[1] It made national headlines in Puerto Rico during a number of raids in the early 1980s, including one in which a policeman was shot to his death.
They established their community on government land in November 1980 but it was razed by police on May 18, 1982, amid violent clashes where a policeman was shot and killed.
[2][3] Historian and writer Ana Juarbe writes in an article titled "Imposing the Past on the Present: History, the Public, and the Columbus Quincentenary" [4] about the photographs of Villa Sin Miedo in Jack Delano's exhibition that "despite US citizenship, Puerto Rican national sentiment is convincingly expressed by land rescuers from a community known as "Villa Sin Miedo".
The caption on the first photograph reads "1982 - Villa Sin Miedo, an illegal community of homeless squatters, near Carolina; a few days after this picture was taken the people were ejected by the police and the houses burned."
They are arranged around a central dirt road that appears from the left side of the image and unfolds up towards a hill that reaches the horizon and meets a distant mountain scape.