Quotes from this book:
Prologue
Juan Vilar—perhaps the most prominent and one of the internationally best-known anarchists in Puerto Rico—also faced numerous trials and retrials during this year. Yet, rather than try him for being an anarchist involved in the murders, Puerto Rican and U.S. authorities charged him with violating public morality. If these authorities could not jail him as an anarchist linked to the March violence, they would do so for publishing what they considered pornography—a story about a priest raping a child.
Seems a common thing that authorities will do.
Introduction
In Puerto Rico, anarchists expressed their concerns and visions through their own brand of cultural politics. Some anarchists published collections of their poetry, complete with calls for revolutionary uprisings. Others published plays and short stories that highlighted class antagonisms, promoted worker revolts, and celebrated revolutionary violence to destroy the last vestiges of bourgeois society while planting the seeds for a new egalitarian future. Women—especially teenage girls—figured prominently in anarchist and leftist culture. Anarchist cultural politics included more than fiction. Anarchists also worked in educational realms to create schools and learning opportunities for both adults and children. Related to this was their consistent anticlericalism against one of the perceived central pillars of cultural authoritarianism in Puerto Rico dating to the days of Spanish rule: the Roman Catholic Church. Anarchists in Puerto Rico joined these educational experiments, anticlericalism, and literary works with critiques of the island’s political economy that was increasingly subservient to U.S. interests. As a result, anarchists forged a cultural politics directed against Puerto Rican and U.S. colonial rulers to promote an antiauthoritarian spirit and countercultural struggle over how the island was being run and the future directions that it should pursue.
While cultural politics reflected one way that anarchists engaged in debates over Puerto Rico–specific issues, many of these cultural debates were actually linked transnationally. For instance, when leftists in Puerto Rico staged plays, they were mostly written by leftists in Cuba, Spain, and the United States. When they engaged in anticlerical actions, they did so as part of a broader international movement of freethinkers that included globally famous activists such as the Spanish-born, Puerto Rican–raised Belén de Sárraga—a freethinking radical who spoke throughout the island in 1912. Thus, this book explores how cultural politics both reflected the island-specific reality that anarchists encountered, as well as the role that cultural politics played in larger transnational radical movements.
Coming back to this.
Just as migrant anarchists from the island helped to internationalize the movement wherever they went and to discuss interna- tional topics upon return to Puerto Rico, the international press functioned the same way. Puerto Rican columns helped readers in New York and Cuba understand their situations in larger transnational dimensions. At the same time, readers of these newspapers in Puerto Rico read critiques of their own situation while coming to understand that they faced cultural, economic, and political struggles similar to those of their comrades abroad. As a result, for much of the early twentieth century, the Cuban and the New York anarchist press functioned as the Puerto Rican anarchist press. Thus, we cannot un- derstand “Puerto Rican” anarchism by focusing only on the island. Rather, anarchists across the Caribbean and along the East Coast of the United States functioned in overlapping networks. As a result, anarchists in Puerto Rico did not operate in global isolation.
Coming back to this, too.
Throughout Latin America, anarchists emerged in countries that had been politically independent since the 1810s and 1820s. By 1898, Cuba and Puerto Rico were the only Spanish colonies left in the hemisphere. Cuba would become independent in 1902 but still suffer under various aspects of U.S. rule and coercion. In 1903, Panama became the newest independent country after seceding from Colombia, but the ten-mile-wide swath cut through the middle of the country for construction of the Panama Canal would be controlled by the United States, and the Republic of Panama became essentially a U.S. protectorate.
Interesting discussion on how anarchism spread through US colonies.
Rather, Boricua anarchists, unlike anarchists anywhere else in Latin America (with the exception of the Canal Zone), operated in a colonial setting where legal, political, and educational systems were run or overseen by the U.S. government. Meanwhile, the island was increasingly taken over by U.S.-based big business, while the island’s labor movement became a colonial offshoot of the U.S.-based AFL.
More discussion.
Second, throughout the hemisphere, anarchists constantly adopted global anarchist ideas and adapted them to fit national and subnational realities. For instance, anarchists in Cuba adapted anarchism to fit the reality of a large Afro-Cuban population. Peruvian anarchists did the same to fit the subnational reality of that country’s large indigenous population, while anarchists in Brazil were challenged to adapt ideals to fit Afro-Brazilian populations as well as migrant workers from throughout Europe. One finds no such adaptation to fit ethnic diversity in Puerto Rico. Rather, the island’s anarchists were mostly homegrown and from a wide racial representation. Until 1898, anarchist influences arrived in Puerto Rico with Spanish migrant workers. However, large, consistent Spanish migration to the island ended with the war. In fact, the 1910 U.S. Census found that out of a total population of over 1.1 million people on the island, there were only 11,766 residents who were foreign born. While 56.3 percent of these were born in Spain, over 7,400 of the total foreign born arrived before 1901. While Spanish laborers and anarchist activists continued to migrate in the early 1900s to anarchist outposts throughout the Caribbean, such as the Panama Canal Zone, Cuba, and southern Florida, they did not migrate to Puerto Rico. And, unlike the fresh waves of Spanish and Italian anarchists who reinforced the ranks of anarchists in Cuba, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and the United States, no such international reinforcement occurred in Puerto Rico.
Worth looking into further.
Thus, anarchists never jumped on the nationalist, Puerto Rican independence movement bandwagon. To do so would have been to fall into the “servitude” about which Bakunin warned. After all, anarchists had been burned before on this issue. In neighboring Cuba, anarchists supported the war for independence against Spain from 1895 to 1898, seeing it not as a nationalist war but an anticolonial war. Throwing off colonial shackles seemed like a legitimate anarchist endeavor to achieve collective freedom. Yet after 1898, Caribbean anarchists saw how Cuban independence had been hijacked by political and economic leaders in Cuba, the symbols of the war for independence had been co-opted by the state, and Cuban leaders had colluded with their U.S. allies. As a result, most anarchists in Puerto Rico wanted nothing to do with those pushing for independence from the United States. This was the danger of a Boricua concept rooted in patriotism and nationalism: one elite-run state replacing another that lacked any regard for the interests of the popular and laboring classes; all it could offer were hollow symbols and empty words that would mask a new kind of authoritarianism.
Other aspects of that discussion to have.
Chapter 2: Radicals and Reformers
For anarchists in Puerto Rico, the messages were clear. They tried to tell their fellow workers that being involved in elections was a bad idea, that politics was nothing but a shell game. Politicians offered promises to get votes, only to renege on them once elected. And working-class politicians? What did voters really think one or two prolabor politicians could accomplish in a political system designed to benefit capitalists? And, just what did workers really think could be accomplished if somehow working-class candidates did take over the towns and the legislature? Did they really think that the United States would stand by and allow legislation to be passed that would harm the capitalists’ bottom line? Thus, as did their brethren around the world, anarchists in Puerto Rico waged a war against electoral politics. But in this new colonial era, antipolitics agendas had larger anti-imperialist implications by rejecting not only elections but the relationship between the island’s elected representatives, the U.S. government, and an entire electoral system founded on the U.S. model.
Useful for conversations around electoral politics.
He came to believe that Puerto Rican workers should no longer affiliate with the SLP and began to consider aligning with the AFL. The AFL pursued “pure unionism,” seeking immediate economic gains for workers through peaceful negotiations with employers whenever possible. The AFL also rejected worker-based political parties and engaging in electoral politics.
The AFL didn't engage in electoral politics? That's an interesting assumption. I wonder how they got there.
In an open forum to the pueblo productor (producing class), Saturnino Dones asked workers if they knew it was the capitalists, politicians, and religious figures who organized the festivities—and thus grew wealthy from worker expenditures. “These are the working people’s enemies!” In both Cuba and Puerto Rico, anarchists viewed carnival as a capitalist spectacle that garnered profits for businessmen while offering a safety valve for pent-up mass frustration. The appraisal pointed to another issue that anarchists in post-Spanish Cuba and Puerto Rico were encountering: how to gain not only political separation from Spain but also cultural and religious separation from the legacies of Spanish colonialism if the working masses were ever going to create new, truly liberated societies.
Not directly comparable, but pride parades today.
From 1900 to 1904, armed groups from the Republican and Federal parties took turns physically attacking one another and any other political force with whom they disagreed. In San Juan in 1902, for instance, armed mobs led by the Republican José Mauleón attacked Federal supporters. The FLT accused Mauleón of violently assaulting union members too. They appealed to the governor, but to no avail, prompting the union to reject the governor’s claim that there was nothing he could do. Actually, the police did step in, but to arrest FLT leaders, among them Romero Rosa and Cirino. Romero Rosa seems to have been a particularly attractive target of the mob violence. Roving bands not only bruised him but also abused his daughters. During another FLT event, Gómez Acosta—a founder of Ensayo Obrero and El Porvenir Social as well as a labor leader and friend of Cruz, who wrote the prologue to Cruz’s anarchist poetry collection Fragmentos—was shot at by vigilantes, miraculously escaping the eight shots fired at him. Throughout May, the anti-FLT violence reached such proportions that one contemporary charged that the assaults were “converting the city of San Juan into a frightful state of anarchy.” Apparently, though, some anarchists were willing to resort to violence themselves. In 1902 in the midst of the political violence rocking the island, anarchists were accused of planting a pipe bomb that exploded in the southeastern city of Humacao, killing a servant who was taking a break.
Anti-union violence of old.
In addition, the AFL rejected involvement in politics and forming of working-class political parties—an antipolitics stance preached by anarchists.
This keeps getting said, but many members of AFL moved into political parties quite effectively. So how true was it?
While the AFL had no problem with democratic politics and elections, they didn’t want the union effort to be diverted toward political campaigning for working-class parties.
Ah, here it is. Because they had no problem with bourgeois political parties.
Meanwhile, as the FLT leadership praised U.S.-style democracy, anarchists were less sure of that democracy, fearing that U.S. ideals of equality and liberty (ideals shared by both anarchists and the American creed) were merely a veneer hiding a government that worked in tandem with its capitalist class. Along these lines, anarchists distrusted all electoral politics, not just workers partaking in them.
Which the AFL explicitly didn't.
In this Puerto Rico–specific colonial context, when anarchists rejected democratic politics they were also showing skepticism about the larger U.S. project of “Americanizing” the island. Within this skeptical view, anarchists were suspicious of the role that the AFL was playing in the Americanization of the Puerto Rican workforce. Anarchists questioned whether the AFL had the island’s workers and future in its best interests.
And this makes sense. If the AFL is joining, then it's also part of the Americanisation of the island.
While anarchists fretted about U.S. political initiatives and their impacts in Puerto Rico, they also began to question the impact of the AFL, its leader Samuel Gompers, Santiago Iglesias (Gompers’s key representative in Puerto Rico), and other issues related to the impact of the U.S.-based workers movement on the island. Wherever the AFL emerged, it generally encountered anarchist opposition because of the AFL’s willingness to work with employers for wage improvements and the union’s perceived close links to the U.S. government. In anarchist eyes, such collaboration undermined the drive for social revolution. After all, how many labor leaders could be said to have dinner in the White House, as Gompers and Iglesias had done? On the U.S. mainland, the AFL also engaged in “nativist” labor organizing by seeking to restrict membership to U.S. citizens and attacking foreign workers. That nativist versus internationalist vision of the labor movement often brought the AFL and anarchist groups to verbal blows. Puerto Rico, though, was an odd case. Neither citizens nor foreigners, Puerto Rican workers occupied a unique position for both the AFL and the anarchists.
And here it is!
The state had a different view. In his 1903 annual report on conditions in Puerto Rico, Governor Hunt concluded “[t]he fact remains, however, that there has been in the past four years a slow but steady increase in the wages of the ordinary laborer which, with improved sanitary conditions and greater personal liberty of action, have greatly improved his condition. The cost of living has increased to some extent, perhaps, there being complaints of this fact, but, on the other hand, the peon lives better than formerly and has developed a greater earning capacity.” Anarchists must have found this amusing, especially considering the reality they faced. If conditions were so much better, then why did so many islanders flee Puerto Rico to find jobs in Hawai’i, Ecuador, Mexico, or the United States? Ultimately, they believed that Iglesias’s ineffective lobbying efforts undermined the workers cause. In fact, it is not difficult to imagine how watching the AFL-FLT begging for governmental help and protection must have weakened the image of the union in certain workers’ eyes, especially when actual conditions on the ground did not appear to improve following such groveling.
Again, the absolute absurdity that is AFL.
Besides seeing the FLT leadership as an ineffectual lackey of U.S. administrators, anarchists also believed that the AFL as a whole had a bias against Puerto Rican workers, despite the cozy relationship between Iglesias and Gompers. For instance, in 1906 and 1907, anarchists challenged the AFL-linked Cigar Makers International Union (CMIU, or the International). The CMIU was a highly structured union with an abundance of rules coupled with a high initiation fee of three dollars and weekly dues of thirty cents. High fees were leveraged by negotiators who achieved good pay and conditions for members, strike funds, and travel loans, as well as sickness, unemployment, and death benefits. The CMIU was attempting to expand it organizational reach throughout the cigar industry in South Florida and Puerto Rico. In 1908, the union slashed fees to try to attract Tampa workers. For years, the International had campaigned for recognition in Puerto Rico. However, operators feared the combined impact of the CMIU, the FLT, anarchists, and the tradition of parejería. In January 1907, the island’s tobacco workers voted to align themselves with the CMIU. Yet, anarchists were not pleased with this development and had worked to prevent the CMIU’s arrival. Anarchist opposition rested in part on issues of autonomy. They saw CMIU encroachment as a battle to determine who would control labor agitation in general and strikes in particular. Always suspicious of centralization, anarchists feared that local initiatives would fall prey to dictates from a central CMIU union hall that answered to AFL headquarters in the United States.
This distrust of a distant CMIU-AFL monopoly and control worried anarchists on another front. Anarchists criticized how the International charged equivalent dues regardless of a worker’s location. Thus, worse-paid workers on the island paid the same fees and followed the same by-laws as better-paid workers in Tampa, New York, and New Orleans. In essence, Puerto Ricans paid a higher proportion of their wages to the union than their compatriots on the mainland. As one writer noted, the so-called “international” union seemed more interested in mainland-based workers, and should really be referred to as the Unión Internal, not Internacional. Likewise, writing to Havana from Arecibo, Venancio Cruz charged that such practices undermined labor organization on the island, fostering worker apathy. In short, were such unions truly internationalist in scope or were they merely manipulating “internationalist principles” in a larger labor movement power play against Puerto Rican workers? When Cruz published similar criticisms in the FLT’s Unión Obrera, the CMIU fought back, charging that such criticisms undermined all union efforts. In fact, the CMIU slandered Cruz, accusing him of being a secret agent of the factory operators whose words were designed to divide the tobacco workers. Anarchist conspiracy theories were being realized: any anarchist who criticized the CMIU or the AFL ran the risk of being labeled an agent provocateur or a scab.
See: Why we should be cautious of things like the AFL-CIO even today!
A clear snapshot of the love-hate relationship between AFL-linked organizations and Puerto Rico’s anarchists can be seen in a three-month span in mid-1909. In April, a columnist took to the pages of ¡Tierra! to attack Iglesias and earlier harsh words that Iglesias had uttered against Caribbean anarchists. Iglesias had called anarchists pícaros (rogues). In response, this writer called Iglesias a sell-out and a hypocrite: “you were one of them [an anarchist], with the difference that you lost your old work shoes while we, with dignity, kept ours.” The charge of Iglesias having sold out and become part of the labor aristocracy was reinforced in the same column when the writer, building on Iglesias’s history of meetings with Washington politicians, accused Iglesias of “aspiring to suck the Washington dairy from [President] Taft’s teat.”
Lmao. It's hard not to be amused by intracommunity disagreements.
From the anarchist point of view, workers seemed reluctant to join the labor movement in any meaningful way, and then only if joining would garner them a few cents increase in wages. In 1905 in the midst of strike activities in Caguas, Río Grande, Carolina, and Arecibo, Pablo Vega Santos wrote to his comrades in Havana, lamenting what he saw around him. He criticized other workers for so willingly joining carnival celebrations, wasting their time, money, and efforts for a bourgeois celebration. Such festivities, he asserted, illustrated workers’ indifference to the need for a larger social revolution. Here they were, their fellow workers in need of their support and solidarity, but instead they chose to partake in carnival parades and drunken revelries that only benefited the elite.
Okay, but... Was there a consideration that perhaps people who worked their asses off wanted to have fun? I'm genuinely curious because it seems like a constant that people who act as activists think everything's serious.
And even when there are issues worth critiquing (e.g., a man participating in a parade smacking a child for throwing a confetti bomb into a coach), a desire to push for absolute seriousness is infuriating to me. There are criticisms about excessive drinking to be made and how that often plays a part in the abuse of others (generally children, women, and queer folks), but it's also worth recognising that not all drinking is equal (a glass of beer on occasion? isn't the same as excessive consumption).
Osorio claimed that Puerto Rican workers were quick to complain about low wages that didn’t provide enough food for the family but once Saturday evening rolled around they chose to forget these problems by going to taverns to concentrate on the appropriate billiards posture or to carouse with loose women.
It's an interesting thing to see that this is how taverns and pubs were viewed, considering how important they were in organising elsewhere.
Almost to the detriment and exclusion of other people who don't feel comfortable in them for whatever reason (e.g., IWW meetings in pubs).
Chapter 3: Anarchist Alliances, Government Repression
By 1910, the state of public education in Puerto Rico was dismal, but not that different than Cuba, which had also been a recipient of U.S.-guided public-school reform for a decade. In Cuba, the United States created a new education system modeled after the School City experiment in New York, which provided basic instruction, including civics and trades. Such approaches were replicated in Puerto Rico, where U.S. officials viewed public education as a central tool to Americanize Puerto Ricans and make the island a bilingual, bicultural resource linking the United States and Latin America. Thus, not only were students to learn trades but also civics (e.g., saluting the U.S. flag each morning), industrial education, and especially English.
SIGH.
However, such efforts had limited success. A decade after liberation from Spanish rule, both islands had public-school attendance rates hovering around 31 percent. In 1910, over 404,000 Puerto Ricans between six and twenty years old lived on the island, but only 31.6 percent attended school: 35.1 percent of six- to nine-year-olds, 47 percent of ten to fourteen-year-olds, and 13.1 percent of fifteen- to twenty-year-olds. In the second decade of U.S. rule, school enrollments and attendance dropped significantly. While 207,010 students enrolled and 155,830 students actually attended in the 1913–14 school year, these figures fell to 155,657 and 116,779 for 1916 and 1917, respectively, even though the number of teachers and schools increased over the same period. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church and a variety of Protestant churches operating under the American Missionary Association ran schools across the island. The latter in particular were part of the U.S. Americanization project and targeted “training” in manual arts.
Screaming.
In Puerto Rico, this effort to found rationalist schools was left largely to the anarchists and some of their socialist allies. In Cuba from 1909 to 1912, Ferrer’s execution energized the anarchist community, which launched fund-raising drives to create rationalist schools and hire teachers to guide the children. The larger anarchist community around Havana, complete with its own press, was in a much stronger financial and political condition to start schools. The furor over Ferrer’s execution was no more timid in Puerto Rico, but lacking large numbers of activists as well as their own newspaper, anarchists struggled to cobble together whatever they could to create a rationalist educational program. While the freethinkers offered public support for these initiatives, they seem to have not put their money behind the efforts.
Wonder why it is that I say what I say about anarchist press today. Can't be things like this or anything.
The center was not much to speak of: a small library and parlor with the works of the leading radical writers from abroad, a large table to gather around, red flags hanging from the walls, and portraits of Kropotkin, Marx, Bakunin, Máximo Gorki, Anselmo Lorenzo, and other “honored men who figured prominently in the libertarian movement that convulsed throughout the European continent.”
Oh, gag.
For instance, on Labor Day 1910, the city’s activists performed the classic del Valle play Fin de fiesta in the Teatro Yagüez. But an event with a cloudy agenda like the one in Mayagüez could create confusion. The FLT in the city was responsible for the Labor Day festivities. While the day’s events culminated with del Valle’s play, the celebration also included a speech by Dr. Gutiérrez Igaravidez, Governor Colton’s representative to the meeting. Thus, the FLT in Mayagüez included broad representation on its bill; however, when representatives of the colonial government were featured speakers alongside the performance of anarchist plays, it was easy for an audience member to get mixed messages. The more anarchist-led stronghold of Caguas seems to have avoided this problem. During Labor Day celebrations there in September 1910, Vilar and others spoke to an estimated crowd of over a thousand. According to Pablo Vega Santos, it was the largest workers’ gathering in the city’s history—with no proworker message diluted by “official” speakers.
Wonder why it is that "left unity" and "working within the state apparatus" won't work. Hmmm~.
Economics undermined efforts in Caguas. By June 1910, the Caguas economy was on the ropes. The FLT newspaper reported that factories which usually employed 200 to 250 workers were only employing 30 to 40 workers due to a shortage of tobacco leaf. While one could say that workers and potential beneficiaries of a CES might have had more time to go to the center because they lacked employment, the equal reality was that few people had disposable income to spend at the CES for newspapers or even to support the CES’s operations. Despite this, the CES did its best to survive and even extend its reach. Anarchists were accustomed to having no money and making the most out of good intentions and a few dollars. In July, the CES set out to print its own newspaper, launching a fund-raising campaign, but to no avail. On another front, the Caguas CES started to offer day classes for working-class children. In addition, as the strongest CESs in the Americas showed, no CES was worth its name without a band. CES member Rafael Ceferino led the one in Caguas that had been launched during the workers congress earlier in the year. Just as a CES needed music, it also needed plays. One of CES member Enrique Plaza’s fondest memories of the Caguas group was the dramatic performances of plays, among them Gori’s anarchist Primero de mayo (May Day).
Also why I think crowdfunding is a problem.
Juan Vilar was the key to the Caguas CES; however, he could rub people the wrong way. Erudite and dedicated, he saw rationalist education as his true calling. But Vilar was sickly, too, and his health began steadily to deteriorate in 1910. In mid-1910, he became increasingly ill. Stomach pains led to high fevers and blurred vision. Eventually, he had to stop working in the Johnson cigar factory in Caguas. With no money coming in, his compañera went to work. But coworkers also took up a collection, raising enough money to buy some medicine. These initial acts of solidarity, though, were short-lived. Soon, his companion—a fellow teacher at the CES Juventud Estudiosa—also fell ill and was unable to work. Worse, upon hearing that Vilar was feeling better but not yet capable of returning to work, his former colleagues in the factory declined to raise more money to help him. As Vilar put it in a letter to Santiago Iglesias, “That was the last straw.”
Huh.
[Ángel] Acosta, [Foster] Brown, and [George] Colton remained convinced that [Ventura] Grillo was not just a random criminal but, in fact, a violent anarchist who was part of a larger dangerous anarchist element in the city. Governor Colton claimed in July that Grillo “was a member of an anarchist society in Caguas, named ‘Centro de Estudios Sociales,’ that had relations with other societies of like nature in Cuba, Spain and South America.” Colton believed that members of the CES were involved in a plot to kill the two victims based on the fact that [Grillo] was an anarchist member of the CES and no evidence had been unearthed that Grillo had any personal motives for the murders. For the governor, this was more than just a murder investigation: “Anarchy and anarchist societies have no room in this territory nor in any other under the American flag.” Colton sought to reassure Puerto Rican workers that he was on their side and that workers deserved justice, rights, and good earnings. However, “I assure you that I absolutely will not tolerate breaking the law or back-stabbing plots from anarchists or anyone else who considers themselves above the law.”
Wow, surprise.
The CES that Colton identified was obviously Juventud Estudiosa, and to any casual observer of the labor press on the island, it would have been obvious that no secret anarchist cell existed. Anarchists were quite open about who they were and what they believed. Unlike the nearly two dozen men detained by Acosta following the murders and then released for lack of evidence, Vilar (like Grillo) had remained a prisoner, jailed initially on suspicion of conspiracy and held in order to keep him from committing another crime. Then a trumped-up morality conviction kept Vilar in legal limbo. By summer, Vilar’s case remained in the media and courts. Fearing the ongoing strike, coupled with the Vilar case, tobacco companies in Caguas began to forbid the lector in their factories from reading political, independent, or workers newspapers—a move protested by organized labor but apparently to no avail.
It's like the state will do anything to, y'know, silence people!
More broadly, the treatment of anarchists, among them Vilar, began to have rippling effects among many leftists whose early faith in American progress and democratic rule continued to slip away. The example of Vilar’s lawyer, Rafael López Landrón is a case in point. An early supporter of Americanization like many progressives associated with the island’s labor movement, López Landrón supported the various strands of “socialism” found on the island in the early 1900s, including at times a belief in stateless socialism, that is, anarchism. Despite this, he used his talent in the U.S. judicial system on the island to defend people ranging from Vilar in 1911 to Santiago Iglesias and Luis Muñoz Rivera over a decade earlier. But after a decade of U.S. rule, López Landrón and many others began to question their early support of Americanization, and by the 1910s would be calling for Puerto Rican independence—another issue that would divide the Puerto Rican Left...
Understandably so.
Chapter 4: Anarchists, Freethinkers, and Spiritists