The World That Jesus Colon Almost Built: Pan-Latino Radicalism, Puerto Rican Nationalism, and the Maturing of a Latino Working Class in New York City, 1930–50

During the 1930s and 1940s the Latino popular front in New York city was the largest and dominant political space for Latino, and especially Puerto Rican political organizing.  Parallel to the incorporation of Puerto Rican migrants into emerging industrial CIO-based unions, and the initial emergence of a union-based and communist-party allied leadership, the Cervantes society of the International Workers Order became the vehicle for the creation of a cultural, social and political space in which thousands of Puerto Rican and other Latino immigrant workers developed an anti-colonial, radical democratic praxis towards their countries of origin but also a populist radical-assimilationist path within the United States.

This paper will study the Latino popular front around the “Spanish” section of the Communist Party, the Hispanic section of the international Workers Order and the alliances built mainly around the American Labor Party and secondarily among Social Democratic organizations.  It will explain how the internal strengths of this coalition within the large Latino communities of New York City coalesced with strong party-based, popular front and populist left alliances outside of these communities to mature a set of ideas, shared experiences, organizations, lessons and leaders.  It will discuss how the extended popular front period prepared the community, through political and union activism, for the two critical challenges raised by the post war period: the migration of tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans from the island as well as the deepening climate of repression and fear of the internal cold war period.