Anticolonial Anti-Intervention

Puerto Rican Independentismo and the US ‘Anti-Intervention’ Left in Reagan-era Boston

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12977006
AutoresEric D Larson (0000-0002-0299-7591, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, autor de correspondencia)
Año2018
Volumen9
Número1
Fecha de publicación2018-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Transnational American Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1940-0764 • E-ISSN: 1940-0764
EditorialCalifornia Digital Library (CDL) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5070/t891030631
OpenAlexW2912647590
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas13

Scholars of the post-1968 transnational left have increasingly criticized liberal frameworks that suggest that transnational politics fundamentally revolve around solidarity relationships between full citizens of distinct nation-states. The literature on the movements that opposed US military and political intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1970s and 1980s has also shifted to better illuminate the fundamental roles migrants, refugees, politically targeted activists, and minoritized groups have played in contesting US intervention, particularly in Central America. This article adds a layer to that discussion by examining how diasporic Puerto Rican activists helped galvanize anti-intervention movements in Boston in the 1980s. It shows how El Colectivo Puertorriqueño de Boston (the Puerto Rican Collective of Boston) developed what I call a politics of “anticolonial anti-intervention” that directly related empire “over there” to racialized colonialism in the urban US. They grappled with what it meant to live in a colonial diaspora as they helped build anti-intervention organizing in Boston. They centered the demand for Puerto Rican independence yet linked it to their resistance to US intervention elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean. They recalibrated independentista visions of self-rule, including through an updated version of community control, in the Reagan era. In doing so they challenged the implicitly white politics of rescue, aid, and deracialized Marxism that prevailed in much of Boston’s anti-intervention movement

Colonialism · Diaspora · Ethnology · Independence (probability theory · Intervention (counseling · Latin Americans · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Puerto rican · Sociology · Solidarity · Vision · White (mutation · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society