Puerto Ricans

PUERTO RICANS. The interaction between Puerto Rico’s semi-colonial status and the status of Puerto Ricans as an oppressed minority ensured that the Left would find a presence both on the island and on the mainland. Until the post-World War II migration, however, relatively few Puerto Ricans resided in the continental United States. The great majority lived in New York City, mainly in “El Barrio,” an area of the East Harlem section of Manhattan that previously had been home to many Jewish Americans. By 1964 fully one-third of Puerto Rico’s population had migrated to the continental United States to become East Harlem’s largest ethnic group. El Barrio housed churches, cultural centers, political clubs, restaurants and markets that attracted Puerto Ricans from throughout the city. Puerto Ricans soon spread out to various locations where they formed new communities. By 1980, fewer than 50 percent of diasporic Puerto Ricans resided in New York. Within a year following the devastating Hurricane Maria in 2017, nearly 160,000 Puerto Ricans fled the island in one of the largest migrations in its history, and many resettled in Florida.

Radical ideas reached Puerto Rican immigrants early. At the time of World War I, La Escuela Francisco Ferrer y Guardia (Francisco Ferrer School), a flourishing community center in East Harlem served Spanish-speakers attracted by anarchist ideas. In 1918, the first Puerto Rican section of the Socialist Party appeared. Shortly afterward the Associación Nacionalista, advocating independence for Puerto Rico, came into existence. El Centro Obrero Español (Spanish Workers Center), founded in 1927, became a major center of the Communist Party’s growing influence in the community. El Centro sponsored a newspaper, La Vida Obrera (Worker’s Life), and took part in successful labor organizing campaigns. In 1924, El Barrio had enthusiastically supported Robert La Follette, the Progressive Party’s presidential candidate and became an integral part of the coalition that, from 1922 to 1932, elected as East Harlem’s Congressman Fiorello La Guardia, the urban-populist who advocated a unique Left program.

Vito Marcantonio’s candidacy for Congress from East Harlem in 1934 opened a new phase in El Barrio’s political life. Arguably the most successful American radical politician of the 1930s-1940s, Marcantonio embraced the cause of Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican people as his own. In June, 1936, Marcantonio submitted a bill calling for “genuine independence [for Puerto Rico and the declaration of] the responsibility of the United States for the disastrous state of the economy of Puerto Rico and the abysmal poverty of the people.” In August, in his role as the president of International Labor Defense, the Communist Party’s legal arm, he flew to San Juan. There, together with Gilberto Concepción de Gracia (who in 1946 founded the Puerto Rican Independence Party), he became co-attorney for Pedro Albizu Campos, the leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and six other Nationalists, all of whom had been indicted for conspiring to overthrow the US government. Marcantonio’s insistence that the Puerto Rican people were “the most exploited victims of a most devastating imperialism” resonated with their experience. During his fourteen years in the House of Representatives, Marcantonio served as de facto Congressman for Puerto Rico. In El Barrio, his well-staffed and well-financed political organization attended to the everyday needs of his Italian American, African American, and Puerto Rican constituents. Consequently, El Barrio provided 66 percent of its vote for Marcantonio and emerged as an essential component of his electoral coalition.

Although it would be impossible to overlook Marcantonio’s influence, the Left also existed independently of the radical congressman in El Barrio. In 1936, 57 percent of El Barrio’s vote for Marcantonio had been registered on the All People’s Party, a short-lived entity associated with the Communist Party. The Communist candidate for the State Assembly, José Santiago, received 24 percent of the vote in one election district and in general achieved impressive totals from El Barrio voters. That same year, El Barrio’s vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Herbert H. Lehman, running for governor on the American Labor Party (ALP), received 8.6 percent, a percentage unmatched in any other non-Jewish district of New York City.

In 1937, Oscar Garciá Rivera, the Republican/ALP candidate for state assembly for a district that included El Barrio, won a special election, thus becoming the first Puerto Rican elected official in the continental United States. In 1938, he won the same office by running solely on the ALP line. El Barrio meanwhile provided Israel Amter, the Communist Party’s at-large candidate for the city council, his third-highest vote of any Manhattan assembly district. In the same election, Lehman, who was running for Senate, received two to three times as many votes on the ALP line than his citywide average of 15 percent. Marcantonio, running as the ALP/Republican candidate, swept El Barrio, receiving three ALP votes for every Republican vote. In 1940, nearly 30 percent of El Barrio’s voters pulled the ALP lever to vote for Roosevelt. In 1941, La Guardia, running on a fusion ticket that included the Republican Party, won a majority of El Barrio’s vote on the ALP line.

Following a decrease in El Barrio’s support for the ALP during the early war years, the community resumed voting for the Left alternative in unprecedented numbers. For example, in 1944 in the Ninth Election District, in the heart of El Barrio, Roosevelt received 649 votes (322 on the Democratic and 301 on the ALP lines) and Dewey, the Republican candidate, received eight votes. Most striking was the support for the entire ALP slate. In 1948, almost two-thirds of its voters supported Marcantonio, who was running solely on the ALP line, and approximately 50 percent voted for Manuel Medina, the ALP’s candidate for state assembly. Most significant, Henry Wallace, the presidential candidate for the newly founded Progressive Party, received over 50 percent of the vote in two election districts. In all, Wallace carried all eight of El Barrio’s election districts, which represented 27 percent of the election districts that Henry Wallace, running for the Progressive Party, carried in the entire United States.

Despite intensified red baiting, El Barrio continued voting ALP. In 1949, when Marcantonio ran as the ALP mayoral candidate, he carried El Barrio with two-thirds of the vote. Now running for city council, Medina won as much as 73 percent of the vote in some El Barrio election districts. In 1950, El Barrio’s voters cast over 60 percent of its vote for the only congressman to vote against the Korean War and to support the right of the Communist Party to a legal existence. Citywide, the ALP candidate for Senate, W. E. B. Du Bois, received 6.5 percent of the vote; in El Barrio he received approximately 45 percent. In those few elections the ALP contested before its demise in 1954, its totals in El Barrio were always greatly above those elsewhere in the city. Other than El Barrio, nowhere did the ALP become the major party.
During this entire period, the Left had a highly visible felt presence in El Barrio. The New York Times noted in 1938 that leftwing “parades and demonstrations … have become almost a part of the life of the colony.” Many Left-wing organizations had headquarters in El Barrio, from ALP clubs, organizations advocating independence for Puerto Rico, the Workers Alliance headquarters, to a Communist Party club. The Cervantes Fraternal Society, the Spanish-speaking branch of the International Workers Order, had six lodges in Puerto Rican communities. The president of the Cervantes Fraternal Society, Jesús Colón, had arrived in New York City in 1917 as a stowaway. Without formal education and living under miserable conditions, Colón became an important Communist Party leader and journalist. The relative weakness of the Catholic Church in El Barrio and other potential competing organizations greatly benefited these Left organizations.
Their work was amplified by the widespread circulation of a Left Spanish-language press: a daily, La Voz (The Voice), from 1937 to 1939 and Los Pueblos Hispaños (The Hispanic Peoples), a weekly founded in 1944 and edited by Juan Antonio Corretjer, the Nationalist poet who had joined the Communist Party. A succeeding weekly, Liberación, edited by Bernardo Vega, a Communist journalist and organizer, emblazoned on its masthead “Por la libertad de España, Puerto Rico, y demás paises oprimidos.”(“For the liberty of Spain, Puerto Rico, and other oppressed nations.”) Liberación’s editors paired Puerto Rico with Spain, because the Fascist defeat of the Spanish Republic was a matter of great concern to all Latino Leftists.
East Harlem’s Puerto Ricans remained close to the land of their birth. To some extent, this was a byproduct of their holding American citizenship, which allowed for unimpeded travel to-and-from the island. But discrimination in obtaining housing, jobs, and access to the wider society heightened their attachment to a distinct Puerto Rican culture. The use of Spanish at home, in church services and everyday life, also music as well as food culture and social mores, predisposed them to retain their culture and language. The general resistance to assimilation created obstacles to prevailing attitudes and beliefs that leaned decisively to the Right.
The influence of the Island’s politics predisposed many of these immigrants toward Leftist parties. During the 1930s the Socialist Party, earlier advocating Puerto Rican statehood, had drifted too far to the Right to gain a large following. Later in the decade, the rise of the Left-political populist People’s Democratic Party with its slogan “Bread, Land, Freedom,” had a great impact. Starting from 1930, when Albizu Campos became its President, the Nationalist Party, despite its small membership, gained significant influence. The US rule over Puerto Rico guaranteed that Puerto Rican nationalism would be tied to Left-wing currents.
In support of the nationalist uprising on the island, Nationalist Party members Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo attempted to assassinate President Truman on 1 November 1950. Torresola died of gunshot wounds. Collazo, who had worked closely with Marcantonio in El Barrio, remained in prison until 1970 when President Jimmy Carter commuted his sentence. On 2 March 1954, shortly after their arrival, Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andrés Figueroa Cordero, and Irving Flores Rodríguez took their seats in the House of Representatives spectator gallery. They unfurled the flag of Puerto Rico, shouted “Que viva Puerto Rico Libre,” and fired pistols into the chamber. The four Nationalists had bought one-way tickets to Washington, DC. At their trial, Lebrón explained: “I came to die not to kill.” The US Federal Government used the Nationalists’ actions as a justification for intensified police surveillance of Left political activity of all kinds on both the mainland and the island. Later campaigns to free the imprisoned Nationalists helped to reassemble a Left contingent among Puerto Ricans.
The Puerto Rican Left re-emerged from an unexpected quarter. The formation of the Pro-Independence Movement / Movmiento Independencia Puertorriqueño (MPI) in 1959 attempted to coalesce various organizations and political devotees around the cause of Puerto Rico’s independence. Its successor, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP), founded in 1971, for some time united significant numbers of island and mainland Puerto Ricans in the same organization. Largely comprising professionals, the PSP also had a base in Puerto Rico’s trade union movement. Significantly, it published Claridad (Clarity), a paper whose excellence, especially in cultural areas, continued to attract a dedicated audience. However, the PSP’s insistence that Puerto Ricans both in the United States and in Puerto Rico were part of the same nation put it at odds with the rest of the Left, which recognized Puerto Rico as a nation and the Puerto Ricans in the diaspora as an oppressed national minority. By the end of the 1960s, difficulties of creating a political agenda encompassing the needs of both sectors of the Puerto Rican people precipitated a decline in the PSP.
In 1967, a Puerto Rican street gang in Chicago under the leadership of José “Cha Cha” Jiménez became highly politicized. Closely modeling itself after the Black Panthers, the Young Lords published a news monthly, Pa’lante (Forward), and also started a breakfast program for schoolchildren. The following year, in El Barrio, the Young Lords occupied a church where they first organized a day-care center and, somewhat later, founded a health clinic. These visible direct-action tactics gave Chicago’s Young Lords much publicity and inspired the organization of other chapters.
The New York City Young Lords, which emerged from a radical study group, La Sociedad Albizu Campos, followed closely the program of the Chicago group. Perhaps because of its college-educated leadership, differences widened between the New York City and Chicago organizations. In 1970, New York City’s Young Lords officially constituted themselves as the Young Lords Party. For the most part, the Young Lords had not been born on the island. Many spoke English as their first language, a fact that reflected the increasingly large diasporic contingent of the Puerto Rican population, which by 1970 had grown to 43 percent of the aggregate Puerto Ricans’ population. The Young Lords’ generalized radical philosophy—Maoist in style, pro-Cuban, and not openly hostile to the Soviet Union—met with a positive response among second-generation Puerto Ricans. The ghetto poor also responded to the Young Lords when they marched through their communities chanting “Despierta, Boriqua, Defiende Lo Tuyo” (Arise, Boricua [Puerto Rican], Defend What Is Yours). By 1972, the Young Lords Party had evolved into the Organization of Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers, which espoused Maoist ideas and practices. Police repression, factional disputes, and exhaustion caused a meltdown of a much-depleted party.
Among other Leftist groups contending for hegemony among radicalized student and community sectors of the Puerto Rican people was El Comité. El Comité grew out of a massive anti-urban-renewal project on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that displaced large numbers of Puerto Ricans. Though much smaller than other Left organizations, El Comité attracted considerable attention. More than its rivals, it welcomed non-Puerto Ricans into its ranks. Similarly, El Comité paid more attention to the legacy of Vito Marcantonio. In pamphlet form, El Comité published a section of Marcantonio’s speeches and writings on Independence for Puerto Rico. “Old Leftists,” including Annette T. Rubinstein, contributed their energy and expertise to this group. El Comité left its mark.

During New York City’s 1975–1976 financial crisis, all elements of the Puerto Rican Left combined to prevent the closure of Hostos Community College, the bilingual unit of City University, founded in the South Bronx in 1968, and named after Eugenio Maria de Hostos (1839–1903), a famed Puerto Rican educator, writer, and independentista. Hostos Community College had acquired enormous symbolic significance to Puerto Ricans and the wider Latino community. The threat of closure generated organizations to save Hostos that launched mainstream and direct-action campaigns to insure its survival. These combined efforts culminated in an occupation of Hostos and a march of thousands from El Barrio to the headquarters of the city’s Financial Control Board. Thanks to a threat of a reduction to its budget by the Black and Latino Caucus of the New York State Community College had been saved.

Opposition to the movement to make English the official language of the United States united Puerto Ricans, both on the mainland and on the island community, who interpreted this suggestion as an insult and threat to their culture. The community remained politically divided, however, between those who wished to retain the present commonwealth relationship and advocates of either statehood or independence.

The 1990s saw the emergence of a distinct Left-wing Puerto Rican literary culture. The Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe on New York’s Lower East Side became one of the city’s premier literary performance venues. On the political side, Bronx Democrat Jose Serrano gained distinction as a progressive politician, and in the controversies around the US assault on Iraq, he became a lightning rod of opposition. Retiring in 2020, due to advanced Parkinson’s disease, he was succeeded by Ritchie Torrez, one of the first gay Latino politicians to rise to a high post in Manhattan government. Like Serrano, he advanced progressive legislation on a host of issues, supported by a newly mobilized player in New York’s political scene: the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

The new century also saw the rise of handful of other Puerto Rican leaders within and around the Democratic Party. Lydia Valesquez, the first Puerto Rican woman elected to Congress, took strong stands on many social issues, but also led the successful struggle to halt the use of the Viequez site for practice bombing by the US military. Her Congressional colleague as of 2018, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, rapidly became a superstar and hero of American socialists, second to Bernie Sanders in public acclaim, first in political charisma with the younger generations stepping up to succeed their elders. Taking over parts of a Bronx district long held by Vito Marcantonio, she also occupied a transcendent or symbolic status as a popular Puerto Rican leader in the United States.

Sanders, her zealous supporter, had long campaigned such Puerto Rican issues as debt relief, the safety net, and notably hurricane recovery financing. Vigorous campaigning by “AOC” increased his support in the Bronx and in areas of Greater New York where the mostly young DSA members lived. In the final Sanders run for president, Carmen Yulin Cruz, mayor of San Juan, became co-chair of his campaign.

In short, US progressive politics had, at least in part, caught up with the best of Puerto Rican expectations held long before.

Colón, Jesús. A Puerto Rican in New York and other Sketches. New York, International Publishers, 1983.

Meyer, Gerald. Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.

________. “Pedro Albizu Campos, Gilberto Concepcion de Gracia, and Vito Marcantonio’s
Collaboration in the Cause of Puerto Rico’s Independence,” 86-123, Centro: Journal of
the Center of Puerto Rican Studies (Spring 2011).

Torres, Andrés and José Velázquez, eds. The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.

Vega, Bernardo. Memorias de Bernardo Vega: Contribución a la historia de la comunidad puertorriqueña en Nueva York. Río Piedras, PR: Ediciones Huracán, 1977.