SPECTACLE, PERFORMANCE, THEATRE: THE 2010 STUDENT STRIKE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PUERTO RICO

Abstract

Rather than negotiate first with protesting and then striking students, the administration of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) shut down its flagship Río Piedras Campus from 21 April to 6 July 2010. Regular academic activity on the campus came to a standstill, and as a consequence the semester programmed to end in mid-May could not be finished until mid-August. Yet in those seventy-plus days of closure (cierre) a poignantly expressive culture of resistance took shape out of the continuous tension among the striking students who occupied the campus, the remote administration that refused to respond to their issues, the heavily armed state police officers who were stationed just outside the campus's gates, and the crowds of professors, nonteaching personnel, parents, and student supporters who gathered daily to urge the administration to open a dialogue with the students. Along with independent radio broadcasts, the skillful use of cyberspace, celebrity concerts, and other strategies to capture public and media attention, the protest movement also fostered the spectacle of mass rallies and marches that featured acts of performance and theatre. If the university's theatres were dark, the streets that surround the campus became the stages for seminude, placard-carrying bodies moving serpentine through crowds; stilt-walking masked portrayals of local politicians and university administrators; large, painted-cardboard dragons and wolf heads to stare down police officers; a twenty-foot-tall puppet whose shirt front read “the university is not for sale” (“La UPR no se vende”); processions of black coffins accompanied by black-clad lloronas (mourners); and red-nosed, broom-carrying clowns decked out in tactical police gear to parade comically in front of the heavily armed and real tactical forces.