Two variants of Caribbean nationalism: Marcus Garvey and Pedro Albizu Campos

Some of the forms that collective identities and nationalism have taken in the Caribbean are analyzed in this paper, which examines two historical figures, one from Jamaica and the other from Puerto Rico: Marcus Garvey (1887 1940) and Pedro Albizu Campos (1891 1965), respectively. Both were black, radical, and politically persecuted. A history of nationalism in both Jamaica and Puerto Rico is impossible without taking them into account. Marcus Garvey is one of Jamaica s officially designated national heroes. He was the first such person to whom this honor was conferred after Jamaica s independence in 1962. Garvey s name and portrait appear in some of Jamaica s currency, in public buildings, and in the names of streets. Puerto Rican nationalists consider Pedro Albizu Campos, one of the island s greatest patriots of the twentieth century. There are some important similarities in the life history and political career of these two Caribbean leaders. But their construction of the ideas of race and nationalism are very different. This paper compares the different ideas of Garvey and Albizu about race and nationality, as well as the praxis that went with them. For Marcus Garvey race took precedent over nation. In contrast, for Albizu Campos Raza meant the Hispanic race. The explanation of these differences in nationalist ideology lies, at least in part, in the different ways in which historically the social construction of ethnicity and race has taken shape throughout the Caribbean, and in Jamaica and Puerto Rico particularly. Among the factors taken into consideration to explain these differences in nationalist ideology are the following: historical differences in the social impact of the plantation system, the relative position of free blacks during the slave period, the cultural factors involved in the formation of social classes, and different colonial experiences.