Gaining Access through Protest Politics: The Black and Puerto Rican Construction Workers Coalition

In the mid-1970s in New York City, Black and Puerto Rican construction workers formed an alliance to protest the exclusionary trade union practices that denied them access to jobs generated by city-funded renovation projects at Lincoln Hospital and the City College.of New York. The Black and Puerto Rican Construction Workers Coalition (BPRC) employed a number of tactics to pressure construction companies with city contracts to hire minority workers.  I analyze the structural and historical factors that shaped the labor activism of Puerto Ricans in the Coalition, who were members of El Comite-MINP (Moviemiento de Izquierda Nacional Puertorriqueno).Influenced by their  shared experience of migration in the 1950s and 1960s following a period of massive repression of nationalists in the colony, by the civil rights movement and early 1970s activism of the Young Lords, and by the hostile labor market and exclusionary hiring practices of labor union locals during New York City’s fiscal “crisis” of the mid-1970s, El Comité initiated or joined local campaigns to expand or protect democratic rights, understood as access to jobs, housing, education, and health care. The struggle for city construction jobs was one of the main arenas in which Puerto Rican activists joined with African Americans to protest discrimination and demand access to decent jobs. One of the main theoretical concerns of this study is how subordinate groups interpret and respond to oppressive conditions that are based in relations of class, race, and national origin. Mobilization for the purpose of resistance, with its attendant risks, requires a shared perspective on the nature of the grievances and what to do about them. This complex political identity is rooted in a convergence of political and economic structures, historical factors, social conditions, and human agency.