Abstract In 1970, a Puerto Rican woman named Juanita Serrano was elected to serve as a chair of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) after spending numerous years organizing poor women in Cleveland, Ohio. In this role Serrano joined welfare rights organizers from across the country as they protested the social, economic, and political conditions faced by poor people. This article provides a history of Puerto Rican women's contributions to welfare rights organizing in the United States. It argues that Puerto Rican women activists within the welfare rights movement articulated a vision of collective care that insisted that working-class people should have control over social welfare institutions and that welfare recipients should dictate the forms that care took in their communities. Their vision also addressed Puerto Ricans’ experience as colonial citizens, migrants, Spanish speakers, and people of color. The article examines how demands for collective care were advanced both in organizing to improve social welfare programs in the United States and Puerto Rico, and in leftist political mobilizations that contested capitalism and colonialism. Thus, one of the particularities of Puerto Rican welfare rights activism was that it was often closely linked to broader struggles for colonial migrants’ rights and for the decolonization of Puerto Rico.
