Puerto Rican Nationalist Research Articles

Solidarity across the Americas: The Puerto Rican nationalist party and anti-imperialism

Solidarity across the Americas: The Puerto Rican nationalist party and anti-imperialism

Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism by Margaret M. Power (review)

Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism by Margaret M. Power (review)

Gendered Exile: Examining the Avian and Nautical Metaphors in Julia de Burgos's Poetry

Abstract: This essay employs a literary analysis of Julia de Burgos's poetry to establish how she has been, borrowing from Dixa Ramírez's Colonial Phantoms (2018), misrepresented and "ghosted" in Western discourse and national archives as solely a Puerto Rican nationalist poet when she was an exile, too. Distinct from this misrepresentation, Burgos perceived herself as an exile. Part of the work of this essay is undoing the colonial ghosting of Julia de Burgos's legacy by remembering her as she was—an exile. Utilizing Edward Said's notion of an intellectual exile, I provide an examination of the nautical metaphors and avian imagery in Burgos's poetry collections as personal renderings of exilic status, and thus of an exilic writer. Denying Burgos's exilic status is to deny her the political significance of her poetry and her life. Everything she wrote and the way she lived was defined by the fact she could not reside or simply "be" in her homeland.

Solidarity across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-imperialism

Solidarity across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-imperialism

Poetic Schemas

This article reads the affective charge of ethnonationalism and antiblackness in Puerto Rican poetics and performance. Moving from the “legible” affect in Afro–Puerto Rican feminist poet Julia de Burgos's ethnonational poetry to the “illegible” affect experienced on stage by Afro–Puerto Rican queer theater and performance artist Javier Cárdona Otero, this article provides a fragmented trajectory of the antiblack and white supremacist affective violence constitutive of art-making in Puerto Rico. In doing so, it locates an aesthetic collusion between ethnonationalism and antiblackness that in turn illuminates how the aesthetics of Puerto Ricanness can be antiblack, a claim that calls into question Puerto Rican nationalism's desire or need for ethnic difference.

The Pilgrim’s Quest: On Solidarity and Justice in the Work of Eugenio María de Hostos

Abstract: Eugenio María de Hostos, arguably the main founding father of Puerto Rican nationalism, recreates Puerto Rican national identity through the sacred symbol of the pilgrim. This article connects Hostos’ first work, a novel titled La peregrinación de Bayoán (1863), to his science of morals, Moral Social , written twenty-five years later. The novel’s main protagonist, a Taíno-pilgrim, is a liminal archetype who embodies an ethics of solidarity from below rooted in Christianity. Hostos’ work provides an alternative view of the human experience from the periphery that can contribute to contemporary literature on service leadership, global awareness, and citizenship education.

‘It’s in my blood, in my food and in my soul’: current understandings of Puerto Ricanness within the Puerto Rican nation

ABSTRACT Although the United Nations no longer classifies Puerto Rico as a colony, Puerto Rico poses theoretical and empirical challenges to inquiries about national identity within (post-)colonial situations. Gazing through a sociohistorical lens, the present study explores how beliefs about legitimate membership criteria relate to self-identified Puerto Ricans’ understanding of their and in-group others’ national identity. By contextualizing current perceptions of national identity as linked to an emergent Puerto Rican nationalism throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth-century, this paper relates individual-level conceptions of membership criteria to institutional and discursive interventions, thereby contributing to studies of national identity in colonially (un)settled times.

Hemispheric Solidarity and Puerto Rico - Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism. By Margaret M. Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 308. $99.00 cloth; $32.95 paper; e-book $25.99.

Hemispheric Solidarity and Puerto Rico - Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism. By Margaret M. Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 308. $99.00 cloth; $32.95 paper; e-book $25.99.

The challenges and complexities of anti-fascist politics in colonial Puerto Rico, 1935–1945

ABSTRACT This article explores how and why the anti-fascist politics of the Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, PNPR), the Partido Popular Demócrata (Popular Democratic Party, PPD) and the Partido Comunista de Puerto Rico (Communist Party of Puerto Rican, PCPR) coincided with and differed from each other. It argues that each party’s understanding of anti-fascism corresponded to its political vision, goals, and program and its relation to other domestic and transnational forces. The colonial context and the disproportionate power the United States exercised over the archipelago greatly influenced how these parties understood and expressed anti-fascism, just as their formulation of anti-fascism reflected their positions on and relationships to the US government.

Decolonization is Imminent: Notes on Boricua Feminism

Abstract: In Rican feminist thought, decolonizing is not merely an approach, method, or exercise, but an ongoing way of life. From Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebron's cry that she "came to die for Puerto Rico" to the signal from Boricua author Elizabet Velasquez that "staying alive, well, that too is Puerto Rican history," Rican women have long struggled, resisted, and endured against colonial time. This "ongoing performance of bodily endurance" (Sandra Ruiz, 2019) under US colonialism, most recently marked by Maria, economic violence, the coronavirus pandemic, and femicide is a decolonial yearning, documented in the cultural work of Boricua women writers, artists, and activists. Boricua feminist thought, however, is largely absent in the academic feminist canon. In this paper, I argue Boricua feminism is not often interpolated as feminism since it does not resemble the expected, and particularly, Western, view of feminism as "women's struggles against men and patriarchy," though multiple patriarchies hinder the lives of Puerto Rican women and gender minorities. Rather, anticolonialism is at the forefront of Boricua feminist and queer struggles and subjectivities, yet is dislocated by these same lenses, and interpellated as not properly endemic to gender and sexual identity formations. Yet Boricua feminism is vital to decolonial feminist imaginings.

"Pedro 'Pete' Augusto del Valle: The Americanization of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Far Right"

This article uses the career of Pedro Augusto del Valle as a lens through which to explore Puerto Rican responses to U.S. colonialism, and the islanders' influence on mid-twentieth century domestic politics, both of which are often elided in the literature. Most of the scholarship on Puerto Rico focuses on pro-independence or autonomist figures and movements. In contrast, Del Valle embraced Americanization and American Empire, before becoming an influential figure in the U.S. far right in the mid-twentieth century. Though Del Valle was an outlier, he was not unique. Rather, this study contends that he is one example of a group of Puerto Rican elites and military officers who embraced a white, American, and Christian identity. Moreover, it argues that the omission of these figures from the historical record has produced an overly simplified narrative of the evolution of Puerto Rican nationalism and obscured both Puerto Ricans' contributions to U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and the diverse origins of the U.S. Far Right.

Revolution and Power in Puerto Rican Nonfiction

Revolution and Power in Puerto Rican Nonfiction

Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America

Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America

Afterlives of Anticolonial Dissent: Performances of Public Memory within and against the United States of América

ABSTRACT Examining how Puerto Rican nationalist icon Lolita Lebrón is celebrated through artistic performances of public memory, this essay investigates how social movement rhetorical histories are used to propel contemporary sovereignty struggles in Puerto Rico. In it, I argue that situating the afterlives of Lebrón’s anticolonial dissent requires that scholars and activists pay specific attention to the unique interlocking systems of oppression and privilege distinctive to the Caribbean territory, influenced by centuries of colonialism. Describing “la trinchera cultural” – or “the cultural trenches” – as the battleground for the urgency of sovereignty for Puerto Ricans, I describe how Las Lolitas, the group responsible for Lebrón’s centennial celebration, engaged in performances of public memory that took place in spaces that would showcase a Puerto Rican nationalist rhetorical repertoire. This repertoire emphasizes networks of solidarity, feminist concerns, and revolutionary spirit across time, highlighting resistance to past colonial transgressions to aid in present/future struggles over Puerto Rican self-determination.

Afterlives of Anticolonial Dissent: Performances of Public Memory within and against the United States of América

ABSTRACT Examining how Puerto Rican nationalist icon Lolita Lebrón is celebrated through artistic performances of public memory, this essay investigates how social movement rhetorical histories are used to propel contemporary sovereignty struggles in Puerto Rico. In it, I argue that situating the afterlives of Lebrón’s anticolonial dissent requires that scholars and activists pay specific attention to the unique interlocking systems of oppression and privilege distinctive to the Caribbean territory, influenced by centuries of colonialism. Describing “la trinchera cultural” – or “the cultural trenches” – as the battleground for the urgency of sovereignty for Puerto Ricans, I describe how Las Lolitas, the group responsible for Lebrón’s centennial celebration, engaged in performances of public memory that took place in spaces that would showcase a Puerto Rican nationalist rhetorical repertoire. This repertoire emphasizes networks of solidarity, feminist concerns, and revolutionary spirit across time, highlighting resistance to past colonial transgressions to aid in present/future struggles over Puerto Rican self-determination.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg in the Twenty-first Century: An Introduction

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg in the Twenty-first Century:An Introduction Laura E. Helton (bio) and Rafia Zafar (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Arturo Schomburg, c. 1896. (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL Digital Collections, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-8851-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99) Who was Arturo (Arthur) Alfonso Schomburg and why, as we approach the sesquicentennial of his birth, do his life and work still draw us in?1 In the 1980s, coeditor Rafia Zafar, then a graduate student, read for the first time Schomburg's canonical essay, "The Negro Digs Up His Past," a text that has long served as a touchstone statement for scholars in Black studies. His often quoted imperative from that essay, that "the American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future" (231), has rallied generations of subsequent researchers and creators. For Zafar, Schomburg was a theorist of the African diasporic archive, an intellectual whose vision made possible her own academic career. Coming to Schomburg in the early 2000s and in the wake of the archival turn, coeditor Laura E. Helton, herself an archivist, saw him as part of a cadre of bibliophiles and librarians who laid the groundwork in the early twentieth century for nearly every [End Page 1] major repository in the United States devoted to Black collections. Schomburg was not the only collector of his era, but through his famous manifesto and his namesake institution, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, his story has become synonymous with the project of Black historical recovery. Schomburg's biography, which traverses Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, New York, and Europe, intrigues scholars from many fields who claim him for overlapping but distinct intellectual pantheons. He has become an icon of the diasporic turn in African American studies and a highly visible figure in Puerto Rican studies. In recent years, he has also been the subject of a children's book, works in the popular press, a play, and a new series of US postage stamps, "Voices of the Harlem Renaissance."2 With this increased attention comes an opportunity to think more expansively about his practices. Beyond his clarion call to act "more collectively, more retrospectively" in "The Negro Digs Up His Past" (231), what was the texture of Schomburg's thought and how did his ideas shift over time? What exactly did he want a Black archive to comprise? And what does his work mean today? In this special issue of African American Review, scholars of the literary, visual, and historiographic archive take up these questions, resituating Schomburg and his legacy for the twenty-first century. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 2. Studio portrait of Arthur Alfonso Schomburg as a young child, c. 1878. (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL Digital Collections, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/3588a080-e2fe-0133-9629-00505686a51c) [End Page 2] Born in 1874 in San Juan to a mother from St. Croix, Schomburg grew up with his maternal family in Puerto Rico and St. Thomas and was likely estranged from his father, a Puerto Rican with European roots.3 The educational milieu of his early life reflected a broad tradition of popular and working-class education in the Caribbean that included informal libraries, tabaquero-led study groups, and instructional societies, often started by and for formerly enslaved and free Blacks (Ferrer 116; Hoffnung-Garskof 14–15). Before his migration as a teenager to the US, some of Schomburg's schooling took place in youth clubs and under the guidance of Puerto Rican nationalist historian José Julian Acosta, who was an important influence on Schomburg's thinking.4 In one version of the mutable stories Schomburg conjured when asked why he became such an incurable bibliophile, he told the Pittsburgh Courier that, among the members of these clubs, there was a tendency among the whites and near-whites to point with more pride to the achievements of their white ancestors, than the blacks seemed able to do of their ancestors. Mr. Schomburg noted this and made it a point to study up...

Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building: National Sentiments, Transnational Realities, 1897–1940

Naida García-Crespo's superb study of the confluence of early Puerto Rican cinema and the development of nationalism should interest a wide set of readers in the history of early cinema, Puerto Rican and Caribbean studies, and Latin American intellectual discourse during the early twentieth century. It provides both an excellent historiography of silent and sound films produced on the island before World War II and a treatise on how the idea of the Puerto Rican nation emerged as a “mediation among contradictory discourses” of nativist nationalism and cross-cultural, transnational, and colonial exchanges (p. 170).In her attempt to create something solid out of the otherwise spectral, García-Crespo faced two daunting challenges. On the one hand, only one feature film produced in Puerto Rico before 1940 still exists today—the 1934 Romance Tropical, which García-Crespo informs us is preserved in the University of California, Los Angeles, film archive (p. 177n2). On the other, the study of a national cinema usually implies the existence of an actual nation and an actual state; Puerto Rico, of course, transitioned from a colony of Spain to one of the United States during the period under review and remains today, in García-Crespo's term, a “stateless nation” (p. 9).She was able to overcome the first of these challenges thanks to a solid methodological grounding in the study of early film. Through an exhaustive study of archival and published primary sources—including movie scripts, newspaper and magazine reviews, business documents, government records, and ancestry work—García-Crespo re-creates both the narrative plotlines of several films and the institutional history of the nascent film industry in Puerto Rico. Following a recent trend in early film studies that considers distribution networks, viewership, and exhibition practices to be as important to the development of national cinema as auteurship and film production, she demonstrates that even notable failures produced long-term benefits to the Puerto Rican film industry. Both the Tropical Film Company (based in Ponce between 1916 and 1917) and Porto Rico Photoplays (which built a film studio in the Hato Rey neighborhood of San Juan in the early 1920s) reveal the kinds of transnational partnerships at the heart of Puerto Rican culture.Despite key differences, both of these short-lived production companies symbolize the creative use of transnational analysis that García-Crespo employs to overcome the second challenge mentioned above. The Tropical Film Company, which was founded by Rafael Colorado D'Assoy (a Spanish-born entrepreneur who first came to the island as a Spanish soldier in the Cuban-Spanish-American War of 1898) and Nemesio Canales and Luis Lloréns Torres (two elite intellectuals known for their involvement in the nationalist independence movement), deployed cinema as a Progressive Era tool of education and reform. In contrast, Porto Rico Photoplays was a business venture between the American filmmaker F. Eugene Farnsworth (who later became a leader of the Maine chapter of the Ku Klux Klan) and local elites such as San Juan businessman Enrique González Beltrán that sought to attract US capital and talent to the island. Although the Tropical Film Company also had commercial aims, it produced a wide array of narrative and documentary films such as Los funerales de Muñoz Rivera (1916). Porto Rico Photoplays produced just one film, a derivative romance with antimiscegenation themes called Tropical Love (1921).For each example, García-Crespo argues that we cannot read history backwards to see the birth of the Puerto Rican independista movement in the films of the Tropical Film Company or simply condemn the colonial commercialism of Porto Rico Photoplays. Rather, each exemplifies how under colonial contexts “the national and the transnational become so intricately connected . . . that delineation between the two becomes impossible” (p. 8). Each, she argues, demonstrates how ideas about the nation “emanated from both rejecting and embracing different transnational discourses about the island's image and place in the world” (p. 172).The book moves chronologically forward from the first film screenings in Latin America and the Caribbean in the late 1890s to the creation of the New Deal–inspired Division of Community Education (DIVEDCO) by the insular Puerto Rican government in the 1940s. Delightful stories about early Puerto Rican filmmaking (too many to detail here) are matched by astute analyses of how gendered and elite visions of the nation are at the root of both early cinema and the early nationalist project on the island.Readers of the Hispanic American Historical Review, however, might come away wishing that García-Crespo had expanded her analysis through more explicit comparisons with cinematic and nationalistic developments in other parts of Latin America. Despite its somewhat inward-looking approach (common in Puerto Rican studies), the book makes a substantial contribution to the study of early Puerto Rican cinema and culture. Serving as a counterweight to traditional national histories of early cinema, it would make a great addition to syllabi in global film courses as well.

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

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.

Our Own Monument: Landscape in the Linguistic Others of Quebec and Puerto Rico

ABSTRACTIt is common in discourse surrounding Québécois and Puerto Rican nationalism to discuss both regions in terms of their linguistic marginality to Anglo-majorities found in Canada and the USA, respectively. As two areas faced with the common American task of inventing a national identity in displaced settings in the New World, English becomes an easy “other” against which the French Quebecker and Spanish Puerto Rican may define themselves. However, language becomes a problematic means of definition when considered in relation to its intrinsically Old World origins. This paper reexamines Quebec and Puerto Rican nationalism from a larger New World perspective that focuses on the role of American landscapes and settings in conjunction with the traditional linguistic approach.

Seeing the U.S. Empire through the Eyes of Puerto Rican Nationalists Who Opposed It

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