Guillermo Rebollo Gil

How to Find Sustenance

This short chapter recounts performance artist Awilda Rodriguez Lora’s intervention during the 2017 National Colloquium on Women at the University of Puerto Rico’s Mayaguez campus. In doing so, it offers a reflection on the possible meanings of and potential for “sustenance” in the colonial context.

How to Travel

This chapter—anecdotal in scope—explores the intricacies of social privilege within the context of the Puerto Rican migration and briefly speculates about the possibilities of travel restrictions for islanders.

How to Become Visible

This chapter, in making an argument for the importance of make-believe in forming a robust political imagination, turns its attention to a pair of Puerto Rican wrestlers, whose performance as villains highlights the terms of Puerto Rico’s visibility in the American imagination: a beautiful place, but a bad investment—a domesticated population, but severely policed.

As Far as Manifestos Go

This chapter seeks to establish the scope and tone of the book. In doing so, it offers a critical reflection on social privilege, specifically, on how a sincere engagement with decolonial theory requires an accounting of one’s own privilege.

The Largest Mall in the Caribbean

This chapter references the public discourse and debate surrounding out-migration in Puerto Rico and locates speculation as to the possibilities of oppositional thought and action within this context. Additionally, it reflects briefly on how islanders—in their quotidian activities of packing up and speaking out—are often misinterpreted by onlookers from the mainland.

Regarding the Future

This chapter recounts and examines a failed act of dissent staged in 2014 in a Walgreens construction site in Puerto Rico. However, rather than focus on the causes for its failure, it looks to the event as a harbinger for hope. In doing so, an argument is made to consider events of dissent not as occasions for large-scale movement building but as unique opportunities for both protesters and onlookers to be moved and remain “pumped with the revolution.”

How to Feel Helpless

This chapter offers a somewhat whimsical, yet critical, reading of the fiscal control board’s “presence” in Puerto Rico in relation to, and through the prism of, the 2017 University of Puerto Rico student strike. In doing so, the chapter reads like a defense of the often-maligned “custom” of student stoppages and strikes in the University of Puerto Rico system.

How to Become Governor

This chapter gives a quick, sarcastic rundown of the familial ties among Puerto Rican government officials, past and present, as well as their links to the media industry, in order to convey a sense of conspiracy and/or claustrophobia when one considers the major figures in the island’s political landscape.

How to Be Middle Class

This chapter examines the link between a perceived lack of opposition to the fiscal control board among the majority of the island population and the government and media’s anti-poor discourse. Exposing how public debt has been equated with a flawed moral character of the people—especially of those most marginal—this chapter sheds light on how a middle-class subject is formed out of a generalized disdain for the most downtrodden and an assumed lack of alternatives for social and political change.

How to Reach a Point of No Return

This chapter considers two real-life events of dissent—a protest staged at the entrance of the Caribe Hilton Hotel in San Juan and the UPR student strike in 2017—through the lens of Rafael Acevedo’s novel Guaya Guaya, where a gang of bank robbers take hostages in the name of Puerto Rican independence. An argument is made on behalf of ill-timed and/or ill-conceived acts of opposition, as carried out by those most unfit to carry them out, for it is this type of act and this type of subject that communicate the most radical and inspiring visions of a more egalitarian and more just society to come.