The founding of the Nationalist Party

The Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico was founded on September 17, 1922 in San Juan, with independence as its declared goal, at a moment when most island political energy still centered on autonomy within the U.S. system rather than a clean break. In its early years it was a relatively minor player in island politics.

That changed with one man. Pedro Albizu Campos, a Puerto Rican lawyer and politician, joined the party in 1924 and became its vice president in 1927. In 1930 he was elected party president, a turn that pushed the nationalists hard toward radical anticolonial politics and confrontational tactics the party had not embraced before. He would remain the party's president and public face until his death in 1965.

Unable to win enough electoral support through the 1930s, the party made a weighty decision: it withdrew from electoral politics entirely and shifted its energy wholly to activism and street demonstrations, betting that direct action would achieve what the ballot box had not.

That strategic turn set up the direct confrontations with U.S.-appointed authority that would define the rest of the decade, including the Río Piedras massacre in 1935 and the Ponce massacre in 1937, both grown directly out of the confrontational posture the party adopted under Albizu Campos.

Albizu Campos himself paid a high personal price for his position: across his life, he spent a combined total of 26 years in prison for his pro-independence activities, in and out of federal custody over four decades.

The tension came to a head on July 25, 1938, the fortieth anniversary of the 1898 American invasion, a date the party chose on purpose, when an attack targeted U.S.-appointed governor Blanton Winship during a military parade in Ponce. Winship escaped unharmed, but 36 people were injured, the first assassination attempt in Puerto Rico's history against the life of a sitting governor, and a raw measure of how far the confrontation had escalated by decade's end.

Sources: Pedro Albizu Campos; Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico; Historia de Puerto Rico. Freeze 2026-08-22.