Bastion-Making in Santurce: LaGoyco Takes on Grief and Recolonization

Abstract

Taller Comunidad LaGoyco is a community organization operating in the Machuchal sector of Santurce, a district of San Juan experiencing gentrification. In the years since Hurricane María the group has transformed a vacant school in the area into a vibrant community center, helping the neighborhood respond to a host of needs and challenges. In this essay I offer an account of the story of LaGoyco with a focus on the organization's spatial practices, showcasing their work as a case study in grassroots placemaking in a post-disaster context. I argue that the LaGoyco working group engages in a kind of placemaking I call bastion-making, in which a community facing threats on multiple flanks responds by forging sociospatial structures that afford protection on multiple fronts. Building on interviews and participant observation, I present a series of vignettes highlighting key "spatial" turning points in the story of the organization. I draw from environmental psychology and actor-network theory to conceptualize bastion-making as a spatial justice-oriented form of placemaking, using the story of LaGoyco as an example of space-conscious autogestión intent on defending the right to the city in the context of intersecting crises that characterized the period in which the project took shape. In the last section, I focus on the contribution of one of LaGoyco's main shapers, the late musician and activist Héctor "Tito" Matos, to offer a more personal reflection on the role of individual agency in placemaking, in a context where the threat of displacement is experienced as a form of recolonization. [Keywords: placemaking, bastion-making, autogestión, spatial justice, environmental psychology, recolonization]

Headnote

ABSTRACT

Taller Comunidad LaGoyco is a community organization operating in the Machuchal sector of Santurce, a district of San Juan experiencing gentrification. In the years since Hurricane María the group has transformed a vacant school in the area into a vibrant community center, helping the neighborhood respond to a host of needs and challenges. In this essay I offer an account of the story of LaGoyco with a focus on the organization's spatial practices, showcasing their work as a case study in grassroots placemaking in a post-disaster context. I argue that the LaGoyco working group engages in a kind of placemaking I call bastion-making, in which a community facing threats on multiple flanks responds by forging sociospatial structures that afford protection on multiple fronts. Building on interviews and participant observation, I present a series of vignettes highlighting key "spatial" turning points in the story of the organization. I draw from environmental psychology and actor-network theory to conceptualize bastion-making as a spatial justice-oriented form of placemaking, using the story of LaGoyco as an example of space-conscious autogestión intent on defending the right to the city in the context of intersecting crises that characterized the period in which the project took shape. In the last section, I focus on the contribution of one of LaGoyco's main shapers, the late musician and activist Héctor "Tito" Matos, to offer a more personal reflection on the role of individual agency in placemaking, in a context where the threat of displacement is experienced as a form of recolonization. [Keywords: placemaking, bastion-making, autogestión, spatial justice, environmental psychology, recolonization]

Introduction

On a sunny morning in August 2020, nearly three years after Hurricane María had struck Puerto Rico and five months into the COVID pandemic, then San Juan mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, and musician-activist Héctor "Tito" Matos stood each before a podium to deliver a few words before signing the deed that would transfer LaGoyco1 a las manos de la comunidad (to the hands of the community). A small group of meticulously masked, socially distanced attendees stood nearby, some outside, some under the tarp that was set for the occasion in the atrium of the former Pedro G. Goyco elementary school in Santurce. Matos, a native of Santurce and founding board president of Taller Comunidad LaGoyco (TCLG), the nonprofit organization that was about to become the building's proprietor, and Cruz, then in her second term as mayor and running for her party's gubernatorial nomination, were about to finalize a process that had started five years earlier, when long rumored plans to close the school due to low enrollment became imminent in the spring of 2015.

In her remarks at the ceremony, the mayor conceded that "since we took too long, the community opened the gates and took ownership of the school,"2 to which she added, "A confrontational government would have said the community invaded the space. A collaborative government would do what we did; we recognized that the space was of the community and for the community. And that it was the community that had the right... to make it their own." Matos, in turn, reminded the audience that "the first point in the objectives of Taller Comunidad LaGoyco is to defend the right to the city, the right to this diverse, vibrant, changing city, which also needs to be inclusive and habitable."

That this was no hollow allusion to the "right to the city" (Lefebvre 1996; Harvey 2012, 137-82) was evident in Matos's subsequent enumeration of the specific ways in which the group had used the space to support the Machuchal community (traditionally low income and aging) during a challenging three-year period. The island had endured two hurricanes, post-disaster mismanagement, earthquakes, the pandemic, and a fiscal crisis and draconian government spending restructuring imposed by Puerto Rico's Financial Oversight and Management Board, a Congress-imposed budget decision-making body that many in the island see as epitomizing Puerto Rico's colonial status (Atiles 2021; Bonilla 2020a; Bonilla and LeBrón 2019; Cabán 2018; Center for Puerto Rican Studies 2020; García-López 2018; Garriga-López 2019, 2020; Morales 2019; Negrón-Muntaner 2018). "It is now that the task of giving shape to this project in a sustainable way begins. We know that the responsibility is big, that the process will be arduous. But we're not afraid, and we're confident that this will result in a better quality of life for our neighborhood."

Seventeen months after the traspaso ceremony, in the morning of January 18, 2022, Tito Matos, the organization's first president and premier placemaking craftsman, died unexpectedly of a heart attack, just moments before leaving home for LaGoyco to start the day's work. A well-known musician and educator, and a key figure in la plena, the Afro-Puerto Rican genre that counts Santurce as one of its cradles (Quintero Herencia 2022), his death became news across the island and in the diaspora (Herrera 2022). His loss leftthe organization shaken. But grief and pain were transformed into action as the group set out to organize a massive funeral at LaGoyco, celebrating Matos's life and contributions. In the wake of Tito's passing, the people of LaGoyco restabilized themselves partly by affirming the place that he had helped them build, a site in which, and with which, to anchor and link their many struggles.

Inspired by the work of TCLG, I present a model that seeks to make sense of what has allowed LaGoyco to flourish in a context of major losses and constraints. I argue that the LaGoyco working group engages in a specific kind of placemaking I call bastion-making. While the term bastion is sometimes associated with the regressive defense of obsolete values (as in "a bastion of male privilege"), it also refers to an architectural feature in fortified military structures that allows for defense from various angles: "a projecting part of a fortification built at an angle to the line of a wall, so as to allow defensive fire in several directions" (as defined by Oxford Languages; see also Keeley et al. 2007). While the first, stronghold-related meaning of bastion as "an institution, place, or person strongly defending or upholding particular principles, attitudes, or activities" (Oxford Languages) is more commonly used (either to celebrate resistance or to denounce obsolescence), here I draw on the second, architectural meaning, with its focus on defense on multiple sides. Beyond its military origin, several connotations make the term attractive to describe contexts involving non-military conflict of some kind.

I take the bastion as a useful analogy to think about some of the sociospatial features that make LaGoyco the protective agent that it has become in the area and about its perceived protective roles in the lives of those involved in the project or impacted by it. Taking a cue from grounded theory's emphasis on the "constant comparison" between observations and emerging concepts (Glaser 2002), I link my observations with the emerging interpretive framework I call the bastion thesis or bastion model of autogestión. According to this model, in geographical contexts characterized by a confluence of crises (economic, ecological, political, public health, mental health), communities facing threats on multiple flanks may respond by forging sociospatial structures that afford protection on multiple fronts. This includes the creation or occupation of settings with a manageable degree of internal differentiation in which participants with reciprocally valued skills, pursuing a variety of community-oriented goals, interact collaboratively on the basis of mutual respect, equitable participation, and a shared understanding of the space they occupy and the goals, needs, and challenges they face. Instead of being pulled apart, dispersed, and demoralized by the threats and precariousness around them, these challenges draw them closer together, as they respond to the interconnected problems they face with a sturdy web of community-oriented projects which support each other by contributing to the mutually beneficial creation of an evolving protective space from which to respond, individually and collectively, to what they're up against.

The bastion model emerged from an analysis of some of the meanings and functions alluded to in interviews and informal conversations with people involved with LaGoyco, as they sought to tackle a variety of challenges stemming from the post-disaster, neoliberal, colonial, and gentrifying context in which they operate. I took seriously and literally a statement I heard often: "somos una comunidad en lucha" ("we are a community in struggle, or in battle"). Used in reference to a community, the phrase en lucha implies taking on adversity and resisting forces that block its attainment of goals or threaten its very existence. While being en lucha can make one think of trincheras, or trenches, bastion seems more appropriate as these are visible in the landscape, while trenches afford protection partly by being concealed below ground level. The same applies to bunkers, which are typically underground. Fortress conveys a sense of enclosure and impenetrability that does not fit with LaGoyco's constant interaction with its surrounding community. It may also conjure images of self-segregating enclaves of privilege, such as gated communities (Low 2001), often associated with the fracturing of social space and the tearing apart of the social fabric rather than its nurturing and strengthening, as arguably is the case with LaGoyco. The terms fort and stronghold refer to fortified structures which in turn may feature bastions in the architectural sense. A bastion in the sense theorized here is not itself a place but is a bastion in relation to a place, a bastion of and for a place. It is the bastion of a community. LaGoyco, then, is a bastion of Machuchal, or at least it is the point where bastionness becomes visible in its landscape.

Naming the Crisis

LaGoyco took shape in response to, and in the heat of, a series of compounding crises and disasters that struck Puerto Rico in short succession, including the debt crisis and the intensification of austerity measures and public spending cuts imposed by the oversight board starting in 2016 (Cabán 2018; Morales 2019), the destructive hurricane season of 2017 which brought Irma and María, "post-disaster" mismanagement and the scandal-ridden period leading to the Ricky Renuncia mobilizations of 2019 (Mazzei and Robles 2019), the earthquakes of early 2020, and the COVID pandemic that started shortly after (Center for Puerto Rican Studies 2020). Attempts at crisis naming have yielded helpful results as scholars have referred to this confluence or piling up of crises in various ways. Whether they refer to it as "permanent crisis" (Garriga-López 2019), "disaster swarm" (Bonilla 2020b), "waves of disaster" (Atiles 2021), "polycrisis" (Zayas del Río 2021, also Morin and Kern 1999), or "catastrophe" (Maldonado-Torres 2019), these authors point to three insights that are relevant to my discussion of TCLG's work: the mutually exacerbating effects that the various crises have had upon each other; the ways in which long legacies of colonialism and corruption helped create the conditions for the precarity and devastation that the crises and disasters revealed; and the overwhelming and disorienting effects of the confluence of crises for those who experienced them. This last point is captured by Bonilla (2020b) when she writes that "[w]hat Puerto Rico, and many of its neighbors, are experiencing might thus best be understood as a 'disaster swarm'-with economic crisis, imperial violence, hurricanes, earthquakes, toxic dumping, climate change, privatization, profiteering, and other forms of structural and systemic violence all acting as a disordered jumble upon a collective body that cannot discern a main event or a discrete set of impacts, only repetitive and enduring trauma" (2).

It is in this collective and subjective context of experience that I would like to inscribe LaGoyco's work and contributions. The bastion model is an attempt to describe spatial aspects of TCLG's efforts at responding to the local, proximal effects that the ecology of threats and vulnerabilities sketched by analysts of these compounding crises have had on the people of Machuchal. By their own description, TCLG's work is organized around three thematic pillars: culture, environment, and health. Each pillar is linked to various dedicated spaces and programming components. Culture, for example, is the focus of La Casa de La Plena, an evolving museum project dedicated to preserving and extending the story of plena, and also of Taller La Ciénaga, a graphic arts workshop where groups of Machuchal residents learn to design and produce their own artwork. More broadly, culture is central to the community's anti-displacement struggle. The environment is the focus of programming around LaGoyco's ecological garden and various local efforts at adapting to and mitigating climate change, including environmental justice and climate justice work. Health is the primary focus of the monthly Feria de Salud y Bienestar, with services catering to older adults in the community, as well as ongoing facilitated conversations focusing on mental health. Each project and space is connected to one or more of the pillars, as the organization strives to reduce collective vulnerability by aligning its areas of strength to existing community needs. For the purposes of this essay, these pillars offer a convenient way of understanding the specific fronts on which TCLG deploys its bastion-like, supportive, protective work within the community.

Autogestión as Response to a Confluence of Crises

Asked to complete the sentence opener "Creemos en" ("We believe in") in late 2019, Mariana Reyes, executive director of LaGoyco, responded "We believe in community action, in autogestión, in the collective creation of solutions, which we basically do from our position, our front. And we've believed in this for a long time, but it is impossible not to say that the hurricane transformed us, and in many ways confirmed the theory that we had that it is starting from the community that things get done, because when there were no other options people went all in and got things done." LaGoyco is one of a substantial number of projects in Puerto Rico that brand themselves as autogestión. While autogestión has been part of community organizing in the island for decades, connected for example to the rescates de terrenos documented by the sociologist Liliana Cotto (2011), various scholars have documented how the creation of grassroots, self-organized, self-managed autogestión projects has become an important strategy to tackle problems in response to government abandonment and mismanagement, especially after María (García-López 2018; Garriga-López 2019, 2020; Klein 2018; Massol Deyá 2019; Ortiz Torres 2020; Roque et al. 2021; Soto Vega 2019; Vélez-Vélez and Villarrubia-Mendoza 2018; Veronesi et al. 2022; Zayas del Río 2021). These projects focus on a wide range of priorities, including natural resource management and environmental justice, disaster recovery, energy independence, agroecology, mutual aid and food justice, community land tenure, community health and wellbeing, culture, and education. The key goals of those involved in autogestión initiatives may also vary, with some viewing it primarily as a collective problem-solving device while others see it as a potentially decolonizing practice that holds the promise of changing social relations and destabilizing colonial forms of thought and action more broadly and deeply (García-López 2018; Garriga-López 2019, 2020; Massol Deyá 2019; Ortiz Torres 2020; Roberto 2019; Soto Vega 2019).

In the 1966 essay "Theoretical Problems of Autogestion," French philosopher and spatial theorist, Henri Lefebvre concludes with four formulaes, the last of which reads, "Autogestion must be studied in two different ways: as a means of struggle, which clears the way; and as a means for the reorganization of society, which transforms it from bottom to top, from everyday life to the State" (2009 [1966], 149). While the term may have been applied differently when Lefebvre wrote about it, these two not mutually exclusive views of autogestión, one more proximal (rooted in immediate struggles) and one more distal and aspirational (pointing to societal transformation), are perhaps a valid description of its dual impetus and meaning among many of those who use the term to describe their own work in the Puerto Rican context. While primarily denoting self-management, self-sufficiency, and a collective do-it-yourself attitude in the absence of state support, it is not uncommon for those involved in autogestión to refer to their projects as being guided by a search for a broader proyecto de país (literally, country project), a sense that while their project may operate at a small scale, it is part of a wider effort toward constructing a shared sustainable future that works at a societal level. This theme came up time and again in my conversations with folks from TCLG and is key for understanding their work. I showcase the story of LaGoyco as one among a plethora of such collaborative efforts operating in the island and documented by other scholars, concrete counterexamples to more fatalistic and disempowering narratives regarding the Island's possible futures, and to upbeat but uncritical narratives that assume things will get better on their own, without questioning or challenging the Island's status quo.

I focus on three of TCLG's spatial practices: 1) the group's dual strategy to secure control over the vacant school, involving both a rescate, or squatting, as well as the pursuit of legal recognition and transfer of property (a trespassing-plus-traspaso approach); 2) the enlisting of the setting itself to solve problems; and 3) the emerging process of bastion-making, in which threats on multiple flanks lead to the creation of sociospatial structures that afford protection on multiple fronts, as contiguous co-evolving projects strengthen each other by contributing to the community-protecting role of the bastion as a whole.

Bastion-making doesn't happen in a vacuum, and local histories and struggles may invest bastion-prone sites with prior meanings. In Puerto Rico, bastions can be connected to a long tradition of site-specific spatial practices of resistance. The history of rescates de terrenos from the late 1960's to the 1980's (Cotto 2011), for example, may be relevant to understanding the rescates de escuelas (Encarnación Martínez 2023) of recent years, including LaGoyco. While I do not claim that space-making of the sort described in this essay applies to every autogestión or rescate project, I believe the case of LaGoyco suggests that a focus on spatial practices may be productively applied elsewhere.

The empirical material for this essay comes from participant observation and interviews with members of the LaGoyco working group and some of their collaborators, collected primarily between the spring 2019 and the summer of 2022, and is presented through vignettes highlighting key moments in the life of the organization. These include their responses to a series of upheavals as they sought to bring stability and protection to the neighborhood of Machuchal and to their own lives in the precarious context created by the mix of disaster, infrastructural breakdown, and government dysfunction that characterized the observed period. Some vignettes are based on direct participant observation and others are reconstructions based on analysis of interviews, news sources, and the organization's documentation of their work on social media. A series of high points are intertwined with blows that shook but also strengthened the webs of meaning and collaboration that are central to their story as they see it.

Full disclosure: Tito Matos was my dear friend for over two decades and this essay also wants to be a tribute to his memory. I interviewed Tito multiple times for this project, by himself and with his partner of more than twenty years, Mariana Reyes Angleró. Encouraged by ethnographic reflections about the non-incompatibility and potentially fruitful combination of friendship and fieldwork (van der Geest 2015; Tillman-Healy 2003; Spradley 2016), in the last part of the essay I offer a more personal account of Tito's contributions, sharing my long-standing sense of gratitude at counting among my friends this unique laborer of Puerto Rican culture who, with his dexterous hands, Protean intellect, don de gentes, and seemingly infinite energy, helped build the rudiments from which LaGoyco was born. I use Tito's example to reflect on the role of individual agency in placemaking and bastion-making, and as a corrective, counterbalancing element vis-à-vis the emphasis on the power of place and "nonhuman actors" that resulted from the theoretical commitments that undergirded my research when I started this project.3

Osamentas

Osamenta is an art project by photographer Herminio Rodríguez in which "abandoned public and private commercial building interiors can be seen as a metaphor of current Puerto Rico's socio-economic situation" (@osamentapr, 2020, Instagram; Redacción 80grados 2020). Started in 2016, it features one picture of an abandoned building from each of Puerto Rico's seventy-eight municipalities. The social life of each building's better days is still discernible in Rodríguez's pictures but is captured in a sort of discarded, decommissioned state, as if abruptly abandoned during the Island's fall from modernist progress, now partially collapsed and overtaken by vegetation, humidity, graffiti, and natural light. The irreducible materiality of what remains is seen in high relief, and the pictures have the feel of an archaeological immersion into a very recent past, one very much present in the minds of island residents during the period, when ubiquitous abandoned residential and commercial spaces were constant reminders of Puerto Rico's steady economic and demographic decline. While the word osamenta translates as bones or skeleton, in the island it often means not huesos or esqueletos in general, but the bare bones of a long dead individual, as may be found in an archaeological site-what remains when life and flesh are gone.

For over two years, the former Pedro G. Goyco elementary school in Santurce's calle Loíza, was a place like that, an osamenta of the sort documented by Rodríguez: vacant, decaying, leftbehind. While it was closed, however, its future was being eagerly discussed by neighbors of Machuchal, keen on not letting the building go unused indefinitely. Designed by Carlos del Valle Zeno, a prominent early twentieth century architect, and named fter Pedro Gerónimo Goyco Cebollero y Sabanetas, an abolitionist doctor trained in Paris (Goyco Camoerga 2020), the school opened in 1923, serving the community for 92 years before its closing in 2015. In a letter from May of that year, then Puerto Rico secretary of Education notified the principal that the school "has been considered for consolidation" ("ha sido considerada para consolidación") and students reassigned to other schools in the area (Román Meléndez 2015). The letter contains a cryptic list of criteria used in making the determination, including "structuration of the system," "the number of students," and "location," as well as the names of the schools scheduled to receive La Goyco's last students. While the closing of La Goyco preceded the avalanche of school closings that took place under a subsequent secretary of Education (Katz and Alhindawi 2019), it is difficult not to see it as part of a longer process that Brusi and Godreau (2019) have called the "dismantling of public education" in the island.

Initially some neighbors sought to bolster community resistance to the closing, arguing that a public school was essential to the wellbeing of the community. Eventually the effort morphed into calls to keep the school building in local hands, as a community-managed space of some sort. Not long after the closing, in the summer of 2015, a group of neighbors drafted a proposal for the municipality, seeking to repurpose the school as a center that could house the various cultural, civic, and environmental groups and initiatives already operating in the area, as well as provide space for local micro-empresas (small, locally owned businesses). The core of the group behind the proposal was a self-designated Comité PR37, which organized the Fiesta de la Calle Loíza, an annual street fair that attracted thousands of visitors in its four installments, before Hurricane María derailed what would have been the fifth (Roldán Soto 2016). Named after the old road from San Juan to Carolina (whose local section in Santurce is called calle Loíza), the Comité's experience organizing the annual fiesta helped cement connections among neighbors who were active around various issues affecting the area, including waste management, abandoned properties, safety issues, and starting in 2015, the closing of the neighborhood school.

Two years after the proposal for a community center had been submitted to the municipality, however, it was uncertain whether the group would be granted access to the facility. Their plans to de-ossify the school, dislodging it, as it were, from its osamenta state, had been put on hold.

Traspasos and Trespassings

In Puerto Rico, the phrase hacer el traspaso refers to the act of signing la escritura (the deed), a legal document that binds signatories to the transfer of property from one part to another. Traspaso is also a false friend of the English word trespassing, or the unlawful entry into land or property. It is reasonable to say that the story of LaGoyco may have involved traspasos of both kinds, and that both-the achievement of the legal transfer of the property to the organization and the "trespassing" involved in the practice of squatting or rescates (Cotto 2011)-hold important meaning in the story of LaGoyco as understood by its members.

In the wake of hurricanes Irma and María and given a widespread sense of government dysfunction and institutional abandonment, calls for the school to be repurposed as a space to support the community took on new meaning and urgency. In early 2018, perhaps driven by the general sense of outrage at the slowness of recovery, the group decided they had waited long enough. In a quick series of events, the lock on the front gate of LaGoyco was disposed of and members of the group went in to assess the general condition of the school two years and two hurricanes after its closure. The old lock was replaced by a new one, with two keys. One was given to the municipality. The other one, the group let the municipality know, TCLG would keep, as they had no plans to leave. Two years later, at the signing ceremony, the mayor referenced this trespassing directly, candidly characterizing it as a direct consequence of her administration's slow response: "Como nosotros nos tardamos, la comunidad abrió los portones y se adueñó de la escuela". To this, she later added: "What is happening at La Goyco is empowerment in its best form" where "the government is a platform for the people and gets out of the way when people are doing what they need to do."

Some months after the unlocking, in a meeting with the community at LaGoyco in the fall of 2018, the mayor publicly agreed to the group's request to transfer la titularidad to Taller Comunidad LaGoyco. But it would be two years before the agreement petitioned became reality. The contained, masked, socially distanced format of the traspaso ceremony in August 2020 only imperfectly concealed the emotions that overcame group members as they reached the awaited milestone.

Placemaking in the Age of Social Distancing?

The first time I visited LaGoyco, in April 2019, it was for a walking interview with Mariana, the executive director of the project. My audio recording from that day is filled with Mariana's aspirational statements about what would take place and where, if the group's plans came to fruition. "Esto aquí va a ser..." and "aquí va a haber...", she declared matter-of-factly while pointing at nondescript nooks in what was still a vacant and run down school building.

During the ensuing months, while on sabbatical leave, I visited LaGoyco dozens of times, attending meetings and events, talking to as many folks involved in the project as I could. One meeting from the period stands out. Dubbed el Desayunión, it was the first official gathering of the entire LaGoyco community, following a concerted effort to reach out to all potentially interested organizations operating in the area. It took place on August 24, 2019, almost exactly one month after former Governor Ricardo Rosselló stepped down following massive protests triggered by the publication of a controversial chat leaked to the press earlier that summer (Mazzei and Robles 2019). The liberating optimism of the successful Ricky Renuncia national mobilization was still in the air and felt congruent with the more immediate and local optimism regarding LaGoyco as a common project. No one could have imagined that in six months the Island and much of the world would come to an abrupt stop and meetings such as el Desayunión would cease to take place altogether.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started in March 2020, my project became per force one involving remote fieldwork (Devine-Wright et al. 2020). But limitations led to new questions, in particular, what happens to placemaking projects such as LaGoyco in the context of social distancing? Would it continue to feel relevant to its members or would it fall apart in the face of new challenges and priorities? The story of how the group adapted to the new restrictions to continue their work gave me the answer. Just days into the lockdown, a panoply of online programs began broadcasting via LaGoyco's Facebook page, including bomba and plena workshops, yoga classes, and a literary program (Pan de libros). Free psychological tele-consultations were set up with a psychotherapist volunteering with TCLG. In the ensuing weeks, musicians, actors, and visual artists (some with funding from Santurce's Museo de Arte Contemporáneo) produced creative content responding to the pandemic, catering to children and older adults from Machuchal and beyond. Sessions were organized to assist neighbors in completing applications for various pandemic relief assistance programs. Groups of volunteers helped distribute masks and bags of groceries provided by the municipality. As the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum following the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, the cultural programming also emphasized issues related to racial justice. When COVID tests became available, the front yard of LaGoyco became a testing site for the community. As vaccines became available to older adults and vulnerable groups in early 2021, LaGoyco served as one of the first vaccination sites in the area. The pandemic, together with the earthquakes of January 2020, tested TCLG's organizational effectiveness and forced the group to hone their capacity for coordinated action online and on site. Through it all, LaGoyco's work did not stop.

Direct service to the community, however, was not all that was taking place with the organization. When I was finally able to return to the Island more than a year after my last pre-COVID visit, in April 2021, LaGoyco was a place transformed. I had followed the online programming showcased on the organization's social media and learned about the community service from the participants with whom I had stayed in touch. What I had not seen or registered was all the on-site space-making labor that Tito, together with folks from Laboratorio Comején, Taller La Ciénaga, La Casa de la Plena, and other groups within LaGoyco had been doing tras bastidores all along. The place was brimming with activity and the collaborative conduciveness afforded by the school building, with its enclosed but internally open spatial organization, was now in plain view. During the long period in which the life of LaGoyco appeared to be mostly online, the sanctioned social distancing and behind-the-scenes discretion afforded by the school building design allowed participants to continue working on the facility, creating the spaces that Mariana had conjured up in the walking interview two years before. This time Tito gave me the tour, showing me the comedor resiliente, co-working spaces, rehearsal and recording rooms, library, ecological garden, main offices, and the soon to be inaugurated Casa de la Plena, all under construction and yet all working, each niche connected to projects and people inside LaGoyco and out, part of an evolving, multi-functional sociospatial structure set in motion collectively and held in place by all. The old vacant school had stopped being an osamenta and in its place a bastion was fast taking shape.

Enlisting "The Setting Itself" to Solve Problems

In the span of a few years, TCLG has scored several important victories, including the successful transfer of the school's proprietary title, an expanding set of community-oriented programs, securing funds to grow their staffand improve the physical structure, creating a forum for the community to address their problems, and becoming an important venue in the cultural life of San Juan and a recognized voice among organizations seeking to advance social and environmental justice in the Island. A less obvious achievement, but one that may shed light on the overall sense that things are working is how the organization has managed to transfer some of the agency needed to do all this work to the setting itself, linking the practices, programs, and shared meanings that make up the everyday life of LaGoyco to niches in the available physical structure in ways that make it easier for participants to build on prior work and collaborate with others. The sense that things are working comes in part from the fact that things and settings have been effectively put to work.

One example of this setting in motion and putting-to-work of the setting, is the creation of La Casa de la Plena. Initially connected to Tito's cultural work as a musician and cultural educator, la plena has been a central element in LaGoyco's identity and character from the outset, figuring prominently in their programming, activism, and the quotidian soundscape of the site. The idea of creating a museum of la plena had been discussed by Tito and others for years before LaGoyco existed. But the possibility of using a former classroom in the premises to start what could have seemed initially like a pilot version of the bigger project, in Santurce, and just steps away from Laboratorio Comején, the tinkering workshop where some of the furnishings for the museum could be built, allowed Tito and his collaborators to narrow in on specific steps to get the project offthe ground. Items received from various collections could be organized and displayed and new tasks could be assigned and works commissioned in light of what the available space afforded. Once operative, the place would become a key node for plena educators and enthusiasts and develop its own programming within LaGoyco.

The same applies to the comedor resiliente. When the opportunity to establish a resilient center at LaGoyco arose, the group decided to use the first available funds (provided by the San Juan Bay Estuary Program, an environmental nonprofit organization collaborating with LaGoyco) to re-equip the old school kitchen and to make the space energy self-sufficient with solar panels and batteries donated by a local company, turning the old school lunchroom not just into the main meeting place but also into a shelter equipped to function as such in case of an emergency.

Several other "moving parts" of LaGoyco grew organically as well, from the projects that group members were already engaged in, and were embedded at the site in ways that were both relatively autonomous and richly integrated to the whole. But others took shape under pressure and in the context of emergency, like the organization's multifaceted response during COVID, described earlier, which enlisted participants' talents, the building's affordances (internal open space, privacy, storage space, central location), and other actors (the municipality, several professional associations) to support community health and wellbeing.

On all these fronts (connected to the culture, environment, and health pillars), enlisting the setting itself to solve problems means that some of the organizational challenges faced by the group were transformed into spatial problems for which spatial/temporal strategies and solutions could be devised, developed, and deployed, giving participants concrete ways to tackle problems on site. In arguing this, I draw inspiration from behavior settings theory (Barker 1968), an approach within my field of environmental psychology.4 Harry Heft(2013) describes behavior settings as "extraindividual, eco-behavioral structures that serve as a ground for much of public social life" (165). The term eco-behavioral, coined by Roger Barker (1968), refers to the idea that these structures are "constituted by physical features and social action" (Heft2013, 165; my emphasis). Behavior settings emerge in space and over time as particular spaces, things, goals, norms, and social scripts are functionally linked by their users. Traditional behavior settings research looked at classrooms, courtrooms, post offices, or grocery stores as examples that showed the meaningful patterning of social life in time and space. But the concept has rarely been mobilized to account for work done within social justice or spatial justice activism. In the case of LaGoyco, as settings took a life of their own, many of the challenges that the organization took up became tractable partly by transforming them into spatial programming decisions that were in turn partly held in place by the setting, as described by behavior settings theory, allowing participants to optimize ongoing tasks and take on new challenges in a manageable way.

Actor-Network Theory (Latour 2006; Law 2002) also provides a useful lens for understanding what works at LaGoyco. Starting in the late 1980's, French sociologist Bruno Latour and others argued that by focusing almost exclusively on human actors, social scientists had systematically overlooked the often-crucial role of objects, materials, and networks-or "nonhuman actors"-in shaping social life, leading to an excessively anthropocentric understanding of how the social world works. As an alternative, Latour compels us to find ways of "making objects participants in the course of action" (2006, 73) in the accounts we offer in social theory and social science. In the case of LaGoyco, this suggests that the tools, furnishings, architectural features, infrastructural systems, energy sources, and symbolic materials that participants assemble, repair, retool, link up, and recombine in the process of bringing their projects to life at the site are not mere accessories but key ingredients in creating the world-in-the-making that LaGoyco has become in the area.

In light of these approaches, I argue that TCLG has effectively enlisted the setting itself to create a hybrid, multifront, protective sociospatial structure, a bastion, composed of and held in place by people, settings, and things, from which, and with which, participants make sense and respond to a host of social-ecological challenges resulting from the intersecting crises of the observed period. "Hybrid" also means that the sociospatial structure is not only made by people but partly made of people, an assemblage of human and nonhuman actors, involving interlinked settings, programs, and projects from which participants explore forms of protective placemaking that support individual and collective wellbeing in the ecology of threats and opportunities in which they make their stand.5

Placemaking and Bastion-Making

Folks from LaGoyco do a great job at telling their own story, as exemplified in Otero Garabís (2021), Matos and Quintero (2022), and their YouTube channel. My more modest aim here is to highlight aspects of that story that can be illuminated by a sociospatial perspective, focusing on the organization's spatial and placemaking practices. The term placemaking is widely used to describe place-related processes in locations around the globe, across disciplines and from a variety of perspectives (Amirzadeh and Sharifi2024; Courage et al. 2021; Seamon 2018; Strydom et al. 2018). Reviewing work from architecture, planning/design, and the social sciences, Strydom et al. identify

a shiftfrom an understanding of placemaking as "physical end-product due to a design strategy" to placemaking as a "democratic intervention" with a focus on "the active involvement of all interested parties" (2018, 166). After 2010, they observe, the meaning of the term has been transformed into "community practice in which individuals have been empowered to learn and share skills" and can be understood as an "enabling tool" and "a practice that is not limited to experts" and "can be performed by ordinary people" (2018, 174-75). Toolis (2017) theorizes "critical placemaking" as "a tool for reclaiming public space" against privatization. Placemaking processes can contribute to "transforming community narratives" and "resisting systems of oppression" (184) and can act as a platform for "dialogue, conscientization and empowerment" to counter the erosion and privatization of public space (184). In a more troubled account, Burns and Berbary (2021) see placemaking as often entailing the actual "unmaking" of place. Reviewing various self-described placemaking initiatives in Canada and the US, the authors point to how placemaking work often "fails to account for the ways that placemaking is complicit in the historic and pervasive violences of systemic racism, settler colonialism, gentrification, and socioeconomic elitism" (644). They challenge 'the feel-good story' often associated with placemaking, understood as "a collaborative process by which we can shape our public realm to maximize shared value" (Project for Public Spaces 2018). Among other issues, a view of placemaking as inherently positive "inappropriately celebrates the coming-together of diverse stakeholders without scrutinizing the power dynamics involved in holding a stake in the first place" (646).

Considering these insights, and aware that the concept is often mobilized in ways that seem more accurately described as "place branding" and "place marketing" (Vuignier 2017), I anchor placemaking in a spatial justice perspective (Soja 2009, 2013). Geographer Edward Soja understood spatial justice as "the fair and equitable distribution in space of socially valued resources and opportunities to use them" (2009, 3) and as "a conception of social justice in which geography matters in significant ways" (2013, 75). Thus, I focus on the case of LaGoyco as an example of grassroots placemaking processes in which a community seeks to uphold a sense of place in ways that allow them to confront and denounce processes that threaten their collective wellbeing, including institutional abandonment, gentrification and displacement, and what in the next section I consider as recolonization. LaGoyco's brand of placemaking, what I call bastion-making, is an example of "seeking spatial justice" in a post-disaster, neoliberal, colonial context.

The making of the places that are relevant to LaGoyco (Machuchal, la Loíza, Santurce), however, is grounded in long and complex histories of migration, economic hardship, labor and political activism, cultural production, and urban splendor, decay, and rekindling (Picó 2014; Aponte Torres 2023 [1985]) that lie outside the scope of this essay. While here I focus on a specific setting (LaGoyco) within these places, I understand the broader placemaking processes at stake to include the richly connected way in which that setting (or constellation of settings) has enmeshed itself in the sociospatial life of la Loíza, Machuchal, and Santurce, as well as a much wider geography, reaching places near and far, in the Island and the diaspora.

LaGoyco then is a bastion, understood as a set of affordances or "action possibilities" and functional meanings (Heft2013) emerging in an environment characterized by a confluence of perceived threats and vulnerabilities. In such context, a variety of factors lead participants to believe in their ability to defend their place, including the existence of substantial cultural and social capital (Bourdieu 2018), the creation of shared environmental meaning (Rapoport 1990), a strong sense of collective efficacy (Bandura 2000), and an orientation toward autogestión (Lefebvre 2009 [1966]; Massol Deyá 2019). By coupling the affordances of the available physical structure with the meanings and programmatic goals of their spatial justice-inspired autogestión project, TCLG has transformed a languishing osamenta into a living bastion, one meaningfully connected to the neighborhood whose mission it is to serve , as well as to a broad network of similarly inspired projects in Santurce, the San Juan metropolitan area, and throughout the Island. Bastions may afford not only actual material and logistical support to a community on various fronts, but enough perceived stability and protection to allow it to respond coherently to a host of disparate threats in a context of intersecting crises. Even if the proximity, hostility, imminence, or seriousness of the threats themselves (extreme weather events, gentrification-driven displacement, colonial dispossession) do not change directly in response to the spatial practices and sociospatial patterning described here as bastion-making, what is proposed is that such practices likely leftparticipants better able to respond to the compounding crises of the observed period by allowing them to understand, organize, and energize their community-protective activities and roles more effectively.

Bastions, Barricades, Crises, and Time

In his book on networked protest, sociologist Manuel Castells (2012) traces the meaning of barricadas, or barricades, to a long tradition in the 19th century which he considers relevant to understanding the Occupy and Arab Spring movements of 2011-2012. He argues that while barricades have historically had "very little defense value" (10), often becoming "easy targets" that end up attracting aggression, they have important symbolic meaning. For Castells, they signal the kind of "spaces of autonomy" that he sees as a hallmark of emerging movements "in the internet age," in their quest to create "spaces for deliberation," a "free community" and "instant communities of transformative practice" (11). While a bastion in the sense discussed here is not a barricade in Castells's sense, the aspiration to create spaces of autonomy is common to both, as is the implication that creating and maintaining such spaces means that they must be defended. Bastions, however, aspire to be more enduring than barricades, which are typically abandoned or removed when the battle moves elsewhere.

In their introduction to Aftershocks: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm, Bonilla and LeBrón (2019) challenge the view of disasters as linear and as having a sharp starting point. Disasters, they propose, ought to be understood as "cumulative and ongoing" (2). From this, we may reason that responses and solutions that are effective and desirable should also be cumulative and ongoing, focused on fostering stability and continuity of support over time, helping communities better navigate "the temporal logics of emergency" (Bonilla 2020a). In this sense, bastions may help communities withstand disasters and their "aftershocks" not only on multiple fronts but on different tempos, responding quickly to sudden blows while nurturing the community over time, in the face of looming ecological, economic, and socio-political threats. I was able to see this firsthand in early 2020, as the earthquakes that affected primarily the southern region of Puerto Rico also disrupted electricity service across the Island, including in Santurce. On social media and by word of mouth, LaGoyco announced that the comedor resiliente would be open to the public. Dozens came to have food, charge their phones, or use the comedor as a working space, as the organization also collected donated goods to bring to the more affected areas in the south. In retrospect, the organization's response to the earthquakes helped them prepare for the more extended and complex response (described earlier) required by the COVID pandemic that started not long after.

But responding to emergencies in Machuchal has required TCLG to engage with many actors for the benefit of the community. In the aftermath of María, given the disastrous mismanagement that characterized the central government's response, and countless self-organized neighbors and communities were forced to take care of their own in conditions of institutional abandonment, the slogan "sólo el pueblo salva al pueblo" ("only the people save the people"), often associated with autogestión, took on a profound resonance, and for some time sounded like a demonstrated fact. Often enough, however, many self-described autogestión projects seem to remain agnostic as to whether government or non-governmental entities, such as philanthropic foundations, can play a part in solving the people's problems. Instead, they simply respond to existing needs and opportunities by prioritizing local solutions and engaging municipal, state, or not-for-profit actors, if needed, pragmatically and on a case-by-case basis. Like other organizations embracing autogestión, LaGoyco adopts such a pragmatic approach, while also retaining some of the outsider, squatter aura that gives it part of its credibility with project participants who prefer a more marginal relationship with official institutions, especially given the colonial context. This is seen, for example, in the earlier discussion of TCLG's efforts to secure control of the school, involving a dual trespassing-plus-traspaso approach, squatter ethic and legal strategy.

To the extent that it characterizes the work of LaGoyco, then, bastion-making is a pattern of grassroots placemaking that is inherently vigilant and potentially combative, taking a cautious and selectively collaborative stance, informed by an inherently ambivalent relation to power, wary about the risk of being co-opted, silenced, or complicitous, while also cautiously engaging state and nonprofit/philanthropic actors, embracing a pragmatic view of resource-seeking in a neoliberal context of reduced public budgets and austerity.

El Muro, The Right to the City and Recolonization

There is a six-foot tall cement wall along the sidewalk that passes in front of LaGoyco, separating the school from the rest of la calle Loíza. Over the years TCLG has used the outer side of the wall as a mural space where artists from the community create messages on themes of concern to the neighborhood including displacement, post-hurricane recovery, and mental health. Sometime before the pandemic, however, Tito and others in the organization were weighing whether it would be a good idea to have the wall removed. In their view, tumbar el muro (tearing down the wall) would broadcast a message of unequivocal openness to the community, signaling to neighbors, especially older residents, that the school was now theirs, and transforming the front area of LaGoyco into valuable public space. Others saw risks: the front space could become yet another source of nuisances in a neighborhood already affected by safety and noise-related issues associated with several after-hour businesses operating in the area. Losing a clear boundary could also leave LaGoyco less able to control entry and perhaps more vulnerable to vandalism.

The dialogue over what to do about the wall showed that members understood the physical space of the school as malleable and as conveying meanings that could be shaped. An overarching meaning guiding much of the group's work from the beginning has been the notion of the right to the city, which has broad appeal among anti-gentrification activists around the world. In adducing it as the first point in their mission, as mentioned by Tito at the traspaso ceremony, TCLG situates its work within a broader international movement to reclaim urban space. Coined by Henri Lefebvre (1996), the right to the city is invoked in struggles against forces that threaten to enclose city space, either by making it unaffordable for long-term residents or through the privatization of public spaces, considered crucial for the flourishing of democratic culture (Mitchell 2003; Merrifield 2013). Admittedly, at first glance, tearing down a wall, as Tito and others wanted to do at LaGoyco, would seem like a right-to-the-city thing to do if what's behind the wall is something good and worth sharing. On the other hand, there is a tension between the radical openness evoked by the assertion of a right to the city in general and the boundary-setting and "place-protecting" processes (Devine-Wright 2009) that characterize right-to-the-city activism when it arises in response to the specific threat of displacement faced by a concrete community. Which leads to the questions, whose right and what kind of right is the right to the city?

Theorists who have tackled these questions (Attoh 2011; Harvey 2012; Marcuse 2014; Merrifield 2013) usually understand the right to the city as a collective right, rather than an individual one. But as geographer Andy Merrifield asserts, "[t]he right in question isn't a right for everybody but rather one that must pivot on two axes, on two sections of society, those excluded from the plenty all around them, and those discriminated against; in short, the exploited and the oppressed, the deprived and the discontented" (2013, 25). In Machuchal, those most vulnerable and whose right to the city it is most crucial to defend are the long-term residents, many of them working class, many of them Dominican, whom LaGoyco's declared mission it is to serve. This illustrates the extent to which defending the right to the city often means defending a particular community's "right to stay put" (Hartman 2002 [1984]), the right of local residents to remain in place, even if "market forces" want them out. In such context, the wall, an otherwise vilified architectural element associated with social, political, or racial exclusion (Dinzey Flores 2013) may also operate as a symbol of resistance, a marker, as the rest of LaGoyco, of certain sociospatial sturdiness in a context where the threat of displacement activates fears of erasure of the community or its transformation beyond recognition. The wall protects the integrity of the bastion, which protects, or aspires to protect, the integrity of the neighborhood in turn.

Gentrification as Recolonization

In Santurce, as in Puerto Rico more broadly, displacement has become more visible in the context of the rising popularity of short-term rentals (STRs). The role of unregulated STRs as drivers of gentrification, elevating costs and exacerbating displacement, has been studied in locations around the world (Wachsmuth and Weisler 2018; Grisdale 2021; Gant 2016), including Puerto Rico (Santiago Bartolomei et al. 2022). Folks from TCLG understand that gentrification and the STR boom are part of a pattern seen in cities elsewhere. However, given the colonial conditions in which these happen in the Puerto Rican context, many of them experience the changes-closing of neighborhood businesses along la Loíza, wholesale acquisition of housing units by short-term rental investors, increasing presence of beneficiaries of tax-incentive laws designed to attract outside investors to move to the Island (Rivera Sánchez 2024)-as a sort of second American invasion, a new round of colonial dispossession, perhaps a form of colonial re-occupation or what I would call recolonization.

We can conceptualize recolonization as involving a new round of colonial "accumulation by dispossession" (Harvey 2003) characterized by a perceivable degree of spatial and demographic reconfiguration (gentrification, displacement) in which the fundamental colonial relationship is reasserted or deepened while at the same time remaining fundamentally unchanged. Recolonization entails an oppressive reduction of the space in which Puerto Ricans can live. This reduction results from a drastic drop in access to affordable housing, more expensive daily living, and a growing sense of becoming second class citizens in their own land. In the context of Puerto Rico, still a US colony, the term recolonization seems appropriate to describe the perception of a reassertion of American presence, enabled and incentivized by the local government, especially following Hurricane María, with significant tax-incentives and a courting discourse directed at 'high value' potential settlers in which the island was presented as a blank canvas for investors.

This articulation of a contemporary global trend with a longer history of colonial presence and subjugation colors the lived experience and meaning of gentrification in Santurce and arguably around the Island, as new instances of displacement are seen by many as contributing, intentionally or not, to a pattern of de facto population substitution. This contextual meaning of the threat of displacement also shapes TCLG's understanding of its mission in relation to Machuchal. The multi-front, right-to-the-city inspired placemaking work of the organization-their bastion-making-seeks to build an assertive sense of stability and protection in a context of general vulnerability and infrastructural breakdown, seen by many as a sort of expulsion technology leading to the massive removal of Puerto Ricans not just from the city but from the Island.

Among the most odious entries in the Telegram chat that galvanized the uprising that led to the ousting of former Governor Ricky Rosselló in the summer of 2019, was one "I see the future and it is splendid. There are no Puerto Ricans" (translated and quoted in Negrón-Muntaner 2018; also Valentín Ortiz and Minet 2019). Infamously fantasized by one of Rosselló's advisers, and shared without pushback in the ex-governor's inner circle chat, the remark lent credence to the sense shared by many that a massive exodus was more than merely an unwanted effect of Puerto Rico's long economic downturn, and that from the standpoint of some powerful local players and their political project, the overall demographic pattern (Puerto Ricans leaving the Island and 'high value' Americans moving in) was not just good, it was "splendid."

This theme is part of the symbolically charged atmosphere of the broader sociopolitical and ecological context in which members of the LaGoyco working group make their stand, a context that, I argue, could be helpful to understand in terms of recolonization. LaGoyco's bastion-making work and affirmation of a right to the city ought to be understood as connected to a broader claim for spatial justice in the context of an expansion of colonial presence and power in the Island. Their right to the city activism is ultimately about a broader right to the Island, the right to stay put of the people of Puerto Rico.

The Bastion-Makers

The relationship between friendship and fieldwork has been a subject of debate in the social sciences, mainly among cultural anthropologists, whose use of the ethnographic method requires sustained contact with participants, which often leads to lasting friendships. According to Jsaak van der Geest, "[a]nthropologists are divided over the question of whether intimacy is an advantage or an obstacle when doing ethnography" (2015, 6). While most examples considered involve friendships that emerged during fieldwork (Driessen 1998), Spradley (2016) discusses the challenges of "making informants out of friends" (28). But he doesn't rule out its possibility: "[a] skilled, experienced ethnographer can often work with friends, relatives, or acquaintances, but such traditional roles will always create certain difficulties" (28). Lisa Tillman (2003) tackles the challenge head on in her discussion of "friendship as method," offering examples of the potential ethnographic value of friendships that predate fieldwork, despite the widely held assumption that friendship is contrary to the distancing required for objective research. Summarizing Tillman's argument, van der Geest states that "her message is not: make friends to get better data, but: carry out research among your friends" (2015, 6).

While my goals are more modest than to write a full ethnography, these reflections help me make sense of my experience working with friends on this project and resonate with me especially in light of Tito's passing. I interviewed Tito multiple times for this project, both with Mariana and by himself. He was an excellent communicator and a sophisticated thinker, a true organic intellectual, deeply rooted in his artistic community, with an action-oriented sense of solidarity and an uncompromising anti-colonial stance. It is safe to say that all his work was connected to a profound awareness of the need to overcome disempowering narratives that make colonialism self-perpetuating and seemingly inescapable and his sense that taking and making space was a key strategy for combating it.

Tito's relationship with the space of LaGoyco became more intimate over time. A month or so after the traspaso, he candidly and almost impatiently told me he couldn't wait for his term as board president to end, so that he could focus entirely on the "planta física" ("the building itself"). With years of experience working in construction in various capacities and a BA in landscape architecture, he had been the self-appointed custodian and maestro de obras of the project all along and wanted to be able to focus on that work. The century-old school building would keep him busy.

Bastion-making is, of course, a collective effort, attributable to the group as a whole. But Tito's passing laid bare the colossal amount of work that a single individual took up in making LaGoyco a reality, growing the place and keeping it running so that others could focus on their own tasks. In many ways, he was the bastion-maker par excellence. Crystalized in the spaces of LaGoyco are the labor, creative energies, wisdom, and profound commitment to collective agency and anti-colonial struggle of this rather special artist and activist, a walking collection of tenacities, driven by a desire to make things work and figure things out together with others, in the spirit of autogestión. Tito's anti-colonial stance regarding Puerto Rico's non-sovereignty is key to understanding his many contributions, including to LaGoyco. His cultural activism was grounded on the idea that la plena and later LaGoyco were means of resistance and tools against the erasure of Puerto Rican culture.

The irony of ending this essay with a eulogy to the creative power of a single individual is not lost on me. I set out to write a story about the power of place and the power of settings, a place-centered story, showing how a relatively new organization infused new life into a vacant school building which helped sustain their project in turn, holding things in place for them as they took on their daily struggles. Places make people as much as people make places, was my mildly counter-intuitive argument, along the lines of Winston Churchill's often-quoted assertion that "first we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us." While I have sought to adopt a distributed sense of agency in my account, shifting some of the explanatory weight onto the setting along the lines of behavior settings and actor-network theory, the story of LaGoyco owes much to the two specific individuals that led the collective effort and helped invest the project with meaning and sense of direction from the beginning. Consistently across interviews and informal conversations with LaGoyco participants, Tito and Mariana were credited with playing the crucial leading roles right from the start of the project. My focus on the power of place led to a focus on the power of a group to stir their placemaking powers to support a community, which leads back to the remarkable contributions of two individuals to the collective process that resulted in LaGoyco.

At a more general theoretical level, the bastion model connects with classic questions in fields interested in space and place regarding the relationship between social processes and spatial form (Harvey 2010 [1973], 2012; Low 2016): to what extent do space or settings themselves have effects on their own (on behavior, social interaction, wellbeing) and to what extent is it through social processes that spaces acquire meanings or functions worth discussing? Does affirming the centrality of meaning in people's relationships to the built environment (Rapoport 1990) imply that empty spaces somehow cease to be places? In the context of this essay, photographer Herminio Rodríguez's osamentas would seem to lay to rest any simplistic argument about the meaning or power of the place itself. Osamenta is a direct reminder of the extent to which places and settings are brought to life by people, and much of what they are is suspended when abandoned. But at the same time, LaGoyco is an example of how at least some osamentas may remain in a dormant state, a material afterlife that may end up being just an interlude in a longer story of artifactual uses, retaining its capacity to anchor a community's imagined futures of one kind or another. As other rescued spaces in Puerto Rico today, LaGoyco stands as living testament that sometimes, with strong collective will and coordinated effort, osamentas may come back to life and become something else, including bastions.6

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to express my deep gratitude to the many members of the LaGoyco working group and others who generously sat with me for interviews and informal conversations. Especially important has been the continued dialogue with Mariana Reyes Angleró, the executive director of LaGoyco and arguably the project's primary force from the beginning, whose leadership, vision, and courage, even in times of deep personal loss and intense grief, has been inspiring throughout. I also thank colleagues at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY) for supporting a sabbatical leave (2019-2020) that made the project feasible and three anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions.

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Footnote

NOTES

1 I use "La Goyco" to refer to the school as it existed before the group occupied it, and "LaGoyco" (no space, italicized) to refer to the community center and broader project initiated by TCLG.

2 This and subsequent translations from Spanish are mine.

3 Except for Tito and Mariana, whose names are publicly associated with LaGoyco and to whom I will refer by their first names, all other names have been removed to comply with confidentiality protocols.

4 Environmental psychology is an interdisciplinary field interested in the mutually constitutive transactions of people and their environments (Gifford 2014). The field's focus on physical settings informs some of my assumptions in this essay, specifically, that physical settings are part of psychological experience (both individually and collectively); that settings may support (or hinder) psychological functioning and well-being; that in contexts of crisis, the potentially stabilizing, psychologically protective role of settings may become crucial; and that place-making may itself have protective effects.

5 Within urban studies some have raised the concern that using actor-network theory to describe small scale urban phenomena may lead researchers away from more structural and systemic analysis (Brenner et al. 2012). To avoid this risk, I have framed TCLG's bastion-making work as a pattern of response to the confluence of crises described earlier, rooted as these are in structural and systemic factors, from disaster capitalism and colonialism to climate change.

6 I want to acknowledge El Bastión, a cultural organization operating in Viejo San Juan whose work I was unfamiliar with when I started using the terms bastion and bastion-making to refer to the work of LaGoyco and the model presented here.