On the mid-afternoon of Tuesday, October 31, 1950, my father was laying tiles in a new house in the San Juan metropolitan area. He’d rigged a radio connected to a lamppost by snaking extension cords from the sidewalk to the kitchen. The musical offerings were interrupted by what would become the first live continuous breaking news in Puerto Rican radio history. The police and National Guard had surrounded Papi’s older brother’s barber shop, Salón Boricua, where armed pro-independence rebels were holed up following an exchange of gunfire. While the reporter set the scene, shots erupted. Papi put away his tools and rushed to the avenue, where he flagged down a público. The chauffeur had the radio on. The curious had assembled near the barbershop in spite of errant bullets flying between the authorities and the Nationalist rebels. No one knew how many were inside. A police officer and a bystander had been injured. An emotional Papi explained to the chauffeur that the news was about his brother and the other passengers agreed to go out of their way so he could be at his mother’s side. 

His other brother, Toño, also found his way close to the barber shop. Weaving through bystanders, he found Bartolo, another brother. Five of the other nine siblings living in Puerto Rico, their spouses and children were on their way, or keeping vigil with Abuela and Abuelo, listening to the radio like everyone else. Two of their sisters had emigrated to New York. 

Toño and Bartolo stood on someone’s porch facing the doors to the barbershop where they could see the police running around, the National Guards setting up positions behind trucks and parked cars, the bullet holes scarring the building’s façade. My uncles were reluctant to identify themselves as Vidal's brothers. Both had flirted with the Nationalist cause but backed away when its leadership advocated armed means to independence.

My mother heard the news from a neighbor. She grabbed my hand, and carried my eight-month-old sister Delsa from El Fanguito to Villa Palmeras. People had congregated in bars, shops, and open doors and windows whose residents had placed radios facing the street. We heard most of the broadcast through them. I sensed something important was happening, but didn’t know what it meant. Mami didn’t explain but increasingly panicked by the reports, dragged me along when I couldn’t keep up with her long strides. When we reached my grandparents’ house, Papi hadn’t arrived. 

Abuela and Abuelo were surrounded by sons and daughters, their spouses, their children, a priest, and neighbors. Even the babies seemed aware something momentous was happening and didn't fuss or fidget. The youngest napped on their mothers’ laps or on the floor. The plastic radio Papi had bought for Abuela was on the dining table. It was mustard yellow with a golden lighted clock face and a second hand. The volume knob was turned all the way up, like every other radio up and down the street. But even without the broadcast, gunfire echoed in my grandparents’ living room a few blocks from where Vidal and his wife Maria worked, lived and raised their children.

The surprisingly calm reporters were close enough to intercept police officers and national guardsmen running here and there who stopped to answer questions as they clicked tear gas cartridges into weapons and shouted for more guns and grenades. The announcers apologized several times to their listeners because they couldn’t control the expletives from those around them. They begged the public to avoid the area but, eager to see the spectacle for themselves, the crowd increased in size. 

Abuela, who was sixty-four, and Abuelo, seventy-five, listened in real time as their government tried to kill their son because he was willing to die for justice and independence for Puerto Rico. 

During my childhood, Vidal’s commitment to an independent Puerto Rico was anxiety-provoking to my relatives and it would be decades before I understood what had happened. He was born twelve years after the United States invaded our islands during the Spanish American War. Soon after, they changed Puerto Rico to Porto Rico to make it easier to pronounce and legislated English as the national language, among other laws. 

Governance was at the whim of the US President, who appointed cronies and businessmen with lofty titles that gave them power to plunder the islands. The First Amendment protections were ignored, and free speech was censored even after Congress legislated USA citizenship for Puerto Ricans in 1917. By then, the United States had major business investments and had built military bases in the big island of Puerto Rico and on Vieques and Culebra to the east. They feared an independent Puerto Rico would undermine the US military presence in the Caribbean basin and threaten the sea lanes toward the Panama Canal, built and, at the time, owned by the United States.

Nationalists and other patriots forced the US to rescind the language law, and Spanish was reinstated as Puerto Rico’s official language, but the resentment lingered. Under pressure, in 1946 President Truman appointed the first native born Puerto Rican to be Governor, and two years later, residents were allowed to vote for Governor. Luis Muñoz Marín became the face of the Partido Popular and promised if he were elected, Puerto Rico would become independent. 

In 1948, the first free elections in our four-hundred-and-fifty-year history allowed Puerto Ricans to choose who would govern us, and there was strong support for independence. Luis Muñoz Marín convinced potential voters his Popular Party was better prepared to lead the island without the threat of violence advocated by Nationalists. He soon betrayed that promise. Early in his administration, he passed a law making it illegal for Puerto Ricans to advocate independence, including singing patriotic songs, flying the Puerto Rican flag (banned when the US invaded), and printing, reading and holding materials critical of the United States’ presence and activities in the archipelago. 

The rhetoric from the Nationalist leadership became more incendiary in response to the stripping of civil liberties by governors and local officials loyal to the United States.

My uncle Vidal was radicalized by the inequities he experienced as a boy and adolescent. He was among the eldest sons of a large family of agricultural workers who didn’t own the land they made fruitful. Soon after the USAmerican invasion, their government and businesses bought and in other ways took control of fincas, plantations and haciendas that had supported the mostly rural population. They evicted thousands of campesinos, built fences and installed military bases. 

Vidal’s parents and ten siblings, their spouses and children, were forced from their homes to join the thousands trekking toward towns and cities, hoping to find work and a safe place to live. Vidal had been apprenticing as a barber when his family left the only home they’d known, where generations of our people had lived and raised families. He joined the Nationalists, and over the years, rose to President of the Municipal Board of Trustees and the party’s Treasurer. He also became the personal barber and adviser to don Pedro Albizu Campos, the movement’s leader. 

My father told me what he remembered about that time and how Vidal resisted. One of the stories was about how the FBI followed don Pedro everywhere. To throw them off, Vidal and don Pedro came up with a scheme. They had similar build, Vidal was a bit lighter skinned, but sported the same mustache that made him look more like don Pedro. Don Pedro visited his shop weekly for a shave and trim. After the appropriate time, he emerged wearing his fedora and suit. The FBI agents trailed him, usually back to his home in San Juan. A while after he left, another figure emerged from the barbershop dressed in similar fashion, his face shaded by his fedora. He was picked up in an unprepossessing sedan, and soon the real don Pedro would be delivering a fiery speech to his constituents in plazas and auditoriums while his doppelgänger, Vidal, hunkered down with their colleagues in don Pedro’s law office until dark, when he returned to his home. The FBI figured it out eventually, but don Pedro and Vidal were successful enough times for them to have a good laugh over their ruse. 

Nationalists had been jailed for talking publicly about independence but Vidal had never been arrested. Abuela said it was because he was protected by her fervent prayers. He suspected some of his clients were undercover agents but he treated everyone equally, his humanistic leanings in full blossom even when he knew what he said was being added to a file somewhere. 

Long before he was installed as the US-backed nominee for Governor, the Nationalists did not trust Muñoz Marín. He was born in San Juan but raised in Washington, DC, where his father was the commissioner representing Puerto Rico's interests in Congress but with no vote for or against legislation that would affect generations of his compatriotas. Muñoz Marín grew up bilingual and bicultural. Back in Puerto Rico, he stood in a rumpled guayabera at a road stand enjoying salt-encrusted tostones, and a few hours later wearing a light-colored suit, his hair brilliantined into a sheen, he hosted estadounidenses and wealthy Puerto Ricans in mansions spitting distance from El Fanguito, the notorious shantytown where we lived. His political party was the Populares, whose flag was white stamped with the bright red profile of a Puerto Rican jíbaro wearing the palm-leaf pava. My grandfather made and wore his, like many campesinos did, when working under the sun. Don Pedro railed against the Populares appropriating the symbol of agricultural workers. 

Muñoz Marín’s father was a poet who wrote many stanzas about the countryside and jíbaro life even though he only knew us from his porch while sipping a rum and smoking a cigar. But Puerto Ricans were easily impressed by images and slogans. The vast majority were illiterate or under-educated, and the red jíbaro with the pava spoke to many who’d never seen any indication the elite cared about them. You can still drive around Puerto Rico with the Populares’ flag waving in front of homes and businesses, even though, according to the Nationalists, don Luis was a vendepatria, and in fact, when elected, was instrumental in establishing the Estado Libre Asociado/Free Associated State. To date, we remain citizens of the United States, can be drafted into its wars but forbidden to vote for President if we live here. We can travel between Puerto Rico and the continent with no need of a passport, but all exports and imports from and to Puerto Rico must be shipped under the US flag with US merchant marines, the most expensive way to move products to and from our islands. Don Pedro was a Harvard-trained lawyer, soldiered in World War I, and when he returned to Puerto Rico, saw what most of us couldn’t see or were too dazzled by slogans and propaganda. The United States had no intention of willingly releasing Puerto Rico from its status as its territory won in a war. It is to this day the only colony in the American hemisphere. 

Don Pedro and the Nationalists understood what was going on. They claimed negotiations behind closed doors benefitted the United States and undermined the rights of the local population. Nationalists leaders determined independence was unlikely without revolution but they didn't have enough armaments or the strong organization needed to start one. They advised supporters not to vote in the elections because they believed it was rigged against them. In spite of their efforts, Muñoz Marín won the governorship and moved quickly to enact some of his popular promises, among them redistribution of land. Simultaneously, he was making deals with USAmericans that we wouldn't learn about for decades. Two years after his election, Muñoz Marín was campaigning for a referendum to further define the relationship between Puerto Rico and the US. The Nationalists warned that Muñoz Marín was willing to sell our nation to the United States. The proposed legislation didn't define our sovereignty, but bound us in the ambiguous Free Associated State, fancy words for “we agree to be a colony.”

Nationalists had had enough. They stockpiled arms for a series of coordinated attacks hoping to incite patriotic and revolutionary fervor among the people. Informers leaked the plans to the authorities. In response, the Nationalists moved up the date for what they hoped would be a revolution while they were still organizing. On October 30, 1950, five armed men exchanged fire with the police at the entrance to the governor’s residence and four were killed in the attempt. The government mobilized quickly to quell the planned insurrections. The United States deployed war planes and bombed towns suspected of harboring Nationalists, killing innocent civilians. 

On the early afternoon of Tuesday, October 31, the police stormed Vidal’s barber shop expecting a cadre of revolutionaries preparing for the next attack. Fifteen policemen and twenty-five National Guardsmen surrounded the building. An officer stormed into the marital bedroom and Vidal shot him. The officer and his partners ran, returning fire. Vidal closed the doors, pushed furniture against them to prevent reentry. For the next few minutes, a firefight could be heard throughout the neighborhood. The police crouched behind vehicles and other buildings, strafed the barbershop’s walls in response to the bullets whizzing from the narrow opening of a door left ajar. Newspaper reporters and photographers arrived on the scene, as well as mobile units from the main radio stations.  

Over the course of the broadcast, the connection to the public was lost several times because the microphone cords didn’t stretch far enough as the reporters crept toward the action. We learned later Vidal heard at least the beginning of the broadcast until his electricity was cut off. 

One of the announcers identified the Nationalist Vidal Santiago Díaz, barber, and gave the exact address, so there was no doubt about where the events were unfolding and who was involved. The shop was on a corner of a busy intersection with entrances on both sides of the roads. According to the authorities, there were an unknown number of armed men in the barbershop who’d already discharged revolvers. The police responded with machine guns. There was a lull in the shooting and a reporter speculated the rebels might have run out of ammunition. A police sergeant ordered onlookers to move away but the crowd grew bigger. Metal on metal clicked as the radio reporter described a police officer charging tear gas canisters. The sergeant told the shooter to aim through the door left ajar but there was some question whether the officer knew how to operate the equipment. Nevertheless, the reporter was impressed by the firepower available to the authorities. In the background, the commanding officer coordinated the assault, ordering grenades be thrown into the barbershop. 

He determined who’d go in once the tear gas was discharged. The sergeant in the background yelled at his men not to fire indiscriminately. A reporter indicated he spoke with the sergeant in charge who said he'd received orders to bomb the building. 

The microphone captured the action as grenades were thrown into the building through a skylight. The blasts rattled walls on homes blocks away. The sergeant exhorted the tear gas shooter to aim well and the first one went through the door and another through the opening where the skylight had been blown by the grenades. Snipers were stationed on the roofs of houses across the street. One yelled he had the perfect spot from which to shoot anyone who ran out. They threw more grenades and more tear gas exploded, followed by screams from inside the barbershop. The police demanded the rebels surrender but no one emerged. They rammed the doors. The authorities flooded inside and began to push and throw chairs, tables and other furnishings from the building onto the sidewalk. A display of threads from Maria’s dry goods shop in another room unspooled into the gutter. Vidal's barber chair clattered onto the pavement. Glass jars filled with blue liquid shattered just outside the doors, scattering combs and brushes. Several uniformed men ran out, but no rebels appeared. Flames flickered along the sides of the building where exploding grenades had caused a fire. Sirens howled, and firefighters rushed to the scene. The fire was soon contained and the police re-entered the barbershop and more of the charred remains of Vidal and Maria’s belongings were thrown onto the sidewalk. 

“You stand over there! You! To the side door!”

Then two shots rang. The radio announcer spoke the words no one in my family wanted to hear. “Sacaron un muerto de la barbería.” A dead man was taken from the barbershop. 

The sergeant ordered a cease fire so he could assess the situation. The reporter stopped a photographer who took pictures of the body and described him as literally riddled with bullets. He confirmed “el muerto es el barbero” and identified him as a Nationalist.

I was at Abuela’s house. I was a kid, and scared because the grown-ups were crying and gasping and holding on to each other. Every word I’ve written about this chapter in my family's life is tattooed in my consciousness. Remembering has caused me palpitations, has urged me to run away from these pages, has ingrained a deep-seated fear to look further into the events that altered the lives of my loved ones and scarred us all physically and emotionally.  

The drone from the radio, the neighbors pressing against each other so they could hear better, the murmurs, a rooster crowing down the street, a dog barking. Boom. Boom. “El muerto es el barbero.” Many voices sounded like one cry, and we children picked up on the adults' dismay and added our own cries without knowing why. I heard Mami, Abuela, Abuelo, tití Concha, tití Generosa, sobbing. Tío Cándido dropped his head into his hands and rocked back and forth. Tío Flor held up Abuelo who had fainted. Abuela was surrounded by every woman in her family and one of my cousins was waving a fan in her face and, nearby, the priest clicked his rosary beads.

Years later, Papi and my uncles told me what they remembered. I’ve come across newspaper reports and audio recordings. The police and National Guard found Vidal slumped in a corner of the building, bleeding from his torso, his head and left hand. They thought he was dead, but then realized he was mortally wounded. They thought to put him out of his misery, and an officer delivered the coup de grâce at close range into the middle of Vidal’s forehead. One man grabbed his legs and another his arms and they dragged him to the sidewalk, where they dropped him as the coroner's van wove its way through the crowd. The police and National Guard went in and out of what was left of the building, but found no other rebels inside. My uncle Vidal had been alone in his home business shaping a client’s hair. When the police surrounded them, the customer fled, but Vidal hunkered in his barber shop for three hours against the firepower on the sidewalks. 

The radio announcers reported Vidal was dead, but in the recordings there’s an audible gasp followed by an outcry. Then the crowd cheers. Everyone in Abuela’s house and yard leaned toward the radio again. 

“¡Está vivo!” Someone called. 

Vidal was alive.

He was taken to the hospital. My grandparents, his wife María, Papi and my uncles followed but weren’t allowed to see him because he was in surgery. The siege in Vidal’s barbershop was front page news. The next day, on November 1, 1950, Puerto Rican Nationalists attempted to assassinate President Truman who was then living in Blair House while the White House was under renovations. He was unharmed, but a police officer and one of the rebels were killed. The others were arrested. With so much anti-government violence from the Nationalists in Puerto Rico and in the United States, Vidal was considered an even greater threat and his family was forbidden from seeing him in the hospital. 

Once out of surgery, he was arrested and guarded by armed men. The family waited in the hospital through the night, but the authorities didn’t relent. María appealed to her minister, Reverend Rico Soltero. Unable to get anywhere with the government, he went to the press. Vidal was in mortal danger, he said, and should be permitted a spiritual advisor. The Attorney General allowed a short visit but Vidal was unconscious through it. The reverend prayed over him. Back in the lobby, he provided comfort to Vidal’s wife, his children, parents, and siblings. Vidal was in critical condition, Rico Soltero said, his head, torso and left hand wrapped in bandages but with their prayers, he'd pull through.

Some newspapers criticized Governor Muñoz Marín because he'd reportedly listened to the siege and when the police couldn't put a stop to the gunfight as quickly as he wished, gave the order to bomb the place. Most of Vidal’s injuries, including the loss of the index and middle fingers on his left hand, were caused by the grenades. The coup de grâce might have been a merciful act toward a man in excruciating pain, but in some quarters, a well-known Nationalist was better dead than alive. When Vidal survived and became a folk hero to many Puerto Ricans, Muñoz Marín figured out how to benefit from the events. 

Muñoz Marín sympathized with the majority of dispossessed Puerto Ricans. His political stance was as a man of the people. Unfortunately, he was also spineless when it came to challenging the United States government.

Papi accompanied his parents from one government office to another, trying to get permission to see Vidal. When they refused, Abuela went to the governor’s mansion and asked to appeal directly to Muñoz Marín. She was rebuffed, so she sat on the curb and waited. And waited. And waited. Strangers watched over her, gave her water. Her sons and daughters tried to convince her to go home. She refused, prayed her rosary. Waited. People brought her water, shaded her with their parasols. Her sons and daughter tried to convince her to return home, but she refused. She sat on the curb, praying her rosary, unyielding. 

Her priest knew Muñoz Marín personally and he and his staff suggested it didn’t look good for him to ignore Abuela, sitting on the curb in front of the official residence, praying, the people holding vigil with her asking where he’d placed his sense of compassion. He agreed to meet with her. 

Papi didn’t know when and where Abuela met with the Governor, and he wasn’t in the room. She was accompanied by Padre José. In her last few years, Abuela lived with Papi and they spent many hours chatting and recalling her experiences. 

“Mamá’s silence often spoke louder than words,” Papi said. “When she did talk, it was in a soft voice. She said she had to sit close to the Governor, otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to hear her.” She asked him to interfere with the authorities so that, if Vidal survived, he wouldn’t be sent to federal prison in the United States, where she’d never see him again. She reminded him that, the previous day, when the violence erupted, Vidal sent a telegram offering to be a mediator between the Nationalists and the government. As an advisor to don Pedro, Vidal might influence him to curb the violence. The response was an attack on his barbershop. 

Abuela told my father the Governor was condescending and kept shaking his head, but she was desperate to help her son. She told don Luis she was a midwife and curandera, and even though a devout Catholic, she attended and took care of women whose lifestyles were not sanctioned by the church or society. Jesus had been compassionate toward María Magdalena, she said, and she didn’t look down on women in that life. On the contrary, helping them in their need was part of her service as a good Catholic. The women trusted her because she didn’t judge them. Among them were the residents of a discrete brothel familiar to members of Muñoz Marín’s administration. She didn’t have to say that he, too, was a frequent visitor. 

“He turned jincho, paler than before,” she told Papi. “I mentioned a few women whose illegitimate babies I'd delivered. He knew who I was talking about and their fathers.” 

Abuela was under five-feet tall, descended from enslaved and indigenous cane workers, illiterate, ten years older than the Governor, unprepossessing and easily overlooked by the commanding and powerful. But she had a sense of her own power, and he was no dummy. 

A deal was struck. A photo op was organized in which my grandparents were photographed signing up to vote for Luis Muñoz Marín's upcoming constitutional referendum establishing the Free Associated State. 

In another photo, Abuela is on a cot as if she’d fainted, with doña Felisa Rincón de Gautier, the mayor of San Juan, sitting nearby, presumably offering comfort. In yet another, Muñoz Marín, hat in hand, stands over Abuelo, shaking his right hand while my grandfather wipes tears from his eyes with a handkerchief. Abuelo, who fifty-two years earlier had been mustered to defend Puerto Rico against the Yankee invaders, looks old and frail. 

In another image, Abuela sits alongside Vidal's hospital bed, Abuelo hunched behind her, my uncle, sedated and wrapped in bandages. They were allowed to see him the day after the photos were published. 

In an interview some months later, a reporter states that neither Abuelo or Abuela had any idea what they were signing their X for. Neither had ever voted in any election and he quoted Abuela saying the only reason she allowed the photos be taken was to benefit her son. 

When Vidal was well enough, he was transferred to prison, and received visits by Reverend Rico Soltero. At his urging, Vidal accepted Jesus as his savior. This created a rift with his Catholic mother who, according to Papi, was annoyed by Rico Soltero’s proselytizing and taking credit for Vidal's recovery in the name of a Protestant Jesus when the Catholic Jesus had protected him for a lifetime. His daughters remind me it’s the same Jesus.

Vidal spent two years in prison in Puerto Rico. Papi believed that at the time of the photo ops with Abuelo and Abuela, they’d been promised a pardon once Vidal went through the legal process. To his credit, Muñoz Marín fulfilled that promise and pardoned Vidal so long as he didn’t advocate non-democratic means to independence and was monitored by the local Parole board. Vidal recovered from his injuries, but even though the bullet in his head was removed, he was prone to seizures and agonizing migraines. He joined his brothers in their construction businesses until he altered the way he worked as a barber. His left thumb, ring and pinky fingers gripping his comb, he snipped errant hairs from customers with honed scissors in his right hand. 

As children we don’t know what history is even as every breath consigns us to it. By the time I was six years old, I knew I was Puerto Rican and lived on an island but I’d never seen the sea and had no concept of what being on an island meant. When I first saw a world map, I was astonished that Puerto Rico was an indistinct speck in the middle of a vast ocean. We were then living in Macún, a rural barrio in Toa Baja. My language was Spanish and Papi had told me there were people whose lips and tongues formed different shapes from ours, sounds I'd be unable to decipher because not everyone in the world spoke Spanish. I didn’t know that having been born in Puerto Rico in the middle of the twentieth century to dispossessed peasants struggling in the heaves of modernity meant I was making Puerto Rican history simply by being born in that time, that place, to those people.  

My first understanding of Puerto Rican history began the day Papi brought me to spend a few days with Abuela when I was about eight years old. After Papi left, tío Vidal stopped by. I might have met him before, but this is the encounter that hasn’t left me. His skin was lighter than Papi's but he smelled the same because they both slapped cologne on their cheeks and the backs of their necks. He wore crisp clothes, and his neat mustache framed a mischievous smile. His head was large for his body, somewhat misshaped. The index and middle fingers on his left hand were stubs. He kissed my cheek before sitting next to me on the sofa. I couldn’t keep my eyes from the bruise on his forehead. While Abuela prepared hot chocolate, tío Vidal leaned closer so I could get a good look at his brow. There was a hole surrounded by a purple scar. 

“Did you fall?”

“I had it done so I can scratch my brain.” I giggled and he grimaced. “Oof! It’s itchy now.” He pressed his thumb into the scar. “But my finger is too fat. Can you do it?”

“No!” 

“Please. It’s very itchy.”

“Stop teasing the girl,” Abuela called from the kitchen.  

Vidal made a sad face that made me curious. I poked my index finger into the scar.

“Gently,” he said. 

It was soft and warm, like when I stuck my finger in my belly button. I wiggled my tip around it. 

“Ouch!” He pulled his head back. I burst into tears. 

Abuela ran in and took me into her arms. “You’ve frightened her,” she scolded. 

“It was a joke. You didn’t really hurt me. I was just playing.” He smiled, looked contrite. “Come on, don’t cry.” He reached his arms out for a hug which I accepted. 

It became our little joke. For a couple of years, whenever I saw him, he said his brain was itchy and let me put my finger inside the hole in his head and wiggle it around. But once I learned what had really happened, it was no longer funny.

Esmeralda Santiago: Memoirist, essayist, novelist. Her most recent novel is LAS MADRES.

Editor’s Note: For more of Esmeralda Santiago’s writings, subscribe to her Substack. Julio Ricardo Varela edited and published this edition of The Latino Newsletter.