Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño records, 1959-2020, bulk 1968-1993

Per former PSP member Carmen Vivian Rivera, in the year 2000, a group of former members came together (through the ¡Despierta Boricua! Recovering History Project) to document the history of the Party, particularly that of the U.S. branch. Rivera served as the coordinator of a group who put out a call for documents to other former PSP members and completed an initial organization of those collected materials after realizing, in her words, that "an exhibit wasn't the best way" to document the Party's history. The process of writing Revolution Around the Corner: Voices from the Puerto Rican Socialist Party in the U.S. (Temple UP, 2020), edited by Rivera, Andrés Torres, and José E. Velázquez, affirmed in practice the necessity of assembling the PSP archive in order to document and better narrativize its history.

Documents related to PSP-Puerto Rico take the form of speeches, ideological/theoretical documents, organizational manuals, booklets of regulations, mockups of early logos, banners, stickers, and flags. Materials related to political education in the PSP-P.R. exist as handwritten notes, syllabi and curricula with marginal notes, and theoretical readings. The Comité Central produced primarily standard typewritten documents and some handwritten notes. Apart from standard-size typed documents, materials related to Congresos Nacionales (PSP-P.R.) take the form of colorful booklets, posters, and prints. The publications of the PSP-Puerto Rico––which among them include Carta Semanal, CHISPA, Tribuna Roja, Nueva Lucha, and Claridad (P.R.)––vary in form from small stapled booklets to full-sized newspapers.

Similarly, documents related to the organizational structure of PSP-U.S. take the form of ideological/theoretical documents, tabulations of membership across various nuclei, housing studies, magazines, and newspaper clippings. Items pertaining to political education of new and continuing members of the PSP-U.S. include basic documents for new members, curricula for the Escuela de Candidatos a Militantes, curricula for the Escuela de Cuadros, syllabi for the Círculos de Estudios, paperback books, and materials produced by the Secretarías de Asuntos Estudiantiles & de Educación Política. Materials related to the Comité Seccional are extensive and include reports, notes, correspondence, and pamphlets and posters from the Congresos Seccionales and Extraordinarios of the PSP-U.S. The collection contains issues of Claridad-U.S. spanning from 1973 to 2017, as well as a 2008 survey on the bilingual supplement of Claridad.

There is a considerable amount of material related to repression and surveillance of both the PSP's activities as well as those of other leftist organizations. This includes but is not limited to Andrés Torres' extensive FBI files, materials related to the Puerto Rican nationalists (led by Lolita Lebrón) who orchestrated the 1954 shooting at the U.S. Capitol, and educational booklets and posters calling for the freeing of Puerto Rican political prisoners. Other political actions organized by the PSP-U.S. include protests at the Democratic Convention (1980), the National Day of Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence at Madison Square Garden (1974), and speeches in relation to the case of Puerto Rico before the United Nations and Congress.

The final series in the collection contains an eclectic group of items related to non-PSP leftist organizations, allies of PSP, and their publications, both in Puerto Rico and in the U.S. This takes the form of newspaper clippings, posters, pamphlets and booklets, ideological/theoretical documents, and magazines. Some of these organizations were also directly organized around the cause of Puerto Rican independence, such as El Comité (MINP - Movimiento de Izquierda Nacional Puertorriqueño), Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional Puertorriqueno (MLN), and the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP). The items in the Records pertaining to other leftist organizations in both P.R. and the U.S. are some of the most visually compelling, as they contain a wealth of posters, art prints, banners, colorful magazines, and a folio from an art exhibition.

In terms of the types of materials that it contains, the collection is varied: it holds typewritten documents (typewriter- and computer-generated), handwritten notes, correspondence (handwritten, typewriter-, and computer-generated), posters, banners, political buttons, art prints, audiovisual material on VHS and cassette, newspapers and newspaper clippings, booklets, paperback books, and wood-mounted posters.