In 1898, at the end of the Spanish-American War, Spain surrendered its colony of Puerto Rico to the United States. The United States installed a new territorial government, shored up the police, and, while making Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens in 1917, cracked down hard on a rising independence movement. Fifty years after the conquest, the Puerto Rican flag was banned, and a network of police informants kept a careful watch on anyone thought to harbor thoughts of a free Puerto Rican nation.

In 1950, small episodes of armed revolt broke out on the island. The U.S. Air Force bombed one rebel holdout, the mountain town of Jayuya. At almost exactly the same time, two Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to assassinate President Harry Truman in Washington, killing a police officer. Two years later Puerto Rico was declared a commonwealth with a nonvoting member in Congress. The independence movement continued to simmer, and in 1954 a nationalist leader named Lolita Lebrón and three others opened fire inside the Capitol, wounding five legislators.

Ask the proverbial person on the street about these events, even in Puerto Rico, and you’ll likely be met with a blank look. That’s where John Vasquez Mejias’ new book, The Puerto Rican War: A Graphic History (Union Square & Co., May 4) comes in, blending solid history with striking woodcuts that tell the story of that struggle for independence.

Vasquez Mejias, 51, is the son of Puerto Rican immigrants who moved to New York’s Spanish Harlem in the 1950s, “but as [my parents] had kids they whisked us off to Long Island,” he explains. Determined to be an artist from a young age, he studied studio art in college, then earned a master’s degree in education and became an art teacher in the New York City public schools. “One day this woman came to the school and said, ‘I can get you a job right now, but it will be more like missionary work with a lot of Dominican kids and Puerto Rican kids.’ I and one other person raised our hands: ‘Sign us up!’”

Vasquez Mejias, who now makes his home in the Bronx, pursued other passions while teaching. One was singing in a punk rock band, which he still does—“I’m really just sort of yelling melodically”—and the other was studying Caribbean history and working on his book.

Asked why the events he describes in The Puerto Rican War are so little known, he offers a blunt reply: “The broadest thing to say is that nobody cares. Who knows why some things get picked up in history and some things don’t? When I was in high school, I had a teacher who was Irish, and I learned a lot about Irish history. But I kept thinking, are you going to mention Puerto Rico even once? And he didn’t. But then I was invited to do a show at a gallery in Puerto Rico, and the owner, who was about my age, didn’t know anything about it either. When he was in school, it wasn’t part of the curriculum.”

That Vasquez Mejias did come to know the story was thanks to his parents, “who are very proud Puerto Ricans and would tell me about culture and history at home.” His father, a veteran of the U.S. Marines, was particularly incensed by the fact that the Puerto Rican flag had been outlawed for so long, and he wasn’t shy about making his feelings known. “I’d been making comics about being an art teacher for a while by then,” he says. “But I said about everything I had to say, so I started thinking about what else I wanted to do. Well, here’s this thing that’s been on my mind and my family’s mind for all this time, and I thought I’d tell that story. That really put the fire under me.”

Vasquez Mejias returned to his student days, reviving an interest in printmaking and painstakingly carving wood blocks. “I was teaching full time all day, and then I’d come home, eat dinner, and work until I was exhausted. Although I got better and faster as I worked, it still took me six years to make the book. If people see me carving, they’ll comment on how fast I am, in fact, and I tell them, ‘Yeah, but it took me 20 years to get this fast.’ Of course, I look at my daughter, who makes art with her iPad, and it makes me feel like an antique.”

With echoes of Picasso, Diego Rivera, the German expressionists, and other modernist masters—plus a nod, Vasquez Mejias hastens to add, to Jack Kirby of Marvel Comics fame—and printed with dense black and gray inks, The Puerto Rican War sat unpublished for a bit after completion. Then he self-published it, with a newspaper printer in Queens running off 1,000 copies. “Thanks to a website and social media, it really took off,” he says. “People loved it. So I got a grant and printed 2,000 more. By word of mouth and the internet, social media, it just started taking off more and more. Then one day I got an order from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and they put the book in a show, and it took off even more.”

The original edition of The Puerto Rican War now resides in the museum’s permanent collection. Meanwhile, a friend with whom he had drawn comics long before, Jay Sacher, had signed on as a senior editor at Union Square and acquired the book for trade publication in a handsome hardcover edition. “As soon as it came out,” Vasquez Mejias reports with a laugh, “my dad said, ‘Yep, now it’s going to get banned.’”

Vasquez Mejias is now looking more closely at the life of Lolita Lebrón, the revolutionary leader who was radicalized after the U.S. governor of Puerto Rico ordered the police to shoot into a crowd of unarmed demonstrators in 1937. (The governor was removed from office but not otherwise punished.) “You know, they were just going to unfurl the Puerto Rican flag and fire their pistols in the air, but one guy got carried away and wounded five congressmen,” he says of the 1954 attack on the Capitol. “Lebrón was a seamstress, like my mom and my aunts who came to New York at about the same time. They were expecting to be killed, but they were taken alive and were sentenced to life in prison, although President Carter released them in the late ’70s.”

Meanwhile, quietly, a Puerto Rican independence movement endures, occasionally making the news, as when Congress resolved in 2022 to allow a referendum considering the question of national sovereignty. “Some people want statehood, some people want things to stay as they are,” Vasquez Mejias says. “Since I’m who I am, I talk mostly with the people who are interested in independence. I’m a little baffled that the whole island isn’t for independence, but I don’t know. I’m baffled by a lot of things in politics.”

Gregory McNamee is a contributing writer.