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Simon Bolivar, Jose Marti, Che Guevara, we know the names of these liberators and countless others, but seldom outside of Puerto Rico do I hear the name of Pedro Albizu Campos.  Actually the name was uttered countless times by Che Guevara himself who testified before the United Nations asking that the u.s. stop torturing him in their prisons.   But I often wonder why he's obscure or feared. Is it that the u.s. has worked hard to ensure that it be this way? Is it because he was a man with a huge fighting spirit and had no issues going toe to toe with the u.s.? I was happy to learn that a friend's mom, a peruana honors Albizu and his work. She remembers the legacy he left and his close connection to her country as his beloved wife Laura Meneses was from Peru and one of the first Latin American woman educated at Harvard, where they met.

Anyhow, today, September 12 is recognized as his birthday. But even that is a controversy. He used several birthdays throughout his life, one in June and this one. One in 1891 and one is 1893. That's only part of the mystique around my big hero.  Folks seem to have decided on September 12, 1891 for historical reasons. But here's my "top of the dome" tribute to this big man. And cuz you never should expect to hear about him in school. If you do send me a message so I can grant them an award!  It'll be damn long cuz great men deserve great tributes and even this won't be enough……

"Raising Revolution", 2004 by Yasmin Hernandez, Collection of The Center for Puerto Rican Studies, CUNY, NYC. www.yasminhernandez.com/raisinrev

So Don Pedro was born a few years before the 1898 US invasion of his homeland Puerto Rico.  Growing up within these first years of colonialism, he witnessed things such as the imposed English language on school children.  Living in poverty, Pedro didn't start school till the age of 12.  He then proved to be a child prodigy, completing his primary and secondary education in only 8 years, instead of the usual 12.  He was recruited to the University of Vermont to study bio-chemistry and later was snatched up by Harvard where he studied law, military strategy, the colonial cases of Ireland and India among other things.  He also spoke 7 languages. 
In 1917, the US imposed their citizenship on all Puerto Ricans. It was a strategic move since it was the same year the US entered World War I so they could now draft Puerto Rican men to fight foreign wars, even though they had  no rights under the u.s. government.  The above image is of Don Pedro in a u.s. army uniform.

"Pedro Albizu Campos", 1994, by Yasmin Hernandez. www.yasminhernandez.com/albizucampos

It was in the u.s. army where Albizu began to recognize the unfair treatment of African-Americans and Puerto Ricans through segregation and racism.  All the injustices he endured is what encouraged him to craft his anti-imperialist ideologies, not to mention his participation on Harvard's debate team and his close ties to the Boston Irish community.  Upon his return to Puerto Rico, Pedro first joined the Union Party, the first Party to have PRican independence on its platform.  Later on when the Nationalist Party was created, he joined it, with its exclusive independence approach.  Albizu quickly climbed the party ranks becoming first its international ambassador, traveling to Haiti, Dominican Republic, Peru, and other countries to rally support for independence and then in 1930 becoming its president. 
Under Albizu's leadership, the Nationalist party was  radicalized. The above image is inspired by an event in which he climbed a podium to speak. The podium was decorated by u.s. and Puerto Rican flags. Before speaking, he first took down all the u.s. flags and stuffed them into pocket, leaving only the Puerto Rican flags. The Puerto Rican flag was banned in Puerto Rico from 1898-1952. He and his party are the ones that promoted that flag and made it the loved piece of fabric it is today with millions waving it at the NYC Puerto Rican Day Parade.  For over 50 years, it was a crime to wave our flag.  He and his party taught us that our identity is never a crime. The only criminals are those who deem it such, the imperialists.  Albizu taught "where tyranny is law, revolution is order".  In 1932 election results for a campaign he participated in did not reflect the desire of the people. He decided then that within a colonial system, in which the u.s. president presides over all Puerto Rican affairs and has veto power over all Puerto Rican laws, a democracy cannot exist, the people's vote is always subject to a foreign government's manipulation.  Since then Nationalists do not participate in the electoral process (me either!)

The Ponce Massacre, 1997 by Yasmin Hernandez. www.yasminhernandez.com/ponce

Events like the one pictured above, the Ponce Massacre, characterized the nature of life in Puerto Rico during the 1930s under the oppressive rule of u.s. appointed governor General Blanton Winship. This is really when the Nationalist Party decided to take a self-defense approach.  In response to young Nationalists assassinated at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras and other events, the party responded by assassinating the Chief of Police.  In the above incident a peaceful parade organized by the Nationalists to commemorate the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico, on Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937, ended with 21 dead and 150 wounded when the police fired on a crowd of unarmed men, women and children.  Albizu was arrested immediately after the assassination of Chief of Police Riggs, along with 7 other Nationalists, among them were the great Puerto Rican poets, Clemente Soto Velez and Juan Antonio Corretjer.  Another infamous event of the 1930s is when American Dr. Cornelius Rhodes decided to inject cancer into Puerto Ricans in a secret experiment. It was discovered when he crumbled up a letter to a friend in which he described Puerto Ricans as dirty and lazy and worthy of being killed off.  All this was supporting his cancer experiment which he revealed in the letter to his friend, but threw it in the wastebasket where it was found by a Puerto Rican worker. When word got back to Albizu, he took the news to the masses.  Well here's this link I found with Dr. Rhodes on the cover of Time magazine celebrated as a "Cancer fighter". Well, we were the guinea pigs, just like Puerto Rican women were guinea bigs for population control, the birth control pill and contraceptive foam. http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19490627,00.html.

"Carpeta: Albizu", 2007 Archivos Subversivos Series, by Yasmin Hernandez.

As a Harvard educated lawyer, Albizu had turned down jobs in Washington to go back home to work for the liberation of Puerto Rico. When Nationalists were arrested, he served as their defending lawyer and also represented himself in a court presided over by American judges and in trials conducted in English, a language foreign to a nation that had spoken Spanish for the past 400 years.  The FBI began their COINTELPRO harrassment on the lives of any Puerto Ricans identified or suspected of being independence supporters.  After a 1950 revolution in Jayuya led by Nationalist Blanca Canales, yes Boricua women are fierce!, over 2,000 were arrested and the "carpeta" or government file process spread like wildfire. Each independence supporter was under surveillance. Their everyday moves were tracked by the government.  The painting above is from my ARCHIVOS SUBVERSIVOS project which focuses on this part of our history and present because it still occurs.  

"Crucified Albizu", 2006 by Yasmin Hernandez. www.yasminhernandez.com/crucifiedalbizu

For being a revolutionary and fighting for the dignity of his homeland and his people, Don Pedro spent the majority of his adult life in u.s. federal prisons.  While there he complained about having been subjected to radiation experiments. Many called him a loco. As if the person who studied biology and chemistry at Harvard didn't know what radiation was or the damage it could cause his body.  The American League for Puerto Rican Independence, in 1954 wrote a letter to famed scientist Albert Einstien, then studying the new atomic energy used by Americans to kill countless Japanese and used by Americans on their federal prisoners to study its affects on humans.  The letter was pleading with him to look into the case of Don Pedro. They reached out to him not only for his expertise in the field, but for his outspokeness against the un-American Committee hearings happening at the time.  Albizu continued to suffer from lesions throughout his body and burn marks.  The radiation was administered in the form of light rays in his prison cell and hospital room.  There are cases of folks using his body to create X Rays of metal objects placed under this body.  Oh and remember Dr. Cornelius Rhodes, the cancer injector? Well bust how he just happened to be the head of medical services the for the u.s. department of federal corrections at the time Albizu was being used as a lab rat.  Pay back possibly for Albizu having exposed his evil plot to exterminate Boricuas back in the 1930s through cancer? Read about it in Yo Acuso y lo Que Paso Despues, a book written on the controversy. 
Albizu was finally pardoned in 1965 and died three months later on April 21, exactly two months after another "by any means necessary revolutionary, Mr. Malcolm X (d. Feb. 21st).  And guess what he died of, Cancer! Yes, the plot thickens.  Puerto Rican history is not about the music we make  and the way our women's hip sway, it's also about the struggle a people have endured and their resistance.

Albizu's Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico, celebrates their 85th anniversary this week.  Check out this link for a flyer to a Sept 14th celebration in NYC.   http://pictures.aol.com/ap/singleImage.do?pid=2e90tYBxdJdSzzaLfD*Q0DwTcd1LkWTSNyh6v4xQp5Fd3Ig%3D

Come commemorate Don Pedro's birthday with me tonight (Sept 12) at my talk on my ARCHIVOS SUBVERSIVOS project at Cemi Undergound. Check out my last post on this blog for details. 

And last but not least, join me and many others on September 23 at Times Square and the United Nations where we will demand a free Puerto Rico (more details two posts ago on this blog).

Albizu Vive!,

Filiberto Vive!

Que Viva Puerto Rico libre!

Yaz