In 2011, there was concern about the police department using tear gas and violence against protests that were being carried out by students. They were upset about police violence and the funding for the university being cut. There were also labor unions who were reacting to the previous government cutting 20,000 to 30,000 government jobs. That was a real constituency of people who were not happy with what was going on. There were huge demonstrations.

A lot of those people who were involved in those movements, they graduated from university and remained activists. The Colectiva Feminista started organizing around that time, or shortly afterward. So there was a lot of momentum.

What happened with #RickyRenuncia is that all those groups that had been active were then joined by people who were not necessarily involved in activism, because they were so outraged by what was revealed in the Telegram chat. First, there were all the sexist, racist and homophobic comments, but also there were jokes about the victims of María, when again, people had not gotten completely over the trauma of what they went through. And then you add Bad Bunny, Ricky Martin and Residente, and you get a huge constituency of young people, as well as older people who all along had been very skeptical of what was going on.

What hopes do you have for the island now in terms of its political destiny?

What I see as the best possible future is definitely a change in status, whether it’s a more autonomous relationship with the U.S., or independence. I’m really hoping Puerto Rico can move to a new stage by a vast reduction of the debt, and then come up with a serious proposal to ask for reparations from the United States for having kept it as a colonial territory for more than a century and having repressed its independence movement in the 1950s.

Image Ed Morales Credit... Lidia Hernandez Tapia

We have in place the possibility of a new intersectional movement that has a lot of potential to solve this problem of the disconnect between classic politics and identity politics in the U.S. It does that by being a nationalist movement that is trying to move past some of the problems of previous versions of nationalism, which are often patriarchal and discriminate against women and L.G.B.T.Q. people.