🇵🇷 Puerto Rican & Black History 101 🇺🇸 Puerto Ricans played a significant role during the infamous prison uprising that took place at the Attica State Correctional Facility in 1971. They were on both sides of the conflict. Puerto Ricans made up nine percent of the inmate population at Attica. In addition, several members of the observer committee sent to the prison during the four-day standoff were Puerto Rican. This presence is embedded throughout historian Heather Ann Thompson’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Attica Prison Uprising, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 And Its Legacy. In the opening chapters, for example, Thomspon outlines the shared struggle of Puerto Rican and African-American inmates at the prison, who, in addition to the deplorable conditions for all inmates, faced even harsher treatment. A majority of the more difficult, lower paying and menial jobs were assigned to African-American and Puerto Rican inmates, which, in turn, made prison life more difficult (less funds, more strenuous, etc.). Puerto Ricans and African-Americans were also subject to more stringent regulations when it came to family visitations. In some cases, however, the abuses, while shared among African-Americans and Puerto Ricans, were relative to each group. Mail censorship, for example, was much stricter for African-American and Puerto Rican inmates; yet for Puerto Rican inmates, the letters they received were simply discarded because they were written in Spanish—rather than the harsh scrutiny given to the letters received by black inmates. The language barrier led to other abuses, most visibily in the form of neglect when it came to medical attention. Thompson recounts the experience of Angel Martinez, a young Puerto Rican prisoner who neither spoke, nor understood English. He was sent to Attica after becoming addicted to heroin, which he had begun using in an attempt to relieve the pain caused by his polio. Thomson notes that the two doctors on staff, Dr. Selden T. Williams and Dr. Paul G. Sternberg, were “particularly unresponsive to the medical needs of Attica’s Puerto Rican population.” Inmates like Martinez were unable to a