Puerto Rican nationalism and its spectacular history is a topic that most Puerto Ricans have some knowledge about. In cities and towns all over the archipelago and the continental United States, the symbols of Puerto Rican nationalism are often deployed as a cultural language and to demarcate space. This is the case in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood, where two monumental, iron Puerto Rican flags buttress the Paseo Boricua and mark it as a hard-fought-for Puerto Rican enclave. The flag, once seen as a symbol of Puerto Rican nationalism and banned by the archipelago's government in the mid-twentieth century, continues to be an important symbol of Puerto Rican identity and history.

But what, I have often wondered, might these symbols mean to others? What do those massive flags signal to the many non–Puerto Ricans who traverse the Paseo Boricua? The history of Puerto Rican nationalism, of those who fought for the...

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