I first encountered the story of Ruth Mary Reynolds in 2012 while attending a meeting of the Puerto Rican Studies Association. There I met Noelle Ghoussaini, a playwright and distant relative of Reynolds, who was there to discuss her recent play about her. Standing in line to grab lunch, we got to chatting, and she introduced me to Reynolds’s extraordinary life. At the time I was a graduate student and just starting serious study of Puerto Rican nationalism. Ruth Reynolds, a white pacifist from North Dakota, was a part of a devoted group of activists that joined the civil rights movement and sought an end to British empire. After connecting with independence-minded Puerto Ricans in Harlem, New York, she then committed her activism to the cause of the colony’s liberation for the remainder of her life. In the early 1950s, she served several years in prison for her work with the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. How had I never heard of Reynolds before this moment?

Later, while researching my own family connections to Puerto Rican nationalism, I once again came face to face with Reynolds when I discovered that, during her incarceration in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, she shared a prison cell with my great-aunt, Monserrate del Valle. Reynolds, who played a key role in my great-aunt’s survival during that dismal time, spoke about her and the other nationalist women incarcerated alongside them in an oral history she gave to the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. How had this white woman from a small-town in the mid-West gotten tangled up with the liberation of Puerto Rico? And how did she come to be in the same jail cell as my great-aunt, a working-class Puerto Rican woman who I had heard about my entire life?

With so many questions about Reynolds and her unique life, I could not have been more excited to learn that Lisa G. Materson was working on a comprehensive biography about Reynolds. In Radical Solidarity: Ruth Reynolds, Political Allyship, and the Battle for Puerto Rico’s Independence, Materson has given us a masterful and beautiful account of the complicated and steadfast activist from her early years in the Black Hills of North Dakota to her time in Puerto Rico fighting for its independence to her years of activism before the United Nations and on behalf of Puerto Rican political prisoners. The author has carefully and lovingly excavated the limited and well-trod archives of Puerto Rican nationalism, which includes government surveillance records, newspaper accounts, some previously published oral histories, and court transcripts. However, beyond the official sources, Materson also worked with Reynold’s surviving family members and their family archives to tell a more complete and more nuanced story of their relative. She conducted oral histories with several nationalist women, and she excavated related religious and political archives and other fonts not only to weave together the history of Reynolds’s life and involvement in the nationalist movement but also to fill in a critical historical moment in US and global history.

Significantly, Radical Solidarity also contributes to a small but growing body of scholarship that is concerned with the lives of the women of the nationalist movement. For too long, the story of Puerto Rican nationalism has focused on the men, and in particular, the charismatic leader of the Nationalist Party, Pedro Albizu Campus. And while that work has been important in building the historiography of Puerto Rican nationalism, it has elided the important role that women played in the movement. In recent years, we have seen a slow trickle of articles and chapters focused on the role of women nationalists in Puerto Rico’s struggle for independence. Importantly, historian Olga Jiménez de Waggenheim’s Nationalist Heroines: Puerto Rican Women History Forgot, 1930s–1950s (2017) offered a series of short biographical sketches of Puerto Rican women involved in the nationalist struggle. However, Materson’s biography of Ruth Reynolds, following the activist’s life from her earliest years to her death in 1989, is the first monograph to focus on the life of one of the movements important female participants, one who was involved at the top levels of the Nationalist Party and whose later years continued to be devoted to the struggle for Puerto Rico’s liberation, even after the Nationalist Party had dissolved and its leader had died. This contribution is poised to usher in a new moment of interest in the history of women in the movement, the critical work they did, and the sacrifices they made to further that work.

Materson’s examination of Reynolds’s life could not have come at a more opportune moment. Through Reynolds’s story we are granted an exemplar of a life of conviction, of activism, and of solidarity. Reynolds’s political praxis, what Materson calls “radical solidarity,” allowed her to occupy and reconcile the often-fraught tensions of her position as a committed pacifist who also supported Puerto Rican independence and the work of the Nationalist Party. In her practice of radical solidarity, she “insisted that North American allies, like herself could pick their protest tools against US colonialism, but they should not tell Puerto Ricans what tools to use in their struggle for national sovereignty.” (11) Materson, in her thorough retelling of Reynolds’s story, offers the reader a portrait of a complicated life, one that was not devoted to material wealth or personal gain but to her ideals and her steadfast belief in social justice and equality.