Puerto Rican Chicago
Puerto Rican Chicago

Author: Mirelsie Velazquez

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2022-02-01

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 0252053206

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The postwar migration of Puerto Rican men and women to Chicago brought thousands of their children into city schools. These children's classroom experience continued the colonial project begun in their homeland, where American ideologies had dominated Puerto Rican education since the island became a US territory. Mirelsie Velázquez tells how Chicago's Puerto Ricans pursued their educational needs in a society that constantly reminded them of their status as second-class citizens. Communities organized a media culture that addressed their concerns while creating and affirming Puerto Rican identities. Education also offered women the only venue to exercise power, and they parlayed their positions to take lead roles in activist and political circles. In time, a politicized Puerto Rican community gave voice to a previously silenced group--and highlighted that colonialism does not end when immigrants live among their colonizers. A perceptive look at big-city community building, Puerto Rican Chicago reveals the links between justice in education and a people's claim to space in their new home.

Brown in the Windy City
Brown in the Windy City

Author: Lilia Fernández

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-07-21

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 022621284X

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Brown in the Windy City is the first history to examine the migration and settlement of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in postwar Chicago. Lilia Fernández reveals how the two populations arrived in Chicago in the midst of tremendous social and economic change and, in spite of declining industrial employment and massive urban renewal projects, managed to carve out a geographic and racial place in one of America’s great cities. Through their experiences in the city’s central neighborhoods over the course of these three decades, Fernández demonstrates how Mexicans and Puerto Ricans collectively articulated a distinct racial position in Chicago, one that was flexible and fluid, neither black nor white.

Puerto Rican Chicago
Puerto Rican Chicago

Author: Wilfredo Cruz

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2005-02-02

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 1439631549

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Puerto Ricans have a long history in Chicago. Beginning in the 1920s, a handful of middle-class Puerto Rican families sent their daughters and sons to study at prestigious universities in the city. While most returned to Puerto Rico, migration to Chicago peaked during the 1950s and 1960s. Enticed by the prospect of a better life for their families and future generations, thousands of Puerto Ricans came to Chicago in search of a brighter tomorrow. They came to Chicago as American citizens, yet still faced rampant discrimination and prejudice. In 1950, there were only 255 Puerto Ricans in Chicago; today, there are over 113,000. Chicago is home to a thriving Puerto Rican community, and its members continue to make important contributions to the political, educational, social, and cultural institutions of Chicago.

A Grounded Identidad
A Grounded Identidad

Author: Merida M. Rua

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0190257806

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This interdisciplinary study--the first book-length study of Chicago's Puerto Rican community rooted not simply in contemporary ethnographic source material but also in extensive historical research--shows the varied ways Puerto Ricans came to understand their identities and rights within and beyond the city they made home.

Puerto Rican Citizen
Puerto Rican Citizen

Author: Lorrin Thomas

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-06-15

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0226796108

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By the end of the 1920s, just ten years after the Jones Act first made them full-fledged Americans, more than 45,000 native Puerto Ricans had left their homes and entered the United States, citizenship papers in hand, forming one of New York City’s most complex and distinctive migrant communities. In Puerto Rican Citizen, Lorrin Thomas for the first time unravels the many tensions—historical, racial, political, and economic—that defined the experience of this group of American citizens before and after World War II. Building its incisive narrative from a wide range of archival sources, interviews, and first-person accounts of Puerto Rican life in New York, this book illuminates the rich history of a group that is still largely invisible to many scholars. At the center of Puerto Rican Citizen are Puerto Ricans’ own formulations about political identity, the responses of activists and ordinary migrants to the failed promises of American citizenship, and their expectations of how the American state should address those failures. Complicating our understanding of the discontents of modern liberalism, of race relations beyond black and white, and of the diverse conceptions of rights and identity in American life, Thomas’s book transforms the way we understand this community’s integral role in shaping our sense of citizenship in twentieth-century America.

Defending Their Own in the Cold
Defending Their Own in the Cold

Author: Marc Zimmerman

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2011-09-15

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0252093496

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Defending Their Own in the Cold: The Cultural Turns of U.S. Puerto Ricans explores U.S. Puerto Rican culture in past and recent contexts. The book presents East Coast, Midwest, and Chicago cultural production while exploring Puerto Rican musical, film, artistic, and literary performance. Working within the theoretical frame of cultural, postcolonial, and diasporic studies, Marc Zimmerman relates the experience of Puerto Ricans to that of Chicanos and Cuban Americans, showing how even supposedly mainstream U.S. Puerto Ricans participate in a performative culture that embodies elements of possible cultural "Ricanstruction." Defending Their Own in the Cold examines various dimensions of U.S. Puerto Rican artistic life, including relations with other ethnic groups and resistance to colonialism and cultural assimilation. To illustrate how Puerto Ricans have survived and created new identities and relations out of their colonized and diasporic circumstances, Zimmerman looks at the cultural examples of Latino entertainment stars such as Jennifer Lopez and Benicio del Toro, visual artists Juan Sánchez, Ramón Flores, and Elizam Escobar, as well as Nuyorican dancer turned Midwest poet Carmen Pursifull. The book includes a comprehensive chapter on the development of U.S. Puerto Rican literature and a pioneering essay on Chicago Puerto Rican writing. A final essay considers Cuban cultural attitudes towards Puerto Ricans in a testimonial narrative by Miguel Barnet and reaches conclusions about the past and future of U.S. Puerto Rican culture. Zimmerman offers his own "semi-outsider" point of reference as a Jewish American Latin Americanist who grew up near New York City, matured in California, went on to work with and teach Latinos in the Midwest, and eventually married a woman from a Puerto Rican family with island and U.S. roots.

The Battle of Lincoln Park
The Battle of Lincoln Park

Author: Daniel Kay Hertz

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2018-10-16

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13: 1948742101

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"A brief, cogent analysis of gentrification in Chicago ... an incisive and useful narrative on the puzzle of urban development."-- Kirkus Reviews In the years after World War II, a movement began to bring the m

The Near Northwest Side Story
The Near Northwest Side Story

Author: Gina Perez

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004-10-04

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0520233689

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"An original and significant contribution to Puerto Rican, Latino, and Latin American studies, drawing on the perspective of ordinary men and women. Gina Pérez's fine work is based on intensive research in two distant but interconnected places, conducted by a perceptive and sensitive observer-participant, herself immersed in two languages, cultures, and nations. Clearly written and cogently argued, her book will be of great interest to students of migration, ethnicity, and gender."—Jorge Duany, author of The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States "In this fresh, textured, original, multi-sited ethnography, Pérez traces the changing ways that Puerto Ricans have experienced poverty, displacement, and discrimination, and how they imagine and build deeply rooted but transnational lives through the extended families, dense social networks, and meaningful communities. Pérez exposes the limits of citizenship for racialized minorities; the contradictory, constrained agency in community mobilizations and urban uprisings; and the often-failed promise of transnational migration as a place to build a counter-hegemonic political space."—Brett Williams, Professor of Anthropology, American University "This is a fascinating account of transnational migration as survival strategy, one bound up in kin, region, and economic restructuring."—Vicki L. Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows

The Taste of Sugar
The Taste of Sugar

Author: Marisel Vera

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2021-07-06

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1631499041

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It is 1898, and groups of starving Puerto Ricans, los hambrientos, roam the parched countryside and dusty towns begging for food. Under the yoke of Spanish oppression, the Caribbean island is forced to prepare to wage war with the United States. Up in the mountainous coffee region of Utuado, Vicente Vega and Valentina Sanchez labor to keep their small farm from the creditors. When the Spanish-American War and the great San Ciriaco Hurricane of 1899 bring devastating upheaval, the young couple is lured, along with thousands of other puertorriquenos, to the sugar plantations of Hawaii—another US territory—where they are confronted by the hollowness of America’s promises of prosperity. Writing in the tradition of great Latin American storytelling, Marisel Vera’s The Taste of Sugar is an unforgettable novel of love and endurance, and a timeless portrait of the reasons we leave home.