Jesús Colón, also known as the “Father of the Nuyorican Movement,” was born on January 20, 1901, in Cayey, Puerto Rico, during a time when most of the tobacco-producing land in Puerto Rico was under the control of American Tobacco Companies. His home was behind the town’s cigar factory, where employees read stories aloud to the workers while they worked. As a child, Colon frequently visited the factory and was influenced by the stories he heard. This experience influenced his socialist ideology and sparked his interest in the spoken and written word.
In 1917, when he was 16, Colón boarded the S.S. Carolina as an employee and landed in Brooklyn, N.Y. There, he went to live with his older brother, Joaquin Colón. He worked in various unskilled jobs and could observe the deplorable conditions of the working class of the time.
Before leaving Puerto Rico, he was an editor for a newspaper called Adelante at the Central Grammar School in San Juan. This is where his passion for writing began. He received little schooling in Puerto Rico and was self-educated when he arrived in the United States. There, he completed his secondary education as an adult. In New York, he worked in various unskilled jobs such as a dishwasher, postal clerk, waiter, and messenger. Colón was of Afro-Puerto Rican descent and faced discrimination because of the color of his skin and inability to speak English. Nevertheless, Colón documented his experiences and those of other immigrants and was among the first Puerto Ricans to do so in English. His most notable work is “A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches,” significantly contributing to the Nuyorican Movement.
In 1927, he joined the editorial board of Grafico, a New York City-based newspaper that featured writing by Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Latino migrants living in New York. In 1934, he began writing for Justicia, a newspaper for the Federacion Libre de Trabajadores in Puerto Rico, and other Spanish newspapers such as Liberacion. Colón was the President of Hispanic Publications, a publisher of Spanish history books and political pamphlets. Additionally, he was the president of the Cervantes Fraternal Society, the Spanish language division of the pro-Communist International Workers Order. His main objective was to help others by forming organizations that aided Latinos who were struggling financially, especially those who wanted to live free from the threat of racism. In 1922, Colón helped fund the Alianza Obrera Puertorriquena e Hispana, then Ateneo Obrero Hispano in 1926, followed by the Liga Puertorriqueña Hispana in 1928. These organizations were created to help people build a community and foster a sense of unity.
Colón’s involvement with the socialist labor movement and political affiliations caused him to be investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the McCarthy era of political repression in the 1950s. Despite the investigation, his literary work grew, and he was published in The Daily Worker, The Worker, The Daily World, and Mainstream. In 1955, he began a Spanish-language newspaper and wrote a regular column for the Daily Worker, now known as People’s World. He is known for being a political activist, pushing for social change through his writing, and being active in his community.
In 1969, Colón ran for the position of comptroller of New York on the Communist Party ticket, with Rasheed Storey as the candidate for mayor. Their platform included demands such as creating jobs for youth with minimum weekly salaries, providing free daycare for children of working mothers, ending police brutality by eliminating biased officers from the police force and putting an end to the draft and the Vietnam War.
Jesús Colón planned to publish another book but unfortunately passed away before completing it. After his passing, his collection of papers was donated to the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter College. The collection is a remarkable contribution to Puerto Rican history, especially concerning the Puerto Rican community’s role in New York. The collection comprises letters, notes, drafts of published and unpublished works, reports, and photographs.
In 1993, Edna Acosta Belén, a professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Albany, and Virginia Sanchez Korrol, an associate professor and Chair of the Department of Puerto Rican Studies at Brooklyn College, collaborated on a booklet of Colon’s writings titled “The Way it Was and Other Writings.”
Jesús Colón passed away in New York City in 1974. His ashes were returned to Puerto Rico and scattered over River La Plata in Cayey.
##
