Puerto Rican Socialist Party - Legacy

Legacy

The PSP militancy left a legacy that contributed to change Puerto Rican culture. A wider general consciousness of class and race divisions, and of the contradictions between the state and the social and popular interests still exists in Puerto Rico, largely as a result of the PSP's public influence in the 1970s and 80s. Protest and patriotic singers, literary authors and graphic artists whose works became popular by means of socialist recording and editorial production, spectacles, book shops, local publications, demonstrations and rallies, later on have gained general recognition, thus strengthening Puerto Rican national identity and popular culture.

Activities defiant to authorities and demanding rights now common among the island's poor and in the Puerto Rican community in New York and other urban areas of the US, were made popular by the MPI and PSP. The tradition among the general public to set up pickets, street rallies, protest strikes and mass demonstrations also comes largely from the influence of the PSP and the other anticolonial and socialist groups. The new social and cultural space created back then has continued to the present in different forms, despite the crisis of the left. The spreading of the ideas that Puerto Rico is a distinct nation and the present political system is a colonial one, is largely due to the PSP. Claridad, which became a daily newspaper between 1974 and 1977, cleared the way for incisive journalism revealing scandals of corruption and links between private interests and the island's government, and reporting on the problems and claims of the downtrodden and the poor.