Nationalist Heroines: Puerto Rican Women History Forgot, by Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim

A review of Nationalist Heroines by Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim. Nationalist Heroines is a collection of biographical profiles of 16 women jailed in Puerto Rico and/or the United States for membership in, or actions on behalf of, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PN), and one other female PN supporter. With the goal of “rescu[ing] their names and deeds from … historical amnesia” (p. 13), Olga Jiménez has pieced together evidence from interviews, testimonies, and memoirs, from government, police, FBI, and prison files, and from newspapers in order to sketch the youth, family background, and education of each woman, detail her political activism and painful experiences with territorial and federal legal and prison systems, and document her postprison life. [From the Author]