The History of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Movement

A new book sheds light on a century of struggle.

by

The semi-citizens of Puerto Rico had no choice or role in their inclusion as a U.S. colony but ample opportunities to be exploited. Many Puerto Ricans have been seeking ways to fight back, some to gain the island’s independence, others to stop the ongoing destruction of their environment, still others to gain space for themselves, their language, and their culture within the mainland of the United States. In Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism, an important new book, author Margaret M. Power, who moved to Chicago in 1981 to work with the city’s Puerto Rican community, tells one particular story and draws out its many implications for solidarity across the Americas.

Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism

By Margaret M. Power

University of North Carolina Press, 308 pages

Publication date: April, 2023 

Power was initially drawn to the dramatic saga of four Puerto Rican nationalists who entered the U.S. Capitol in March 1954, firing about thirty rounds from small handguns and wounding five members of Congress. Struggles for their defense and release reached an apex twenty years later, as a new generation of activists in the United States and Puerto Rico protested on their behalf. President Jimmy Carter pardoned the surviving prisoners in September 1979, granting them unconditional release.

In 1898, the Spanish-American War moved the island of Puerto Rico into the U.S. orbit. It was only decades later, with the founding of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PNPR), that a coherent oppositional force came together. Under the leadership of Pedro Albizu Campos, the PNPR demanded independence, while simultaneously stressing the interdependence of a cultural heritage shared across much of the Caribbean, Central, and South America. Power, a professor emeritus of history, conducted interviews and examined archives in half a dozen countries to relocate the heroes and heroines of a little-understood movement that has been invisible to generations of American tourists seeking fun, sun, and piña coladas on the island.

No doubt the origins of the resistance in Puerto Rico itself may be found, partly, in the linguistic, cultural continuities that survived efforts to impose a u.s.based acculturation and the abandonment of Spanish for the English in the public schools beginning in the early twentieth century. Puerto Ricans have also resisted the binary white-over-Black racism of the United States—adopting instead something closer to the complex mixtures of many Latin American societies, with whites inevitably remaining at the top. Meanwhile, the exploitation of the working population for sugar and tobacco production anticipated the needlework jobs that would follow when anti-union employers sought to escape the U.S. labor movement. 

Power carefully traces these complexities as she explores the rise of organized resistance and its scattered victories, including for the right of women to vote beginning in 1929 (although not universal until 1935). A broad array of island peoples, including Haitians, Dominicans, and Cubans, individual intellectuals and political groups expressed sympathy and solidarity with the independista spirit and goals of the Puerto Rican activists. 

If the Depression brought much suffering to the island, it also intensified mobilization attempts for change from above by New Dealers along with intensified U.S. efforts to quash the independence sentiment. Formal trials of Puerto Rican nationalists taking direct action began in 1936, amid protests by ten thousand nationalists in Spanish Harlem that were boosted by their new hero and defender, U.S. Representative Vito Marcantonio.

We can look back and wonder at Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy.” It seemed, at first, to lighten the load of U.S. domination, or at least to rule out future military invasions and occupations. But U.S. leaders deemed Puerto Rico necessary for strategic resistance against German influence, and for the soldiers and sailors needed in the coming war.

By the early 1940s, Nationalist Party leaders had relocated to New York to escape the worst of the repression, but here they also experienced newfound support. In 1944, the American League for Puerto Rico’s Independence took shape, gathering support from prominent intellectuals and activists including Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Pearl S. Buck and union leader A. Phillip Randolph. In 1953, the United Nations pronounced Puerto Rico a “Non-Self-Governing Territory” and granted (some) rights by way of the U.N. Charter. 

The Popular Democratic Party, led by Luis Muñoz Marín, meanwhile swept into power promising reform. Marín was the first Puerto Rican governor allowed to be elected by popular vote in 1948, remaining in office until 1964. The reforms successfully transformed the island from a rural society to an industrial and urban one, but without anything resembling independence or social equality. It was an industrial and urban society, but remained bound by the economic and political influence of Washington.

The U.S. exploitation of the island of Vieques for weapons testing and target practice prompted special resentment and a muted resistance met by FBI and police investigations and selective prosecution along the lines of McCarthyism in the United States. No doubt for space and research reasons, Power does not quite get to the big upswing of independence activity during the 1970s. But the sea of Puerto Rican flags that met the released prisoners in 1979 has served as a symbol ever since: history had been made, and the waving of little flags, still often seen in crowds, marked a collective self-recognition that has not gone away.

Power explains, in the last two pages of the book, that public disaffection with the U.S. control has increased, with the environmental damage of recent hurricanes adding new levels of inequality and threats to the future of the island. The nationalist movement itself, isolated and divided internally, contrasts with the widespread cultural sense of Puerto Rican-ness, expressed in murals, music, and even the waving of Puerto Rican flags at parades on the streets of many cities.