Revolution Around the Corner: Voices from the Puerto Rican Socialist Party in the United States [REVIEW]
Before 1998, when José Velázquez and Andrés Torres published their edited volume The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora, historical scholarship about the politics and activism of Puerto Ricans in the United States filled a small library shelf. Over the course of that year—which, not coincidentally, marked the centennial of the beginning of formal U.S. colonialism in the Caribbean—the small library shelf grew a bit longer.¹ Book by book over the next couple of decades, scholars and activists worked to make Puerto Ricans visible in historical accounts of the postwar United States. Many of us were inspired in no small part by Torres and Velázquez and the distinctive voices they captured in The Puerto Rican Movement, a book that recreated a vibrant world of people working to change their political horizons in the 1970s.
With Revolution Around the Corner: Voices from the Puerto Rican Socialist Party in the United States, Velázquez, Torres, and Carmen V. Rivera (author of one of the autobiographical essays in The Puerto Rican Movement and, like Torres and Velázquez, a former member of the PSP) seek to provide the same vivid context and evocative detail about one of the key organizations that grounded the despierta boricua of the 1970s. Unlike the Young Lords, whose central role in that era has been explored in about a dozen scholarly accounts and memoirs published in the last two decades, the PSP has received scant attention.² This has something to do with the fact that the Puerto Rican independence politics that defined the PSP from its inception have remained less legible to U.S. audiences—and even to some Puerto Ricans—than the radical and charismatic community activism that first galvanized the Young Lords. Another factor is that, around the time its membership and visibility peaked in the mid-1970s, the PSP’s political profile was shadowed by a false association with an extremist independentista organization in the U.S., the FALN (Fuerza Armadas de Liberación Nacional), which claimed responsibility for over one hundred bombings in U.S. cities between 1974 and 1983.³ Whatever the reasons for their marginalization in the historical record, the fact remains, as the editors write in the Introduction, “[t]his story has remained hidden from most accounts of radical social and political movement in the United States.”⁴
Velázquez, Rivera, and Torres assemble the evidence here for situating the PSP squarely in the expansive field of Left political activism in the 1970s. Revolution Around the Corner is full of first-person recollections and detailed accounts of the PSP’s varied campaigns in the U.S., including shifts in organizational strategy as the group sought to prioritize community activism while also navigating the complicated terrain of independence politics and labor socialism. These narratives will draw in readers with even a modest interest in the history of Puerto Ricans and their politics in the U.S., and will prove essential to scholars seeking primary source material on anticolonial politics or radical community activism during the coda of the civil rights movement. The first section of the book also functions as a kind of finding aid—the catalog and guide researchers rely on in an archive—as its chapters provide a detailed timeline and an outline of the founding, development, and decline of the PSP.
Any good history, of whatever length, depends on the quality and depth of its details; on this measure alone, Revolution Around the Corner merits a place on the upper shelves of what is by now a full bookcase of works on the politics and history of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. In each of the book’s fifteen chapters, we encounter layered stories that construct for us a vibrant past punctuated by questions and aspirations—achieving self-determination for Puerto Rico, protecting workers in a rapacious global economy, challenging racism and class bias—that remain as relevant today as they were to these historical actors of half a century ago. In recounting their own or their informants’ experiences in the PSP, the chapters’ authors bring such life to their stories that reading at many points feels like watching a play. “Historical actor” may be too dull a label to impose on editor José Velázquez, to take one example, but in one luminous anecdote in a chapter about his own experience in the PSP, Velázquez turns out actually to be an actor. He describes enrolling at City College of New York during the fall semester following the dramatic campus takeover in April 1969 (which Velázquez had participated in as a high school student), quickly becoming a campus leader, but then dropping out of school to play a founding role in the Third World Revelationists, a Marxist street theatre collective that used performance as tool for political organizing. The group, comprising Puerto Rican, African American, and Colombian members, only lasted a few years, but before it disbanded some members began working with the Movimiento Pro Independencia (MPI), the organization out of which the PSP was formed. Then, with Velázquez’s prodding, the disbanding Revelationists donated the building they owned to the fledgling PSP.
There are so many equally captivating stories of the PSP’s origins, connections, and complications that it’s hard to settle on examples. Journalist Alfredo López narrates his path from student activist to aspiring author (he began writing his 1973 book The Puerto Rican Papers as an undergraduate) to the first editor of the PSP’s bilingual international newspaper, Claridad. From there he was pulled in to lead the planning for an event that would turn out to be the PSP’s most ambitious and successful effort in its twenty-four year history. The crowd that joined El Acto Nacional (National Day of Solidarity with Puerto Rico) in Madison Square Garden in late 1974 filled the arena to capacity. Lenina Nadal describes her experience as a “pamper rojo Boricua baby of the PSP,” growing up attending rallies and fundraisers with her activist parents and passing the time with other children in the claustrophobic childcare room of Claridad while her mother worked long hours helping get the paper to press. The late Ramón Jiménez recounted his leadership in the determined battle to save Hostos Community College, the only bilingual college in the City University of New York’s system, founded in 1968. The Community Coalition to Save Hostos brought together partners from beyond the Bronx campus, including the PSP and United Bronx Parents, led by the indefatigable Evelina López Antonetty. The Coalition waged a year-long campaign, staging marches, two campus takeovers, and finally an effective legislative effort that resulted in the passage of a state law that protected bilingual higher education, and Hostos, over the long term. Many of the chapters highlight the crucial leadership of women in the organization; indeed, the centrality of gender in the authors’ stories of the PSP represents one of the great strengths of the collection.
Any book on the politics of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. must confront in some way how marginalized Puerto Rican voices remain in the national discourse. Most non-Puerto Rican Americans (including, I dare say, many members of the U.S. Congress) don’t know the details of Puerto Ricans’ U.S. citizenship, much less anything about the island’s political status or how the colonialist law and policy governing Puerto Rico’s relationship to the United States contributed to the island’s strangulation during the recent debt crisis and then again in the aftermath of the 2017 hurricanes. In this context, with most U.S. audiences showing only a passing interest in Puerto Ricans’ political and economic struggles, editors of a collection like Revolution Around the Corner confront the challenge of arguing for the significance of a history that might seem, at first glance, to be irrelevant to many readers.
Velázquez, Rivera, and Torres write that they “hope the book will help broaden the knowledge of the PSP’s history,” and it will surely do just that for readers already focused on Puerto Rican activism. But for the book’s many potential readers with a more general curiosity about the era and less grounding in the book’s specific subjects, it would have been helpful to have the introduction situate the PSP more thoroughly in the varied terrain of Leftist politics in the 1970s. The intricate detail of the very long first chapter, “A Brief History of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party in the United States,” will be of great value to specialists; but I worry that it may read like insider baseball to those looking for an entry point to understanding the seriousness and importance of the PSP’s political vision in a broader context.
While the first section of the book may not quite succeed at broadening a reader’s understanding of the PSP—the emphasis there is more on deepening—the later chapters that make up the bulk of the book offer rich reward for those who want to learn about connections with other organizations, people, movements, and issues that animated the decade. Woven through the contributors’ narratives are plentiful examples of the significance of the PSP’s work well beyond questions of Puerto Rican independence and the marginalization of Puerto Rican people in the U.S. Many of the first-person accounts describe a point of entry into the PSP from non-Puerto Rican groups; and most explore the PSP’s coalitions and collaborations with organizations beyond the Puerto Rican independence movement. Zoila Torres, a past president of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights, describes founding a PSP chapter in Los Angeles and creating deep connections with Chicano activists in the city. Olga Iris Sanabria Dávila’s chapter shows the dense weave of the PSP members’ ties with other organizations and their interconnected political projects, including collaboration with the United Nations Decolonization Committee and solidarity work with the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Sanabria Dávila emphasizes the historical continuity of the political goals of the PSP, reminding us that “progress toward liberation, justice, and social transformation is not a straight road.”
We see up close the impediments to liberation and justice in many chapters here, including one by historian Alyssa Ribeiro about the PSP’s campaign for a Bicentennial Without Colonies. This was a massive project initiated by the PSP with support from various other leftist groups, including the American Indian Movement (AIM), which had also participated in the 1974 National Day of Solidarity with Puerto Rico. Organizers viewed the July 4, 1976 event as a success, but were angry that participation was hampered by fear-mongering on the part of members of the centrist media and academia, who, willfully misreading the Leftist politics of the era, warned the public that the PSP was collaborating with the FALN, the Weather Underground, the Communist Party, and other “terrorist” groups to disrupt the nation’s peaceful celebration of the Bicentennial in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, the most likely source of danger for those who joined the Bicentennial Without Colonies demonstration came from Mayor Frank Rizzo, who was notorious for cracking heads during his term as Philadelphia’s police commissioner. Rizzo tried unsuccessfully to persuade federal officials to send fifteen thousand National Guard troops to control a crowd that probably numbered no more than fifty thousand.⁵
More than fifty years after PSP members and thousands of other like-minded activists began to call attention to the problem of American colonialism, the U.S. is approaching its semiquincentennial anniversary (250 years) as a nation—still with colonies. Most Americans think little or not at all about this fact, even if they may read the occasional news story that highlights the inequality of colonial policy related to Puerto Rico. Take the recent Supreme Court case for example, U.S. v. Vaello-Madero, which concerns the denial of SSI benefits for a disabled Puerto Rican man who relocated from New York to Puerto Rico—and which, it hardly needs to be said, has received scant coverage in the U.S. media. Many legal experts anticipate that the case will not only require the Court to consider the equal protection provisions of the Constitution in relation to Puerto Ricans, but that it should also force a reconsideration of the 120-year-old Insular Cases, which established the unequal rights of people living in U.S. territories.⁶ Issues like those raised in the Vaello-Madero case serve as a crucial reminder that the problems that galvanized members of the PSP in the 1970s—the island’s pernicious lack of self-determination and the crippling poverty and unequal treatment of Puerto Ricans throughout the diaspora—remain as relevant as ever. As every one of the fifteen contributors in Revolution Around the Corner shows us, sharing the history of collective action is the best way to illuminate the path forward.
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Revolution Around the Corner: Voices from the Puerto Rican Socialist Party in the United States
Edited by José E. Velázquez, Carmen V. Rivera, and Andrés Torres
Temple University Press, 2022. 408 pgs. $32.95 (paperback)
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Notes
¹ Before the 1980s, the scholarship published about Puerto Ricans fell into two basic categories: social science writing on the various “problems” of Puerto Rican migrants, primarily by non-Puerto Ricans; and works, primarily by Puerto Ricans scholars, that sought to situate the struggles of Puerto Rican communities in the history of colonialism and structural economic disadvantage. Starting in the early 1980s, works by historians and political scientists, most of them Puerto Rican, substantially broadened the field of inquiry. Scholarship on Puerto Rican political history in the U.S. produced in this era includes the following major works: Virginia Sánchez-Korrol, From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1983); James Jennings and Monte Rivera, eds., Puerto Rican Politics in Urban America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,1985); Félix Padilla, Latino Ethnic Consciousness: The Case of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1985) and Puerto Rican Chicago (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1987); Andrés Torres, Between Melting Pot and Mosaic: African Americans and Puerto Ricans in the New York Political Economy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); and Clara E. Rodríguez and Virginia Sánchez-Korrol, Historical Perspectives on Puerto Rican Survival in the U.S. (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996). Key additions to the shelf in 1998, along with The Puerto Rican Movement, included José Cruz, Identity and Power: Puerto Rican Politics and the Challenge of Ethnicity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998) and Félix Matos-Rodríguez and Linda Delgado, eds., Puerto Rican Women’s History: New Perspectives (New York: Routledge Press, 1998).
² This book focuses on the history of the U.S. Branch of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, though it describes carefully the relationship between the U.S. Branch and the PSP in Puerto Rico.
³ See Revolution Around the Corner, p. 342; and Lorrin Thomas and Aldo Lauria Santiago, Rethinking the Puerto Rican Movement (New York: Routledge Press, 2018), p. 144.
⁴ Revolution Around the Corner, p. 3.
⁵ Ribeiro, in Revolution Around the Corner, pp. 344-347.
⁶ See, for example, Lía Fiol-Matta, “The Insular Cases: It’s Time to Turn the Page,” Bloomberg Law, March 14, 2022 (https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/the-insular-cases-its-time-to-turn-the-page).
Lorrin Thomas is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden, where she teaches Latin American and Caribbean history and the comparative history of the Americas. Her research explores ideas about rights and equality in the twentieth-century Americas. Her first book, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City (2010), traces the complex meanings of citizenship for colonial migrants in the U.S. metropole. Her second book, Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights (Routledge, 2018), co-authored with Aldo Lauria Santiago, surveys Puerto Ricans’ civil rights activism in the U.S. since the 1940s. Her current project, Minority: Latino Civil Rights and the Making of Multiracial America after the 1960s, examines the ways Latinx political actors tested, implemented, and expanded the legal and policy changes of the civil rights era.