This pathbreaking study examines the radical Left in Puerto Rico from the final years of Spanish colonial rule into the 1920s. Positioning Puerto Rico within the context of a regional anarchist network that stretched from Puerto Rico and Cuba to Tampa, Florida, and New York City, Kirwin R. Shaffer illustrates how anarchists linked their struggle to the broader international anarchist struggles against religion, governments, and industrial capitalism. Their groups, speeches, and press accounts - as well as the newspapers that they published - were central in helping to develop an anarchist vision for Puerto Ricans at a time when the island was a political no-man's-land, neither an official U.S. colony or state nor an independent country. Kirwin R. Shaffer is an associate professor of Latin American studies at Pennsylvania State University and the author of Anarchism and Countercultural Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba.
Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations and Style Notes xiii Prologue xv Introduction: Cultural Politics and Transnational Anarchism in Puerto Rico 1 1. The Roots of Anarchism and Radical Labor Politics in Puerto Rico, 1870s-1899 23 2. Radicals and Reformers: Anarchists, Electoral Politics, and the Unions, 1900–1910 46 3. Anarchist Alliances, Government Repression: Education, Freethinkers, and CESs, 1909–1912 76 4. Anarchists, Freethinkers, and Spiritists: The Progressive Alliance against the Catholic Church, 1909–1912 92 5. Radicalism Imagined: Leftist Culture, Gender, and Revolutionary Violence, 1900–1920 106 6. Politics of the Bayamón Bloc and the Partido Socialista: Anarchism and Socialism in the 1910s 123 7. El Comunista: Radical Journalism and Transnational Anarchism, 1920–1921 141 Conclusion and Epilogue: Anarchist Antiauthoritarianism in a U.S. Colony, 1898–2011 167 Notes 181 Bibliography 199 Index 213
''Black Flag Boricuas sheds a great deal of light on the anarchist movement in Puerto Rico, a little-studied topic with implications in important debates on religion, education, colonialism, nationalism, and labor. This overall picture of an intellectually dynamic movement will be of interest to scholars interested in anarchism and Latin America.'' Mark Leier, author of Bakunin: The Creative Passion: A Biography