by Xavi Luis Burgos
Chicago is a city where politics is life, and Puerto Ricans raise organizers. In the last 25 years, Puerto Rican youth forged new movements to successfully remake universities and the city for collective liberation. The following is an excerpt from an essay first published by the digital and print magazine Intervenxions of The Latinx Project.
That night, the air was solemn but busy in Café Teatro Batey Urbano. Dozens of youth adorned shirts with the name “Filiberto.” Hundreds raised their fists in the air to sing the pro-independence anthem, “La Borinqueña.” Its final line of “la libertad”—“the freedom”—rang loudly with echoes of pain and longing.
March and housing fair, 2007.
A day earlier, the San Juan office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) splattered a rural, mountain home with bullets, sparking a gun battle inside. Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, the 72-year-old resident, bled to death even after hundreds of people arrived in protest. The FBI blocked all entrances. The day, September 23, 2005, was the anniversary of the Grito de Lares, the 1868 revolution.
The murder of the clandestine leader of an armed organization, Ejército Popular Boricua—Los Macheteros—and the date chosen signaled to the entire independence movement a resurgence of repression. As with the experience of multiple grand jury hearings and ferocious militancy in the 1980s, prospects arose of state ire in the city’s Puerto Rican community. Youth and students spoke more loudly about independence, protesting in front of FBI offices downtown.
These early moments made it clear that student leaders of the 1990s profoundly shaped the successes of this new generation. That era’s youth reinvigorated an unbroken succession of generational uproars in the city’s independence movement.
To help free Vieques Island from U.S. military bases, ‘90s youth cultivated a coalition to be arrested for civil disobedience, including near the White House in 2001. They led with ferocity the exoneration of many Puerto Rican political prisoners, engraving the beginnings of the current prison abolitionist movement. They fought to have a statue of an Afro-Boricua independence leader in the park district, paving the way to the gateway flag monuments.
As it were, for their mentors of the 1960s through the 1980s, triumphs came with the specter of state repression. These generations were chiseled by years of institutional onslaught aimed at dismantling activism at DePaul University and Roberto Clemente Community Academy, which has deeply influenced 21st-century youth facing new challenges.
In 2007, a grand jury convened in New York City to inquire into its local independence movement, spurring hundreds to the courthouse in opposition. UPRS-NEIU invited one of the subpoenaed to speak about their activism, and joined community teach-ins by the National Boricua Human Rights Network on interactions with the FBI. Puerto Rican youth and students of this era exposed oppression as proof of unequal citizenship and organized for Puerto Rico’s independence as the solution.
At Pa’lante, UPRS, and other UIC youth promoted the movement to free remaining and new political prisoners and Vieques Island from military toxins. UPRS youth from both campuses gathered at the La Capilla del Barrio neighborhood church to honor the birthday of a long-imprisoned community organizer, attesting to a deeply local political spirituality. This could also be found in storefronts and large ministries, such as First Congregational, New Life, and Rebaño, with youth leading community work.
Puerto Rican youth maintained ties to the archipelago’s movements, traveling annually to Puerto Rico with the National Boricua Human Rights Network to exhibit political prisoners’ art and engage in dialogue with organizers. They met with the elders of the legendary Partido Nacionalista, Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño, and Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño organizations at the commemoration of the murder of two independentista youth at Cerro Maravilla. On one occasion, they heard a speech by a gubernatorial candidate who’s become a political icon.
As youth retained links to Puerto Rico, they continued firmer roots in local needs. These past two decades have seen fresh initiatives and mass organizing that have demonstrated tenacity in transforming society.
The first decade of the 2000s saw students and other youth arrested on live TV for blocking the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) headquarters. The “¡Humboldt Park NO SE VENDE!/ NOT FOR SALE!” campaign ignited, mobilizing hundreds with Brickerdike Redevelopment Corporation/ Humboldt Construction to defend and create affordable housing. The campaign’s annual Paseo Boricua Parranda gathered hundreds to sing in the snow to visit elders in towering, community-built Hispanic Housing complexes.
Students from ASPIRA of Illinois organized teach-ins with QOS on African and Indigenous ancestries, as well as marches for community peace. Students from Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School convened hundreds for the annual Three Kings Day parade to nourish historic roots on Division Street. In the same neighborhood, in places like Youth Service Project, students and youth painted and restored dozens of murals depicting migration, cultural traditions, and collective experiences. In the hundreds, they learned the traditional cuatro guitar and performed for thousands in annual concerts by the Puerto Rican Arts Alliance (PRAA). All this growth in artistic activity empowered the creation of theatre and gallery spaces, such as El Schomburg, and the expansion of PRAA, Puerto Rican Cultural Center, Urban Theater Company, Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center, and the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture.
By the second decade of the 2000s, the queer and trans-led Chicago Dyke March and the once-repressed Puerto Rican People’s Parade activated thousands through radical politics and art in marches through Paseo Boricua. After hurricanes Irma and María, students, alumni, and community elders raised millions in relief for their homeland. Youth organized larger gatherings for Black and Palestinian life.
In the third decade, after the 2020 uprisings, the Afrorriqueñes conference at Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center brought days of dialogue and healing among Black artists and activists. Chicago Boricua Resistance captivated a new cohort to combat the federal board imposed on Puerto Rico and provoke their governor’s resignation in 2019. The YLO was resurrected as the New Era Young Lords and organized mutual aid and first-aid classes.
In one of the most audacious moments in the entire epoch, a coalition of Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Black youth and elders mobilized hundreds to Washington, D.C., in a call for immigrant amnesty. After a press conference, the youth ambushed the office halls of Congress, loudly chanting “Sí, Se Puede,” and smashing a youth-led Chicago Puerto Rican newspaper with their demands. Capitol security arrested a member of UPRS and another youth.
Alumni of these struggles later founded La Respuesta, a diaspora-wide magazine to agitate and exchange these political strategies. Between 2013 and 2018, it published 300 Puerto Rican writers, expanded in Chicago and New York City, and reached a monthly audience of over a million.
By the first decade of the 2000s, Puerto Rican students at UIC, NEIU, and other universities were still organizing for their political prisoners, alongside other rising challenges. Military spending increased alongside hate for immigrants and Islam. The economy crashed more than once, with thousands of their peers dying or being injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of bulldozing blocks, the city supported smaller-scale, expensive housing to achieve incremental gentrification. In response, Chicago youth marched in the hundreds of thousands for affordable housing, an end to war, and amnesty for the undocumented.
Chicago’s Puerto Rican Student and Youth Movements mobilized deeply for immigrant rights. For weeks, over a dozen stood in shifts, holding a light-blue Puerto Rican flag to demonstrate protection for an undocumented family under sanctuary in a Humboldt Park church. Working intimately with Pilsen-based Centro Sin Fronteras and its Zócolo Urbano youth hub, which has the historic motto “Boricua Mexicano, Luchando Mano a Mano,” this coalition demonstrated a politics of respect for legacy and reciprocity.
For two years, Puerto Rican youth from local high schools and universities across Illinois— including Loyola University, DePaul University, Northwestern University, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, University of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago, and city and suburban colleges, such as Wright, Harold Washington, Kennedy-King, and Triton—mobilized thousands in marches for amnesty and against war. Members of UPRS-NEIU and Mexican organizers in the Humboldt Park and Pilsen neighborhoods met at the Rainbow Push Coalition headquarters to plan action.
As the city transformed into the campaign headquarters to elect a local resident as the first Black president, civil rights for immigrants were central to a Chicago-style coalition of identities. A UPRS–NEIU alum and the most pro-immigrant member of Congress ran a mayoral campaign with a march with youth in 2011. Another alum launched a major progressive challenge to the decades-long status quo at city hall.
Meanwhile, the federal administration deported millions and supported increased federal control in Puerto Rico. Simultaneously, it recommended a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, another major center in the Boricuascape, to the Supreme Court and, in 2016, granted clemency to a Puerto Rican political prisoner and veteran of the 1970s youth movement. Today, with a federal government widely described as fascist, students and movement veterans are center stage in street battles for immigrants.
Immigrant communities in the Albany Park neighborhood organized rapid-response teams to counter deportation operations alongside alumni of UPRS and QOS and the Alderperson, a longtime youth arts educator and cofounder of Chicago Boricua Resistance. Concurrently, Homeland Security stormed the parking lot of the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture. Later, agents burst into a hospital, arresting the neighborhood alderperson, an alum of UPRS-NEIU and QOS, who calmly stressed the violation of constitutional rights. As it seems, wide successes in life-saving activations are still met with violence.
Decades of confrontation and survival also attest to the power of radical solidarity and ethnic coalition building. In the past quarter-century, equipped with this knowledge and ethos, Boricua youth commanded new building structures at universities, founded powerful institutions, freed political prisoners, mobilized tens of thousands of people, and launched mass media. Undoubtedly, this century’s Chicago politics owes much of its form and participation to Puerto Rican youth, among whom support for Latines, immigrants, Black and Palestinian life, and Puerto Rico’s independence is common and official. As fascism threatens hard-won achievements, you can count on Chicago Boricuas to fight until victory.
