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5. Radicalism Imagined Leftist Culture, Gender, and Revolutionary Violence, 1900–1920 Bythe1910s,SantiagoIglesiasandthe FLT leadershiphadflirtedoff and on with formal electoral politics.At the 1910 FLT congress,delegates had voted to abandon this course of action after disastrous electoral results—and not a little internal criticism from anarchists within the FLT. As a result, the union recommitted itself to the economic struggle. From late 1913 through early 1915, large strikes rippled through the tobacco and sugar industries. Two thousand cigar makers in Caguas struck in October 1913. In February 1914, some 1,500 tobacco workers throughout the island went on strike. Agricultural workers,especially in the sugar fields,struck in the early months of 1915,torching fields and destroying plantation property.In response,colonial authorities turned the striking areas over to the insular police,which applied violence and intimidation against strikers. When the FLT and the AFL appealed to the U.S. Congress to provide protective labor legislation for the island in 1916, no such bill or amendment garnered enough support to be sent to the president for signing.1 Thus,while labor actions and strikes were on the rise, there were only scattered material benefits from these actions. By 1915,the FLT leadership had begun to reconsider its abandonment of electoralpoliticsasastrategytoimproveconditionsforPuertoRico’sworking masses.First,there was growing recognition that labor actions could produce only limited results against the agribusiness elite who now controlled much of the island. A report by the U.S. Department of War, which oversaw the island, concluded in 1915 that conditions in Puerto Rico were deteriorating for workers; unemployment was growing at unimagined rates; daily costs of living were increasing faster than wages; and child labor was on the rise.2 Second,local labor parties—unaffiliated to any other party or the FLT—had Radicalism Imagined 107 surprising electoral successes in 1912 and 1914 in Arecibo. There, in 1914, the Partido Obrero Insular (Island Workers Party), which supported trade unionism and Americanization (the same goals as Iglesias)—won control of the municipal government.3 Discouraged by the limited results of the FLT’s economic strategy but inspired by the electoral victories in Arecibo, some FLT members, among them Iglesias, increasingly believed that the labor movement had to return full force to the electoral struggle to gain legal protections. Thus, the FLT leadership began formulating its next move. At its March 1915 convention, FLT delegates formed the Partido Socialista (PS) to engage the colonialbourgeois forces at the ballot box. The PS and the FLT remained administratively separate entities but with considerable overlap. For instance, while the PS dealt with electoral issues and the FLT with economic concerns,one had to be a member of the FLT in order to be a member of the PS.However, the reverse was not true,so anarchists could still be union members without having to become party members too. Besides sharing rank-and-file membership, both organizations shared leaders.Santiago Iglesias was president of both.The leadership also emerged from shared experiences in labor struggles and in worker education. For instance, Prudencio Rivera Martínez was a key PS leader, having emerged from the labor struggles in Caguas where he had worked side by side with Juan Vilar and other anarchists at the city’s CES.Rivera Martínez and Iglesias represented the upper echelons of the PS and FLT hierarchies and thus the least radical part of the labor movement. Meanwhile, the party’s lower-level leadership emerged from the artisans,teachers,and tobacco workers.4 These groups had been less willing to accept bread-and-butter trade union negotiations and wanted more radical solutions. While rarely comfortable with PS electoral politics, many anarchists from these ranks continued their earlier roles as agitators and upholders of radical consciousness in the FLT. Throughout the 1910s, Puerto Rico’s anarchists continued to work on their own,within the FLT,and to some extent with the PS.One of their most important areas of activism was in cultural and literary productions.Between 1910 and 1920, anarchists produced more pamphlets, booklets, plays, and newspapers than at any other time.The rise in anarchist cultural productions published in Puerto Rico during the decade not only encouraged anarchists but also continued to influence the more radical elements in the PS. From 1915, anarchist ideas found their way into the PS and party culture when authors who were party members continued to incorporate anarchist themes into their own writings and,despite the party’s official rejection of...

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