This chapter shows that the material presence of a public gathering is an embodied speech act whose performative effects are conditioned by the social meanings attached to the gathering's physical qualities. Based on the fact that public audiences paid significant attention to the physical elements of the Riots/Uprising and anti-Prop. 187 march, the chapter posits materiality as a criterion of protest. It reconstructs ordinary conventions of protest that concern the material: spatial location and physical peace and order, as well as participants’ racial embodiment. While radical democratic thought holds that popular assemblies can felicitously enact social changes such as constituting the people, this chapter shows that these ordinary conventions, as well as the social meanings that a gathering’s specific location, physical activities, and racializations carry, constrain that performative enactment. The anti-Prop. 187 march was politically legible as an orderly gathering that took place in politically significant areas of Los Angeles. Within the same terms, the Riots/Uprising appeared to be violent, chaotic, and politically senseless, especially given dominant frames of Blackness.