"La Patria es Valor y Sacrificio" (The Fatherland is Courage and Sacrifice): Puerto Rican Nationalist Party Women and Resistance to U.S. Colonialism

Although for many, Don Pedro Albizu Campos represents the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, this paper will examine the significant role that women played in the pro-independence organization.  Women operated on all levels of the party, from military commanders such as Blanca Canales, who led the 1950s uprising in Jayuya and Lolita Lebrón, who led the 1954 attack on the U.S. Congress to activists who participated on other levels of the party.  In this paper I will explore why these and other women joined the Nationalist Party and what role they played in it.  I will examine what obstacles they confronted from Puerto Rican society, their own families and friends, and male party militants, as female members of the party.

A fundamental question that underlies this paper is what was the connection between gender and nationalism.  I will argue that under the leadership of Pedro Albizu Campos the party called on all Puerto Ricans, irrespective of gender, to participate in the struggle to end U.S. colonialism on the island.  But this ostensibly gender neutral appeal did not necessarily translate into the elimination of gendered attitudes, practices, and realities.  It appears that men, not women, defined much of the ideological and political foundations of the party, just as they held the most important leadership positions, both publically and internally.  Yet, to what extent did the Nationalist Party’s call for all Puerto Ricans to join in the struggle challenge ideas about gender that existed in Puerto Rican society between the 1930s and 1950s?  And to what degree did women activists themselves defy or conform to prevailing gender beliefs as they joined in the Nationalist struggle?