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Prologue Fordays,tensionshadbeenbuildinginthesmall,east-centralPuerto Rican city of Caguas.Tobacco workers across the island were on strike,and anarchists in Caguas were spearheading the efforts there. Juan Vilar was a teacher and organizer in the Caguas Centro de Estudios Sociales (CES)—a center founded by anarchists and other leftists to raise consciousness among the city’s workers and offer alternative education to their children.CES membership had been growing, causing concern among local authorities. At a rally on Thursday evening, March 9, 1911, one speaker after another urged workers to hold on, condemning the U.S.-based tobacco monopoly for not acquiescing to strikers’ demands. But as the crowd dispersed from the rally,shots rang out.Within minutes, twomembersofthecity’sbourgeoisestablishmentweredead—gunneddown by a member of the CES who authorities claimed was part of an anarchist conspiracy.Over the coming year,anarchists and other leftists were rounded up, interrogated, tortured, and abused. In the end, the man who pulled the trigger was found guilty of first-degree murder.Juan Vilar—perhaps the most prominent and one of the internationally best-known anarchists in Puerto Rico—also faced numerous trials and retrials during this year.Yet,rather than try him for being an anarchist involved in the murders,Puerto Rican and U.S. authorities charged him with violating public morality. If these authorities could not jail him as an anarchist linked to the March violence,they would do so for publishing what they considered pornography—a story about a priest raping a child.Ultimately convicted,Vilar rotted in jail over the course of his one-year sentence,complicating his already-precarious health.On May Day 1915, Vilar died. xvi Prologue Juan Vilar’s individual story in many ways captures the history of anarchism in Puerto Rico. The events of 1911 occurred near the middle of the twenty-four-year span in which anarchism played a role in the development of the island’s political,cultural,and economic life.Vilar was a central figure among anarchists. In 1905 and 1906 he had published the island’s first truly anarchist newspaper, Voz Humana (Human voice), helping to launch an intermittent wave of anarchist newspapers over the next fifteen years.Vilar had been a founding member of the Caguas CES, a teacher, and a link between anarchists and other progressive forces on the island like the freethinkers and the spiritists, all of whom praised alternative rationalist education and free speech while condemning Roman Catholicism.His role as an important political intermediary extended to his relations with other left-wing members of the leading union—the Federación Libre de Trabajadores (FLT,Free Federation of Workers)—and leftists who would become cultural and political leaders of the Partido Socialista (PS). As such, anarchists often worked in alliance with those whom they agreed on certain issues while staying true to their antipolitics, antireligion, anticapitalism, anti-imperialism, and antiauthoritarian calls for freedom and equality. Vilar’s history and the events surrounding the Caguas affair of 1911 also reflect the joint Puerto Rican–U.S. government efforts to control and ultimately silence anarchists,a process that began with the antianarchist campaigns of repression in 1911 and continued relatively unchecked through the Red Scare into the early 1920s. Finally, Juan Vilar reflects the transnational dimensions of Puerto Rican anarchism. From the beginning of U.S. control in 1898, Puerto Ricans began a slow, gradual history of circular migration between the island and the United States. Puerto Rican migrants began to leave the island for the U.S. mainland, often returning to Puerto Rico after a few months or years. Anarchists joined them in these circular routes. Puerto Rican anarchists could be found traveling a network from the island to the cigar factories in Tampa, New York, and Havana. In all three locations, they worked with anarchist groups,gave talks,and helped to publish anarchist newspapers.While Vilar was never one of these migrating anarchists who linked into anarchist groups up and down the Atlantic, he represents some of the earliest dimensions of transnational anarchism on the island.His columns to ¡Tierra! (Land!)—the leading anarchist newspaper in the Caribbean Basin published in Havana from 1902 to 1915—were the first links between Puerto Rican and Cuban anarchists as both suffered under fresh waves of U.S. expansionism. Those columns brought the Puerto Rican context to a global anarchist consciousness . When those columns returned to Puerto Rico, they were distributed far and wide or read in cigar factories, CESs, and union...

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