Editors' Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Margaret Power and Andor Skotnes

On October 27, 1974, more than 20,000 people jammed Madison Square Garden (see fig. 1). They came to support independence for Puerto Rico and the release of the five Nationalist political prisoners who had been held in US jails since the 1950s. The Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP) was the principal organizer of the event, and speakers included a wide range of antiwar, Left, and Puerto Rican leaders. Presenters ranged from Jane Fonda to Angela Davis to Juan Mari Bras, the secretary general of the PSP. The rally took place at a time many Leftists in the United States understood that the Vietnamese would soon win the war in Vietnam. Solidarity with Puerto Rico — a US colony with a sizable percentage of its population in the United States, most of whom were workers and racially diverse — encapsulated some of the main politics of the broad progressive movement: anti-imperialism, working-class struggle, and antiracism. However, in the decades since, activists and scholars alike, including those in the Puerto Rican community, have largely forgotten the prominent position Puerto Rico held for a few years on the US Left’s political agenda. Several factors explain the decline in awareness of and solidarity with Puerto Rico in the years after 1974. One is, of course, the waning and splintering of the US Left that occurred following the 1975 victory of the Vietnamese people, and the relative decline of the broad Black liberation struggle after some partial victories and under the impact of widespread police repression. The women’s movement, too, while remaining vibrant through the late 1970s, experienced an ebb. In the Puerto Rican movement itself the emergence of the FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional), an armed clandestine Puerto Rican organization that carried out armed actions — primarily armed propaganda rather than urban guerrilla warfare — in the

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Figure 1. The poster announcing the Day of National Solidarity with the Independence of Puerto Rico event at Madison Square Garden in New York City, October 27, 1974. Designed by Lorenzo Homar. Courtesy of Susan Homar Damm and Laura Homar Damm

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United States had its effects. FALN bombings, the first of which occurred just prior to the huge gathering in Madison Square Garden described above, generated a range of responses, from outright condemnation to enthusiastic approval. But the overall result was the division of proindependence Puerto Rican organizations and the burgeoning US-based solidarity movement. Moreover, revolution and imperial intervention in Central America and advances in national liberation in Africa shifted the attention of the remaining solidarity and anti-imperialist forces away from the Puerto Rican nationalist struggle. Indeed, a kind of amnesia about Puerto Rico and the importance of the Puerto Rican independence movement engulfed the larger Left. Of course, there are also deeper historical and structural factors that con- tinuously undermine support for and popular memory about Puerto Rican struggles and realities. Puerto Rico has been a colony ever since the Spanish overwhelmed the indigenous Taino societies on the island in the 1490s; then in 1898, the United States recolonized it (fig. 2). The 1952 designation of Puerto Rico as a common- wealth, and the subsequent removal of Puerto Rico from the United Nation’s list of non-self-governing territories in 1953, were therefore of great significance and had an impact on a broader scale, both domestically and internationally. As the United States positioned itself as the leader of the “Free World” and the friend of anti-European colonial movements following World War II, it was imperative that it not appear to be a colonial power. To mask its ongoing colonialist control of Puerto Rico, the US government worked with Luis Muñoz Marín and the Popular Democratic Party to transform the island in appearance from a direct US colony to a Free Associated State, which is in reality a constitutional anomaly and anything but free. Puerto Rico had its first Puerto Rican governor appointed in 1947. Then in 1948 Puerto Ricans elected a governor for the first time. As governor, Luis Muñoz Marín worked very closely with the US government to oversee the passage of a new constitution, a process that, the United States proclaimed, signified the end of US colonial rule. And since that time, with the exception of the 1960s and 1970s when the Puerto Rican independence movement resurged in popularity, it appears that many if not most people in the United States — and many on the island — have accepted the lie that Puerto Rico is no longer a US colony. A colleague of ours recently remarked that the recurring historical amnesia of people in the United States about its colonies — especially about Puerto Rico — reminded him of the recurring amnesia of the English about its colony in the north of Ireland, and about colonial Irish history in general. Indeed, when we proposed this thematic RHR issue on “Puerto Rico: A US Colony in a Postcolonial World,” some colleagues worried that the topic was not large or significant enough by itself, that we should somehow shift our focus to a region, to broad transnational questions, to more global concerns. Of course, as the English always rediscover the importance of Ire- land when troubles break out, many in the United States are jolted back into awareness of the importance of Puerto Rico when crisis erupts. And now is just such a time. With the Puerto Rican debt disaster wreaking havoc on the island, with the threat

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Figure 2. A stereograph produced in 1900 depicting the First Battle of San Juan, on May 12, 1898, the first major action of US forces in Puerto Rico in 1898. Fort San Cristobal can be seen in the background. This was an initial step toward the US colonization of Puerto Rico. Library of Congress

of insolvency and co-collateral damage on the mainland looming, concern about the Puerto Rico situation is spreading in the mass media, governmental bodies, political campaigns, educational institutions, personal conversations, and especially in the progressive movement. And activists and scholars, who are the descendants of or who were among those who rallied in Madison Square Garden nearly forty-three years ago are being dramatically reminded that the island is a US colony. However, while the general increase in conversation about Puerto Rico is a definite improvement over the prevailing historical amnesia, there are grave prob- lems with much that is being said. Too often discussions of Puerto Rico in crisis rely on shallow, racialized, implicitly colonialized stereotypes that blame the victims and reinforce oppressive ignorance rather than producing new understandings. Of course historical amnesia is always about more than forgetting. It’s also about never really knowing, about ignoring, about simply accepting many of the “commonsense” illusions that infuse the dominant culture. It’s about not seeing the importance of a particular history or reality, or not understanding the point of caring about it. The problem is not just that the facts discussed about the current situation are often wrong, but that so little is known in large sectors of the US population about the history of Puerto Rico as a nation, as a Spanish-then-US colony, and as a key aspect of an imperialized globe. Little is known about Puerto Rico as a military test site and staging ground for the projection of US power into the hemisphere.1 Or how the United States has used Puerto Rico, its Spanish-speaking colony, to further its imperialist ventures in Latin America.2 Or how the United States has touted Puerto Rico as the mythical capitalist success story in contrast to the alleged economic fail- ure of socialist Cuba, and by extension to all the struggling former colonies around the world not under US tutelage. And little is known about the Puerto Rican people,

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either on the island or in the diaspora — their culture, their diversities, and their divisions. Or about why more Puerto Ricans currently live in the United States than in Puerto Rico. In other words, historical amnesia about Puerto Rico has to do with the absence of contextual understanding that can give meaning to “facts.” One quick way to gauge the lack of knowledge about Puerto Rico is to ask students or acquaintances whether or not Puerto Ricans need a visa to come to the United States (they do not, they are US citizens), or whether, as US citizens, Puerto Ricans who live in Puerto Rico can vote in federal elections (they cannot). Such questions can open a discussion about what citizenship and the lack of voting rights say about the historical and current reality of US colonial control over Puerto Rico. This issue of Radical History Review is based on the premise, for reasons alluded to above, that the history of Puerto Rico is important, not just to Puerto Ricans on both the island and the mainland, but to all in the United States, and especially to those of us who are progressives. Learning about Puerto Rico helps us to under- stand better how US imperialism functions, both globally and domestically. It reveals starkly the various means — from the cruel shooting of peaceful Nationalist protestors in Ponce in 1937, to the early use of COINTELPRO against those suspected of proindependence sentiment, to the massive sterilization of Puerto Rican women, to the profound disregard for Puerto Ricans’ welfare by the US government in the face of the current economic crisis — the United States employs in it attempts to subdue and control this population. But understanding Puerto Rico also provides us with important examples of the ways people resist US rule. And, because Puerto Ricans inhabit and travel between the island and the diaspora, Puerto Rico is in the fairly unique situation of having large numbers of a colonized population inhabiting the colonial metropolis. (Two other examples of this are the Irish in England and the Algerians in France.) This is one reason why Puerto Rican political prisoners who have carried out armed actions in the United States have faced such lengthy sentences in US pris- ons, ranging from twenty-five years for the five Nationalists who attacked Congress in 1954, to Oscar López, who served almost thirty-six years in prison. In this issue we do not attempt to discuss the broad sweep of Puerto Rican history. Instead we focus more on key, select issues of this history. We have enlisted scholars from the Puerto Rican and other communities, from the island and the mainland, in this project. We hope that this work contributes to the necessarily long-term process, involving many movement intellectuals and scholars, of battling historical amnesia about Puerto Rico (fig. 3). This RHR issue was conceived before the full force of the current Puerto Rican crisis was evident, and it is being constructed as this crisis is severely deepen- ing. At this writing, the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) is being implemented and is meeting serious popular resistance (see fig. 4). PROMESA — passed with bipartisan support in the US Congress and func- tioning outside the control of the island’s elected officials — reasserts more obvious colonial rule over Puerto Rico by imposing a Financial Control Board that is mandat-

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Figure 3. A double assertion of popular historical memory — as a public image and as a representation of a historical celebration — the “Sea of Flags,” a 2004 mural in Chicago by Gamaliel Ramirez, depicts the Paseo Boricua during Fiesta Boricua, an annual cultural and music event. Nationalist hero Lolita Lebrón appears in the center of the crowd. Photograph by Savannah López

ing ever more radical forms of austerity and immiseration on the people (for example, the minimum wage for workers under twenty-five years of age has been reduced from $7.25 to $4.25). Because of the extended character of our publishing process, this RHR issue will be reaching you when, most likely, the crisis is in a new and different stage. No matter, because our purpose here is to contribute to a long-term and ever- broadening field of analyses and understandings of Puerto Rican life and history in its many overlapping contexts. We hope this issue challenges and helps to undermine the recurrent amnesia that all too often plagues the colonizer vis-à- vis the colonized, and sometimes plagues the colonized themselves. We also hope this issue will stimu- late greater interest in, awareness of, and knowledge about Puerto Rico; encourage solidarity with Puerto Ricans throughout their continuing struggle; and serve as a resource for those who want to learn more about Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. We are very excited with this issue and we hope you will be too!

. . . . . We would like here to offer brief introductions to each of the pieces in our issue.3 The issue opens with the (Re)Views section, which contains two essays, each by prominent Puerto Rican historians. We asked each of them to write a review essay in which they discuss five key books on Puerto Rican history. We designed this section as an introduction to Puerto Rican history and historiography, mainly for those who do not specialize in Puerto Rico. In “Modern Puerto Rico: A First Reading List,” historian Solsiree del Moral

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offers nonspecialists five important readings that introduce key themes on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of Puerto Rico. Del Moral’s selected readings deal extensively with class, race, and gender relations on the island, par- ticularly focusing on colonialism and working people. For the twentieth century, the readings emphasize migration, diaspora, and national identities. In addition to her five recommended books, Del Moral suggests two particular textbooks as excellent resources on Puerto Rican history. In his review essay, “The Absent State and Five Books on Puerto Rican His- tory,” Fernando Picó takes a different approach to that of del Moral. While introduc- ing key aspects of Puerto Rican history through his five selected books, he offers a broad interpretation that challenges conventional historiographical wisdom. Many historians, he argues, discuss the island’s history in terms of a long series of failed attempts to create an independent nation. Drawing on his five books, Picó proposes that, over the five centuries since the Spanish conquest, successive states have indeed failed to effectively extend their rule over the island’s territory. In reaction, strong solidarities, communities, and traditions have developed among the people. The result of the long history of the “absent state” is a popular mentality that resists, or at least is little interested in, the construction of strong state structures. For Picó, this helps to explain the limited appeal of both statehood and independence. The next section of this RHR issue, Interviews: “Independentistas Remem- ber,” includes three interviews with important figures in the Puerto Rican independence and progressive movements. First is an interview with Lolita Lebrón entitled, “If people had not been will- ing to give their lives for the patria or there had not been the political prisoners,

Figure 4. Protestors during the mass demonstrations that shut down the first conference for PROMESA in San Juan, Puerto Rico, August 31, 2016. Photograph by Víctor Birriel. Courtesy of Claridad, El Periódico de la Nación Puertorriqueña

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then we would be nothing,” conducted by Margaret Power in 2004. In this annotated interview, Lolita Lebrón explains that the racism she experienced as a factory worker in New York City led her to join the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. She also discusses her position as the leader of the 1954 attack on the US Congress, the attack itself, gender relations in the party, Pedro Albizu Campos, male supremacist attitudes toward her on the part of her male compañeros, the Nationalist Party’s relationships with other political forces, and how she analyzes the long-term impact of the 1954 assault. The next interview, also conducted by Margaret Power and entitled, “ ‘From a very early age. I had this idea about Puerto Ricanness,” is with José E. López, director of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago and a long-time activist. In it, López discusses his childhood as an impoverished peasant in Puerto Rico and his youth as a marginalized Puerto Rican in Chicago. He then explores how key political events and movements of the 1960s, such as the Algerian revolution, the development of liberation theology, national liberation struggles, and the idea of a Black nation that he read about in Mohammad Speaks, fostered his activism in support of Puerto Rican independence. The final part of the interview explores his involvement in the independence movement, the impact the FALN had on the independence movement, and why the Puerto Rican Cultural Center developed a pro-LGBT politics. In the final interview, “José Soler: A Life Working at the Intersections of Nationalism, Internationalism, and Working-Class Radicalism,” Eric Larson talks with José Soler, former national (US) President of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP). In his long career of activism, which continues to this day, Soler has sup- ported decolonization efforts in the Americas and Africa, worked as a labor organizer and journalist in the United States and Puerto Rico, and recently retired as director of the Arnold M. Dubin Labor Education Center at the University of Mas- sachusetts Dartmouth. In the interview, Soler discusses the impact of the Black Panthers and the Chicano liberation movement on his own development, and he connects the history of the PSP from 1971 – 93 to the long history of Puerto Rican independence struggles on the island and the mainland. The national question, and the PSP’s approach to it, is a key concern of Soler’s testimony, as is the relationship between working-class organizing and national liberation. This issue’s third section, Curated Spaces, features Darien Brahms’s comparative photographic essay “In Search of Jack Delano’s Puerto Rico: Change and Continuity Revisited, 1941 – 2015.” This “visual narrative” addresses Puerto Rican social life in the pre- and post-Operation Bootstrap eras by juxtaposing 1940s photographs of the famous Farm Security Administration photographer, Jack Delano, with recent images by Brahms. The author’s purpose is to demonstrate, through these photographs, social and cultural consistencies that have maintained, despite the dominating US presence and the massive transformations of the intervening three-quarters of a century. The Features section of this issue comprises five articles on different, but crucial, aspects of Puerto Rican history.

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José I. Fusté’s article, “Repeating Islands of Debt: Historicizing the Trans colonial Relationality of Puerto Rico’s Economic Crisis,” offers us deep historical background to the current debt crisis of Puerto Rico. The article focuses on the “colonial formations that have bound Puerto Ricans to other colonial subjects throughout the US empire.” Fusté begins his analysis with nineteenth-century Supreme Court decisions that, by constructing constitutional exceptions, legalized the conquest of Native American peoples and the seizure of Indian lands. Subsequently, from 1901 through 1921, the court created similar exceptions for Puerto Rico and other US insular colonies. Additionally, Fusté proposes that during the first half of the twentieth century, the United States developed “connected geostrategic and economic logics” that facilitated extraction of wealth by both the US government and private capital from overseas territories, thereby undermining these territories’ potential for independent economic development. Finally, the author argues that today, through less direct and supposedly noncolonial methods of capital investment and debt cre- ation, the US empire continues to extend its control over its “far-flung colonial archi- pelagos,” including Puerto Rico. Lisa Materson’s article, “Gender, Generation, and Women’s Independence Organizing in Puerto Rico,” addresses the question of women’s activism in the Puerto Rican independence movement. Relying on extensive oral histories, she examines the activism of three movement women of different generations — Emilia Rodríguez Sotero, Baldramina Sotero Cervoni, and Isabel Rosado Morales. Draw- ing on her interviews, Materson uncovers the remarkable breadth of strategies employed by these and other women in the struggle, along with otherwise invisible intergenerational interactions and the extension of emotional support across political generations. She argues that this intergenerational exchange represented a dialogic practice that was crucial to the movement’s endurance, and that it “defies an easy inheritance model,” being profoundly dialectical in nature. Marisol LeBrón’s article, “Carpeteo Redux: Surveillance and Subversion against the Puerto Rican Student Movement,” discusses the 2010 and 2011 student strikes at the University of Puerto Rico, and the politicized police surveillance and targeted harassment — the carpeteo — they encountered. The tactics the police and security forces employed were, the students had absorbed from popular memory, similar to forms of repression experienced by earlier Puerto Rican movements. Drawing on oral history interviews she conducted with recent student activists, LeB- rón describes how they learned about past repression, and how they used this knowledge “to position themselves within a genealogy of repression and resistance on the island.” The students, she argues, came to see their experience, not as exceptional or unique, but as an integral aspect of a long, ongoing historical struggle (fig. 5). Eileen J. Findlay’s article, “Dangerous Dependence or Productive Masculin- ity? Gendered Representations of Puerto Ricans in the US Press, 1940 – 50,” analyzes the varying representations of Puerto Ricans promoted by the US popular press during and after World War II and how such representations shifted rapidly in chang-

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Figure 5. Running protest at the University of Puerto Rico led by the theater and protest collective, La Banda del Pueblo Trabajador de Papel Machete, during the massive, 10,000-strong Yo Amo la UPR demonstration against government cutbacks at the university on February 14, 2011. Centro de Medios Independiente – Puerto Rico and indymediapr.org

ing temporal and spatial contexts. Yet no matter how drastic these shifts, Findlay argues, US depictions of Puerto Ricans continually fell back on “well-worn tropes of gender, the family, and domesticity (or lack thereof).” Paradoxically, public portray- als based on these tropes could in one context promote distrust of Puerto Ricans, and in another express sympathy of a sort for them. The author probes the depiction of Puerto Rican migrants from the island to New York and rural Michigan, delves into the difference between postwar actions toward Puerto Ricans and treatment of earlier European immigrants, and shows how gendered notions of respectability privileged Puerto Ricans over Mexican American agricultural migrants to Michigan. In the last feature article, “In Solidarity: Palestine in the Puerto Rican Political Imaginary,” Sara Awartani examines how Chicago Puerto Rican independentistas viewed the similarities — and the solidarities — between their liberation struggle and that of the Palestinians in the 1970s and early 1980s. Drawing on writings of Puerto Ricans imprisoned for alleged participation in the FALN and in armed struggle, Arwatani argues that Chicago independentistas declared the solidarity of the two movements, thereby disrupting dominant US narratives and constructing an “articulation of Palestine in the Puerto Rican political imaginary.” Puerto Rico’s exceptional and ambiguous political status can be challenged by the independence struggle’s insertion within a transnational, comparative framework of anticolonial and anti-imperial movements.

. . . . . The two images on the cover of this issue of RHR represent, on the cultural level, the main contradiction of colonialism and resistance that frames the issue's articles and pieces. The top image is a 1899 lithograph that employs imperialistic romanticism in a popular celebration of the US colonization of the peoples of Puerto Rico and other lands; it was produced by the famed Krueger and Braun lithographers and originally appeared as a cigar box liner and a postcard. The lower image (and also fig. 5) photo- graphically documents the intersection of subversive theater and direct action during

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a 2010 Papel Machete Theater Troup-led demonstration at the University of Puerto Rico, which both practiced and celebrated the ongoing resistance to US colonialism in Puerto Rico. This contradiction between colonialism and resistance is explored on many levels in this RHR issue, and for this we as coeditors want to offer special thanks to several people. We thank the authors of the articles for their hard work, important historical understandings, commitment to the study of Puerto Rico and its peoples, and cooperative and creative participation in our sometimes arduous editing process. We want also to thank our colleague Conor McGrady, who edits our Curated Spaces department, for guiding this section’s contribution to our issue. And we want to especially thank the managing editor of RHR, Tom Harbison, for his constant collabora- tion and invaluable guidance. In every sense he is a coeditor, and more, of this issue.

—Margaret Power and Andor Skotnes, Coeditors

Margaret Power is a professor of history at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She coauthored Hope in Hard Times: Norvelt and the Struggle for Community During the Great Depression. She is the author of Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964 – 1973 and coeditor of Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World and New Perspectives on the Transnational Right. Her current research focuses on the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. She has been a long-time supporter of the Puerto Rican independence movement and serves on the Board of Directors of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago.

Andor Skotnes is professor of history in the Department of History and Society at the Sage Colleges in Troy and Albany, New York. He has been a member of the Radical History Review editorial collective for twenty-five years. His recent book is A New Deal for All? Race and Class Struggles in Depression Era Baltimore (2013). He is a social, cultural, and oral historian of North America; his main research emphasis is on recent US social movements and, in particular, the interrelationships between Black freedom and working-class struggles. His current book project is a study of these movements during World War II and the postwar period in the Baltimore Metropolitan region.

Notes 1. As Katherine McCaffrey has pointed out, in the 1940s the United States took over three- fourths of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques and used it for “firing practice and amphibious landing by tens of thousands of sailors and marines.” McCaffrey, “Social Struggle against the U.S. Navy,” 87. US troops further used Vieques as a staging ground from which to invade Guatemala in 1954; the Bay of Pigs, Cuba in 1961; the Dominican Republic in 1965; and Grenada in 1983, without consulting the Puerto Rican people. 2. One clear example of this is the Kennedy administration’s appointment of Teodoro Moscoso, the head of Operation Bootstrap to coordinate the Alliance for Progress. Ayala and Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century, 202. 3. These introductions come in part from the authors’ own summaries and abstracts of their articles.

References Ayala, César J. and Rafael Bernabe. 2007. Puerto Rico in the American Century. A History since 1898. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. McCaffrey, Katherine. 2006. “Social Struggle against the U.S. Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico: Two Movements in History.” Latin American Perspectives 33, no. 1: 83 – 101.

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