U.S. imperialism in the Americas: the function of colonialism and racism, and how they are different

by Héctor Reyes · Published September 6, 2019 · Updated January 19, 2022

If you live in the U.S. and are not indigenous to it, you live on stolen land.

Frequently, racism and colonialism are used as substitutes for each other. The technical term for this type of conflation is metonym, as Chickasaw Nation scholar Jodi A. Byrd asserts. I want to argue that the currently popular use of the terms racism and colonialism as interchangeable qualities among social justice activists, and even academics, is not only inappropriate, but that their frequent conflation is the result of more than simple expediency.

The failure to recognize that colonialism is structurally different than and not just another manifestation of racism does irreparable damage to the victims of colonialism. In the specific context of colonialism, failure to recognize colonialism as a continuing crime of erasure and dispossession, the liberal prescriptions of inclusion and civil rights exacerbate the harms of colonialism.

Colonialism and settler colonialism

The history of class society is replete with instances of the formation and perpetuation of empires. Yet the empires that battled each other in the early stages of capitalism, during its mercantilist era, directly shaped the history of our modern world. It is precisely during this era that colonization of the Americas, and other parts of the world began to take shape. The modern forms of genocide and colonization have their beginnings in that era. These transcontinental empires were all ruled from European countries, namely France, Spain, England, the Dutch Republic, and Portugal. Through the despicable doctrines of discovery, they proceeded to lay claim to lands inhabited by indigenous peoples across the world. The Americas were divvied up among these empires. Thereafter, they fought each other multiple times over the control and ownership of many of these lands.

I will heavily emphasize here the pertinent aspects of the history of colonialism in the Americas (and Hawai’i, which became a victim of U.S.occupation and colonialism), with the recognition that this process has repeated itself, in historical waves, throughout the world, during the various stages of capitalist development. The crime against humanity that settler colonialism is can only be traced to the dawn of capitalism. It is in this era that the systematic dispossession, displacement, and genocide associated with settler colonialism perpetuates itself.

There has not been a single protocol for the colonization of the land and of the peoples of the world. It depended on the priorities of the colonizer, the natural resources of the targeted lands, and the population density, and the degree and form of economic development of the victims of colonization. Researchers have identified, as a useful framework to understand the dynamics of colonialism, five types of colonization processes. Sociologist Gershon Shafir (in his book Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914, (1996)) summarizes these colonization schemes:

1. Occupation: The colonial power seeks military and administrative control of a strategic region. The existing economic order is exploited and intensified, without necessarily pursuing control of local land and labor.
2. Plantation (and/or Mining): attracts relatively few colonial settlers, due to local geographical, agricultural, and demographic conditions. The settlers acquire land and import a slave or indentured labor force.
3. Mixed Occupation: involves a substantial amount of colonial settlers (relative to the number of natives) achieving direct control of land. Involves coercive labor of the native population, and includes miscegenation with the natives.
4. Pure Settlement: substantial settler arrivals aimed at direct control of the land includes the forcible removal and/or the destruction of the native population in the development of “an economy based on white labor.” The removal of the natives allows the settlers to develop a “sense of cultural or ethnic homogeneity identified with a European concept of nationality.”
5. Ethnic Plantation Settlement: based on colonial settler control of the land with a relatively limited number of settlers, who exploit the native labor. It excludes miscegenation with the native population, explicitly opposing ethnic mixture. As an unstable structure, it eventually requires the arrival of larger numbers of additional colonial settlers.

It is important to highlight that the various schemes of colonization were not monolithic and that one kind of colonization could and did evolve into others, or that more than one form coexisted with another at a particular place and time. Of these five colonial schemes, only the Occupation Colony does not involve a project that requires the deployment of settlers to a significant degree—the colonizers subjugate the local population with a combination of military personnel and superior weaponry. Equally important is to emphasize that it is the dynamics of capitalism/imperialism which propel settler colonialism, in contrast to what some critics of settler colonialism assume. These critics restrict their analysis to one of land as the core component of of wealth.

However, as Shafir clearly describes, the land is a means for the establishment of a different kind of society in which the production of wealth for the colonial masters depends on the labor of the foot soldiers of settler colonialism, those who engage first hand in the pillage and genocide, for they are promised a part of the spoils. Any basic analysis of the development of capitalism in the U.S. can show that the land upon which the massive factories and other instruments of production have been built is just but a small fraction of the wealth contained within these means of production. Settler colonialism thus requires both the plunder of land and the introduction of a foreign labor force, a labor army that displaces the native population, and replaces it permanently.

The two major colonizing powers in the Americas, the English and the Spaniards pursued their own distinct colonial schemes. In what is known today as Latin America, Spain pursued policies of resource control, exploitation of indigenous labor, and miscegenation that ultimately eliminated vast numbers (genocide) of the native populations with a combined and complex outcome regarding the survival of these populations. In South America, Central America, and Mexico the settlers pushed surviving indigenous populations to the outskirts of settler society, despite engaging in a degree of miscegenation, which is the basis of the national narratives of mestisaje (Spaniard and indigenous). Simultaneously, in regions were it lacked sufficient labor, the Spanish Empire brought in African slaves.

There is a frequently ignored presence of descendants of African slaves across most of South America, as well as Central America and Mexico. These are concentrated along the coasts were slaves were brought to engage in agricultural labor, such as the cultivation and processing of sugarcane. These populations are regularly ignored in the formulation of the national narratives of these countries because they undermine their myths of nation building in which the mestisaje narrative is manipulated to satisfy the priorities of their ruling classes. In the case of Brazil, its ruling class has more difficulty in formulating a tidy mestizaje narrative given the significant numbers of slave descendants as the result of the prolific slave trade of the Portuguese.

In the Caribbean, it is also very difficult for the former Spanish colonies to maintain a simple narrative of mestizaje. This region saw a relatively large importation of African slaves (not only by Spain, but also by the French and the English) because the indigenous population across the Antilles were wiped out by disease and exploitation, and in the case of the Spanish colonies their remnants were ultimately absorbed into settler society via miscegenation with the Spanish settlers (of course, by force, specifically in the case of the women). The Taíno populations of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba were exterminated by the Spaniards, as a people. The Taíno women were raped, and converted into domestic slaves.

In the case of Puerto Rico, in the course of only 22 years the Taíno population was decimated from an estimated 60,000 to 1,500. Today, about two thirds of Puerto Ricans contain Taíno genes in our mitochondrial DNA (an exclusively maternal gene inheritance). The Spaniards committed genocide, plain and simple, yet our language, our customs, foods, and idiosyncrasies still contain the legacy of our Taíno ancestors. However, the story does not end there. Since the Spaniards extinguished their indigenous labor force, they were compelled to import African slaves. By the end of the 18th century, the number of slaves, freed slaves, mulattoes and other biracial residents, whose lifestyle resembled that of whites (called pardos) significantly outnumbered the white Europeans, constituting approximately 60 percent of the population. The Spaniards went into a panic, and began offering vast tracts of land to other Europeans to reduce the risk of being overwhelmed in an insurrection.

It is within this cauldron of blood, rape, slavery, and dispossession that we Puerto Ricans were born as a people. We are the offspring of a historical rape of monumental proportions. And just as the children of an individual rape, we despise our rapist father while still being proud of who we are. The mestizaje narrative breaks down with us. We constitute the modern native people of Puerto Rico. We do not make claim to the indigenous status of ancestral peoples who inhabited the Americas. However, we are a people forged in blood and toil under the boot of the Spanish colonial master, with our own linguistic and cultural repertoire, cuisine, and many other unique customs, values, and beliefs. That constitutes our original claim to our own social order, with all of its virtues and warts (e.g., racism, misogyny, homophobia). We are an oppressed nation, with all the distortions of our nationhood and all the social malaise that arise out of being unable to rule ourselves within a capitalistic straitjacket. We are indigenous to the U.S. colonial invader. We have been an occupied colony of the U.S. for 121 years, which is now being reorganized by the economic and political forces of the imperial metropolis. Embryonic elements of settler colonialism have begun to develop via the gentrification wielded by U.S. capital and the absolute political power of the U.S. over every aspect of our lives.

In contrast, in what today is the continental U.S., the thrust of the English (the British, after their 1707 incorporation of Scotland) was that of dispossession, displacement, and mass murder. The genocide of Native Americans has been exposed by a variety of Native American activists and scholars, and by other researchers and anti-imperialist supporters. The land was cleansed of its original inhabitants through a process that the late Australian historian Patrick Wolfe called the elimination of the native. A process that still operates to this day. In his oft-quoted essay, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native” (Journal of Genocide Resreach, December, 2006), Wolfe offers a solid argument disputing the formulation of “cultural” genocide as a separate category from that of genocide, in which the asumption is that the unqualified term genocide is reserved for the physical elimination of the indigenous peoples through mass murder.

Wolfe argues that if genocide is the elimination of a people, of the collective who lives in a particular region, people who have a distinctive culture, language, and way of life, then genocide can be accomplished not only through the physical extermination of a people, but also through their assimilation, and very frequently by both means. Assimilation means the destruction of the collective character of a people as a distinctive societal formation who exercise their prerogatives through their own customs in full sovereignty. In Puerto Rico, the Spaniards physically exterminated the overwhelming majority of the Taínos and the small fraction who survived were assimilated into the colonial structures. That was genocide.

That is exactly what the British, and later the U.S. Americans^[i] pursued as they relentlessly moved west from their initial colonial outposts on the U.S. Atlantic coast. In her book (see Footnote i) Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz thoroughly describes how the U.S. colonial settlers pursued a scorched earth campaign in which the idea was not only to steal the land and its resources, but to destroy the institutions and collective norms of the indigenous tribes they came across. Then once the campaign of dispossession had reached the west coast, as Wolfe explains, the tactics shifted to forced assimilation, through schemes like the separation of Indian children from their families and their sequestration into boarding schools where their culture and language were meant to be erased from them.

This is the context in which the surviving Native American tribes (as well as Native Alaskans), and their scattered brethren are compelled to live today in the continental U.S. In Puerto Rico, right after the 1898 military invasion, over the course of the following five decades, the U.S. attempted to “Americanize” our population. Right from the beginning, they identified the public education system as the most significant tool to accomplish it, and proceeded to impose English as the language of instruction. Thanks in no small part to the resistance of the Puerto Rican people, the replacement of our dialect of the Spanish language by the English language was unsuccessful. In order to succeed in such task, the U.S. needed to have engaged in the large scale introduction of colonial settlers; but in that era that was not part of their colonial priorities for Puerto Rico.

In contrast, the U.S. nearly succeeded in making extinct the language of the native people of Hawai’i, the Kanaka Maoli.^[ii] By the time of the forced annexation of Hawai’i in 1898, the Kanaka have been reduced to a minority of the population in their own country. Thereafter, annexation allowed for a rush of U.S. colonial settlers to further marginalize the Kanaka, their culture, and their language, which included the banning of their language in schools and government. Thankfully, in the 1970s, in what is known as the Hawaiian Renaissance, multiple struggles broke out that lead to the development of the modern sovereignty movement that lead to the rebirth of the Hawaiian language. The movement has included among its major demands the implementation of policy for the preservation of the Hawaiian language and its reintroduction into public schools.

The long arc of imperialism

Some critics of colonialism dichotomize colonialism within a framework of internal versus external colonialism. In contrast, Jodi Byrd argues in her book The Transit of Empire (2011) that such a formulation obscures the reach and continuity of imperialism. She maintains that the ideological construct of “Indianness” is a persistent and core element of the recurrent expansion of colonial reach both within the confines of continental U.S., and beyond. She explains that the subject to be colonized or dominated in both the “domestic” and international contexts is an “other” that always has the quality of the “Indian”: savage, uncivilized, incapable of ruling themselves.

The Monroe Doctrine and its ideological life-force, Manifest Destiny, have been criticized by many activists within communities of color in the U.S., by progressive educators, and the most radical sectors of the U.S. left. In Latin America, the ravages of the implementation of the Monroe Doctrine have been felt for over 150 years through innumerable acts of violence, manipulation, economic extortion, and direct military incursions and occupations. From the standpoint of clarifying the links between U.S. settler colonialism, white supremacy and imperialism, it is useful to connect the historical context of the birth of the U.S. as a nation that was delivered as an offspring of imperialist war to its inexorable pursuit as an expansionary white supremacist and imperialist power.

Just as with other myths regarding the intrinsic superiority of the U.S., its war for independence is mischaracterized and exceptionalized to lionize the leaders and political and ideological constructs of the new republic. In reality, the U.S. American Revolution was part of a larger inter-imperial conflict of the era. In the anthology of essays contained in the book The American Revolution: A World War (2018), the international array of historians presents a thorough description of the war for independence as one component of an international war that pit not only the U.S. settlers against the British empire, but also, and crucially, the British empire against the Spanish and French empires, the Dutch Republic, and even the Kingdom of Mysore in India.

These historians emphasize that the overwhelming military superiority of the British empire at the time, particularly its navy, made it unlikely for the U.S. colonial settlers (who lacked a navy in an era in which naval superiority carried the day) to successfully challenge the British, unless they had overwhelming external support. Historians have characterized this historical period the Second One Hundred Years War, in which the British, French and Spanish empires fought exacting battles with each other across the world. The U.S. American Revolution provided the opportunity for the French and Spanish empires to reverse recent defeats and the hands of the British. The leaders of the Continental Army were deeply aware of their profound disadvantage and explicitly and aggressively reached out to France and Spain.

Despite the persistent pursuit of independence by the colonial settlers, it was ultimately the physical, financial, and political support of the French and Spanish empires, and the Dutch Republic that shifted the balance of forces in favor of the revolutionaries. These European powers provided large amounts of war funds, a recurrent supply of war material (e.g., weapons, uniforms, gunpowder, ammunition), a far-reaching naval challenge of British ships, not only off the shores of the colonies, but also across the Caribbean, the Atlantic and beyond, and direct intervention of their armies in battles from present day Florida all the way to Chesapeake Bay. In the final battle of the revolution on U.S. soil, which compelled the British to sue for peace and recognize the U.S. as an independent country:

On land, Washington commanded sixteen thousand troops, nearly half of them French. With the nineteen thousand sailors of de Grasse’s [French] fleet, the siege [of Yorktown] involved more than twice as many French as American combatants. (Alan Taylor, “Global Revolutions,” in The American Revolution: A World War.)

The U.S. was born a republic as the precocious offspring of the most powerful empire of that epoch, and as a result of an inter-imperial war that took place across the world. At the start of the independence war the British complained about their U.S. colonies intending to establish their own independent empire. No one could see it otherwise. The U.S. either joined the imperial game or it would be corralled, even re-swallowed by one or another European power. It was a task for which its new, sovereign rulers had been well trained, as a result of their own experience as former soldiers and defenders of that British empire, as the foot soldiers of settler colonialism for that empire, of their own conviction as a superior race, and an insatiable lust for the riches that lied to their west.

The Monroe Doctrine simply formalized as a core tenet of U.S. policy this reality. The new republic was born carrying on as an empire in the making, eager to thrust west and further encroach into Native American lands, forewarning all European empires that it and only it had the right to take over all the land that extended to the Pacific coast. In due time it challenged an independent Mexico for half of its land, and stole it (1840s). This was an act of imperialism that was consummated and inseparable from settler colonialism. Once it succeeded in subduing all Native American Nations (1870s) by stealing their land and corralling them into reservations, it shifted from physical extermination to assimilation of Native Americans as its tactic for genocide (see Wolfe). Thereafter, it lunged overseas (1898), into the Caribbean Sea, capturing Cuba and Puerto Rico as war bounty. It has kept Puerto Rico for a 121 as a colony. In the Pacific Ocean, it took possession of the Philippines, Hawai’i and other Pacific islands. In Hawai’i it consolidated a project of settler colonialism.

Gradually and assiduously it made true the intentions it expressed through the Monroe Doctrine, to dominate the rest of the Americas. The weaker and nearby countries of Central America and the Caribbean have been continuously hounded since the second half of the 19th century. In the farther and more economically advanced countries of South America’s southern cone, it took until after WWII for the U.S. to secure its dominance. This is when it became the most powerful empire in the history of humanity, to the chagrin of the decayed British, French, and Spanish empires. It is in this epoch that a variant of colonialism is mastered by the U.S., neocolonialism. Without taking over the administration and direct control of a country, avoiding any direct responsibility, the neocolonial power compels ostensibly sovereign countries to submit to its demands under the threat of military action (including temporary occupation), via economic extortion and strangulation, and through political isolation.

In each and every act of colonialism and imperialism there is an assertion by the U.S. ruling class and its state apparatus, and through its ideological instruments (e.g., its capitalist press) that it is inherently superior. This is a world of oppressor and oppressed nations. There is no symmetry between both. Modern day oppressor nations still do imperialist battle (economic, geopolitical, and ultimately military) with each other over control of resources, labor, markets, or military outposts located in the oppressed countries. In this process, the confluence of white supremacy, the compulsion to maximize profit that is inherent to capitalism, and the disciplining forces of imperialism forged the basic structure of the U.S. as a settler-imperialist country. Undoing this will not be accomplished through sermons, syllabi, or good intentions alone.

Racism and colonialism

The justifications offered by the colonial masters for the violence and dispossession suffered by the victims of colonialism cannot be other than those constructed via a racist collage that presents the victims as inferior, as less than human. In that regard they suffer the same type of cruel characterization, and misrepresentation through half-truths and falsehoods as the victims of slavery and their descendants. African American historian Ibrim X. Kendi, in his meticulous book Stamped from the Beginning (2016), offers a superb presentation and parsing of the work of previous historians linking the dawn of racism to that of slavery in the Americas.

In contrast to ancient forms of slavery in other parts of the world, New World slavery came into existence in the bosom of emergent and internationalizing capitalism, in which the treatment of the slave as property signified a business investment. In this regard, both slavery and colonialism are products of capitalism, and brought simultaneously into existence by the same economic and political forces. Kendi recently highlighted this intangible relationship in an interview in Democray Now!

When you think about, for instance, the slave trade, which was critical in the accumulation of wealth in Europe, that was fundamentally a set of racist policies. When you think of colonialism, or even slavery, these are fundamentally a relationship between racism and capitalism, which was essential to its emergence.

However, there are striking differences in the priorities, the specific policies, and the ultimate goals pursued by the rulers of the white supremacist-settler state as they have oppressed the victims of colonialism in contrast to those who are the victims of oppression mainly through their racialization, such as African slaves and their descendants, and later those labelled as poor nonwhite immigrants who arrived from poor countries. Over the past one and a half centuries, who were these specific countries has shifted according to the reorganization of the world by the imperialist powers and their battles with each other.

Jody Byrd emphasizes that the history of U.S. colonialism and its remedies is complicated by the entangled history of a settler state that engaged in a variety of other crimes of oppression (e.g., racism, sexism, homophobia). The presidency of Donald Trump has once again highlighted the deep connection between white supremacy and misogyny, as clearly expressed by the organized forces of the Alt-right.

Nonetheless, Byrd argues that to subsume the necessary demands for justice for the victims of colonial genocide and dispossession within the same set of prescriptions for the oppressed peoples that struggle to attain justice within the polity of the U.S. harms the victims of colonialism because it ultimately stretches the political terrain in the direction of their erasure:

As Indigenous scholars have argued, inclusion into the multicultural cosmopol, built on top of indigenous lands, does not solve colonialism: that inclusion is the very site of the colonization that feeds the U.S. empire.

Byrd and Native Hawaiian anthropologist J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Hawaiian Blood, 2008) have emphasized that the liberal prognosis of inclusion of the indigenous peoples perpetuates their racialization. It drags them away from their historically distinctive nationhood, grounded on their land, collectivity, and sovereignty, and deposits them into a collection of racialized peoples with whites being at the top of the hierarchy. Byrd and Kēhaulani Kauanui also highlight the way in which indigenous peoples were oppressed in contrast to blacks brought from Africa as slaves. The racialization of indigenous peoples through the racist blood quantum doctrine is meant to dilute the pool of indigenous people recognized by the settler state. To this day, the meager number of “benefits” and official recognition assigned to the members of various Indian Nations by the Federal government is under constant threat, for only those who can prove at least a 50 percent blood quantum are eligible for recognition.

The hustle is on for the indigenous people to disappear, together with their surviving land, culture, and claims. In contrast, during slavery and the Jim Crow era, “one drop” of African blood would suffice to disqualify any person as white. In this context, the opposite effect was accomplished, to guarantee the quality of the slave, and later the sharecropper as perpetually inferior and consumable. Expanding capitalism and its property relations required in the U.S., through the ravages of settler colonialism, taking ownership of the land by displacing and exterminating American Indians. This is why their erasure is codified in laws and government policy. On the other hand, Africans and their descendants where the property themselves, and the perpetuation of this quality required their descendants to be construed as such by law, policy and custom, generation after generation.

All victims of colonialism are dragged through the mud of a racist society such as the U.S. However, how they are made whole requires a recognition of the crimes of dispossession and genocide against them. This is why the confusion and facile way in which the term “decolonization” is wielded in social justice circles of the U.S. is counterproductive. This practice frequently pays lip service to the many colonial subjects that are still under the boot of U.S. imperialism and/or describes as decolonial goals and efforts that are not decolonial in nature, and which fail to take on the root features of colonialism. This kind of discourse is rejected by education scholars Eve Tuck (Native American) and K. Wayne Yang when they point out that “Decolonization is not a metaphor.”

Decolonization is something that cannot be accomplished by carrying out a civil rights agenda. American cultural studies scholar Dean Itsuji Saranillio provides a heart-wrenching analysis of how Hawaiian statehood was secured at the expense of the Kanaka Maoli through the impetus of a civil rights campaign. A recent shameful example of the harms of civil rights blinders applied to colonized peoples has been offered by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) regarding Puerto Rico. The now deposed governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Roselló, who was forced to quit by a massive popular mobilization that militantly rejected his corruption, the neglect of his people, his grotesque lies, and his media manipulation, engaged these two civil rights organizations to secure their support in his campaign for Puerto Rican statehood.

They became accomplices of his fraudulent campaign on the premise of supporting the civil rights of Puerto Ricans. Despite being warned by other Puerto Ricans about Roselló’s fraudulent claims and the incorrect nature of their complicity, LULAC and the NAACP disregarded the truth about the results of a 2017 plebiscite in which Roselló alleged that 97 percent of Puerto Ricans wanted statehood. Both Roselló, LULAC, and the NAACP ignored the fact that 77 percent of the electorate had boycotted the plebiscite, and the support for statehood in Puerto Rico amounted to less than 23 percent of eligible voters. Myopic civil rights formulations on the face of colonial oppression are a betrayal of the colonized. Both LULAC and NAACP owe Puerto Ricans an apology.

Beyond the realm of academic research and intellectual analysis lies a hard truth. If justice is going to be available to the victims of U.S. colonialism, justice must be exacted from the U.S. state apparatus. That requires the dismantling of the U.S. as a settler/imperialist state. This is a grand undertaking that requires the active and radical participation of vast sectors of the U.S. American working class, beyond the colonized and oppressed sectors of that class that are frequently ignored as belonging to it. The Red Nation is a New Mexico-based organization of Native Americans fighting for decolonization. One of its founding members, Nick Estes, described the organization’s Red Deal, an anticapitalist and decolonial plan to enhance the Green New Deal:

This isn’t just an Indian problem. If every struggle were made into a climate struggle, then every struggle in North America must be made into a struggle for decolonization. The solutions offered in the Red Deal must entail a social revolution that turns back the forces of destruction. It must penetrate the economic and cultural realms with equal urgency and force. Indigenous peoples should be empowered to develop and implement restorative practices according to their own customs and traditions. This is the vision of the Red Deal, uniting Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in common struggle.

^[i] I will follow Native American scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2015), in her use of the term U.S. Americans to refer to the citizens of the United States of America (USA). The Americas comprise the territory bounded on the north by Alaska and Artic Canada, and reaching all the way to the southern tip of Chile in Patagonia. Anyone claiming citizenship within this expanse is legitimately an American, thus the hijacking of the term American exclusively for those residing in the USA is not only inaccurate, but it is also offensive to us in Latin America.

^[ii] For a useful introduction to the history and the struggles of the people of Hawai’i against U.S. imperialism see the anthology titled A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty (2014).

Héctor Reyes has been a Puerto Rican independence and socialist activist for 38 years. He is a retired, tenured teacher of the City Colleges of Chicago, where he served as Chapter Chair and Vice Chair of his faculty union. In the U.S., he has been a leader and activist against racism, white supremacy, police brutality, the death penalty, and for immigrant rights and those of the wrongly convicted. During his first experience as a college activist he helped lead a student strike against a tuition increase at his University of Puerto Rico campus in the early 1980s. He currently volunteers as a union organizer for the faculty at this same campus, where he was a faculty member in the early 1990s. He has written many articles about the issues described above in various journals, magazines and other publishing outlets.