Journal of Transnational American Studies

Scholars of the post-1968 transnational left have increasingly criticized liberal frameworks that suggest that transnational politics fundamentally revolve around solidarity relationships between full citizens of distinct nation-states. The literature on the movements that opposed US military and political intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1970s and 1980s has also shifted to better illuminate the fundamental roles migrants, refugees, politically targeted activists, and minoritized groups have played in contesting US intervention, particularly in Central America. This article adds a layer to that discussion by examining how diasporic Puerto Rican activists helped galvanize anti-intervention movements in Boston in the 1980s. It shows how El Colectivo Puertorriqueño de Boston (the Puerto Rican Collective of Boston) developed what I call a politics of “anticolonial anti-intervention” that directly related empire “over there” to racialized colonialism in the urban US. They grappled with what it meant to live in a colonial diaspora as they helped build anti-intervention organizing in Boston. They centered the demand for Puerto Rican independence yet linked it to their resistance to US intervention elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean. They recalibrated independentista visions of self-rule, including through an updated version of community control, in the Reagan era. In doing so they challenged the implicitly white politics of rescue, aid, and deracialized Marxism that prevailed in much of Boston’s anti-intervention movement.