When Boricuas Are Not Unidos - Intra-Puerto Rican Tensions within Histories of Puerto Rican Student Activism at Yale University, 1972-1975

• In Event: Latinx Student Activism, Institutional Power, and Cultural Resistance v2

Abstract

In the fall of 1971, a group of five Puerto Rican students – Manuel del Valle, Cruz
Ramos, Eduardo Padró, Hector Medina, and Gilbert Casellas – established Despierta Boricua, a
political activist organization, at Yale University. They sought out four primary goals: 1) to
improve Puerto Rican presence on campus, in number and quality of academic experience; 2) to
develop Puerto Rican curricula and course offerings at the University; 3) to promote Puerto
Rican cultural identity and resist their assimilation at the Ivy; and 4) to build stronger
connections with other “DiaspoRicans,” in New Haven, New York and beyond, as well as
strengthen solidarities with “other Third World Groups.”[1]
Importantly, while Despierta Boricua members sought to collaborate with island-raised
Puerto Ricans already on Yale’s campus, going so far as to initially call their group Boricuas
Unidos (Boricuas United), frosty encounters with island-raised Puerto Ricans on campus
prompted reconsideration. In the spring of 1975, the Puerto Rican Socialist University Federation
at Yale (FUSP) was established, a pro-independence organization with ties to New York and
mutual investments in improving the experiences of Puerto Ricans at Yale and within New
Haven. While student leader Franklin Velazquez knew of Despierta Boricua’s existence, the
FUSP, Velazquez determined, was more deliberately political than Despierta Boricua.[2] At the
same time, co-founder Eduardo Padró perceived the differences not as steeped in politics, but rather, founded in racism and classism: “…while the islanders were almost all white and
well-off, we were almost all poor and perceived ourselves as nonwhite.[3]”
Utilizing oral histories, speeches, school newspaper articles and archives, I consider the
following: what happens when political solidarity is fractured? How does education become a
lens through which competing notions of political belonging within a group of colonized people
are scrutinized, and how does such a scrutinization shed light on the intricate needs and demands
of a colonized people? I first analyze the origins of Despierta Boricua as an organization, in light
of its co-organizing with other student of Color groups at Yale and simmering tensions with
Puerto Rican students already attending Yale. I then turn to FUSP and consider how its brief life
as an organization challenged the very things Despierta Boricua stood for, and also pushed them
in their pursuit of decolonial, Third World liberation. Such a political mosaic would put into
conversation with one another the fields of histories of education, postcolonial studies, and
Puerto Rican Studies.

Author

• Amanda Rivera, Yale University