“Our Struggle from within”: Theorizing the Diasporic Anticolonialism of the Movimiento De Liberación Nacional, 1977-1992

In recent years, a cadre of historians and sociologists have worked to unearth marginalized histories of U.S.-based radicalism. Here, I focus on a largely forgotten anticolonial project, the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN). Part of what has been called the "hidden 1970s," the MLN was founded as a response to intense repression against alleged militants and supporters of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, an armed clandestine organization formed in the Puerto Rican diaspora that carried out over 100 bombings across the United States and Puerto Rico. In many respects, the MLN shared important features with other radical movements that emerged during this period, particularly those rooted in colonized and minoritized communities. However, unlike most of its contemporaries (e.g., Black Liberation Army, the American Indian Movement, and the Young Lords), the MLN's primary focus was not a single struggle or community. Rather, it brought together, in an unprecedented fashion, Chicano activists seeking the socialist reunification of the U.S. Southwest with Mexico and Puerto Rican activists fighting for Puerto Rican independence and socialism. Drawing on oral history interviews and archival records, I document and analyze the political formation and intellectual foundations of the MLN, paying close attention to the ways its diasporic positionality shaped its particular fusion of insurgent nationalism, internationalism, and Marxist-Leninism. I argue that this political project elaborated a form of “diasporic anticolonialism” that complicates reigning theorizations of the anticolonial.