Title: Dr. Ana Livia Cordero and the Proyecto Piloto: Popular Education for Puerto Rican Liberation in the 1960s adn 1970s

• In Event: La Diaspora Africana en el Camino del Feminismo Decolonial: Colombia y Puerto Rico

Abstract

Dr. Ana Livia Cordero was a Puerto Rican female medical professional, parent, and radical activist who worked in the United States, various countries in Africa, and the Caribbean, from the 1930s to the early 1990s. After working as a doctor and activist in Ghana, Cordero returned to Puerto Rico and began the Pilot Project in 1967. The Pilot Project was a grassroots organization that used community-based research, Marxist, and popular education methods in order to identify and develop revolutionary leadership in marginalized communities throughout the island. In this presentation, I will examine Pilot Project materials in order to illustrate that the group developed a Puerto Rican-specific vision that advocated a version of Black Pride that forged connections across the diaspora, but which did not ignore the country’s particular socioeconomic, political and cultural conditions. Given Cordero’s travels across the African diaspora, she was sensitive to moments of inclusion and exclusion when it came to building much-needed solidarity between Puerto Rican movements for liberation, and movements such as Pan-Africanism and U.S.-based Black Power. I will also consider that Cordero was committed to Afro-diasporic solidarity as a white-presenting Puerto Rican, describing instances where she expanded the bounds of activist communities and reformulated ethnoracial categories. Ultimately, I argue that Cordero and her contexts point to a broader set of experiences and sensibilities that are unacknowledged, ignored, and erased—especially within the diasporic Caribbean community that has come to be known as Afro-Latino, and between this Afro-Latino community and the Black American community in the United States.

Author

• Sandy I Placido, Harvard University