The violent global expansion of Europe in the sixteenth century entangled the Caribbean and Mediterranean worlds across the Red, Black, and Sephardi-Moorish Atlantic.[1] Today, connections between Northern California-based Latin American and Arab SWANA networks of cultural production can be drawn in their movements for sociopolitical liberation against the global order imposed by that violent expansion. Chicanx graphic artist Juan Fuentes is one example of a 1960s-era revolutionary left’s capacity to bring together Latinx and Arab struggles in solidarity. In other examples, contrary to the case of Fuentes, Islamophobia and a paternalistic white left often obstruct South-South solidarity struggles. All the while, many a Latino-Moorish connection is evident in the relations between the rhythms and instruments utilized by North African and Afro-Caribbean performers under the roof of Latin American rooted cultural centers like the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco and Berkeley’s La Peña Cultural Center.
All the social artivists, movements, centers, and vignettes to be presented here are linked by the desire to empower vulnerable communities, as well as by an intellectual vacuum preventing the development of culturally nuanced thinking that can enhance the efficacy of their solidarity actions. These mutually imbricated problems of thought and practice in community are exacerbated by the financial precarity of those poor and working-class people of color whose centeredness and representation in the struggle remains wholly subject to the whims of sometimes well-meaning middle- and upper-class white allies who take the metaphor of their being “cultural workers” far too literally. Decolonizing notions of solidarity as they are currently promoted in these transcultural settings proves necessary to resolving these problems. A solidarity that does not take seriously contemporary European and North American imperialism is one that leaves the power to center and decenter community representatives squarely in the hands of a well-off white left whose own thinking remains Eurocentric, paternalist, and absent of any view toward transitioning away from white power. A colonized solidarity fails to recognize the difference between cultural production with a truly combative decolonial solidarity aesthetic on the one hand and, on the other, a tokenizing multiculturalism that unthinkingly replicates white settler-colonizer domination, discrimination and dehumanization.
Imperial (de)coloniality and Anti-imperial decolonization
Cases of Latin American/SWANA anti-imperial liberation culture in solidarity in the San Francisco Bay Area include work from the Maghribi, African, and Arab diasporas in Latinx-rooted cultural centers, a Chicanx graphic artist of the Mission District and his poster art in support of Palestine, and the experience of Puerto Rican cultural leaders grappling with their independence movement history. Two broad questions are asked in each case: What does it take for a center of culture to foster sociopolitical solidarity and intersectionality in the visual and performing arts? And what is the decolonial potential of conjunctures between Latin American, Maghribi, and Middle Eastern cultural production, when attuned to other sociocultural movements where indigenous and Afrodiasporic communities are centered?
What does the intriguing prospect of decolonizing decoloniality entail, precisely? I would understand it to mean something more profound than the mere replacing of concepts and frameworks produced in Harvard and Berkeley with those made in Stanford, UCLA, or under Columbia’s crown, still squarely ensconced in the Global North. What does a new solidarity front confront decades apart from the revolutionary sixties and in cultural centers miles away from the world system’s periphery where it is supposed to be rooted? Epistemic freedom and intellectual sovereignty can have meaning only insofar as it is tied to a responsibility: a responsibility on the part of scholars and students either in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America, and the Caribbean, or in their respective Global North diasporas, to think and move with the peoples of the Global South, the Indigenous and the Afrodescendent everywhere, the dispossessed and the refugee, the laborer, and the poor. It also presupposes anti-imperialism.
A survey of the current state of the decolonial turn in Berkeley and the San Francisco Bay Area is needed, with a focus on cultural decolonization between Latin American/Latinx diaspora communities and Arab/Arab American, Asian, and North African groups in the area. Attunement to the Bay Area’s Indigenous communities, whose history of activism and resistance goes back at least as far as the occupation of Alcatraz Island from 1969 to 1971, is also in order. Social movements rooted in gender/sexual identity and class-based movements interact with the race/ethnicity-based movements through intersecting matrices of oppression,[2] as do ever-present issues surrounding antisemitism and Islamophobia. I have come to find that the more a decolonial turn turns away from discussions of imperialism and Zionism, and the more it is divorced from economic, legal, and political decolonization, the more it goes the way of postcolonial studies or liberal multiculturalism, the distinctness of which I hope to make clear.
Maghribi Music – Latinx platforms
Yassir Chadly of Casablanca has lived in the Bay Area for decades. In addition to providing Friday sermons for local mosques, most recently at Oakland’s majority-Black Lighthouse Mosque, he regularly performs traditional Moroccan Gnawa and Sufi music at venues like Berkeley’s Ashkenaz Music and Dance Community Center. In previous decades, Chadly often performed at La Peña Cultural Center, founded in 1975 by U.S. supporters of Chile’s democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende, and in partnership with its post-coup political refugees and exiled activists.[3] As early as 1992, and as late as 2013, Chadly performed there. His last shows were with a band that included American musicologist and convert to Islam, Tim Abdellah Fuson. But the most coordinated effort at cultural exchange between this Latin American—rooted nonprofit organization and Arab SWANA arts occurred in 2007. Called the Arab Cultural Initiative, it was headed by Nadine Ghammache in partnership with the Arab Cultural and Community Center in San Francisco,[4] and organized with the express intent of repudiating post-9/11 and Iraq War anti-Arab discrimination.[5]
With funding support from the National Endowment for the Arts and UC Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Beirut-born La Peña staff member Ghammache’s Beyond Walls, Beyond Wars: Arab Cultural Initiative showcased spoken word poetry, classical and popular music from Lebanon and Iraq, the Arab American socio-politically conscious hip-hop of The Rogue State (with support from Michigan’s Arab National Museum), and Caribbean-North African fusion music by Abdellah Fuson’s band, The Dunes.[6] Fuson recalls[7] the event as a positive experience, a receptive crowd, an enjoyable gig overall, but no deeper awareness of the history or mission of the center he was playing in and no longer-lasting connections made for future collaborations and cultural exchanges with La Peña regulars.
Sheikh Chadly has, alongside fellow Moroccan Bouchaib Abdelhadi, collaborated musically with Afro-Cuban pianist Omar Sosa, the results of which included a San Francisco concert in summer of 2001, and Chadly’s participation in two of Sosa’s albums, 2000’s “Prietos” (Blacks) and 2002’s “Sentir” (Feeling). But since then, such forms of cultural solidarity have been few and far between. La Peña was a center that from its very beginning hosted events for the American Indian Movement (AIM), whose financial contributions ensured the center’s opening in the first place,[8] founding members of the Black Panther Party, leaders in the Black Arts Movement, Chicano Arts movement, Boricua independence activists, veterans of the Spanish Civil War, feminist, and gay rights movements, and much more. Yet any further development as an outgrowth of 2007’s Arab Cultural Initiative, with that same level of intentionality and organization, is not readily apparent.
Also in 2007, at the same time as the Arab Cultural Initiative, La Peña hosted the Cepeda Family, the most important preserver-practitioners of the two main Afro-Caribbean music genres of Puerto Rico, bomba and plena. Later that year was the Grito de Lares celebration, titled “We Will Not Forget!” with guest poet Aya de Leon and others described as “the Bay’s most talented Boricuas.”[9] Organizing credit went to the Bay Area Boricuas collective, of which there will be more to say later. For now there is another, far more recent, cultural confluence between the Maghrib and Latin America to discuss. This took place not in Berkeley or San Francisco, but further north in the city of Ukiah. Part of the wider “Wine Country” region that was inhabited by Native people for at least 20,000 years and whose descendants still struggle for sovereignty,[10] the area was colonized first by Spain, then Mexico, then the U.S. in the 1850s. All three engaged in a white supremacist settler colonial project that enslaved and massacred the Indigenous Pomo.
Palestine, Political Poster Art and Pan-Indigenous Solidarity
The opening reception of the exhibition, “Mission Gráfica: Reflecting a Community in Print,” took place on Friday, November 7 (2025) from 5:00 to 8:00 pm. Featuring live music from Jazz/Flamenco/North African guitarist Yoba Bouabid, a Ukiah resident, the exhibition was shown at the Grace Hudson Museum until February 2026. The Grace Hudson preserves a great deal of material history from the native Pomo community, including evidence of their enslavement under Spanish, Mexican government, and Anglo-American colonization. The art being showcased comes from San Francisco’s Mission Gráfica, the premier art studio for the production of political posters rooted in the radical Chicano Arts Movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Mission Gráfica centered the Indigenous roots of Mexican Americans and decolonizing their cultural production away from Hispano-Eurocentrism. At the opening was Juan Fuentes, the graphic artist who was Mission Gráfica’s director from 1997 to 2007 during a period of significant decline in the popularity of political posters.[11] Direct linkages between the music of Bouabid and the art of Mission Gráfica might not have been obvious, but there was much to connect Fuentes to Western and Northern Africa, as well as to the wider SWANA region.
Juan Fuentes was one of the very first to benefit from the Third World Liberation Front strikes of 1968 led by African American, Latine (primarily Chicano and Puerto Rican), Asian American, and Native American student groups, first in San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, before spreading across the nation. Avoiding the tracking system that pushed Mexican American/Chicanx high school students away from higher education and towards vocational training, Fuentes entered the fine arts program at SFSU. The 1968 strikes birthed the many colleges and departments of ethnic studies, linking anti-imperial and decolonizing movements from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to their respective diasporas as well as to North American Indigenous movements. A combative, radical, revolutionary decoloniality was developing. It would take, among other things, the illegal counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO, Reaganomic neoliberalism, neoconservative attacks on affirmative action in the 1990s, the legalization of COINTELPRO’s tactics under the Patriot Act, and all the anti-Black, anti-Latinx, Islamophobic, and anti-Palestinian legislation in California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, and elsewhere, to ensure the near death of combative decoloniality.
But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Fuentes had the opportunity to witness cultural decolonization in tri-continental solidarity at its most kinetic. He was convinced by Michelle Mouton, now his wife and then a member of the Alliance Against Women’s Oppression, originally known as the Third World Women’s Alliance, to participate in the Venceremos Brigade.[12] An annual project to do volunteer work in struggling communist Cuba, its formidable years ran from late 1969 to the summer of 1972. Mouton participated in the first trip, and through that and subsequent visits, Fuentes was introduced to causes ranging from Chile’s Popular Unity alliance of socialists, communists, and Christian leftists that would lead to Salvador Allende’s election as president in 1970, to the fight against apartheid in South Africa, on down to that of the Palestinian Liberation Organization under its then recently elected chairman, Yassir Arafat.
A few months before the first brigade, an arson attack on Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque had already led to the Rabat Conference of Islamic Nations, precursor to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation which assisted in strengthening mass support for Palestinians. The first iteration of Souffles had just organized a speaking tour for Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier in February 1969, and three years prior had launched their publication as part of a movement rooted in Havana’s Tri-Continental Solidarity Conference of 1966. The Palestinian struggle and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement had come together via transatlantic conjunctures linking the Maghrib to the Caribbean and Latin America.
Fuentes produced posters in support of Indigenous rights, women’s rights, the anti-war movement, La Raza/Chicano movement, and much more. It was in 1977 that his first two pieces of poster art on Palestine were commissioned, commemorating the second anniversary of the U.N. Resolution declaring Zionism to be a form of racism.[13] One was done at the behest of the Organization of Arab Students in the U.S. and Canada while the other was for the General Union of Palestinian Students, two of the many Arab and Palestinian student groups active in Berkeley and San Francisco at the time. They are perhaps the two works that garnered for Fuentes the most controversy. He continued producing posters for Palestine: 1980s Forward to Palestine Not Backward to Settlement, another in 1982 for a San Francisco march in protest of Israeli and U.S. troops in Lebanon, in 1987 calling for an end to the twenty-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza right at the start of the First Intifada, and 2001’s Stop U.S. Financed Genocide in the Middle East during the Second Intifada. In return, over the years Fuentes was gifted a treasure trove of Palestinian poster art produced by artists connected to the PLO. With family roots close to the U.S.-Mexico border, and the anti-Chicano violence and abuse that took place there, Fuentes recounts,[14] he had no problem feeling a connection to what was happening in Palestine.
This connection is also felt by many Chicanx youth, like “Jackie,” a high school student member of the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán (M.E.Ch.A.). Jackie bravely stood up at UC Berkeley’s Latinx Research Center (LRC) and spoke out against the abject silence with respect to the genocide taking place in Gaza at an event in late October, 2023. The event, proving little more than a fundraising benefit for the Democratic Party, hosted famed labor leader Dolores Huerta as its keynote speaker. Huerta, to her credit, did criticize the U.S. threat to Venezuela and the communal projects emerging there. But Gaza was ignored by the event’s organizer-handlers, of the same sort who promoted wars on Afghanistan and Iran “justified” on feminist grounds. After Jackie’s intervention, some LRC fellows present, including former M.E.Ch.A. members, and even some of those who may have initially egged her on, ignored her as if their lives, or their jobs, dependent on it. I, in an act of combative decolonial solidarity, immediately and publicly expressed my gratitude to her for standing with Gaza.
Juan R. Fuentes, Chicano, Artist, Activist (b. 1950)
We Stand With Gaza, 2023
Screenprint on paper
Photo courtesy of Lincoln Cushing (Docs Populi)
Taken from the exhibit, (re-)Unión de los Pueblos (des)Colonizados" –
Toward a (re-)Union of (de-)Colonized Peoples (curator: Biel Delgado Trabal)Juan R. Fuentes
Chicano, Artist,Activist (b. 1950)
Exist! – Resist! –Return!, 2021
Screenprint on paper
Courtesy of the artistFuentes’s work is part of a larger history of international solidarity with Palestine through the arts, and North Africa is an important center for that story. Starting around 1972, PLO representatives, some with “organic and rich connections” to “the radical cultural journal Souffles, as well as the anti-establishment art scene that coalesced around the Casablanca group” organized exhibitions that would include “a poster design competition for graphic artists around solidarity with the Palestinian struggle”[15] in Damascus (1972), Baghdad (1974), Rabat (1976), Beirut (1978), and Europe. Most Moroccan participants belonged to the Moroccan Association of Plastic Arts (AMAP), headed by Farid Belkahia.[16] Many “collaborated with poets and writers…in the birth of the literary review Souffles which at the time had a great impact on cultural life.”[17] Since the mid-to-late 1960s, the Moroccan artists who formed AMAP in 1972 “had already banded together…in the cause of decolonizing the modern arts of their country while also looking outward to…the transcolonial arena.”[18] Chile was prominent in that arena, and its post-coup traveling museum-in-exile, named after Salvador Allende, influenced PLO representatives’ approach to showcasing Palestinian art, and art in solidarity with Palestine. Chilean painter Roberto Matta donated his works, and the Iraqi artist Jawdat Haseeb produced his 1974 piece, Portrait of Chile, a “painting of a martyr of the Chilean coup d’état reduced to tense muscle on bone.”[19]
AMAP showcased the works of Palestinians Tamam Alakhal and Ismail Shammout in a 1974 exhibition in Rabat, sought “to address in full the Palestinian thematic” in the 1976 biennial, and “eventually forwarded their Palestinian-themed works to Beirut” for the biennial to be held there in 1978. When PLO leadership relocated to Tunisia, an international poster competition was held there in 1985. Fuentes had no recollection of such a competition, though apparently notices in the form of poster copies were “sent to embassies and institutions in… Australia, Canada, Sweden, and the United States.”[20] It was a lost opportunity for widening and strengthening networks of decolonial solidarity, though his 2010 trip to a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut to workshop with young artists-in-training more than made up for it. Transnational solidarity[21] went beyond networks of graphic artists, poets, and writers. It included the decolonization of popular music, through the promotion and rejuvenation of folkloric forms like the U.S. folk revival, South American nueva canción,[22] Latin Caribbean nueva trova, Catalan nova cançó,[23] and the bomba revival. In the 60s and 70s, it involved the decolonizing of film through Third Cinema.[24] It even hoped to decolonize religion through liberation theology.[25]
We have presented here the history of a decolonial network connecting cultural movements in the Maghrib, Europe, Southwest Asia, and Chile, the latter from which La Peña Cultural Center was born. I had this history in mind when curating an exhibition at La Peña in March of 2024 that utilized OSPAAAL (Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America) posters preserved by La Peña’s archives of transnational solidarity, and art by Chican@s Juana Alicia and Fuentes, Ecuadorian Sandra Fernandez, Dominican Pepe Coronado, and Jewish American Lisa Kokin, one-time head of La Peña’s radical arts series. Fuentes and wife Mouton, one of the most fruitful collaborations between the Chicano, Black, and Feminist movements, also have family, through marriage, that includes Muslims of the Sahel region, the purported birthplace of Gnawa music connecting North, West, and Central Africa. I’m sure it is at least one of the reasons I never noticed even the slightest hint of Islamophobia coming from their down-to-earth corner of the Bay Area Activist Left. The same cannot be said with respect to my experiences elsewhere in post-October 7th pro-Palestinian protest movements. It can sometimes seem as if Islamophobia—alongside pernicious forms of Eurocentrism and race/class privileging—permeates the activist left almost as much as it does the right. The connection between the postcolonial Maghrib, Palestine, and U.S. Blacks and Latinos isn’t always as readily recognizable for some as it is for Juan Fuentes.
Palestine and “Los Moros”
In the Gnawa musical tradition, Tim Abdellah Fuson tells me,[26] the dancer is led by the three-stringed bass rhythm of the sinter, in the hopes of entering a state of trance. The metallic, castanet-like qraqeb act almost as sonic obstacles, ensuring only the most dedicated of dancers attain that deeply spiritual state, while the tbel drum provides a percussive accompaniment. Afro-Boricua bomba music and dance from Puerto Rico works differently, though some similarities bear out. Puerto Rican bomba music has been a mainstay at Berkeley’s La Peña Cultural Center, and in it, unlike the Cuban rumba, it is the dancer who leads the drummer and not vice versa. It begins, however, with the lone maraca which, along with the voice of the singer, sets the tone, keeps the pace and time and introduces which of the many rhythms in bomba is to be danced. The provenance of this seed-filled calabash gourd-on-a-stick is Taíno/Arawak, of the original inhabitants of the Caribbean. The cuá, comprised of two wooden sticks played on a small barrel or bamboo and believed to trace its ancestry to the sacred Taíno Mayohuacán drum, helps to keep the basic rhythm while the barril, the African-derived barrel drum leads, improvises, and attempts to anticipate the dancer’s moves, derived from Iberian, African, and Caribbean forms.
Bomba performances are known as areítos, taking place in spaces known as bateys, both terms originating with the Caribbean’s Indigenous peoples. Words traced back to Hausa, the Arabic-influenced lingua franca of Niger, southern Chad, northern Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Benin, Togo, and other parts of Western-to-Central Africa, abound in the journals documenting the history of Puerto Rican bomba throughout the archipelago as preserved by the late patriarch of this and its related musical genre of plena, don Rafael Cepeda Atiles (1910-1996). Rhythms from bomba have been, through the work of master musicians like Dimas Sánchez De León alongside the sons and daughters of don Rafael, linked to rhythms from all over Central and Western Africa.[27] Bomba’s origins are rooted in African and Afro-Indigenous peoples that populated Puerto Rico, as enslaved labor in plantations and haciendas, as well as in maroon settlements founded by those escaping bondage. Black history does not begin with the kidnapping and trafficking of Africans across the Atlantic via the genocidal Middle Passage, just as Indigenous history does not begin with the enslavement and genocide of Caribbean natives. But bomba is indeed born from that point in history, a music rooted in survival and resistance, kin not only to other Afro-Caribbean forms, but also to similar music and dance forms born in U.S. plantations of the antebellum South. Bomba’s sister genre, the plena, originates later, around the turn of the twentieth century, its primary instruments being the indigenous Taíno güícharo, a dried and ridged gourd scraped with tines, and the panderos/panderetas, wooden-framed hand drums that bear a striking resemblance to the North African bendir, the Arabic term from which the words pandero and pandereta are derived.
La Familia Cepeda.Stills taken from Bomba: Dancing the Drum (2001). SearchlightFilms. Directed & Photographed by Ashley James.Bomba has been performed and taught at La Peña Cultural Center for well over two decades, often as part of the Puerto Rican community’s annual Grito de Lares commemorations. These were being held at La Peña even before the Bay Area’s bomba resurgence brought on by the Cepeda Family’s visits in the late 1990s. Taking place around September 23rd every year, the commemorations were organized by the Puerto Rican independence movement’s many factions to remember the 1868 abolitionist revolt that, while failing to free Puerto Rico from Spain, did usher in rebellions in both Cuba and Spain proper that would lead to the abolition of slavery in 1873. A continued war in Cuba followed, ending with the fall of the Spanish empire and the U.S. annexation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898.[28] While Cuba and the Philippines were later made neocolonial states under U.S. hegemony, Puerto Rico remains a direct U.S. colonial possession—or unincorporated territory—to this day, with similar colonial relations existing between the U.S. and the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, and with Guam, the Mariana Islands, and Samoa in the Pacific.
This history also links back across the Atlantic to the Maghrib where, after its 1898 defeat, Spain sought to save face by doubling-down on a military presence in its African colonial possessions. Out of that engagement came another rounding defeat for the Spanish empire and the emergence of a short-lived Arab-Amazigh Republic of the Rif Mountains, established some months after Spain’s most catastrophic military loss in modern history, 1921’s Battle of Anwal. Led by ʿAbdelkrim al-Khattabi (1882-1963), his military victories influenced revolutionaries from Vietnam to Cuba. It is in the Moroccan Rif that the conditions were created for both the emergence of Franco and Phalangist fascism as well as for the emergence of revolutionary republican and radical left movements of the sort that informed the most revolutionary aspects of Spain’s Second Republic (1931-1939). Spearheaded by Catalan and other working-class veterans of the Rif conflict returning home, their will to freedom was inspired by what they witnessed from the freedom fighters of ʿAbdelkrim, who would soon find himself exiled to Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, the epicenter of Arab nationalism at its height. American veterans of the famed Abraham Lincoln Brigade of antifascist volunteer fighters for republican Spain held regular meetings at La Peña during the center’s early years of the mid-to-late 1970s.[29]
Puerto Rican practitioners of bomba face challenges similar to those described by Hisham Aïdi in his article on Gnawa music.[30] Anyone who invests their money, time and energy to learning bomba will find resonances with Aïdi’s criticisms of Chouki El Hamel’s 2013 Black Morocco (2013), for its “claim that racism arrived in North Africa with the advent of Islam, and his division of the Moroccan population into three bounded groups, Arab, Berber, and Black, as if one cannot be black and Berber, or black and Arab, or all three identities” as well as for El Hamel’s superimposing U.S. “American racial categories into Moroccan history.” All these claims and superimpositions regarding categories of racialization (keeping Black and replacing Arab and Berber with Spaniard and Taíno) run rampant in the bomba and wider community, up to and including Islamophobic and Anti-Arab prejudices, resulting most recently in the lukewarm at best, nonexistent at worst, show of solidarity with Palestinians in the wake of Israel’s committing a genocide of Gaza’s population since late 2023.
Grito de Lares (The Battle Cry of Lares) commemorations have been held in the U.S. since at least the 1930s. The independence movements organizing such events included the Nationalist Party of Pedro Albizu Campos (1893-1965) whom Salvador Allende eulogized in the Chilean Senate[31] and whom Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, “the greatest poetess of America, has called the first Hispanic American.”[32] Other groups included the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP), and the Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional (MLN), the latter born in Chicago and formed in 1977 by anti-imperial Puerto Ricans and Chicanos. The MLN was all but disintegrated by 1983, not long after a federal crackdown on the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) put an end to the clandestine organization with the arrest and conviction of its leaders. These included Oscar López Rivera, who rejected President Clinton’s 1999 pardon of FALN prisoners and would remain imprisoned until President Obama’s 2017 commutation, and Dylcia Pagan (1946-2024) who accepted the pardon.[33]
Both of these figures have ties to the Puerto Rican community of the Bay Area. An organization of Puerto Rican students in Berkeley in the nineties rallied around a confluence of matters. Culturally there was the bomba resurgence, ushered in by the Cepeda family’s visit to the area and performance in places like La Peña at the end of the 90s. Politically, there was the 100-year anniversary of U.S. colonization in Puerto Rico and the plight of Puerto Rican political prisoners. When López Rivera was freed in 2017, one of the first places he visited was Berkeley and San Francisco, partly sponsored by La Peña, later providing interviews with the previously mentioned LRC. When Dylcia Pagán passed away in 2024, the Grito de Lares commemoration that September was dedicated to memorializing her life. The center was filled to the brim with many an old white lefty radical who had been supporters of Puerto Rican armed clandestine activity, and many who had known Dylcia Pagan personally and had been active in the push for a presidential pardon. But over the course of the event, one thing became abundantly clear to me: outside of the brief talk on the relationship between the 1868 Lares Revolt’s leader, Ramón Emeterio Betances (1827-1898), and Haiti—a pan-Antillean “Revolution of Love”[34]—by Pierre Labossiere, there was not a single clear and coherent connection made between the events of 1868, the life of Dylcia Pagan, and Israel’s settler-colonial genocide in Gaza.
Between 1979 and 1981, leadership in the Puerto Rican Socialist Party proposed a plan to “redefine itself in less ideological (i.e., non-Marxist-Leninist) terms and…to loosen the party’s ideological frame and invite a broader membership (for example, being open to adherents of liberation theology and to activists in various new social movements).”[35] The plan was rejected by a significant number of old school Marxist class-war activists suspicious of all the talk of identity politics including race, sexuality and gender, leading to the 1982 formation of the Worker’s Socialist Movement which would in 1990 found the Socialist Front. In 1993, the PSP was dissolved, and its absence in the diaspora meant that events like the annual Grito de Lares commemorations, held in cultural centers like that of La Peña in Berkeley, no longer had any nationwide organizational backing or any cogent intellectual and political commitments. Chicago’s MLN had dissolved ten years before that, the Young Lords a decade before the MLN, and Albizu Campos’s Nationalist Party had not had an active presence in most Puerto Rican communities, outside of New York City, since his death in 1965.
Promotional poster forthe “Arab Cultural Initiative: Beyond Walls & Wars.” Circa 2007. Courtesy of Nadine GhammacheWhile La Peña Cultural Center is the main Bay Area venue holding commemorations of the 1868 rebellion against Spain considered a historical benchmark in the formation of a Puerto Rican national identity, the venue has its own history. It is rooted not in the Puerto Rican or Chicano movements, but in the September 11, 1973 Chilean coup d’etat that caused many a supporter of the world’s first democratically-elected socialist government to flee the country’s fascist military takeover and anti-leftist crackdown led by dictator General Augusto Pinochet. Every September, La Peña organizes an event to remember what happened in 1973 and, ostensibly, to renew their commitment to the socialist ideals of Salvador Allende, martyred folk musician Victor Jara, and Chile’s Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). One could have walked out of that event in September 2024 having some idea of the historical moment it memorializes. This was not the case when it came to the Lares commemoration a few weeks later.
It was apparent that there were people who were there for celebrating Dylcia Pagan’s life and not for the Grito de Lares. I even encountered people in the bomba community who expressed utter indifference bordering on contempt for Betances and his 1868 abolitionist revolt. “Puerto Rico didn’t really have slavery,” one overconfident community organizer told me. It’s hard to imagine the late FALN militant Dylcia Pagan would have felt honored by such a sentiment. The FALN was founded in 1974 seeking the release of the Puerto Rican Nationalist prisoners of the 1950s—including Lolita Lebron (1919-2010) and Rafael Cancel Miranda (1930-2020)—each of whom understood their 1950s actions to be in direct continuity with the 1868 revolt.[36] Had any of them been alive and present for this event, they would have serious issue with pitting the 1868 abolitionist revolution against Spain, the slave revolts that preceded it, and the 1950s Nationalist revolt and FALN actions that proceeded from it, each one against the other. A bomba collective would have failed at its purported goal of teaching both insiders and outsiders what it means to be Puerto Rican when it promotes practitioners who are indifferent to Betances and who look askance at Lolita.
Pedro Albizu Campos was arguably the main force behind the spread of 1868 Lares commemorations in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Decades before Oscar López Rivera and Dylcia Pagan, it was Rafael Cancel Miranda who made his earliest post-prison appearance in the Bay Area, after President Carter’s 1979 commutation. In 1981, Berkeley’s democratic socialist mayor, Gus Newport (1935-2023), a man whose legacy the newly elected New York mayor Mamdani might wish to take as an example,[37] declared it “Rafael Cancel Miranda Day” in Berkeley, to which Cancel Miranda remarked how he never imagined such an honor would be granted him within view of Alcatraz, where he spent the first six years of his 25 years in prison, getting to know Black Liberation Movement leaders as well as the recently released American Indian Movement leader, Leonard Peltier. Both Gus Newport and Cancel Miranda expressed decolonial solidarity throughout their lives, including with Palestinians.[38]
Pedro Albizu Campos, seated at his desk with photo of Ramón E. Betances. Circa 1930s.The Hispanismo Challenge, its Traces in Latinidad, and the Decolonizing Response
And so it was to my great dismay to see the invited guest from the Palestinian Youth Movement treated so poorly by a swath of attendees at the 2024 Lares event. She expressed a desire to learn more about Puerto Rico—something the many white lefty, lead-from-behind, éminence grise-style ally-elders, gate-keeping between their favorite pet “ethnics,” hadn’t helped her with at that point. Instead she was coldly received and heckled off the stage before finishing her solidarity statement. The culprits were some suburban celebrity socialists and upper middle-class “Lake Merritt” or “Marin County” militants. Already having “overcome,” some moved straight from the island to the ivy leagues, from the Caribbean to the college towns, skipping the ghetto/barrio entirely. I was already familiar with several of these who in the past, and alongside higher tax-bracketed non-Boricua cultural appropriators, I had witnessed mocking poorer, U.S.-born Puerto Ricans who couldn’t afford bomba instruments to practice on outside of class time.
Among some of them are Zionists, “Friends of Israel” who you might say prefer Krav Maga to Kokobalé, and among some of them are those who repeat myths about “los moros” in Spain and the Christian “reconquest,” attempting to reconcile the ethnic cleansing of Muslims with the struggle of Taínos and enslaved Africans against those very same Spanish conquistadors in the Caribbean. Repeating a racist history, it is more akin to what present-day Spain’s fascist Vox Party spews out rather than that of current historians. Some of this is a holdover of the Hispanism to be found in some early post-1898 nationalist thought, inseparable from the very same racism elite Eurodescendant Puerto Rican nationalists directed against Albizu Campos for being “a Negro plus Indian.”[39] This Hispanism had already been attacked by Betances back in the nineteenth century,[40] and if the intellectual vacuum had ever been filled after the dissolution of the MLN in the 80s and the PSP in the 90s, this would be known by said leadership and widely deployed to decolonize discourses infected with anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.[41]
As far back as 1937, Pedro Albizu Campos tied that year’s Ponce massacre of Puerto Rican nationalists at the hands of U.S.-backed colonial police to the “Lyatly port massacre in Morocco, carried out by the French to the tune of the Marsaillaise” and “the massacre of Arab nationalists in Palestine the Holy Land, with the British army invoking ‘God Save the King.’”[42] The official stated position of the Young Lords, the PSP, the MLN, the FALN, and the Macheteros (a clandestine armed group who took their name, the machete-wielders, from the contingent of enslaved rebels meant to initiate the 1868 Lares revolution via plantation revolts), was pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist. The most recent (2025) Lares commemoration at La Peña received the lowest attendance in its history, and the blame for that lies squarely on the shoulders of the event and venue organizers.
I was heartened to see that, upon completion of the Puerto Rican independence anthem La Borinqueña marking the end of the 2025 commemoration, the lead singer let out a cry of “viva Palestina.” Dismissed by some as the impetuousness of the youth, she was in fact echoing the position propounded by all of her Puerto Rican independentista predecessors. La Peña Cultural Center, as a nonprofit unable to get by without government funding, in October of 2024 appealed to then Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin for a grant. At the city council meeting were representatives of the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), thanking the mayor for blocking a vote in favor of a Gaza ceasefire. It is the same JCRC that has called for the abolition of ethnic studies, and that referred to Bay Area high school student protests for Gaza in October of 2023 and March of 2024—led by Arab, Latinx, Black, Jewish, and LGBTQ+ youth activists, representing the very communities La Peña caters to—as “pro-Hamas protests.” The bad optics were made even worse that evening when some La Peña supporters in attendance looked to be chumming it up with JCRC Zionists.
There had already been a watering down, a colonization of the high school student protests between 2023 and 2024, when Arab youth voices that fearlessly condemned “Genocide” Joe Biden and the Democratic Party for its Zionist complicity were overshadowed—disappointingly enough via the machinations even of people affiliated with Berkeley’s Middle East Children’s Alliance and, less surprisingly, the DSA—by talking points that obscured the culpability of Biden, Harris and the rest of the Democratic party leadership. A project proposed by university students to translate solidarity statements made by Latinx organizations into Arabic pamphlets for distribution in Gaza was smugly shot down by one ecumenically inclined white savior ally whose own role as leading expert on Latin America would never be de-centered. There is no serious attempt at transitioning power to a nonwhite leadership that better represents the majority of the human race, but instead a resignation to a feeling that there is no fleeing from the white God’s right hand of wrath save in the paternalistic embrace of white power’s left wing.
Mayor Arreguín turned out not to be half the mayor Gus Newport was—no Bay Area mayor or mayoral candidate since Newport has come close—and neither is the La Peña of today quite what it used to be. The same goes for the Bay Area Boricuas. Keeping the brand name alone does not ensure the original quality will be maintained. But things do not have to remain as they currently are. The distinction between decoloniality, on the one hand, and the performativity of liberal multiculturalism, on the other, can be expressed as follows: the multicultural progressive contends that joy is resistance, which it can be, and that just being together in community is enough, which it is not. A combative decoloniality responds with a reminder that resistance is also resistance, and that resistance can be quite joyful. Solidarity, wrote Enrique Dussel, is love, “love for the oppressed and the marginalized…for the destitute, the suffering,”[43] the instrumentalized and dehumanized. Real “celebration is possible,” with “joy, satisfaction, song” only in communities that develop a liberationist character, and that requires solidarity.[44]
Album cover art for the Dimas Sánchez Afro Latin Jazz Project’s 2025 album Afro Antillano, depicting Ramón Emeterio Betances, as “a musical tribute to the vision of a United Antilles” [Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean]. Artwork by Alberto Cardona.At the 2025 annual Alcatraz Sunrise Ceremony celebrating, in lieu of Thanksgiving, the American Indian Movement’s occupation of the island from 1969 to 1971, one speaker remembered fondly the 70s and early 80s when AIM veterans would continue their evening commemorations at Berkeley’s La Peña,[45] before the challenges of nonprofit progressivism weakened decolonizing anti-imperialism in favor of multicultural liberalism. La Peña has still fared better than similar institutions like San Francisco’s Mission Cultural Center that recently announced its closing. The difference has everything to do with some uncomfortable racial realities that community members have yet to fully confront: the MCC relied on Mexican-American and Central American money—brown people money—which cannot compete with the “white” money that keeps white institutions afloat. La Peña, meanwhile, remains as a site founded by U.S. upper-middle class white leftists in league with Euro-stock South American dissidents of the wealthy professional and racially hyper-humanized “blanco” upper classes.
But also making its presence felt at Alcatraz that early morning was the Palestinian flag and the New Era Young Lords’ newly formed San Francisco Bay Area chapter, a gesture of solidarity highlighting both their centering of Puerto Rico’s African and Indigenous roots and rejection of the “moor”-hating Hispanism of Spanish colonialism and all its inherent Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism. Such intercommunal work at the local, national and transnational level is essential to the task of deepening people’s understanding of what Puerto Rico’s 1868 abolitionist revolt meant and how it connects both to Havana’s Tricontinental Conference a century later as well as to cultural resistance against colonialism in present-day Puerto Rico and Palestine, from the Bay Area to North Africa.
From left to right: Herman Bell (Black Panthers), Leonard Pelletier (American Indian Movement), and Rafael Cancel Miranda (Puerto Rican Nationalist Party). Circa 1970s.