Ponce, 1891 – San Juan (Puerto Rico), 1965

By Ángel G. Quintero Rivera

Pedro Albizu Campos was the most influential nationalist leader of the 20th century in Puerto Rico and one of the anti-imperialist symbols of America. The son of a single, Black mother, descended from Venezuelan emigrants of Basque origin from the aristocracy of sugar, he was born and raised in the Tenerías neighborhood of Ponce, a very poor area founded by freed slaves. In 1912, he entered the University of Vermont to study agricultural engineering thanks to a scholarship granted by the Masonic House Aurora in his hometown. The following year, he transferred to Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Letters, a degree in Chemical Engineering, and later graduated in Law.

(Puerto Rican Institute of Culture/www.icp.gobierno.pr)

During his years at Harvard, he developed his anti-imperialist stance. He gave lectures on colonialism in Puerto Rico, Latin immigration in the United States, and the situation of Blacks in the continent. At the same time, he voluntarily enrolled in the military school of the ROTC and in the U.S. Army for World War I. His years at Harvard were a formative experience in various aspects that cemented his political thought: Puerto Rican sovereignty would be achieved through a demand—not a request—which implied, if necessary, armed struggle. This thinking was also nourished by his activism in the decolonization movements of India and Ireland. He married Laura Meneses, a Peruvian who also studied law at Harvard. Despite his academic achievements, he did not accept the prestigious legal positions offered to him and began working as a lawyer in a small office in Ponce, serving the poor.

Upon returning to Puerto Rico, he entered political life as a member of the Unión Party. In 1924, an internal split in the party led to the founding of the Nationalist Party (PN), of which Albizu Campos was elected vice president. Between 1927 and 1930, he traveled to the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, spreading his thesis that Puerto Rican independence was central to the continental anti-imperialist struggle. For progressive Latin American intellectuals, he represented Puerto Rico’s fight to retain its Hispanic character against the powerful “colossus of the north.”

Upon his return, he was appointed president of the PN and launched an intense campaign throughout the country. His speeches—some of which have been published posthumously—were widely listened to in radio broadcasts. His stance on Puerto Rican dignity in the face of colonial politics was highly admired and summarized in his slogan, “The homeland is courage and sacrifice!” As the scholar Arcadio Díaz Quiñones noted:

[…] In an apocalyptic tone, Albizu postulated the mystical and heroic transfiguration of the homeland, which translated into the military vanguard […] of the Cadets of the Republic (a body he founded as the armed wing of the PN in 1931). However, this was unacceptable to Puerto Ricans who wanted negotiated solutions, sought to strengthen civil society, and feared the consequences of militarization.

The PN suffered a resounding defeat in the 1932 elections and intensified its campaign for a “purifying” military confrontation.

In 1934, sugarcane workers staged the first major strike, which in U.S. unionism is called a “wildcat strike,” meaning it was spontaneous and outside union structures. Albizu Campos was called by the workers to address the strikers. Nationalism reached its peak of mass expression; but Albizu’s conception of the PN as a “military organization to rescue the homeland,” with an authoritarian, caudillo-like leadership, prevented that rapprochement with the labor wage struggles from consolidating. The workers refused to accept the “impeccable” petty-bourgeois leadership that Albizu Campos tried to impose on them. Moreover, the labor movement, with its rich socialist tradition, had been advocating since the early 20th century for the social expansion of democracy—including struggles against racism and sexism, especially as one of its main sectors consisted of female tobacco workers—and defended the modernity of rational education against what it called “the four centuries of ignorance and servitude under Spanish colonialism.” Against these conceptions, Albizu’s pro-Catholic and imperialist Spain rhetoric was unacceptable, as was his archaic proposal for gender-segregated education. (The PN’s program considered “co-education as an unacceptable American import.”)

The PN mainly appealed to a small bourgeoisie in the painful process of proletarianization and to university students. After several desperate encounters between nationalists and the police, which resulted in several deaths, Albizu was imprisoned on charges of “armed conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government” and sentenced in 1937 to ten years in prison in Atlanta.

When he returned to the island, widely celebrated in 1947, he found a Puerto Rico much changed: on the path to economic progress and greater development of self-government, led by the populism of Luis Muñoz Marín. The former prisoner condemned the new forms of colonialism and continued his militaristic struggle for the “redemption” of the homeland. In 1950, the PN gained worldwide attention with an armed uprising (quickly suppressed) in Puerto Rico and an assassination attempt on U.S. President Harry Truman in Washington. Albizu Campos was again arrested and sentenced to 53 years in prison.

His health deteriorated significantly in prison, and he claimed to be a victim of torture. For this reason, he was pardoned by Governor Muñoz Marín in 1953. But the following year, PN militants under his command opened fire on several members of the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, and he returned to prison, where he fell ill repeatedly. Due to his fragile health, Muñoz Marín pardoned him again in 1964. Albizu Campos died the following year and received an enormous public funeral.

Colonialism bred many contradictions. Although the PN’s intransigent militarism has always been widely rejected in Puerto Rico, Albizu Campos is remembered as a kind of secular saint. As Díaz Quiñones pointed out, “with his martyrdom, canonization, liturgy, sacred texts, fanatics, and heretics.” Anthropologist Ramón López testified to how often Albizu Campos’ image was present in the sacred space of Catholic and spiritualist home altars, especially of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora. Faced with such a powerful capitalist colonialism, Puerto Ricans developed “the art of bregar” (to deal with), the possibilities of oblique struggle. With politics, one “brega,” but the secular canonization of Albizu Campos exemplifies that with certain fundamental matters of identity, such as nationality—constantly reworked and reconstituted—the art of bregar dictates that with that, one does not “brega.”

Published 31/08/2016 12:02, Content updated on 02/06/2017 09:12.

Translation by ChatGPT.