Puerto Ricans in the United States


Book Description

Edna Acosta-Belén and Carlos Santiago trace the trajectory of the Puerto Rican experience from the early colonial period, through a series of waves of migration to the US, to current cultural legacies and political and social challenges. Their work is an indispensable resource for anyone seeking to understand the history, contributions, and contemporary realities of the ever-growing Puerto Rican diaspora.




Puerto Ricans in the United States


Book Description

Puerto Ricans in the United States begins by presenting Puerto Rico—the land, the people, and the culture. The island's invasion by U.S. forces in 1898 set the stage for our intertwined relationship to the present day. Pérez y González brings to life important historical events leading to immigration to the United States, particularly to the large northeastern cities, such as New York. The narrative highlights Puerto Ricans' adjustment and adaptation in this country through the media, institutions, language, and culture. A wealth of information is given on socioeconomic status, including demographics, employment, education opportunities, and poverty and public assistance. The discussions on the struggles of this group for affordable housing, issues of women and children, particular obstacles to obtaining appropriate health care, including the epidemic of AIDS, and race relations are especially insightful. The final chapter on Puerto Ricans' impact on U.S. society highlights their positive contributions in a wide range of fields.




Seams of Empire


Book Description

“A truly excellent contribution that unearths new and largely unknown evidence about relationships between Puerto Ricans and African-Americans and white Americans in the continental United States and Puerto Rico. Alamo-Pastrana revises how race is to be studied and understood across national, cultural, colonial, and hierarchical cultural relations.”—Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores, author of Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States and its history of intermixture of native, African, and Spanish inhabitants has prompted inconsistent narratives about race and power in the colonial territory. Departing from these accounts, early twentieth-century writers, journalists, and activists scrutinized both Puerto Rico’s and the United States’s institutionalized racism and colonialism in an attempt to spur reform, leaving an archive of oft-overlooked political writings. In Seams of Empire, Carlos Alamo-Pastrana uses racial imbrication as a framework for reading this archive of little-known Puerto Rican, African American, and white American radicals and progressives, both on the island and the continental United States. By addressing the concealed power relations responsible for national, gendered, and class differences, this method of textual analysis reveals key symbolic and material connections between marginalized groups in both national spaces and traces the complexity of race, racism, and conflict on the edges of empire.




Borderline Citizens


Book Description

Borderline Citizens explores the intersection of U.S. colonial power and Puerto Rican migration. Robert C. McGreevey examines a series of confrontations in the early decades of the twentieth century between colonial migrants seeking work and citizenship in the metropole and various groups—employers, colonial officials, court officers, and labor leaders—policing the borders of the U.S. economy and polity. Borderline Citizens deftly shows the dynamic and contested meaning of American citizenship. At a time when colonial officials sought to limit citizenship through the definition of Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory, Puerto Ricans tested the boundaries of colonial law when they migrated to California, Arizona, New York, and other states on the mainland. The conflicts and legal challenges created when Puerto Ricans migrated to the U.S. mainland thus serve, McGreevey argues, as essential, if overlooked, evidence crucial to understanding U.S. empire and citizenship. McGreevey demonstrates the value of an imperial approach to the history of migration. Drawing attention to the legal claims migrants made on the mainland, he highlights the agency of Puerto Rican migrants and the efficacy of their efforts to find an economic, political, and legal home in the United States. At the same time, Borderline Citizens demonstrates how colonial institutions shaped migration streams through a series of changing colonial legal categories that tracked alongside corporate and government demands for labor mobility. McGreevey describes a history shaped as much by the force of U.S. power overseas as by the claims of colonial migrants within the United States.




Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire


Book Description

Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire is the first in-depth look at the experiences of Puerto Rican migrant workers in continental U.S. agriculture in the twentieth century. The Farm Labor Program, established by the government of Puerto Rico in 1947, placed hundreds of thousands of migrant workers on U.S. farms and fostered the emergence of many stateside Puerto Rican communities. Ismael García-Colón investigates the origins and development of this program and uncovers the unique challenges faced by its participants. A labor history and an ethnography, Colonial Migrants evokes the violence, fieldwork, food, lodging, surveillance, and coercion that these workers experienced on farms and conveys their hopes and struggles to overcome poverty. Island farmworkers encountered a unique form of prejudice and racism arising from their dual status as both U.S. citizens and as “foreign others,” and their experiences were further shaped by evolving immigration policies. Despite these challenges, many Puerto Rican farmworkers ultimately chose to settle in rural U.S. communities, contributing to the production of food and the Latinization of the U.S. farm labor force.




Fantasy Island


Book Description

A crucial, clear-eyed accounting of Puerto Rico's 122 years as a colony of the US. Since its acquisition by the US in 1898, Puerto Rico has served as a testing ground for the most aggressive and exploitative US economic, political, and social policies. The devastation that ensued finally grew impossible to ignore in 2017, in the wake of Hurricane María, as the physical destruction compounded the infrastructure collapse and trauma inflicted by the debt crisis. In Fantasy Island, Ed Morales traces how, over the years, Puerto Rico has served as a colonial satellite, a Cold War Caribbean showcase, a dumping ground for US manufactured goods, and a corporate tax shelter. He also shows how it has become a blank canvas for mercenary experiments in disaster capitalism on the frontlines of climate change, hamstrung by internal political corruption and the US federal government's prioritization of outside financial interests. Taking readers from San Juan to New York City and back to his family's home in the Luquillo Mountains, Morales shows us the machinations of financial and political interests in both the US and Puerto Rico, and the resistance efforts of Puerto Rican artists and activists. Through it all, he emphasizes that the only way to stop Puerto Rico from being bled is to let Puerto Ricans take control of their own destiny, going beyond the statehood-commonwealth-independence debate to complete decolonization.




War Against All Puerto Ricans


Book Description

The powerful, untold story of the 1950 revolution in Puerto Rico and the long history of U.S. intervention on the island, that the New York Times says "could not be more timely." In 1950, after over fifty years of military occupation and colonial rule, the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico staged an unsuccessful armed insurrection against the United States. Violence swept through the island: assassins were sent to kill President Harry Truman, gunfights roared in eight towns, police stations and post offices were burned down. In order to suppress this uprising, the US Army deployed thousands of troops and bombarded two towns, marking the first time in history that the US government bombed its own citizens. Nelson A. Denis tells this powerful story through the controversial life of Pedro Albizu Campos, who served as the president of the Nationalist Party. A lawyer, chemical engineer, and the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard Law School, Albizu Campos was imprisoned for twenty-five years and died under mysterious circumstances. By tracing his life and death, Denis shows how the journey of Albizu Campos is part of a larger story of Puerto Rico and US colonialism. Through oral histories, personal interviews, eyewitness accounts, congressional testimony, and recently declassified FBI files, War Against All Puerto Ricans tells the story of a forgotten revolution and its context in Puerto Rico's history, from the US invasion in 1898 to the modern-day struggle for self-determination. Denis provides an unflinching account of the gunfights, prison riots, political intrigue, FBI and CIA covert activity, and mass hysteria that accompanied this tumultuous period in Puerto Rican history.




Boricua Power


Book Description

Jos Snchez offers a fresh new way of thinking about Puerto Rican politics. Guided by a dynamic and suggestive concept of political power, the author navigates his way deftly through the thickets of volatile debates and controversy in tracking a century-long history of radical class and ethnic speaking-truth-to-power in the Latino vein. Taking us back to the cigar worker strikes before the 1920s, the story of Boricua Power goes on to probe the political scene in the post-World War II era, and then sheds new light on the Young Lords Party and the exciting political watershed of the Sixties and Seventies in New York City. To sidestep the pitfalls of blame-the-victim pathologizing on the one hand, and wishful triumphalism on the other, Snchezs metaphor of the play of power as dance is fun, convincing, and thoroughly apropos.--Juan Flores, author of From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity"A well-written, historically informed, and original treatment of the Puerto Rican cultural and ethno-class struggle in America. Boricua Power is scholarly yet heartfelt and recommended to anyone interested in ethnicity and social power."--Michael Parenti, author of The Culture StruggleWhere does power come from? Why does it sometimes disappear? How do groups, like the Puerto Rican community, become impoverished, lose social influence, and become marginal to the rest of society? How do they turn things around, increase their wealth, and become better able to successfully influence and defend themselves?Boricua Power explains the creation and loss of power as a product of human efforts to enter, keep or end relationships with others in an attempt to satisfy passions and interests, using a theoretical and historical case study of one community--Puerto Ricans in the United Sta




Sponsored Migration


Book Description

In Sponsored Migration: The State and Puerto Rican Postwar Migration to the United States, Edgardo Meléndez provides the first comprehensive study of the role played by the Puerto Rican government in the promotion of migration and the incorporation of Puerto Ricans into the United States in the late 1940s, and the effects of this intervention on the political and economic development of Puerto Rico.




The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move


Book Description

Puerto Ricans maintain a vibrant identity that bridges two very different places--the island of Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland. Whether they live on the island, in the States, or divide time between the two, most imagine Puerto Rico as a separate nation and view themselves primarily as Puerto Rican. At the same time, Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917, and Puerto Rico has been a U.S. commonwealth since 1952. Jorge Duany uses previously untapped primary sources to bring new insights to questions of Puerto Rican identity, nationalism, and migration. Drawing a distinction between political and cultural nationalism, Duany argues that the Puerto Rican "nation" must be understood as a new kind of translocal entity with deep cultural continuities. He documents a strong sharing of culture between island and mainland, with diasporic communities tightly linked to island life by a steady circular migration. Duany explores the Puerto Rican sense of nationhood by looking at cultural representations produced by Puerto Ricans and considering how others--American anthropologists, photographers, and museum curators, for example--have represented the nation. His sources of information include ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, interviews, surveys, censuses, newspaper articles, personal documents, and literary texts.