And We Reject: Meditations on Gaza, Solidarity and Latinx Studies
On October 23, 2023, the Puerto Rican Studies Association published its statement of solidarity with Gaza. One refrain from the statement has continued to sit with me since. “For many Puerto Ricans,” writes the executive council, “Palestinians are our neighbors, colleagues, family, and friends, and we reject any discourses that aim to further isolate Palestinians.”
Chicago's Puerto Rican community’s solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians spans decades, understanding both Puerto Rico and Palestine as intertwined anti-colonial struggles, including this ca. 1975 forum on the role of the United States in the Caribbean and Middle East. Private collection, Puerto Rican Cultural Center, Chicago, IL.
The statement cites my work. My book manuscript, Solidarities of Liberation, tells a globally expansive story of Palestine liberation informing Puerto Rican radicalism and the United States’ efforts to weaponize and police those freedom dreams. At its heart is the story of how an array of Puerto Rican radicals in Chicago wedded their rejection of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico to the Palestinian struggle. Like their Palestinian “counterparts,” these Puerto Ricans committed themselves to achieving decolonization through armed struggle and peoples’ war. They also found themselves in solidarity with Palestine because of what was, to them, very real—and very analogous—experiences of surveillance and political repression.
At the same time, other powerful actors—most notably the Reagan administration and the New Right—would exploit those very solidarities to combat the rising problem of international terrorism. In what was ultimately a battle over the United States’ reputation as a global leader of democracy, Puerto Rican solidarities with Palestine became weaponized in service of imperial ambitions, demarcating the boundaries of legitimate political dissent. From the state’s perspective, the Puerto Rican independence movement, much like Palestinian resistance, was simply a terrorist—and therefore illegitimate—political menace.
Yet unless you are familiar with me, you would not know that Palestinians are, in fact, my family. And while I was certainly shocked—and honored—to see my scholarship cited here, what meant most to me was to know that one of my main intellectual homes had recognized me—my personhood, my family—not as a trendy object of analysis (especially not one that you could quickly refuse at the first signs of state-sanctioned propaganda dehumanizing Palestinians as terrorists and animals, as we’ve witnessed across the past month), but as human.
As much as this refrain sits with me, so does the guest lecture I gave in an Intro to Latina/o Studies course on October 5—two days before violence erupted in Palestine.
That day, I taught my then-most recent article published in the anthology Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies. The story recovers a foundational moment in the narrative of solidarity between Puerto Ricans and Palestinians in Chicago: The policing and surveillance of the May 11, 1978, Israeli Independence Day protest, in which pro-Palestinian students, including Puerto Ricans, disrupted the 30th-anniversary celebration of Israeli Independence held at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle—known today as simply the University of Illinois at Chicago.
As I explained to the students in class that day, many colleagues have taught my work before, but this was the first time I’d joined a class that had read my writing. I began by asking them to imagine how it would feel if in 10 to 15 years, college students were reading their research. I explained to them how surreal that moment was for me—how 10 years ago, I was just like them—a college student, still just a senior at the University of Florida, only beginning down this path of research.
What I promised to do for those students that day was to bring my research to life for them—to explain: Why had I even considered studying Latinxs and Arab Americans alongside one another in the first place?
The answer was family.
My mother is Puerto Rican. My father, Palestinian. But I was born and raised in the South aspiring toward assimilation and largely divorced from both of my communities. As an undergraduate student at the University of Florida, I began to wonder if there was a way to compare Puerto Rico and Palestine so that I might selfishly learn something more of myself and my histories—especially since I grew up speaking neither Spanish nor Arabic.
Pasquín publicado por la Unión Internacional de Estudiantes. “15-22 de Mayo, Semana Internacional de Solidaridad con la Lucha del Pueblo y los Estudiantes Palestinos”. Ca. 1972. Colección GAG.
So as a college junior, I did what all undergraduate students do: I typed “Puerto Rico and Palestine” into Google.
Today, this term produces a dizzying array of results, especially as more and more Puerto Ricans across the archipelago and the diaspora declare their solidarity with Palestine in the face of Israel’s most recent genocidal onslaught on Gaza. And it’s not just on Google. Footage of Puerto Ricans marching in solidarity inundates social media. Intervenxions, too, published a brilliant essay, titled “The Shadow of Palestine in Puerto Rico.” My inbox has also seen a shift, with journalists sending me requests to speak on the long history of Puerto Rican solidarities with Palestine—requests that I, regrettably, have found myself unable to accept given my lack of job security.
But in early 2013, when I first typed “Puerto Rico and Palestine” into Google, the search results were far different—indeed, they revealed a far longer genealogy of not just Puerto Rican solidarities with Palestine but how the United States government has long racialized these two communities together as “terrorists.”
Among those original search results, I found a political cartoon by The Washington Post’s chief editorial cartoonist, Herbert Block, satirizing the Palestine Liberation Organization, Irish Republican Army, and Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN)—a Puerto Rican independence organization committed to achieving Puerto Rican independence through armed struggle—as terrorist movements. The cartoon reads: “We should be getting our international diplomatic invitations any day now,” as an armed Yasser Arafat passes by two figures in a shadowy corner—IRA and FALN gunmen—both of whom tightly grasp their own explosives. The message is clear: Puerto Ricans, Palestinians and Irish do not have legitimate claims to independence and self-determination. They are all criminals. They are all terrorists.
To bring my research to life for those Intro to Latina/o Studies students, I also went back to look at my archives. I ended up locating the proposal I wrote for my undergraduate senior thesis. I am amazed by how so much of what I wrote as a college senior has become part of my research project:
“This thesis seeks to examine how Puerto Rican and Palestinian independence activists in the United States envisioned their place as spokesmen for their respective nations in the United States. Although first glance renders such a topic arbitrarily chosen, preliminary research has revealed thematic links between Puerto Rican and Palestinian independence movements. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Puerto Rican independence activist Elizam Escobar—a member of Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN)—compares the struggle for Puerto Rican independence with that of Palestine. Additionally, in 1996, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quoted proposing ‘a model of a state like Puerto Rico,’ as a solution to the Palestinian problem. Thus, both Puerto Rico and Palestine share similar patterns of ambiguity in regards to their status question.
Alternatively, this thesis has a profoundly personal value. As both Puerto Rican and Palestinian, I envision this project as a vehicle in which to empower my historical identities. I am especially interested in examining how Puerto Rican and Palestinian independence activists negotiated their national identities with the larger legacies of colonialism, transnationalism, and marginalization from mainstream U.S. society, such as accusations of terrorism.”
I am struck by this final sentence I wrote, and how it echoes the Puerto Rican Studies Association’s call to not further isolate Palestinians by adopting the state’s language of terrorism: “Palestinians are our neighbors, colleagues, family, and friends, and we reject any discourses that aim to further isolate Palestinians.”
Ten years later, this call to refuse dehumanization remains the same.
Of course, I have thought about those Intro to Latina/o Studies students daily since October 7. As we ended our time together in class that day, I read the article’s conclusion aloud:
“Now, in 2019, we are again entering a renewed era of racialization and exclusions justified under the United States’ and Israel’s policing methods and technologies. The Israeli Independence Day protests provide a cautionary tale of how the carceral state extends beyond physical ‘borders’ to criminalize solidarities and the acts of protest that empower communities of color. It also demonstrates the crucial role universities play in the enactment and experience of—and resistance against—repression. In policing the boundaries of acceptable political dissent, [Chicago Circle’s] administration willingly subjected its own students to heightened technologies of surveillance. As student activists continue to organize against border-maintaining institutions—mass incarceration, immigration, police brutality—on college campuses today, the 1978 Israeli Independence Day protests stand as history that they, too, can cull from in denouncing the universities’ role in undergirding U.S. imperialism, domestically and abroad.”
That day, I asked the Intro to Latina/o Studies students who among them was an organizer and, if so, what lessons we might learn from the 1978 Israeli Independence Day protests. But I cannot help but wonder: Had I lectured October 7, or the next day, or any day after that or any day since, how differently might have they received my work? Would my research fall into the category of “misinformation” about Israel, which U-M administrators have encouraged students to report? Or would those students have found comfort?
At the University of Michigan, where I am a collegiate fellow and assistant professor, our main Latinx student organization, La Casa, continues to organize in solidarity with Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students on our campus—including participating in the October 25 National Walk Out, demanding the university divest from companies that fund and participate in the genocide of Palestinians, and co-sponsoring anti-colonial resistance open mics. “La Casa stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their fight for liberation, self-determination, and justice,” reads the organization’s October 26 statement. “Our organization is dedicated to advocating for social justice issues and we support the Palestinian struggle for liberation as part of our unequivocal commitment to advancing human rights and equality for all people. We condemn all forms of oppression, discrimination, and violence that have afflicted the Palestinian people, and we are disappointed to see the University neglect this pressing subject.”
And so we reject.
From the executive board of the PRSA to the executive board of U-M’s La Casa, we reject any efforts to further isolate Palestinians.
And I hold on to the hope that it would, in fact, have been the latter—that those Intro to Latina/o Studies would have found comfort in the lessons gleaned from studying the long history of Puerto Rican solidarities with Palestine.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated. An incorrect version of the piece was accidentally uploaded.
Sara Awartani is an LSA Collegiate Fellow and Assistant Professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. An interdisciplinary historian, her research, publications, and teaching focuses on twentieth-century U.S. social movements, interracial solidarities, policing, and the United States in the world, with special attention to Latinx and Arab American radicalisms. Her first book project, Solidarities of Liberation, Visions of Empire: Puerto Rico, Palestine, and American Global Power (under advance contract with University of North Carolina Press), chronicles a globally expansive story of Palestine liberation, Puerto Rican radicalism, and the United States' efforts to weaponize and police those freedom dreams.