Puerto Rico, a Unique Culture: History, People and Traditions is a delightful and enjoyable must-buy book about this Caribbean island, written from the viewpoint of Puerto Rican author Hilda Iriarte. Recent events have placed the island in the news. Learn about its unique history, the people that have distinguished themselves as firsts in their fields, some of its traditions, and relevant facts. You will learn much more to be able to understand the culture and the love of the people for their island. Learn about the many Puerto Ricans that have distinguished themselves in the world with their tenacity, hard work, and distinct personalities, having to sometimes rise above difficult odds.
Over the past fifty years, Puerto Rican voters have roundly rejected any calls for national independence. Yet the rhetoric and iconography of independence have been defining features of Puerto Rican literature and culture. In the provocative new book Dream Nation, María Acosta Cruz investigates the roots and effects of this profound disconnect between cultural fantasy and political reality. Bringing together texts from Puerto Rican literature, history, and popular culture, Dream Nation shows how imaginings of national independence have served many competing purposes. They have given authority to the island’s literary and artistic establishment but have also been a badge of countercultural cool. These ideas have been fueled both by nostalgia for an imagined past and by yearning for a better future. They have fostered local communities on the island, and still helped define Puerto Rican identity within U.S. Latino culture. In clear, accessible prose, Acosta Cruz takes us on a journey from the 1898 annexation of Puerto Rico to the elections of 2012, stopping at many cultural touchstones along the way, from the canonical literature of the Generación del 30 to the rap music of Tego Calderón. Dream Nation thus serves both as a testament to how stories, symbols, and heroes of independence have inspired the Puerto Rican imagination and as an urgent warning about how this culture has become detached from the everyday concerns of the island’s people. A volume in the American Literature Initiatives series
Available for the first time in English, Cruz Miguel Ortiz Cuadra's magisterial history of the foods and eating habits of Puerto Rico unfolds into an examination of Puerto Rican society from the Spanish conquest to the present. Each chapter is centered on an iconic Puerto Rican foodstuff, from rice and cornmeal to beans, roots, herbs, fish, and meat. Ortiz shows how their production and consumption connects with race, ethnicity, gender, social class, and cultural appropriation in Puerto Rico. Using a multidisciplinary approach and a sweeping array of sources, Ortiz asks whether Puerto Ricans really still are what they ate. Whether judging by a host of social and economic factors--or by the foods once eaten that have now disappeared--Ortiz concludes that the nature of daily life in Puerto Rico has experienced a sea change.
The first book solely devoted to Puerto Rican visability and cultural impact. The author looks as such pop icons as JLo and Ricky Martin as well as West Side Story.
Language and identity have an undeniable link, but what happens when a second language is imposed on a populace? Can a link be broken or transformed? Are the attitudes towards the imposed language influential? Can these attitudes change over time? The mixed-methods results provided by this book are ground-breaking because they document how historical and traditional attitudes are changing towards both American English (AE) and Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS) on an island where the population has been subjected to both Spanish and US colonization. There are presently almost four million people living in Puerto Rico, while the Puerto Rican diaspora has surpassed it with more than this living in the United States alone. Because of this, many members of the diaspora no longer speak PRS, yet consider themselves to be Puerto Rican. Traditional stances against people who do not live on the island or speak the predominant language (PRS) yet wish to identify themselves as Puerto Rican have historically led to prejudice and strained relationships between people of Puerto Rican ancestry. The sample study provided here shows that there is not only a change in attitude towards the traditional link between PRS and Puerto Rican identity (leading to the inclusion of diasporic Puerto Ricans), but also a wider acceptance of the English language itself on this Caribbean island.
The Living Arts Library is specially designed to stimulate children's interest and imagination in all aspects of the international arts. The activity-based approach encourages readers to try for themselves a variety of skills and techniques.
Discusses the history, people, and culture of this island commonwealth and the life-style and problems of the Puerto Ricans who have migrated to the mainland in search of jobs.
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.
Winner of the Children’s Literature Association’s 2023 Book Award During the early colonial encounter, children’s books were among the first kinds of literature produced by US writers introducing the new colony, its people, and the US’s role as a twentieth-century colonial power to the public. Subsequently, youth literature and media were important tools of Puerto Rican cultural and educational elite institutions and Puerto Rican revolutionary thought as a means of negotiating US assimilation and upholding a strong Latin American, Caribbean national stance. In Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture, author Marilisa Jiménez García focuses on the contributions of the Puerto Rican community to American youth, approaching Latinx literature as a transnational space that provides a critical lens for examining the lingering consequences of US and Spanish colonialism for US communities of color. Through analysis of texts typically outside traditional Latinx or literary studies such as young adult literature, textbooks, television programming, comics, music, curriculum, and youth movements, Side by Side represents the only comprehensive study of the contributions of Puerto Ricans to American youth literature and culture, as well as the only comprehensive study into the role of youth literature and culture in Puerto Rican literature and thought. Considering recent debates over diversity in children’s and young adult literature and media and the strained relationship between Puerto Rico and the US, Jiménez García's timely work encourages us to question who constitutes the expert and to resist the homogenization of Latinxs, as well as other marginalized communities, that has led to the erasure of writers, scholars, and artists.
