Solidarity across the Americas

The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-imperialism

Margaret M. Power

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781469674056, 9781469674049
• eBook ISBN: 9781469674063
• Subtopic: North American History

The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PNPR) understood that to successfully establish an independent nation it needed to generate solidarity across the Americas with its struggle against US colonial rule. It invested significant energy, personnel, and resources in attending regional conferences, distributing its literature throughout the hemisphere, creating solidarity committees, presenting its case to elected officials and the general public, and promoting the causes of oppressed peoples. The hemispheric outpourings of solidarity with Puerto Rican independence have been obscured by larger, later liberation movements as well as the anticolonial party’s ultimate failure to achieve independence. However, as this book shows, they were nonetheless central to anti-imperialists, nationalists, and revolutionaries from New York City to Buenos Aires.

Margaret M. Power’s new history of the PNPR focuses on how it built a broad movement with active networks in virtually all of Latin America, much of the Caribbean, and New York City. This hemispheric view introduces a sprawling transnational network, nurtured by the PNPR from its founding in 1922 through its military actions of the 1950s and beyond that included individuals, parties, organizations, and governments throughout the Americas, and it resituates the Puerto Rican nationalist movement as a transnational revolutionary influence and force.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Nineteenth-Century Roots of Transnational Anticolonial Struggle and Solidarity
• 2. Setting Up the U.S. Colonial State
• 3. Becoming the Nationalist Party
• 4. Building Latin American Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence
• 5. Depression, Repression, and Militant Resistance in the 1930s
• 6. Puerto Rican Nationalism, Latin American Solidarity, and the 1930s: How Good Was the Good Neighbor Policy?
• 7. Puerto Rican Nationalism in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s
• 8. The Nationalist Party and the Cold War: 1940s–1950s
• 9. The 1950s: Armed Struggle, Repression, Exile, and Solidarity
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index