"We Could No Longer Do This Work as Separate Entities”: Transnational Solidarity in the Puerto Rican Diaspora, 1975–85

This paper discusses a set of transnational networks, both public and clandestine, established in the mid-1970s by Puerto Rican revolutionaries. Three decades after the end of World War Two triggered massive working class out-migration from Puerto Rico, the existence of a wide spread, permanent, and multi-generational diaspora facilitated the development of novel forms of left internationalism that called into question the traditional divisions common to national liberation discourse. From San Juan to Chicago, Mexico City and elsewhere, activists framed local struggles in terms of grand narratives of anti-imperialism and Marxism-Leninism.
By tracking the trajectories of multiple political organizations, including the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, my paper documents the ways in which Puerto Rican independence activists collaborated with like-minded Spanish-speaking radicals throughout the Caribbean basin and beyond. While these networks themselves were generally small in scale, they frequently drew the attention of the United States government, which attempted to disrupt their functioning, within and outside its borders. I argue that this repression helped deepen a contradiction between the innovative social practice that characterized such transnational efforts and the highly orthodox ideological commitments of the participating organizations. Thus, by the early 1980s, even as support for Puerto Rican independence surged in Latin America, the political groups most responsible for this growth were withering under external and internal pressures.