Black Flag BORICUAS Anarchism, Antiauthoritarianism, and the Left in Puerto Rico, 1897-1921 Kirwin R. Shaffer Black Flag Boricuas Black Flag Boricuas Anarchism, Antiauthoritarianism, and the Left in Puerto Rico, 1897–1921 Kirwin R. Shaffer University of Illinois Press Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield © 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America c 5 4 3 2 1 ∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shaffer, Kirwin R. Black flag boricuas : anarchism, antiauthoritarianism, and the left in Puerto Rico, 1897–1921 / Kirwin R. Shaffer. pages cm ISBN 978-0-252-03764-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-252-09490-3 (ebook) 1. Anarchism—Puerto Rico—History—20th century. 2. Puerto Rico—Politics and government—1898–1952. 3. Puerto Rico—History—1898–1952. I. Title. HX864.S53 2013 320.5’709729509041—dc23 2012047402 To the history professors at the University of Kansas who introduced me to Latin America: Charley Stansifer, Betsy Kuznesof, Tony Rosenthal, and the late Robert Oppenheimer. Afterward they will say of us that we didn’t matter. But whether we matter depends on the scale by which they measure us. Doesn’t the atom in all its mysteries reproduce the universe? We are made of the same clay as the rest of humanity. There is some bit of everything in all of us. The scenario may seem tiny. But what if it’s a life we are talking about? There’s no such thing as a tiny life! — César Andreu Iglesias’s Los derrotados (The Vanquished) In that people [Puerto Ricans] there is such a quan- tity of resistance to all servitude that, as the great philosopher might well say to those who sought to dominate him: “Nothing and nobody can make me a slave because my freedom lies in myself.” — Belén de Sárraga’s El clericalismo en América a través de un continente (Clericalism across the American continent) Contents Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations and Style Notes xiii Prologue xv Introduction: Cultural Politics and Transnational Anarchism in Puerto Rico 1 1. The Roots of Anarchism and Radical Labor Politics in Puerto Rico, 1870s-1899 23 2. Radicals and Reformers: Anarchists, Electoral Politics, and the Unions, 1900–1910 46 3. Anarchist Alliances, Government Repression: Education, Freethinkers, and CESs, 1909–1912 76 4. Anarchists, Freethinkers, and Spiritists: The Progressive Alliance against the Catholic Church, 1909–1912 92 5. Radicalism Imagined: Leftist Culture, Gender, and Revolutionary Violence, 1900–1920 106 6. Politics of the Bayamón Bloc and the Partido Socialista: Anarchism and Socialism in the 1910s 123 7. El Comunista: Radical Journalism and Transnational Anarchism, 1920–1921 141 Conclusion and Epilogue: Anarchist Antiauthoritarianism in a U.S. Colony, 1898–2011 167 Notes 181 Bibliography 199 Index 213 Acknowledgments Many people and institutions provided insight and support for this book. First of all, thanks to Mary, Nathaniel, and Hannah; you put up with a lot. I wish to thank my numerous colleagues around the world who are central to the renewed historical interest in anarchism and whose questions, com- ments, and suggestions personally, electronically, and at conferences helped to shape this work: Tony Rosenthal, Steven Hirsch, Geoffroy de Laforcade, Bert Altena, Lucien van der Walt, Constance Bantman, Davide Turcato, David Struthers, Kenyon Zimmer, Raymond Craib, Carl Levy, Evan Daniel, Luis Martínez-Fernández, Barry Carr, Jorge Chinea, and Mark Leier. I especially thank the staff and assistants in the institutions where this work was investigated: the International Institute for Social History in Am- sterdam (especially my friend Mieke IJzermans), the staff at the Instituto de Historia in Havana, the New York Public Library, the Hunter College Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños in New York City, the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland, the Archivo General and Biblioteca Nacional in San Juan, the Colección Puertorriqueña at the Universidad de Puerto Rico–Río Piedras, and especially the kind, helpful staff (Evelyn Solá Maldonado, Milagros Laboy, and Dr. Maximiliano Dueñas) at the Centro de Documentación Obrera Santiago Iglesias Pantín at the Universidad de Puerto Rico–Humacao. The staff at Penn State University–Berks’s Thun Library are the best! Margie Kruppenbach in particular worked small miracles finding material via interlibrary loan. I have incorporated parts of several journal articles and a book chapter that have appeared over the past few years, including: “Contesting International- ists: Transnational Anarchism, Anti-Imperialism, and US Expansion in the xii Acknowledgments Caribbean, 1890s-1920s,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 22, no. 2 (julio–diciembre 2011): 11–38; “Havana Hub: Cuban Anarchism, Radical Media, and the Trans-Caribbean Anarchist Network, 1903–1915,” Caribbean Studies 37, no. 2 (July–December 2009): 45–81; “By Dynamite, Sabotage, Revolution and the Pen: Violence in Caribbean Anar- chist Fiction, 1890s-1920s,” New West Indian Guide 83, nos. 1 and 2, (2009): 3–35; and “Tropical Libertarians: Anarchist Movements and Networks in the Caribbean, Southern US and Mexico,” Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Post-Colonial World, 1870–1940: The Praxis of National Libera- tion, Internationalism, and Social Revolution, Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, eds., 273–320 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers, 2010). Many thanks to those publications for kindly granting permission to use the information for this book. I am especially indebted to Laurie Matheson at the University of Illinois Press for her early and continuous enthusiasm about this book. I offer a special word of thanks to my colleagues at Penn State University–Berks Col- lege, especially Belén Rodríguez-Mourelo, Paul Esqueda, and Ken Fifer for supporting my research and travel both financially and with kind encourage- ment. Finally, thank you to Zohra for being there in the final stages of this book, keeping me grounded, and helping to show me what really matters. Cheers to all! Abbreviations and Style Notes ACP American Communist Party AFL American Federation of Labor ATC American Tobacco Company CMIU Cigar Makers International Union (aka, the International) CES Centro de Estudios Sociales (Social Studies Center) FLT Federación Libre de Trabajadores (Free Federation of Workers) FRT Federación Regional de Trabajadores (Regional Federation of Workers) IWW Industrial Workers of the World (aka, the Wobblies) POS Partido Obrero Socialista (Socialist Labor Party in Puerto Rico) PS Partido Socialista (Socialist Party of Puerto Rico) SLP Socialist Labor Party All translations from Spanish are the author’s unless otherwise indicated. Throughout the book, socialist refers to someone with broadly socialistic ideas, while Socialist refers to a member of the Partido Socialista. I have tried to avoid the terms America, American, North America, and North American when talking about the United States. However, I have used the historical and contemporary Americanization when referring to efforts by the United States to make Puerto Rico more like the U.S. mainland. Prologue For days, tensions had been building in the small, east-central Puerto Rican city of Caguas. Tobacco workers across the island were on strike, and anarchists in Caguas were spearheading the efforts there. Juan Vilar was a teacher and organizer in the Caguas Centro de Estudios Sociales (CES)—a center founded by anarchists and other leftists to raise consciousness among the city’s workers and offer alternative education to their children. CES mem- bership had been growing, causing concern among local authorities. At a rally on Thursday evening, March 9, 1911, one speaker after another urged workers to hold on, condemning the U.S.-based tobacco monopoly for not acquiescing to strikers’ demands. But as the crowd dispersed from the rally, shots rang out. Within minutes, two members of the city’s bourgeois establishment were dead—gunned down by a member of the CES who authorities claimed was part of an anarchist conspiracy. Over the coming year, anarchists and other leftists were rounded up, interrogated, tortured, and abused. In the end, the man who pulled the trigger was found guilty of first-degree murder. Juan Vilar—perhaps the most prominent and one of the internationally best-known anarchists in Puerto Rico—also faced numerous trials and retrials during this year. Yet, rather than try him for being an anarchist involved in the murders, Puerto Rican and U.S. authorities charged him with violating public morality. If these authorities could not jail him as an anarchist linked to the March violence, they would do so for publishing what they considered pornography—a story about a priest raping a child. Ultimately convicted, Vilar rotted in jail over the course of his one-year sentence, complicating his already-precarious health. On May Day 1915, Vilar died. xvi Prologue Juan Vilar’s individual story in many ways captures the history of anar- chism in Puerto Rico. The events of 1911 occurred near the middle of the twenty-four-year span in which anarchism played a role in the development of the island’s political, cultural, and economic life. Vilar was a central figure among anarchists. In 1905 and 1906 he had published the island’s first truly anarchist newspaper, Voz Humana (Human voice), helping to launch an in- termittent wave of anarchist newspapers over the next fifteen years. Vilar had been a founding member of the Caguas CES, a teacher, and a link between anarchists and other progressive forces on the island like the freethinkers and the spiritists, all of whom praised alternative rationalist education and free speech while condemning Roman Catholicism. His role as an important political intermediary extended to his relations with other left-wing members of the leading union—the Federación Libre de Trabajadores (FLT, Free Fed- eration of Workers)—and leftists who would become cultural and political leaders of the Partido Socialista (PS).