Puerto Rican Independence Research Articles

Rebel in the House: The Life and Times of Vito Marcantonio

Vito Marcantonio was the most consequential radical politician in the United States in the twentieth century. Elected to Congress from New York's ethnically Italian and Puerto Rican East Harlem slums, Marcantonio, in his time, held office longer than any other third-party radical, serving seven terms from 1934 to 1950. Colorful and controversial, Marcantonio captured national prominence as a powerful orator and brilliant parliamentarian. Often allied with the U.S. Communist Party (CP), he was an advocate of civil rights, civil liberties, labor unions, and Puerto Rican independence. He supported social security and unemployment legislation for what later was called a "living wage" standard. And he annually introduced anti-lynching and anti-poll tax bills a decade before it became respectable. He also opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee, redbaiting, and antisemitism, and fought for the rights of the foreign born. He was a bold outspoken opponent of U.S. imperialismThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Jim Blaut's Model of the World

Jim Blaut’s model of the world remained incomplete at his untimely death (Wissoker, this issue), but its outlines were clear. Rooted in his lifelong engagement with the Puerto Rican independence movement and appreciation of peasant livelihood strategies, he seeks to recover the agency of what he termed the Third World from its marginalization in First World practice and thought. Beginning with the seemingly straightforward question of where capitalism was born (Blaut 1976), he concluded that conventional answers to this question shape knowledge production about the Third World (Blaut 2000). In developing this argument, he sought to articulate geographic with Marxist theory, and theoretical argument with a rich cross-section of mostly second-hand empirical evidence, all the while maintaining a characteristically uncompromising critique of any accounts contaminated by the Eurocentrism that he analyzes as the root of the marginalization of Third World agency.

Between Borinquen and the Barrio: Environmental Justice and New York City's Puerto Rican Community, 1969–1972

The last decade has seen an upsurge of both scholarly and popular interest in the US environmental justice movement. What is largely missing from this contemporary discussion is any sense of the historical roots of this new wave of environmental activism. This paper explores the emergence of a radical Puerto Rican organization called the Young Lords that was active in a number of US cities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In New York City, the Young Lords successfully mobilized their community through a series of direct actions devoted to improving public services, the creation of new community spaces and the assertion of cultural identity. I examine the internal tensions within the organization as it sought to extend its role beyond community‐based concerns such as sanitation and health care towards more abstract political goals, including demands for Puerto Rican independence. It is argued that the ultimate disarray of this radical phase of Latino political activism cannot be understood separately from a series of wider developments, including the gathering pace of urban decline, the marginalization of the US left and the dissolution of the New Deal era. Although the movement faded away in the 1970s, a legacy of diasporic environmentalism dedicated to the transformation of the urban environment has provided a powerful degree of political continuity with contemporary struggles for environmental and social justice.

Puerto Rico: the trials of the oldest colony in the world

The island of Puerto Rico has a severely distressed economy, is one of the most densely populated places on earth, and enjoys only limited political freedom. As a United States commonwealth, it is still treated by Congress as one of the last remaining colonies in the world. In this book a distinguished Puerto Rican legal scholar and former government official discusses the island's century-old relationship with the United States and argues that the process of decolonization should begin immediately. Jose Trias Monge first describes the Spanish rule over Puerto Rico and then traces the impact of American colonial policies there, comparing them with those in the Pacific and the British, French, and Dutch experiences in the Caribbean. He argues that the large amounts of money the United States has given to Puerto Rico have not been productive: not only has the island become frightfully dependent on United States munificence but more than 60 percent of Puerto Rican families still live below the poverty line. Politically, the situation is even worse. The United States has granted Puerto Rico limited self-government but has ignored the wishes of the Puerto Rican people-as expressed in two plebiscites-for greater autonomy, since it cannot make up its mind which decolonization option best serves American interests. Trias Monge discusses the various options of Puerto Rican independence, statehood, and an enhanced commonwealth status and urges the United States to end its present policy of inattention and inaction.

Puerto rico Rafaél Cancel Miranda

"Puerto rico Rafaél Cancel Miranda." NACLA Report on the Americas, 31(1), pp. 50–51 Additional informationNotes on contributorsRafaél Cancel MirandaRafaél Cancel Miranda has been a member of the Puerto Rican independence movement for over 50 years. As a teenager, he refused to serve in the U.S. military forwhich he was sentenced to two years in jail. In 1954, together with Lolita Lebrón,Irving Flores and Andres Figueroa Cordero, he forcibly disrupted the U.S. House of Representatives inan action that sought to bring attention to Puerto Rico’s colonial status andto demand its independence. For this he served 28 more years in U.S. federal prisons. He continues his advocacy for independence and remains an activist both in Puerto Rico and in the United States. He was interviewed while on a speaking tour in New York City by Pedro Juan Rodriguez in April, 1997.

Intellectuals Confront the Crisis of Traditional Narratives in Puerto Rico

This intervention is divided into two parts. The first concerns the crisis in Carlos Gil the ideology of Puerto Rican independence. The second part explores one of the elements that will most strongly condition Puerto Rican theoretical output in the coming years: the crisis in the Paternal State and its repercussions for university practices in Puerto Rico. I have a dual purpose. First, to show the breakdown in the narrative of independence that has traditionally organized the praxis of an important sector of intellectuals. Second, to consider one of the determining factors of regional theoretical production: the collapse of the welfare state and its manifestations in the country's public universities.

Different Case for Puerto Rican Independence

The independence movement in Puerto Rico has been formed in reaction to the cultural and economic dominance of the mainland, and thus it has been anti-Yanqui and anticapitalist. Radicals and nonfriends of the United States, from Castro through many Latin American and Third World leaders, have taken up the cause of Puerto Rican independence as one of the easiest ways, after Vietnam, of discrediting America. Puerto Rican advocates of independence express -themselves with bombs. But causes should not suffer guilt by association, and nonradical Americans might well reconsider the issue. It has been remarkably little examined in the American press except from a usually emotional leftist viewpoint, but there is a good case for amicable separation or divorce on grounds of incompatibility.

Puerto Rican Independence

Puerto Rican Independence

The Struggle for Puerto Rican Independence

The Struggle for Puerto Rican Independence

The Fight Over Status: New Decision on Puerto Rico

Plitics is our national sport,'' a Puerto Rican lawyer warns, "but it sometimes gets too lively. That's why many bars post signs prohibiting discussions of politics or religion."This sport is mirrored in another Island passion: music. In the Miami Beach-type hotels along San Juan's Condado strip, for example, a faceless continental music regales not only North American tourists but dolce vita from the present economic and social system. Behind the Folies Bergeres night club acts flashes the subliminal message: Things are fine as they are.A few miles inland, past a boulevard with high-rise, air-conditioned buildings in the commercial section of Hato Rey, past a Sears and several shopping malls, the rooftops get lower and the housing denser and a wild and exciting beat rises from a street corner opposite the headquarters of the Puerto Rican Independence Party.

Notes and Comments.

Assassinations of Heads of State of foreign countries have usually been carried out by organized political groups seeking to overthrow the government or change its policies. In the United States, on the other hand, Presidential assassinations and threats and gestures of assassination have been the work of mentally disturbed individuals. The only exception is the attack on Blair House in 1950, by Puerto Rican nationalists attempting to assassinate President Harry S. Truman. The nationalists claimed that the United States was illegally occupying their country and that the purpose of the act was to call the world's attention to the cause of Puerto Rican independence.