“Bound for an Island I Had Hardly Thought of a Few Weeks Before”: The Formative Role of Radical Relationships in 1950s Puerto Rico

Dr. Ana Livia Cordero was a physician, Puerto Rican activist, and mother involved in a range of far-flung, yet intimately connected, liberation movements from the 1930s to the early 1990s. Throughout her life, Cordero worked to connect anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist struggles in New York City, the U.S. South, Ghana, Puerto Rico, and Nicaragua. During her time in New York City in the early 1950s, Cordero met and married Julian Mayfield, the African American writer, actor, and activist. Cordero and Mayfield spent the first few years of their marriage in Puerto Rico, where they intersected with several other inter-cultural, radical couples who were living on the island in the mid-1950s, such as Jane Speed and César Andreiu Iglesias, as well as Rosario Morales and Richard Levins. These personal relationships, and the insider travel experiences that they made possible, led to deeply formative, two-way flows of knowledge and experience between leftists from the island and those from the mainland. Thus, this presentation highlights both the role of the Puerto Rican diaspora, as well as the role of U.S. Americans living “abroad” in Puerto Rico, in the development of shared anticolonial and antiracist visions between U.S. and Caribbean activists in the early Cold War.  Methodologically, this presentation will draw from archival evidence and oral histories in order to forefront the way in which international solidarity is built on an individual scale.