Puerto Rican Colonialism, Caribbean Radicalism, and Pueblos Hispanos’s Inter-Nationalist Alliance

Abstract

Drawing from Earl Browder’s papers, this essay examines the Communist-sponsored, New York Spanish-language newspaper Pueblos Hispanos (1943–44), arguing that the publication staged an uneasy alliance between the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and the US Communist Party by positioning Puerto Rican independence as central to a wider decolonial Caribbean and postwar world order. By analyzing Pueblos Hispanos’s practice of “inter-nationalism”—a term the author proposes to denote the flexible strategy used to mediate between competing political interests and which can serve as a model for understanding the compromised collaborations between Communist and nationalist leaders in the Caribbean—this essay expands our understanding of Communist influence in Caribbean liberation movements and begins to reinsert the contributions of early-and mid-twentieth-century Puerto Ricans, and more widely, Spanish caribeños, within a Marxist-inflected Caribbean radical tradition.