The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora (Puerto Rican Studies)
by Andrés Torres, José Emiliano Velázquez
Category: Political Science

Little attention has been paid to the Latino movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the literature of social movements. This volume is the first significant look at the organizations that emerged in the late 1960s to promote Puerto Rican independence and the radical transformation of U.S. society. The Puerto Rican movement was a response to U.S. colonialism on the island and to the poverty and discrimination faced by most Puerto Ricans on the mainland. This anthology looks at the organizations that emerged to combat these two problems in such places as Boston, Chicago, Hartford, New York, and Philadelphia. Almost all the contributors worked with the organizations they describe. Interviews with such key figures as Elizam Escobar, Piri Thomas, and Luis Fuentes, as well as accounts by people active in the gay/lesbian, African American, and white Left movements, create a vivid picture of why and how people became radicalized and how their ideals intersected with their group's own dynamics.