Session Abstract

Latino Radicalisms

Latinos, people of Latin American descent in the US, have a long history of engagement with the US’s politics.  As much the product of larger, epochal shifts in the history of resistance and progressive or revolutionary politics in the US as of the smaller, “internal” histories of communities, migration and the US’s imperial intrusions in the hemisphere, there have been few attempts to discuss these movements across familiar barriers of national origin, place or period. 

This panel suggests that there is much to be gained not only by linking the study of radical, anti-colonial and progressive Latino movements to their larger US contexts but also by placing them in dialog with one another.  This proposal, one of various products of a working group on Puerto Rican and Latino history based at Rutgers University, proposes a dialog across cities, periods and organizations.  The Young Lords, rooted in the new racial left movements of the late 60s and its Pan-Latino ideology;  the Cervantes Society of the International Workers order, rooted in the anti-colonial Puerto Rican and Latin American left in NYC as it intersected with the Communist Party and its popular front during the 1930s; the church based Commission of Hispanic Affairs of the Episcopal church in Chicago as it mobilized in support of Puerto Rico and Chicago-based anti-colonial movements during the late 1970s and finally the alliance of Puerto Rican and Black activists in New York City during the 1970s arond consruction jobs and other struggles of the working poor provide some important and diverse examples of how Latinos in the US mobilized and extended citizenship rights into fights against perceived colonial injuries in the Caribbean and ghetto life in US cities. 

The four papers, based on extensive new research, extend these themes beyond the traditional terrain of ethnic studies, and look towards developing a dialogue with other scholars of radical urban movements, white and Mexican American especially, about how racialized communities in the US assimilated into existing political forms or developed their own.