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Robert McGreevey, Solidarity across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-imperialism, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 2, September 2024, Pages 371–372, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae144
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Margaret M. Power's fascinating new book situates the Puerto Rican independence movement in the history of anti-imperialism in Latin America. The early chapters explore the roots of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico, founded by José Coll y Cuchí, a member of Puerto Rico's elite who was elected as the party's first president in 1922. Coll y Cuchí and other party members had grown frustrated with Puerto Rico's Union party for falling in line with U.S. imperialist policies. In the 1920s, the Nationalist party challenged U.S. empire but did so from an elite white male perspective that marginalized women, Afro–Puerto Ricans, and the working class. The Nationalist party shifted direction in 1930 when Pedro Albizu Campos took over as president and built a more inclusive coalition. Albizu Campos took an increasingly adversarial approach to officials in Washington by defining the United States as an oppressor and, just as crucially, Puerto Rico as part of Latin America, thereby opening the door to anti-imperialist alliances in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America.
