What can lead to national sovereignty?
The opening session of the conference Friday afternoon featured a presentation by Juan Mari Bras on the history of Puerto Rico’s fight for independence. Some 50 people, most of them Puerto Rican youth, attended. Mari Bras has been a leader of the independence movement in Puerto Rico for four decades, and is currently a professor of law at the Eugenio Mara de Hostos School of Law in Puerto Rico. A panel discussion on “The Origins and the Development of Resistance” to imperialism drew 150 people that evening. Three professors – David Roediger, chair of the American Studies Department, University of Minnesota; Denis Valds, associate professor of Chicano Studies, University of Minnesota; and Gary Prevost, professor of Political Science, St. John’s University -initiated a discussion that turned into a lively exchange of views among the panelists and audience on whether or not a socialist revolution is necessary to defeat imperialism. Valds expressed the view that there are many historical e
