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Books by Louis Reyes Rivera
Who Pays The Cost (1978) /
This One For You (1983) /
Scattered
Scripture
Bum Rush the Page
(co-editor) /
The Bandana Republic (co-editor)
Sancocho: A Book of Nuyorican Poetry by Shaggy Flores
(edited by Louis Reyes Rivera)
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Filiberto Ojeda Rios & Puerto
Rican Sovereignty
By Louis Reyes Rivera
For a very long time I have had this
problem with the way history is taught. Too many of our
textbooks and professors teach history as if they were taking a
droplet of water out of the river and presenting that droplet as
the entire river itself. And they do so with little regard to
those trillions of droplets that make a river possible. No one
event, no one person, exists out of context. We are all part of
some sense of continuum.
Because of the way Puerto Rican history is
not taught, far too many people do not fully understand the
social and political context out of which such events as the
assassination of Filiberto Ojeda Rios by FBI agents in Puerto
Rico (September 23, 2005) takes place. Ever since he began
dedicating his life to the independence of Puerto Rico,
Filiberto had become one more contributing factor in the
historical continuum of Puerto Rican struggles that date back at
least to the 18th Century and that continues, however presently
fragmented, straight through into tomorrow.
Consider the following highlights that are
hallmarks to yesterday's river of struggle on the part of Puerto
Ricans, giving rise to a Filiberto.
Beginning in 1795, at the midpoint of the
Haitian Revolution, Toussaint L'Ouverture began to send out
agents to Cuba, Puerto Rico, New Orleans, Jamaica, Mexico, and
to what later became the Dominican Republic. Their task was to
organize and instigate revolution against both slavery and
colonialism. This policy of lending assistance to independence
movements and/or to slave revolts continued on the part of Haiti
until at least the 1840s, culminating in uprisings that took
place in Oriente Province and in Santiago de Cuba . . . in
Southern Louisiana and in Charleston, South Carolina, in Trelawny Town (Jamaica), in Ponce, San Juan and Arecibo (Puerto
Rico), and, of course, in what we now call the Dominican
Republic.
This last particular effort culminated in
the immediate abolition of chattel slavery in Eastern
Hispaniola, first from Spain, in 1797, and then from France in
1821, when Jean Boyer fully and officially annexed the
territory.
Beginning in 1819, Puerto Rican and Cuban
revolutionary exiles joined with the first Mexican Revolution
(1809-1821) to help the Mexicans against the Spaniards. This
pact between Puerto Ricans and Cubans with Mexican
revolutionaries included an arrangement to extend the Mexican
Revolution to Puerto Rico and Cuba. When Mexico defeated Spain
(1821), the generals in charge at that time refused to honor the
agreement, and, again, in 1822, Puerto Ricans and Cubans joined
with Simon Bolivar and made him the same offer—to assist
Bolivar in liberating South America with the explicit
understanding that Bolivar, in turn, would organize an invasion
into both Cuba and Puerto Rico, and then annex those islands
into his Greater Republic of Colombia. (Bolivar, by the way,
also received much assistance from Haiti.)
Directly because of political pressure from
and the threat of armed intervention by the U.S. (1824), Bolivar
decided not to extend his war into the Caribbean.
From 1825 straight through to the early
1840s, we see no less than 20 separate slave revolts taking
place in Puerto Rico, most of them with Haitian assistance. By
the 1840s, slave revolts had caused so much havoc, especially in
Cuba, that Spain began recruiting mercenaries, known as
Gallegos, to root out such revolts. These Gallegos, however,
eventually joined with Caribbean revolutionaries instead of
earning their pay as hired killers.
Beginning in 1852, Ramon Emeterio Betances,
Segundo Ruiz Belvis and Eugenio Maria de Hostos, among many
others, began to dedicate their lives to the overthrow of both
slavery and colonialism in Puerto Rico and Cuba (and, by the
way, to encourage the overthrow of both Haiti and the Dominican
Republic in order to pave the way for a Republic of the Greater
Antilles). This effort culminated in what became known as el
Grito de Lares in Puerto Rico (September 23, 1868), and in el
Grito de Yara (October 10, 1868)—the latter of which became
known as the Cuban Ten Years' War. Both efforts were initially
planned in New York City by Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and
Haitian exiles, along with several locally prominent Sephardic
Jews.
Both attempts basically failed, leading
directly into what is known as The Little War of 1880 (forcing
Spain to abolish slavery by 1884), and, later, in establishing a
Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1891. The Constituent Laws that
governed the CRP specifically included a Puerto Rican Section—meaning to say that once Cuba was free, the intention of the
organizers was to immediately extend their war into Puerto Rico.
This attempt is known as the Second Cuban War for Independence
(1895-98), under the leadership of Jose Marti, who died in
battle on May 19, 1895.
Once it became clear that the Cubans were
on the verge of winning, the U.S. took advantage of the
situation and intervened in 1898, not for the purposes of
assisting the Cubans, but to subvert this third attempt with a
series of invasions into Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.
Thus, what is called the Spanish-American War was an act of
usurpation on the part of the U.S. against Cuban, Puerto Rican,
and Filipino sovereign aspirations.
We should take note that when the U.S. and
Spain signed their Treaty of Paris (December, 1898), there were
no Cubans, Puerto Ricans or Filipinos at the table, yet the U.S.
forced Spain to relinquish any claims over those lands (as well
as Guam and Samoa) in exchange for twenty million dollars. It
should also be noted that the U.S. overthrew the sovereign
government of Hawaii and laid claim to it that same year.
With the rise of Pedro Albizu Campos as a
lead figure for the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (1928-1965),
the struggle continued, culminating in the 1936 arrests and
imprisonment of eight Nationalist leaders, including poets Juan
Antonio Corretjer and Clemente Soto Velez, along with Albizu
Campos. On Palm Sunday of the following year (1937), several
hundred Puerto Ricans were preparing a peaceful march through
the streets of Ponce in solidarity with the Nationalist cause.
They were cordoned off by U.S. troops and local police. The end
result is known as the Massacre at Ponce, in which action over
150 unarmed men, women and children were killed and wounded by
U.S. military personnel.
When the jailed Nationalists completed
their prison sentences (1948), they immediately set about to
prepare what came to be known as the Revolt at Jayuya, in 1950.
The U.S. immediately ordered both Army and Air Force personnel
to put down this revolt, culminating in the re-arrest of Albizu
Campos, along with no less than 1,000 other supporters of
Independence. Four years later, in March 1954, Lolita Lebron and
three other New York-based Nationalists opened fire on Congress
in a last ditch effort to bring world attention to the fact that
Puerto Rico, the fourth largest island of the Caribbean, was
still a colony of the U.S.
After the death of Albizu Campos in 1965,
we see again the rise of such groups as the Young Lords Party
(1968-69), and during the later part of the 1970s, the formation
of such other groups as the FALN and the Macheteros, of which
latter Filiberto Ojeda Rios was a founder.
While it's true that throughout the history
of Puerto Rico and within the political spectrum of thought,
there were and still are (a) assimilationists (i.e., those who
give up on sovereignty to accommodate whatever power is governing
Puerto Rico); (b) annexationists (i.e., those who believe it is
better for Puerto Rico to be annexed to a greater power, or,
like today, hoping to become the 51st State); and, (c)
autonomists (i.e., those who want local rule but wish to remain
subordinate to a greater colonial power—in this case, to
maintain what is referred to as a Commonwealth status)—while
those three factions do remain a constant in current political
thought, throughout the history of Puerto Rico, there has always
been and will continue to be those who are called nationalists
or separatists (both of which tendencies want Puerto Rico to be
an independent and sovereign nation). Many of these separatists
are also socialists, many of whom view Puerto Rican sovereignty
as a necessary first step towards establishing a United
Confederation of Caribbean States.
Thus, the historical context for what
happened on September 23, 2005, when a contingent of FBI agents
surrounded the home of Filiberto Ojeda Rios and let loose a
barrage of gunfire, wounding the Machetero leader and leaving
him to die from wounds unattended.
That the FBI chose to kill him on September
23, the annually commemorated date for el Grito de Lares (the
Revolt at Lares), is a denigrating insult to the pride and will
of Puerto Ricans everywhere. How we have taken this insult is
clearly attested to by the fact that every political faction in
Puerto Rican thought (including Republicans, Democrats,
Autonomists, gradualists, etc.) has joined in solidarity with
the Puerto Rican left to lodge a collective protest against the
FBI's actions. What could result from these events is an open
dialogue among Puerto Ricans, both on the island and within its
diasporic communities on the U.S. mainland and elsewhere, that
may again raise the issue of sovereignty.
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Another view of the assassination: The
Nation* * *
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Bill Moyers and James Cone (Interview) /
A Conversation with James Cone
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John
Coltrane, "Alabama" /
Kalamu ya Salaam, "Alabama"
/
A Love Supreme
A Blues for the Birmingham Four
/ Eulogy for the Young Victims
/ Six Dead After Church
Bombing
Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 9 January 2006 / update
28 November 2011 |
