“The last straw”: Motivations of first-time protesters during the 2019 summer
Abstract
Participation in protest movements, such as the ones in the 2019 summer, is grounded in how individuals and communities make sense of social issues. In this article, I describe and analyze the motivations of three women and three men who participated for the first time during the protests of the 2019 summer. After conducting the interviews in 2021, I analyzed the narratives of participants by integrating elements of the study of social movements, constructionist social-community psychology, and cultural psychology. Participants identified the following motivator factors: the chat, public policy, and desire for social change. An important feature from their narratives is the construction of collective identity among the people who participated in the protests as members of the ingroup and the representation of the political elite as an outgroup. The proportion of individuals who participated in a protest for the first time in the summer 2019 and ways in which their perspective and political action have been transformed remains to be explored.
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Summer of 2019, Interviews, Qualitative research, Protests, Puerto Rico, Motivations
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