This article seeks to examine the origins and historical development of June 2013. Ten years after the demonstrations that shook Brazil, the intellectual effort to understand them remains a difficult task, as the multiplicity of meanings and the dispute over the senses of June lead to interpretation difficulties. The literature about June favored two main theses. The first of them emphasizes the process of social ascension in PT governments and the supposed incompatibility of this process with the revolts. This view reinforces the sudden character of the protests, constructing them like a bolt from the blue, almost irrational. The second strand analyzes the protests as a set of manifestations of various ideological political orders, which, in this interpretative prism, would make June 2013 the inauguration of a right-wing political cycle in contemporary Brazil, i.e., the demonstrations would have gestated the serpent egg that would culminate in the 2018 elections, for example. The hypothesis presented here follows another direction. It is based in the assumption that there is an important interrelationship between structural causes and the agency of political actors rooted in these processes. Through this lens, it is argued that the revolt was also the result of a combination of a progressive and continuous process of worsening of the living conditions in large cities and the emergence of an autonomist protest culture responsible for symbolically shaping these structural problems into a set of experiences of rejection of economic elites and the political representation system. In other words, it is understood that autonomism was the main interpretive key through which the mobilizations were able to gain the traction and magnitude they gained. The article defends this alternative thesis making use of quantitative data, detailing the context of structural urban crisis, and mobilizing qualitative techniques of document analysis to map the construction and diffusion of this autonomist culture of protests.