Limited by a scarcity logic in which migrant flourishing means citizen hardship, nativists in the thrall of whiteness presume that migrant movement w… - Cristina Beltrán

As someone who studies race and the right, I have found that Democrats and progressives, expecting demographic change and rising diversity to tilt the country leftward, have failed to take seriously how that change is not at all a given...Communities of color are simultaneously victims of, participants in and practitioners of the violence practiced within and beyond our nation’s borders...Communities of color have an intimate history with violence, from massacres of Native Americans and chattel slavery to anti-Asian violence, police killings and the deaths of migrants on the border. But communities of color are not monolithic, and their responses and relationships to that violence mirror that very diversity.

Unlike the civil rights struggles of African Americans or the protest politics surrounding the Vietnam War, the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements represent a decidedly underexplored aspect of 1960s New Left radicalism. Outside of the communities themselves, the names, places, and events of these two movements are virtually unknown.

The Puerto Rican movement of the 1960s and 1970s can be defined by its consistent calls for a radical transformation of U.S. society while simultaneously promoting the independence of Puerto Rico. Known as El Nuevo Despertar, this "New Awakening" of Puerto Rican radicalism was inspired and shaped by the growing militancy abroad and at home. Black Power, youth unrest (particularly against the Vietnam War), the War on Poverty, national liberation struggles in the Third World, Chicano and Native American militancy, gay and lesbian rights, and second-wave feminism are all part of the context that shaped the movement.