Solidarity across the Americas

The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-imperialism

By Margaret M. Power

308 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 13 halftones, 4 maps, 4 graphs, 1 table, notes, bibl., index

  • Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-7405-6
    Published: April 2023
  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-7404-9
    Published: April 2023
  • E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-7406-3
    Published: February 2023
  • E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-6205-1
    Published: February 2023

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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.

About the Author

Margaret M. Power is professor emerita of history at Illinois Institute of Technology.
For more information about Margaret M. Power, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"By reintegrating Puerto Rico into a hemispheric context, this book recovers the PNPR as an important piece missing from the history of Latin American anti-imperialist struggles. . . . Highy Recommended."—CHOICE

"An important new book."—The Progressive

"Relying on archival documents, printed sources, and oral history interviews, Power paints a broad picture of the evolution of the PNPR and its multistranded networks of support. . . . Power provides a comprehensive account of the development and significance of the PNPR."—The Americas

"This fascinating story often decenters the party's history from Pedro Albizu Campos and illuminates lesser-known and unknown characters while also decentering the history of the party from a strictly Puerto Rican setting. A fine read!"—Kirwin Shaffer, Penn State University–Berks College

"Breaks important new ground in the study of twentieth-century Puerto Rican politics. Powers's evidentiary base is strikingly broad, reaching from newspapers in multiple countries to oral history interviews to documents obtained via archives on no fewer than three continents."—Michael Staudenmaier, Manchester University