puerto Rico in theminds of the public.53 Although the police were no longer on campus attemptingto violently disrupt the student movement, state violence still, in some ways, contri-buted to the premature end of the student agitation for a more accessible andequitable university system. The events that unfolded at UPR-RP during the secondstrike demonstrate how the state utilizes police violence in order to neutralizepolitical dissent in ways that are more complex then they initially seem. The verypublic violence experienced by students and their supporters did more than justinstill fear or discourage people from protesting; the violence also diverted attentionfrom the original demands of the student movement in a way that benefitted a stateunwilling to halt the University of Puerto Rico’s march towards an increasingly lessaccessible public educational system. Rather than working to create alliances withpoor and working-class communities in the struggle to make the university moreaccessible and accountable, students were instead forced to mobilize against policeviolence. As students and their supporters worked to get the police to leave campusand force the government and university to reinstate the Non-Confrontation Policy,the student movement suddenly became reduced to a movement against policebrutality. In this way, victory for the student movement, in the eyes of many, becamecontingent upon the removal of police from campus, rather than the protection ofthe university against privatization or the cultivation of efforts to create a public

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education system accessible to all Puerto Ricans. The focus on removing the policefrom campus, while tremendously important and necessary, inadvertently allowedfor larger questions of economic and social justice to lose their urgency in the faceof immediate bodily danger and harm. Thus, when the police left campus, the strikewas considered over despite the fact that students found themselves, in many ways, ina position similar to the one they were in when the strike began. This outcome iscentral, and not incidental, to the state’s utilization of police violence to respondto popular protest. Police violence functioned to divide the movement by forcingit to shift attention away from the initial demands of the students and onto responsesto police brutality. As Xiomara Caro noted, “In retrospect, one of the criticisms… atleast internally, is that it became an issue of police brutality. We sold out to everyoneelse.”54 According to Waldemiro Vélez Soto, this shift in attention fragmented thestudent movement and confused the public about the demands of the strike. VélezSoto stated:

It was a mistake. For example, if the demands were accessibility, a university opento the people, the poor, workers, etcetera… then victimizing ourselves because ofpolice abuse is moving us onto another issue. It gives emphasis or impetus to thatissue when that was never the primary issue when we started this struggle. Youconfuse the people because suddenly it becomes a principle demand. Then, whenthe police leave then the strike is considered over, no?55

While police brutality became a rallying point for many Puerto Ricans on theisland and in the diaspora, this emphasis on ending police brutality against thestudent movement inadvertently foreclosed broader and more meaningful conver-sations about austerity, neoliberal reform, public resources, and social access.

Despite a sudden end to the second strike with the withdrawal of the police, thestrike had nonetheless facilitated necessary connections between the student movementand movements for racial and economic equality on the island. Reflecting on the strike,and in particular on the incidents that occurred between the students and young peoplecontracted by Capitol Securities, Giovanni Roberto suggested that, despite the incidentsof hostility and violence that the strikes generated, the experience was valuable for thestudent movement in highlighting the ways in which the state uses racial and classtension and division in order to consolidate power and protect capitalist interests.Roberto notes, “The incident with the Capitol guards was important and positive, inmy opinion, because it allowed us to target the capitalist system, the exclusions thatexist and hide behind the university’s title of public, the racial composition that noone speaks about, and the necessity of solidarity from below, from a class perspec-tive.”56 He also noted that the incident with the youth contracted by Capitol promptedthe student movement to be more explicit in including marginalized communitiesin the struggle for accessible education and helped to establish connections betweenuniversity students and the barrio. “Some of the strikers made contacts in barriosand communities and managed to meet and interact with some of the young peoplerecruited during those days. We broke the tactics of repression and we opened upa space for unity,” he concluded.57 Although the state used a variety of tactics to prevent

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the formation of solidarity between the student movement and low-income andracialized communities, members of both communities negotiated these momentsof tension in order to highlight a common struggle against the injustices of capitalismand neocolonialism. These moments of tension and solidarity, although fraught,represented a broad-based rejection of the various spatial, racial, economic, andpolitical inequalities entrenched through state violence and politicized policing asa solution to crisis.

Acknowledgments

I thank the editors at Souls as well as the anonymous reviewer for their helpfulcomments. Jennifer Lynn Kelly and Lydia Pelot-Hobbs offered thoughtful editsand suggestions on this article. Arlene Dávila provided feedback on an early versionof this article. I am grateful to Giovanni Roberto, Xiomara Caro, Waldemiro VélezSoto, Lourdes C. Santiago Negrón, Pedro Lugo Vázquez, Roberto Thomas, AbnerY. Dennis Zayas, and Maritza Stanchich for sharing their stories of the Huelga withme, which form the basis of this article.

Notes

1. Video footage of police intervention and brutality during the pintata can be seen in this two partvideo report for Diálogo, the URP student newspaper: Editores Diálogo, “9 de febrero motín enUPR-RP,” YouTube, February 9, 2011, http://youtu.be/_DVtAd5avqo (accessed January 27,2014) and Editores Diálogo, “motín en UPR-RP—9 de febrero de 2011 (2da parte),” YouTube,February 9, 2011, http://youtu.be/LjBaWESdTjg (accessed January 27, 2014).

2. “Editorial: The Police Must Leave Campus,” Puerto Rico Daily Sun, February 10, 2011.3. Throughout this article, I deploy the term neocolonial as opposed to colonial in reference

to Puerto Rico’s status in order to index transformations in governance and rule in therelationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. By neocolonial, I refer the continuingstrategies deployed by the United States to maintain control of Puerto Rico in the wake of theinternational decolonization movement. Following Puerto Rican political theorist RamónGrosfoguel, I believe that neocolonial more appropriately captures the ways in whichboth Puerto Rican and U.S. political elites have promoted Puerto Rican sovereignty withoutdecolonization, in order to facilitate military and capital exploitation of the island and itspopulation. For more see Ramón Grosfoguel, Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a GlobalPerspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). I also use the terms “the state”or “the Puerto Rican state” to refer to the Puerto Rican government and its agents. I realize,of course, that within the context of continued U.S. neocolonial control over the island,making claims about the will or agenda of the Puerto Rican state can be difficult; still,I employ this phrasing while recognizing the way in which U.S. capitalist and neocolonialimperatives can influence the actions of the Puerto Rican state.

4. Throughout this article, I refer to the ways in which race, space, and class coalesce and shapeone other in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico, like many other Latin American and Caribbeancountries, promotes the idea of itself as a racial democracy. According to this logic, PuertoRico, because of racial mixing, does not suffer the effects of binary conceptions of race,leading to more egalitarian social relations. As much scholarship on the discourse of racialdemocracy has shown, this logic, although nominally promoting a continuum of racialmixing, still valorizes whiteness while denigrating Blackness and Indigeneity. Additionally,

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as a result of this discourse of racial democracy, race is often inscribed in a classed andspatialized manner, which is not exclusively dependent upon skin color. In other words,low-income people, particularly those living public housing, barrios (poor and working classneighborhoods), and barriadas (slums) are considered to reside in spaces of Blackness. In thecontext of Puerto Rico in particular, Petra R. Rivera has described this process as “emplacing”Blackness to certain sites on the island through the construction of, for instance, Loíza asa site of historical or “folkloric” Blackness and public housing as a site “abject” Blackness.Zaire Dinzey-Flores, describes a similar process, noting in her study of gated communitieson the island that racist notions about criminality and immorality get ascribed to publichousing, in many ways spurring the need to build gates that keep Blackness in its designatedplace. For more, please see Petra Raquel Rivera, “Orgulloso de mi Caserío y de Quien Soy":Race, Place, and Space in Puerto Rican Reggaetón” (PhD diss., UC Berkeley, 2010) andZaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores, Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

5. Although outside of the scope of this particular article, while the student strikes at the Universityof Puerto Rico drew upon raced and classed technologies and strategies of policing, it is crucial tonote that the violence directed at students also echoes an equally long and tumultuous history ofrepression and violence against pro-independence and labor activists. For details on the historyof colonial and neocolonial repression on the island please see Roman Bosque-Perez and JoseJavier Colon Morrea, Puerto Rico Under Colonial Rule: Political Persecution and the Quest forHuman Rights (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).

6. It is worth noting that this circuitry of police practice, which moves from marginalizedcommunities to the wider population, is not specific to this particular moment or to theisland of Puerto Rico. A number of scholars have described the ways in which newpolice technologies and practices are often “tested” in low-income communities andcommunities of color before being expanded and normalized as simply policing. For anexcellent primer please see Christian Parenti,Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in theAge of Crisis (London: Verso, 1999). See also Dylan Rodriguez,Forced Passages: ImprisonedRadical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 2006).

7. “Ley Especial Declarando Estado de Emergencia Fiscal y Estableciendo Plan Integral deEstabilización Fiscal para Salvar el Crédito de Puerto Rico,” Ley Núm. 7 del año 2009(P. de la C. 1326). Translation my own.

8. Yarimar Bonilla and Rafael Boglio Martínez, “Puerto Rico in Crisis: Government WorkersBattle Neoliberal Reform,” NACLA Report on the Americas, 43, no. 1 (January/February2010): 6–8.

9. Ibid.10. In this article, I focus on the events that took place at the University of Puerto Rico’s Río

Piedras (UPR–RP) campus. I focus on UPR–RP because, as the flagship campus for theuniversity system and its central location within the San Juan metropolitan area, it was themost active site of activism during the strikes. While other campuses went on strike in2010 and 2011, the bulk of protests and mobilizations occurred at UPR–RP, especially duringthe second strike.

11. Recinto de Ciencias Medicas, the University of Puerto Rico’s Medical School, was theexception because of the time sensitive nature of their scientific investigations and their workwith ill patients. The medical school did, however, hold a brief work stoppage in solidaritywith the other ten campuses on strike.

12. The late 1960s and early 1970s were marked by a series of violent incidents between ReserveOfficers’ Training Corps (ROTC) cadets, police, annexationists, and pro-independencesupporters on the UPR–RP campus, which left both police officers and protesters wounded.On March 4, 1970, following a confrontation between ROTC cadets and pro-independence

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supporters, the police anti-riot squad entered the UPR–RP campus and began violentlybeating students in an attempt to subdue the protests. The event left more than one hundredinjured and one student, Antonia Martínez, dead from a police bullet. In 1981, students atUPR–RP went on strike to protest the high costs of tuition. The 1981 huelga [strike], whichlasted five months, was marked by incredible violence between student protesters and police.The violence of the 1981 strike finally pushed university administrators to institute thePolítica de no Confrontación, or Non-Confrontation Policy. The implementation of thePolítica de no Confrontación, although only an informal agreement between universityadministrators and the police, led to an immediate decrease in instances of political violenceon the university campus.

13. Waldemiro Vélez Soto, interview by author, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, April 26, 2012.Translation from Spanish my own.

14. Ibid.15. Leila A. Andreu Cuevas, “Presidenta de la Cámara llama ‘radicales’ a los manifestantes del

hotel Sheraton,” Primera Hora, May 21, 2010 http://www.primerahora.com/noticias/gobierno-politica/nota/presidentadelacamarallamaradicalesalosmanifestantesdelhotelsheraton-388935/ (accessed January 27, 2014).

16. Nydia Bauza, “Repudio a los excesos policiacos,” Primera Hora, May 22, 2012, http://www.primerahora.com/noticias/gobierno-politica/nota/repudioalosexcesospoliciacos-388998/(accessed January 27, 2014).

17. Maritza Stanchich, “University of Puerto Rico Student Strike Victory Unleashes Brutal CivilRights Backlash,” Huffington Post, July 7, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd/university-of-puerto-rico_b_635090.html (accessed January 27, 2014).

18. Stanchich, “University of Puerto Rico Student Strike Victory Unleashes Brutal Civil RightsBacklash.”

19. Maritza Stanchich, “More Violence in Puerto Rico as University Student Fee is Imposed.”Huffington Post, December 15, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd/more-violence-in-puerto-r_b_810628.html (accessed January 27, 2014).

20. See Mariana Cobián, “Los recogen en Loíza y los meten de guardias en la UPR sin explica-ciones,” Primera Hora, December 13, 2010, http://www.primerahora.com/noticias/gobierno-politica/nota/losrecogenenloizaylosmetendeguardiasenlauprsinexplicaciones-452612(accessed January 27, 2014) and Giovanni Roberto, “De cuando el barrio entró a la UPR,”Socialismo Internacional, October 26, 2013, http://socialismointernacional.org/2013/10/26/de-cuando-el-barrio-entro-a-la-upr/ (accessed January 27, 2014).

21. Cobián, “Los recogen en Loíza y los meten de guardias en la UPR sin explicaciones.”22. Giovanni Roberto makes this point clear in his piece, “De cuando el barrio entró a la UPR.”23. Cobián, “Los recogen en Loíza y los meten de guardias en la UPR sin explicaciones” and

Roberto, “De cuando el barrio entró a la UPR.”24. “Encubiertos de Capitol Security en huelga de la Universidad de Puerto Rico UPR,” YouTube,

December 7, 2010, http://youtu.be/xZPOrVvKwCM. Translation my own.25. “Huelga UPR 2010—Me gusta dar cantazos (Capitol Security),” YouTube, December 10, 2010,

http://youtu.be/Uv8pAXDZ-gA. Translation my own.26. Benjamín Torres Gotay, “Los discípulos de Chicky Starr en la UPR,” elnuevodia.com,

December 7, 2010, http://www.elnuevodia.com/blog-los_discipulos_de_chicky_starr_en_la_upr-832674.html (accessed January 27, 2014). Translation my own.

27. Roberto, “De cuando el barrio entró a la UPR.”28. For more information on the police occupation of Villa Cañona and the violence that

followed please see the short documentary, “El color de la justicia,” YouTube, March 24,2011 [2008], http://youtu.be/H3CiyzJjSCo

29. Cobián, “Los recogen en Loíza y los meten de guardias en la UPR sin explicaciones.”Translation my own.

30. Ibid.

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31. For more on the concept of violence workers see Martha K. Huggins, Mika Haritos-Fatouros,and Philip G. Zimbardo, Violence Workers: Police Torturers and Murderers ReconstructBrazilian Atrocities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

32. Cobián, “Los recogen en Loíza y los meten de guardias en la UPR sin explicaciones.”33. Roberto, “De cuando el barrio entró a la UPR.”34. Giovanni Roberto, interview by author, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, January 31, 2012.35. Ibid.36. Ibid.37. Ibid.38. “Giovanni Roberto—Discurso a Guardias Capitol—UPR 2010,” YouTube, December 10,

2010, http://youtu.be/xXzpbYB7Ndo. Translation my own.39. Ibid.40. In fact, students had taken up a collection offering to pay the youth from Loíza their day’s

wages if they left their security posts and joined them in protest.41. “Giovanni Roberto—Discurso a Guardias Capitol—UPR 2010.” Translation my own.42. Juan A. Hernández, “Police Takes Over Campus after Stoppage,” Puerto Rico Daily Sun,

December 9, 2010.43. The leaders represented Cantera in Santurce, the Luis Llorens Torres public housing

residence, Sonadora in Aguas Buenas, Piñones in Loíza, Mariana in Humacao, San Antonioin Caugas, and Los Filtros in Guaynabo.

44. Cristina del Mar Quiles, “Condena unánime a represión policiaca contra estudiantes UPR,”InterNewsService, December 10, 2010 Translation my own.

45. Ibid. Translation my own.46. Nydia Bauza, Maritza Díaz, and Mariana Cobián, “Calma en la UPR -Minuto a minute,”

PrimeraHora.com, December 17, 2010. Translation my own.47. Xiomara Caro, interview by author, March 7, 2012, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico.48. For more on the history of mano dura contra el crimen and the use of disproportionate

policing against marginalized populations in Puerto Rico please see, Marisol LeBrón, “ViolentArrest: Punitive Governance and Neocolonial Crisis in Contemporary Puerto Rico” (PhDdiss., New York University, 2014). Also see, Dinzey-Flores, Locked In, Locked Out.

49. Pedro Lugo, personal correspondence, December 9, 2013.50. Ibid.51. Maritza Diaz Alcaide, “Se van a paro los profesores de la UPR,” Primera Hora, February 10,

2011, http://www.primerahora.com/noticias/gobierno-politica/nota/sevanaparolosprofesores-delaupr-472401/ (accessed January 27, 2014).

52. Maribel Hernández Pérez, “Gobernador afirma que los policías deben estar en la calle y no enla Universidad,” Primera Hora, February 14, 2011, http://www.primerahora.com/noticias/gobierno-politica/nota/gobernadorafirmaquelospoliciasdebenestarenlacalleynoenlauniversidad-474453/ (accessed January 27, 2014). Translation my own.

53. The end date of the second strike is debatable. Some suggest that the strike did not end untilMay 2011; however, for many the end of the strike was marked by an incident in which UPR–RP Chancellor Ana Guadalupe and the chief of Campus Security were assaulted by protestorson March 7, 2011. Although many students claim that the individuals who assaulted thechancellor and chief of Campus Security were not actually affiliated with the student move-ment, and were police operatives, this moment soured the public’s support and the movementhad difficulty mobilizing in the assault’s wake.

54. Xiomara Caro, interview by author, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, March 7, 2012.55. Waldemiro Vélez Soto, interview by author, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, April 26, 2012.

Translation from Spanish my own.56. Roberto, “De cuando el barrio entró a la UPR.”57. Ibid.

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About the Author

Marisol LeBrón is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studiesat Dickinson College. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from New YorkUniversity. Her research interests include policing, militarization, incarceration,spatial inequalities, political economy, youth, and race in the Americas. Sheis currently at work on a manuscript about the growth of punitive governance incontemporary Puerto Rico.

134 Souls January–June 2015