Militant Puerto Ricans

Militant Puerto Ricans
Author: Michael González-Cruz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2020-08
Genre:
ISBN:

Facing discrimination from fellow members in unions, organizations, and political parties, Militant Puerto Ricans tells the story of how Puerto Ricans in the United States participated in traditional politics, while creating clandestine organizations. By 1965, Puerto Ricans had created over six-hundred different political and communal organizations, with different approaches, methods, and tactics. Many organizations focused on improving conditions in Puerto Rican communities, and others aimed at freeing Puerto Rico from its colonial status. Militant Puerto Ricans focuses on the formation and the strategies of the Young Lords Party (YLP), the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP), the Puerto Rican National Left Movement (or the "Comité MINP"), the Puerto Rican Student Union (PRSU), the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), the Nationalist Party (PN) and the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP). Militant Puerto Ricans tells the story of how leaders and activists who belonged to these organizations, constantly travelled between Puerto Rico and the U.S., strengthening the bonds between activists and organizations in and outside Puerto Rico. Additionally, Militant Puerto Ricans tells us the story of how clandestine organizations, such as the FALN and the Macheteros, organized to make others conscious about Puerto Rico's colonial status. Militant Puerto Ricans' timeline starts in 1868, when Puerto Ricans rebelled against the Spanish colonial government in "El Grito de Lares." After El Grito, rebel bands in Puerto Rico continued their resistance by assaulting landowners, burning their fields, and destroying credit books. These bands were known as the "Tiznados," who despite their efforts, did not organize into a large-scale revolutionary movement. Puerto Rico would not see a large revolutionary movement until the 1930s, when Pedro Albizu Campos was elected the president of the Nationalist Party, a working-class movement that threatened corporate and colonial powers. The U.S. fought the Nationalist Party by implementing a Gag Law, they tortured and executed Nationalists, and shot peaceful protesters. Facing violent oppression from the colonial government, the armed struggle became clandestine. The Chicago-based Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) and the Boricua Popular Army (EPB) [otherwise known as the "Macheteros"] took command. They attacked and destroyed banks, oil pipelines, military equipment, and federal offices. Their aim was not to overthrow the government, but to protest Puerto Rico's colonial status. The FBI and Puerto Rican police's tactics against activists were vicious and brutal. Besides their assassinations of activists without due process, one of the most shocking facts this chapter reports on was how a bomb was planted in the Puerto Rican Socialist Party's daycare center. It was only after 150,000 dossiers on independence supporters were revealed to the public in the late 1980s, that the FBI scaled back its vicious assassination campaign. Instead, their tactics shifted to harassment of key individuals, infiltration of activist organizations and a massive media brainwashing campaign to demonize leftist militant tactics.Militant Puerto Ricans concludes with a chapter on the lives of Pedro Albizu Campos' revolutionary disciples. In 1999, the U.S. released twelve Puerto Rican political prisoners after a massive protest took place in the island. Puerto Rico received them with hugs, ovations, and parades. Michael González-Cruz tells us that these revolutionaries were radicalized by the tragic circum-stances of their nation, their communities, and their reality. In the United States, many became radicalized when they witnessed the police and FBI violently repress the Black Panther Party. Puerto Ricans who have been born and raised in the United States have faced racism and discrimination to this day. Our militants have fought for liberation, occupied buildings and rescued their history.

Los Macheteros

Los Macheteros
Author: Ronald Fernandez
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1987
Genre: Bank robberies
ISBN: 9780135406007

The Young Lords

The Young Lords
Author: Johanna Fernández
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2019-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469653451

Against the backdrop of America's escalating urban rebellions in the 1960s, an unexpected cohort of New York radicals unleashed a series of urban guerrilla actions against the city's racist policies and contempt for the poor. Their dramatic flair, uncompromising socialist vision for a new society, skillful ability to link local problems to international crises, and uncompromising vision for a new society riveted the media, alarmed New York's political class, and challenged nationwide perceptions of civil rights and black power protest. The group called itself the Young Lords. Utilizing oral histories, archival records, and an enormous cache of police surveillance files released only after a decade-long Freedom of Information Law request and subsequent court battle, Johanna Fernandez has written the definitive account of the Young Lords, from their roots as a Chicago street gang to their rise and fall as a political organization in New York. Led by poor and working-class Puerto Rican youth, and consciously fashioned after the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords occupied a hospital, blocked traffic with uncollected garbage, took over a church, tested children for lead poisoning, defended prisoners, fought the military police, and fed breakfast to poor children. Their imaginative, irreverent protests and media conscious tactics won reforms, popularized socialism in the United States and exposed U.S. mainland audiences to the country's quiet imperial project in Puerto Rico. Fernandez challenges what we think we know about the sixties. She shows that movement organizers were concerned with finding solutions to problems as pedestrian as garbage collection and the removal of lead paint from tenement walls; gentrification; lack of access to medical care; childcare for working mothers; and the warehousing of people who could not be employed in deindustrialized cities. The Young Lords' politics and preoccupations, especially those concerning the rise of permanent unemployment foretold the end of the American Dream. In riveting style, Fernandez demonstrates how the Young Lords redefined the character of protest, the color of politics, and the cadence of popular urban culture in the age of great dreams.

Radical Imagination, Radical Humanity

Radical Imagination, Radical Humanity
Author: Rose Muzio
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2017-01-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438463553

Provides firsthand accounts of militant Puerto Rican activists in 1970s New York City. In this book Rose Muzio analyzes how structural and historical factors—including colonialism, economic marginalization, racial discrimination, and the Black and Brown Power movements of the 1960s—influenced young Puerto Ricans to reject mainstream ideas about political incorporation and join others in struggles against perceived injustices. This analysis provides the first in-depth account of the origins, evolution, achievements, and failures of El Comité-Movimiento de Izquierda Nacional Puertorriqueño, one of the main organizations of the Puerto Rican Left in the 1970s in New York City. El Comité fought for bilingual education programs in public schools, for access to quality jobs and higher education, and against health care budget cuts. The organization mobilized support nationally and internationally to end the US Navy’s occupation of Vieques, denounced colonial rule in Puerto Rico, and opposed US aid to authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Africa. Muzio bases her project on dozens of interviews with participants as well as archival documents and news coverage, and shows how a radical, counterhegemonic political perspective evolved organically, rather than as a product of a priori ideology.

New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone

New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone
Author: R. Rivera
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2003-02-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1403981671

New York Puerto Ricans have been an integral part of hip hop culture since day one: from 1970s pioneers like Rock Steady Crew's Jo-Jo, to recent rap mega-stars Big Punisher (R.I.P.) and Angie Martinez. Yet, Puerto Rican participation and contributions to hip hop have often been downplayed and even completely ignored. And when their presence has been acknowledged, it has frequently been misinterpreted as a defection from Puerto Rican culture and identity, into the African American camp. But nothing could be further from the truth. Through hip hop, Puerto Ricans have simply stretched the boundaries of Puerto Ricanness and latinidad.

Caribbean Revolutions

Caribbean Revolutions
Author: Rachel A. May
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2018-06-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108424759

A comprehensive history and comparative analysis of the most important Caribbean armed revolutionary movements during the Cold War era.

Free Puerto Rico

Free Puerto Rico
Author: Pedro Albizu Campos
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021-07-15
Genre: Nationalism
ISBN: 9781105772696

Pedro Albizu Campos (September 12, 1891 - April 21, 1965) was a Puerto Rican attorney and politician, and the leading figure in the Puerto Rican independence movement. Contained in this volume are the most prescient of his words on Puerto Rico, which to this day remains a subject of the United States of America.

Fantasy Island

Fantasy Island
Author: Ed Morales
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2019-09-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1568588984

A crucial, clear-eyed accounting of Puerto Rico's 122 years as a colony of the US. Since its acquisition by the US in 1898, Puerto Rico has served as a testing ground for the most aggressive and exploitative US economic, political, and social policies. The devastation that ensued finally grew impossible to ignore in 2017, in the wake of Hurricane María, as the physical destruction compounded the infrastructure collapse and trauma inflicted by the debt crisis. In Fantasy Island, Ed Morales traces how, over the years, Puerto Rico has served as a colonial satellite, a Cold War Caribbean showcase, a dumping ground for US manufactured goods, and a corporate tax shelter. He also shows how it has become a blank canvas for mercenary experiments in disaster capitalism on the frontlines of climate change, hamstrung by internal political corruption and the US federal government's prioritization of outside financial interests. Taking readers from San Juan to New York City and back to his family's home in the Luquillo Mountains, Morales shows us the machinations of financial and political interests in both the US and Puerto Rico, and the resistance efforts of Puerto Rican artists and activists. Through it all, he emphasizes that the only way to stop Puerto Rico from being bled is to let Puerto Ricans take control of their own destiny, going beyond the statehood-commonwealth-independence debate to complete decolonization.

Brown in the Windy City

Brown in the Windy City
Author: Lilia Fernández
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2014-07-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 022621284X

Brown in the Windy City is the first history to examine the migration and settlement of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in postwar Chicago. Lilia Fernández reveals how the two populations arrived in Chicago in the midst of tremendous social and economic change and, in spite of declining industrial employment and massive urban renewal projects, managed to carve out a geographic and racial place in one of America’s great cities. Through their experiences in the city’s central neighborhoods over the course of these three decades, Fernández demonstrates how Mexicans and Puerto Ricans collectively articulated a distinct racial position in Chicago, one that was flexible and fluid, neither black nor white.

The History of Puerto Rico

The History of Puerto Rico
Author: Val Karanxha
Publisher:
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2021-03-28
Genre:
ISBN:

In this project, I traveled through a timeline, from the days the island became a Spanish dominion until the 1950s where insurgency arose to separate Puerto Rico from the United States and start the process of nation-building. This process never came to fruition due to the clashes between the local nationalist elite and the diaspora in the US. There are various theoretical threads that try to explain the identity-forming and the rise of nationalism in Puerto Rico. I summarize these strands and make room for future implications about the case of Puerto Rico.