Required reading.

Puerto Ricans do matter—in the city, in the state, and anywhere they can be found.

Ahead of the National Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York on Sunday, members of the Puerto Rico Not For Sale campaign are set to protest on Friday outside National Puerto Rican Day Parade Inc.’s scholarship gala at Gotham Hall in Midtown Manhattan.

Like many firsts of May in the past, this year’s May Day will see workers and activists around the world take to the streets to demand greater labor rights and protections. In Puerto Rico, they will also be condemning displacement and environmental destruction.

Fearing the increasing displays of nationalistic pride sweeping across Puerto Rico in 1936, colonial authorities derailed that year’s constitutional convention movement to establish the Republic of Puerto Rico, thus ensuring U.S. colonialism would endure.

The first in a three-part series looking at the attempts made by Pedro Albizu Campos and other local leaders in Puerto Rico to hold a constitutional convention in 1936—the closest the archipelago has come to breaking free of U.S. colonial rule.

For Puerto Rico, Don Pedro represents an important link between the 19th century, when Latin America freed itself from Spanish colonialism, and the modern era, in which Latin America strives to protect itself from the insidious influence of U.S. imperialism.

The lack of affordable housing has been exacerbated by the pandemic, but it’s a systemic problem that goes back much further.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The number of people in Puerto Rico who identified as “white” in the most recent census plummeted almost 80%, sparking a conversation about identity on an island breaking away from a past where race was not tracked and seldom debated in public.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Soraya Santiago, the first person from Puerto Rico to undergo gender reassignment surgery and a longtime icon for the U.S. territory’s LGBTQ community, has died. She was 73.

The trend is strongest in the state of New York. Urban poverty and social vulnerability factors increase the possibility of becoming infected or dying from the virus in places where most Puerto Ricans live.

Passenger flow from the areas of largest spread of the virus in the United States has decreased but has not stopped. Those areas also have the highest concentrations of Puerto Rican residing there. That is coupled with the fact that island airports did not take preventive health measures for weeks, and tracing people who were in contact with positive COVID-19 cases has not begun.

HUD Spokesman Darryl Madden told the CPI that he could not offer more details because the process has just begun.

There is a new reality now.

Sign-on letter condemning the actions of the Puerto Rican government on May Day and demanding justice for the Puerto Rican people

Wall Street won the hurricane recovery fight.

“I will continue to use every available platform to ensure that we are treated fairly and with respect,” she said in an interview with Latino Rebels.

The majority of these deaths were men and women over 50 years old who died in hospitals and nursing homes.

La mayoría de estas personas son hombres y mujeres por igual, mayores de 50 años, y murieron en hospitales y asilos.

How many Puerto Ricans who have fled the island might return home—and how many are gone for good?

“That’s terrible.”