Margaret M. Power, "Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism" (UNC Press, 2023)

Jul 29, 2023

Solidarity Across the Americas

The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism

Margaret M. Power

Hosted by Caleb Zakarin

Buy Book

Summary

Throughout its quest for freedom from colonial rule, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PNPR) created strategy through a solidarity that moved far beyond the archipelago. It invested significant energy, members, 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 connections between supporters of Puerto Rican independence have been obscured by larger, later liberation movements as well as the island's ultimate failure in its quest for independence, but they were nonetheless at the vanguard of the postcolonial revolutions that swept the world after the Cuban revolution.

Margaret M. Power's new history of the PNPR, Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) 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 to its dissolution in 1965, that included individuals, parties, organizations, and governments throughout the Americas, and it resituates the Puerto Rican nationalist movement as a transnational revolutionary influence.

Margaret M. Power is professor emerita of history at Illinois Institute of Technology.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.