(Image source: Axios)

“We’ve been here before,” Margarita says as she holds a sign with bold, red and green letters exclaiming, Basta ya genocido! Variously translated as “enough is enough” or “stop already,” basta ya is a Spanish exclamation of exasperation. And Margarita is exasperated. “What I mean is [that] we’ve done this before,” she explains, “when they [the Israeli military] evicted families in Sheikh Jarrah in 2021, when Israel invaded Gaza in 2014, after Hurricane María, when they [the U.S. Navy] bombed Vieques, during the Second Intifada, I was out here, protesting. Enough is enough!”

Wearing a loose, floral, floor-length dress, brown jacket, and burgundy head covering, Margarita joined thousands of other Puerto Ricans in November 2023 demonstrating in Brooklyn and Manhattan on behalf of Palestinians, demanding a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war. At the march, Puerto Rican flags flew next to Palestinian ones alongside signs reading Puerto Rico con Palestina or “Puerto Ricans for Palestine.” Other protestors paired keffiyehs, headdresses that have become associated with Palestinians, with black-and-white banners representing Puerto Rican resistance to U.S. colonialism.

As a Puerto Rican convert to Islam, Margarita feels compelled to take to the streets. But even before she became Muslim, Margarita possessed a sense of solidarity with people in Gaza and the West Bank. “We share a history of oppression, of being under empire’s foot, of being a people without a nation,” she says, “so I’ll continue to show up until Palestine and Puerto Rico are free.”

Puerto Rican demonstrations for justice in Palestine, and Palestinian solidarity with Puerto Ricans, is nothing new. Forged in their common colonial condition, Puerto Ricans and Palestinians have long spoken up — and out — for each other’s fight against imperialism and for independence.

But for Puerto Rican Muslims in the archipelago and diaspora, that solidarity takes on additional, resonant meaning. For some, their faith imbues their solidarity with divine purpose. For others, it is solidarity that leads them to faith in the first place.

La brega  

Talking during a work-break at a posh Italian restaurant in Santurce — a colorful, artistic neighborhood in San Juan, Puerto Rico — Ibrahim says he grew up influenced by global anti-colonial literature. His parents, both academics, provided him with a wide array of books through which he perceived himself, and the world around him.

The former ballet dancer, BMX biker, skateboarder, and punk rocker, says the first influential book he remembers reading was Manifiesto comunista by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Developing a sense of solidarity with various resistance and leftist movements – from the Zapatistas to Hugo Chavez and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) – Ibrahim wanted to understand the motivations of “freedom fighters.” And so, his parents gave him a Qur’an as a gift in 2011, telling him it was “beautiful literature” he should get to know.

Inside, he found much more. “As soon as I began reading it, it changed my life,” he says. “I stopped drinking, stopped smoking, stopped eating pork. Then, I decided I better find a mosque. What started as a sentiment, or a sense of solidarity, led to the shahadah [recitation of faith].”

Ibrahim is one of thousands of Puerto Rican converts to Islam. Though official numbers do not exist, there were an estimated 3,500-5,000 Muslims in Puerto Rico before outmigration lowered numbers in the wake of Hurricane María in 2017. There are an estimated 11,000-15,400 Muslims who identify as Puerto Rican across the U.S.

With a conspicuous tattoo of Leila Khaled, a prominent member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and icon of the Palestinian liberation movement on the inside of his forearm, Ibrahim says he draws on global solidarities to inspire resilience in the midst of his everyday grind.

For Ibrahim, these struggles, or what Puerto Ricans call la brega, include the daily hustle to provide for his family amidst an ongoing economic crisis, exacerbated by natural disasters and the continual failures and broken promises of the local and federal government. He would love to study and become “a proper Puerto Rican sheikh [religious leader],” he says. But he knows he needs to work instead. “In this economy, I can’t just study,” he says.

Both to get by and push back against what he sees as injustices leveled at Puerto Rican people, he often draws on examples from fellow Muslims in other parts of the world. Looking to Palestinian resistance in particular, Ibrahim says it provides inspiration for popular political movements in Puerto Rico.

That’s because converts like Ibrahim feel Palestine and Puerto Rico are both subjected to foreign domination and experience analogous forms of oppression and exploitation.

(March in solidarity with Palestinians in Philadelphia. Image source: Worker’s World)

Palestine has been under Israeli occupation since 1967, with the Israeli government implementing policies resulting in the displacement of Palestinians, the confiscation of their land, and the suppression of their basic human rights — like unlawful search and seizure, and now, as South Africa argued before the United Nations’ top court in January 2024, open acts of genocide.

While respecting the distinct differences between their situation and Palestine’s, many Puerto Ricans see parallels to their lives in what some call, “the oldest colony in the world.”

After 405 years of Spanish colonial control, Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States in 1898, following the Spanish-American War. Since then, the U.S. government has imposed its power over the island through various means, including military intervention and economic policies that scholars and activists say disadvantage Puerto Rican people. Although Puerto Rico has some self-determination when it comes to internal affairs through its own executive, judicial, and legislative branches, U.S. federal law supersedes Puerto Rico’s and the U.S. government controls its trade, commerce, and foreign relations. This is also true of states, but without voting representatives in Congress or the ability to vote in presidential elections, Puerto Rico’s sovereignty is hamstrung.

Though distinct, many Puerto Ricans — Muslim and non-Muslim alike — feel imperial powers impose cultural, economic, and political punishments on colonized peoples in both Palestine and Puerto Rico. This process of suppression, they say, results in struggles not only in their native lands but their marginalization in the media and popular opinion.

Occupied Vieques, Occupied Palestine

Puerto Ricans and Palestinians – Muslim, Christian, and otherwise – have resisted these colonial conditions for decades.

In both places, there are grassroots movements to assert residents’ rights and large-scale political actions to challenge those in power. In Palestine, this takes various forms, including nonviolent protests, civil disobedience, armed resistance, and international solidarity campaigns. Similarly, Puerto Ricans utilize protests, strikes, and armed opposition to the U.S. government, receiving support from progressive movements around the world, including Palestinians.

Sara Awartani, assistant professor of American culture at the University of Michigan, highlights how, in Puerto Rican Chicago, “Puerto Ricans sharpened their political identities in conversation with the struggle for Palestinian liberation.” Awartani wrote how “individuals imprisoned for alleged participation in the Puerto Rican armed clandestine organization Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN; Armed Forces of National Liberation),” and other similar groups, “framed Puerto Rico’s anti-colonial struggle” within an enlarged and “reimagined geography of liberation.” They drew on, and declared solidarity with, Palestinians’ struggle for independence. These struggles cemented Palestine “in the Puerto Rican political imaginary.” It was through the Palestinian struggle that many of these Puerto Rican activists “learned to think and operate within a ‘Third World’ revolutionary political condition,” she says.

For the FALN in the 1970s and early 80s, this was more than a rhetorical flourish. It was an action. On October 26, 1974, five large bombs exploded near Wall Street, in Rockefeller Center, and on Park Avenue in Manhattan. The explosions caused considerable property damage, but no injuries, in what The New York Times described as a “terrorist” attack. The FALN later claimed responsibility, as well as additional explosions in Puerto Rico. Their armed struggle was not, they said, about killing civilians, but attacking symbols of American empire (e.g., capitalist institutions, military bases).

Throughout the following year, the FALN executed a series of bombings, beginning on January 24, 1975, with an explosion at Fraunces Tavern in the New York City financial district, which killed four people and injured approximately 63. The violence climaxed on October 27, with nine nearly simultaneous explosions in New York City, Washington, and Chicago. In waging their own struggle, they also felt their actions were taken in direct solidarity with the Palestinian people and their cause.

More than three decades later, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition marched with Puerto Ricans in the 2001 annual Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City with a sign reading, “U.S. Bombs: Tested in Vieques, Dropped on Palestine.” They were referring to the small island of Vieques, which lies near Culebra, six miles east of the Puerto Rican mainland. In 1941, the U.S. forcibly displaced some 10,000 people, relocating them to the center of the island. For the next six decades, the military used Vieques to test three-to-five million pounds of artillery and explosives per year. The island was poisoned with the remnants of depleted uranium, lead, napalm, and other deadly chemicals. Puerto Ricans on the archipelago and in the diaspora protested, but their cries went largely unheard until 1999, when the killing of 35-year-old David Sanes by a 500lb U.S. Naval bomb sparked worldwide marches and acts of civil disobedience. With signs like the Palestine Right to Return Coalition’s, protestors linked the anti-imperial struggle in Vieques with those in Palestine.

Although Awartani admits Palestine and Puerto Rico are not in the same situation, she says theirs is “a shared colonial condition.” Based on her own comparisons, Awartani says the way activists and everyday Palestinians and Puerto Ricans frame the situation calls attention to a “bigger global structure.” She explains, “the way the U.S. Intervenes in the Caribbean or the Middle East, the everyday experience of surveillance and policing, that’s what is being named by this comparison, [and] the activists are illuminating the ways power works in different places.”

Thousands of seeds, born from the ruins

“Thousands of seed, born from the ruins” was part of the message the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, a direct-action political organization, wanted to send through a new street mural they painted in Puerto Rico in November 2023.

In response to the invasion of Gaza, more than 50 volunteers painted adjacent walls and doorways with Palestinian and Puerto Rican colors and symbols in one of San Juan’s oldest neighborhoods, Río Piedras.

Home to Universidad de Puerto Rico Río Piedras (UPRRP), the country’s largest institute of higher education, the district has often been the site of intense activism. Motivated by a sense of political and moral responsibility toward Palestine, the mural at the intersection of Robles Street and Ferrocarril Street in Río Piedras, was a concrete form of resistance, organizers said.

Alongside a bunch of olives held in two cupped hands, a full-grown olive tree, and a woman in keffiyeh — all Palestinian cultural and political symbols — the mural read De las ruinas nacerán miles de semillas…y será libre Puerto Rico y Palestina, or “thousands of seeds will be born from the ruins and Puerto Rico and Palestine will be free.” Organizers said the phrase, “describes the political context of people besieged by colonialism.”

The ruins, they said, are not only the homes, hospitals, businesses, and schools razed in Gaza, but the ruins of Río Piedras itself, an impoverished neighborhood they insist has been systemically abandoned by authorities.

And they have a point. Puerto Ricans’ marginalized place in American political, social, and cultural orders has been brought into sharp relief over the last several years. Crippling debt, numerous natural disasters, a crumbling infrastructure and economy, as well as inadequate responses by local political leaders and the U.S. federal government to these combined crises have left many Puerto Ricans living in poverty. With a median household annual income of $21,000 (USD) and a poverty rate of around 40 percent, Puerto Rico is twice as impoverished as the U.S.’s poorest state (Mississippi).

Meanwhile, incentivized by favorable tax laws, U.S. investors continue to buy up tracts of land and properties on the island — in places like Río Piedras — developing them for tourism and investment purposes. This has displaced scores of Puerto Ricans, led to a decline in affordable housing and services, decreased job availability, as well as the gentrification of certain areas, with a resultant rise in outmigration as Puerto Ricans seek financial security and representation in places like Connecticut, Florida, New York, and New Jersey.

Marisol, a San Juan resident, said gentrification has become the primary problem she and her neighbors now face. “We are in a vulnerable state,” she says. “We are being displaced from our homes, and can no longer afford to live in places we grew up in. Our land, natural resources, and communities are at stake.”

This has led to palpable and collective rage, on display during public demonstrations that led to the ousting of Governor Richard Rosselló in 2019 (la revolución más corta) – or at the 2017 university protests, when students were joined by a range of activists protesting controversial budget cuts and a lack of democratic representation and accountability.

One of those activists was Adrián Robles. A staunch independentista who advocates for Puerto Rico’s right to be an independent nation, Adrián was an active and politically engaged street artist in San Juan at the time. Known on the Río Piedras campus for his striking political murals, Adrián says he was the only Muslim he knew who took part in the protests. When people asked him about his faith, he pointed to a mural on the wall of one of the campus’s parking lots, depicting female freedom fighters — one Palestinian and one Chechen — along with flowers, skulls, and a gunsight trained on Carlos M. García, a prominent member of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) committee, established by the U.S. government in 2016 to restructure Puerto Rico’s debt.

Adrián says the art, which has since been painted over, symbolized his complex feelings of frustration and his hope for peace and change. But as a Muslim, he says it also illustrated the connected struggles of the Puerto Rican independence movement to anti-colonial resistance throughout the Global South. Through what he calls his, “public art interventions” on walls and hallways across the campus, Adrián puts the intersectionality of his politico-religious sentiments and solidarities into material, graffitied form.

Another of his murals features a Palestinian woman holding a flag in one hand and making a peace sign with the other. Her eyes are shaded with a stylized keffiyeh wrapped around her face; Adrián painted her as a figure of solidarity with the protesting students. At the same time, Adrián says he wants to express the mutual support of independentistas like himself with the Palestinian cause. Scribbled in red graffiti across the upper left corner of the mural are the words, Puerto Rico con Palestina. Puerto Rico con la Infitada, or “Puerto Rico for Palestine, Puerto Rico for the Palestinian uprisings.” Adrián says he feels both murals, depicting strong Muslim women in places far away, resonate with Puerto Ricans who are fighting against the injustice of their own situation. Despite geographic distance and geo-political disparities, he says, “we can draw strength from each other and perhaps be inspired that through our struggle, we might make a better tomorrow.”

(Photo by Ken Chitwood)

Lixabel, another local Muslim convert in San Juan whose family has been involved in the Puerto Rican independence movement for generations, says the only difference between Palestine and Puerto Rico is, “there is no need to bomb a place where people are already dying because of lack of education or the use of drugs.” The only option for such people, Lixabel says, is to sell their land to foreigners and leave Puerto Rico for good. “What’s left behind are crumbling buildings that look like a warzone,” she says.

But like Adrián, Lixabel clings to hope. “Our emotional resonance with the Palestinian struggle creates opportunities to bring awareness, hope, and momentum towards justice,” she believes.

And so, she, Marisol, Adrián, and Margarita say they plan to continue carrying flags, painting murals, and taking to San Juan’s and New York’s streets to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and justice for displaced and despondent Puerto Ricans. As they do so, they say they are bolstered by decades of shared action and solidarity. Despite ongoing frustrations and feelings of hopelessness in the face of liquidation and destruction, they believe life continues to emerge in both places.

“Seeing Palestinians maintain their faith and their smiles through all of their hardship has only solidified my faith,” Lixabel says. “Every time you speak up about something, that is the first step toward a better world.” These, she says, are the true seeds of change born from the resistance and tenacity of people who share each other’s struggles and survive.

Ken Chitwood is a religion scholar and journalist based in Germany. His book AmeRícan Muslims: The Everyday Cosmopolitanism of Puerto Rican Converts to Islam, is under contract with University of Texas Press.