A Global Vision: Dr. Ana Livia Cordero and the Puerto Rican Liberation Struggle, 1931-1992

Abstract

“A Global Vision: Dr. Ana Livia Cordero and the Puerto Rican Liberation Struggle, 1931-1992,” is the first, in-depth study of Ana Livia Cordero, a twentieth century Puerto Rican female physician and transnational anti-imperialist activist. Cordero dedicated her life to Puerto Rican liberation, and she forged ties with activists throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United States. Cordero’s activism was guided by a global, but also Puerto Rican, perspective which insisted on the central role of racism and colonialism in the development of capitalism. Cordero expanded the geographic and demographic boundaries of each of the movements she participated in, and her story is a powerful example of the influential role of Puerto Rico, Puerto Ricans, women, and medical professionals in Cold War-era freedom struggles. Cordero worked to include Puerto Rico on the agendas of anticolonial conferences in Egypt, Ghana, and Cuba throughout the 1960s, she exposed Black Power leaders such as Julian Mayfield (her husband), James Foreman, and Stokely Carmichael to the anti-imperial nature of the Black struggle, and in 1967 she began the Proyecto Piloto de Trabajo con el Pueblo (Pilot Project of Work with the People), a political organizing initiative that worked with Puerto Rican communities marginalized by mainstream independence movements. Over a twenty-five-year period, Proyecto members combined Marxist, social science, and popular education methods to understand Puerto Rican reality and liberate themselves at an individual and collective level. Even though Cordero forged ties with prominent contemporaries such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Juan Mari Bras, and Julian Mayfield, she exists on the periphery of historiographies that cover Pan-Africanism, Black Power, Third World liberation and solidarity, and the Puerto Rican, Latin American, and U.S.-based left. This dissertation is a social biography that delves deeply into Cordero’s life, context, and legacy, and is based on archival research with materials that have yet to be analyzed by other historians; interviews, conversations, and collaboration with individuals who knew Cordero in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Ghana; and observation and contemplation as a migrating female researcher with roots in the Hispanophone Caribbean.