ABSTRACT

4645: (Chronicle of the Puerto Rican Summer)

4645 is a chronicle, turned essay, turned philosophical meditation, turned offering, turned ritual, turned poem about the Puerto Rican uprising of July 2019. A love song to the author’s adopted country, it recounts, with special attention to the lives and futures of his two young, black Boricua daughters, his family and friends’ active participation in the insurgency, along with the multitudes of leaderless, horizontal diversities that seized Puerto Rico’s streets, assumed a historical-heroic-epic role, performed the most spectacular collective wake for the victims of Hurricane María and forced the elected governor to resign.

In the process, Powers Guimond inserts Puerto Rico’s revolutionary Verano Boricua in the anarchist tradition, confirms the immense political import of the body, and situates the rebellion within the artistic-psychic-political portrayals of the always-unfinished mourning of the dead, from Antigone to El Velorio. Nothing guarantees the Puerto Rican archipelago’s future—not even the astonishing achievements of the movement—“but the living idea of a people ready to act for and defend itself, hell or high water, that erupted in July 2019 is the first necessary stone in the bulwark against the barbarisms to come.”