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 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.
With the homeland of Puerto Rico strongly evoked as background, the entire immigration and adaptation process of Puerto Ricans in this country since the early 1900s takes shape in a thoughtful analysis. This is essential reading for understanding an important American (im)migrant group and the development of our urban culture as well.
Though now a significant ethnic group in the US, Puerto Ricans are rarely studied - and often misunderstood. Edna Acosta-Belen and Carlos Santiago change this status quo, presenting a nuanced portrait of both the community today and the trajectory of its development. The authors move deftly from Puerto Rico's colonial experience, through a series of waves of migration, to the emergence of the commuter patterns seen today. Not least, they draw on extensive data to dispel widespread myths and stereotypes. Their work is a long overdue corrective to conventional wisdom about the role of the Puerto Rican community within US society.
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.
Provides information on the history of Puerto Rico and on the customs, language, religion, and experiences of Puerto Ricans living within the United States.
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.
This book examines the contexts into which Puerto Rican immigrants to the United States stepped, and the results of their interaction within those contexts. It focuses mainly on New York City, essentially a social history of the post-World War II Puerto Rican community.
