Black Flag Boricuas (paperback)

This pathbreaking study examines the radical Left in Puerto Rico from the final years of Spanish colonial rule into the 1920s. Positioning Puerto Rico within the context of a regional anarchist network that stretched from Puerto Rico and Cuba to Tampa, Florida, and New York City, Kirwin R. Shaffer illustrates how anarchists linked their struggle to the broader international anarchist struggles against religion, governments, and industrial capitalism. Their groups, speeches, and press accounts – as well as the newspapers that they published – were central in helping to develop an anarchist vision for Puerto Ricans at a time when the island was a political no-man’s-land, neither an official U.S. colony or state nor an independent country.