The Lettered Barriada
The Lettered Barriada

Author: Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2021-09-27

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1478022094

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In The Lettered Barriada, Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo tells the story of how a cluster of self-educated workers burst into Puerto Rico's world of letters and navigated the colonial polity that emerged out of the 1898 US occupation. They did so by asserting themselves as citizens, producers of their own historical narratives, and learned minds. Disregarded by most of Puerto Rico's intellectual elite, these workers engaged in dialogue with international peers and imagined themselves as part of a global community. They also entered the world of politics through the creation of the Socialist Party, which became an electoral force in the first half of the twentieth century. Meléndez-Badillo shows how these workers produced, negotiated, and deployed powerful discourses that eventually shaped Puerto Rico's national mythology. By following these ragtag intellectuals as they became politicians and statesmen, Meléndez-Badillo also demonstrates how they engaged in racial and gender silencing, epistemic violence, and historical erasures in the fringes of society. Ultimately, The Lettered Barriada is about the politics of knowledge production and the tensions between working-class intellectuals and the state. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Imposing Decency
Imposing Decency

Author: Eileen Findlay

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780822323969

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The interrelationship between sexuality and national identity during Puerto Rico's transition from Spanish to U.S. colonialism.

Anarchists of the Caribbean
Anarchists of the Caribbean

Author: Kirwin R. Shaffer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-05-14

Total Pages: 578

ISBN-13: 1108801110

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Anarchists who supported the Cuban War for Independence in the 1890s launched a transnational network linking radical leftists from their revolutionary hub in Havana, Cuba to South Florida, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Panama Canal Zone, and beyond. Over three decades, anarchists migrated around the Caribbean and back and forth to the US, printed fiction and poetry promoting their projects, transferred money and information across political borders for a variety of causes, and attacked (verbally and physically) the expansion of US imperialism in the 'American Mediterranean'. In response, US security officials forged their own transnational anti-anarchist campaigns with officials across the Caribbean. In this sweeping new history, Kirwin R. Shaffer brings together research in anarchist politics, transnational networks, radical journalism and migration studies to illustrate how men and women throughout the Caribbean basin and beyond sought to shape a counter-globalization initiative to challenge the emergence of modern capitalism and US foreign policy whilst rejecting nationalist projects and Marxist state socialism.

Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico

Author: Jorell Meléndez-Badillo

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-04-02

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0691231273

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"How did Puerto Rico end up in its current situation? A Spanish-speaking territory controlled by the United States and populated by the descendants of conquistadors, enslaved Africans, and indigenous inhabitants, this island (or rather archipelago) has a unique history. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo begins the book with an overview of the pre-Columbian societies and cultures that first inhabited Borikén, the indigenous name of the Puerto Rican archipelago. Though the arrival of the Spanish had a profound impact on Puerto Rico's history, he takes care to tell the story "from the shore" and not "from the boat." The Taínos were not merely passive victims; though they were enslaved and murdered during the Conquest, they also had powerful leaders like Agueybaná II who organized the Americas' first indigenous insurrection against colonial rule in 1511. When the colonial enterprise was consolidated a few decades after the Conquest, Puerto Rico became a military outpost for the Spanish Empire. By the nineteenth century, Puerto Rico was a slave colony, and it was ruled through a combination of reform and authoritarianism. This resulted in the proliferation of unsuccessful slave revolts and, in 1868, an insurrection that declared the Republic of Puerto Rico, which only lasted 48 hours. Puerto Rico's major regime change came in 1898 with the US occupation. Though being controlled by the United States has shaped Puerto Rico's history in innumerable ways, it inadvertently fostered a sense of puertorriqueñidad (Puerto Ricanness) among the Island's inhabitants. US colonization may have involved forced Americanization, but it also provoked a multi-layered resistance to those projects, from passive disobedience to armed insurrections. The creation of the Puerto Rican Commonwealth in 1952 involved using a number of institutions to create the notion of cultural nationalism that was detached from the island's colonial status, included Puerto Ricans in the diaspora and was not contingent on obtaining national sovereignty. The last part of the book focuses on more recent developments from the neoliberal turn in the 1990s to current (and likely future) socio-economic and environmental crises"--

Black British Migrants in Cuba
Black British Migrants in Cuba

Author: Jorge L. Giovannetti

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-10-25

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1108423469

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Provides a valuable transnational history of the African Diaspora through examination of British Afro-Caribbeans in Cuba.

Rita Moreno
Rita Moreno

Author: Rita Moreno

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2013-03-05

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1101615222

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In this New York Times bestselling memoir, West Side Story star Rita Moreno shares her remarkable journey from a young girl with simple beginnings in Puerto Rico to Hollywood legend—one of the few performers, and the only Hispanic, to win an Oscar, Grammy, Tony and two Emmys. Born Rosita Dolores Alverio in the idyll of Puerto Rico, Moreno, at age five, embarked on a harrowing sea voyage with her mother and wound up in the harsh barrios of the Bronx, where she discovered dancing, singing, and acting as ways to escape a tumultuous childhood. Making her Broadway debut by age thirteen—and moving on to Hollywood in its Golden Age just a few years later—she worked alongside such stars as Gary Cooper, Yul Brynner, and Ann Miller. When discovered by Louis B. Mayer of MGM, the wizard himself declared: “She looks like a Spanish Elizabeth Taylor.” Cast by Gene Kelly as Zelda Zanders in Singin’ in the Rain and then on to her Oscar-winning performance in West Side Story, she catapulted to fame—yet found herself repeatedly typecast as the “utility ethnic,” a role she found almost impossible to elude. Here, for the first time, Rita reflects on her struggles to break through Hollywood’s racial and sexual barriers. She explores the wounded little girl behind the glamorous façade—and what it took to find her place in the world. She talks candidly about her relationship with Elvis Presley, her encounters with Howard Hughes, and the passionate romance with Marlon Brando that nearly killed her. And she shares the illusiveness of a “perfect” marriage and the incomparable joys of motherhood. Infused with Rita Moreno’s quick wit and deep insight, this memoir is the dazzling portrait of a stage and screen star who longed to become who she really is—and triumphed.

Aftershocks of Disaster
Aftershocks of Disaster

Author: Yarimar Bonilla

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2019-09-03

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 164259086X

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Two years after Hurricane Maria hit, Puerto Ricans are still reeling from its effects and aftereffects. Aftershocks collects poems, essays and photos from survivors of Hurricane Maria detailing their determination to persevere. The concept of "aftershocks" is used in the context of earthquakes to describe the jolts felt after the initial quake, but no disaster is a singular event. Aftershocks of Disaster examines the lasting effects of hurricane Maria, not just the effects of the wind or the rain, but delving into what followed: state failure, social abandonment, capitalization on human misery, and the collective trauma produced by the botched response.

Policing Life and Death
Policing Life and Death

Author: Marisol LeBrón

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2019-04-16

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0520300173

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In her exciting new book, Marisol LeBrón traces the rise of punitive governance in Puerto Rico over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present. Punitive governance emerged as a way for the Puerto Rican state to manage the deep and ongoing crises stemming from the archipelago’s incorporation into the United States as a colonial territory. A structuring component of everyday life for many Puerto Ricans, police power has reinforced social inequality and worsened conditions of vulnerability in marginalized communities. This book provides powerful examples of how Puerto Ricans negotiate and resist their subjection to increased levels of segregation, criminalization, discrimination, and harm. Policing Life and Death shows how Puerto Ricans are actively rejecting punitive solutions and working toward alternative understandings of safety and a more just future.

American Empire and the Politics of Meaning
American Empire and the Politics of Meaning

Author: Julian Go

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2008-03-14

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 0822389320

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When the United States took control of the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the wake of the Spanish-American War, it declared that it would transform its new colonies through lessons in self-government and the ways of American-style democracy. In both territories, U.S. colonial officials built extensive public school systems, and they set up American-style elections and governmental institutions. The officials aimed their lessons in democratic government at the political elite: the relatively small class of the wealthy, educated, and politically powerful within each colony. While they retained ultimate control for themselves, the Americans let the elite vote, hold local office, and formulate legislation in national assemblies. American Empire and the Politics of Meaning is an examination of how these efforts to provide the elite of Puerto Rico and the Philippines a practical education in self-government played out on the ground in the early years of American colonial rule, from 1898 until 1912. It is the first systematic comparative analysis of these early exercises in American imperial power. The sociologist Julian Go unravels how American authorities used “culture” as both a tool and a target of rule, and how the Puerto Rican and Philippine elite received, creatively engaged, and sometimes silently subverted the Americans’ ostensibly benign intentions. Rather than finding that the attempt to transplant American-style democracy led to incommensurable “culture clashes,” Go assesses complex processes of cultural accommodation and transformation. By combining rich historical detail with broader theories of meaning, culture, and colonialism, he provides an innovative study of the hidden intersections of political power and cultural meaning-making in America’s earliest overseas empire.

The Young Lords
The Young Lords

Author: Johanna Fernández

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2019-12-18

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 1469653451

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Against the backdrop of America's escalating urban rebellions in the 1960s, an unexpected cohort of New York radicals unleashed a series of urban guerrilla actions against the city's racist policies and contempt for the poor. Their dramatic flair, uncompromising socialist vision for a new society, skillful ability to link local problems to international crises, and uncompromising vision for a new society riveted the media, alarmed New York's political class, and challenged nationwide perceptions of civil rights and black power protest. The group called itself the Young Lords. Utilizing oral histories, archival records, and an enormous cache of police surveillance files released only after a decade-long Freedom of Information Law request and subsequent court battle, Johanna Fernandez has written the definitive account of the Young Lords, from their roots as a Chicago street gang to their rise and fall as a political organization in New York. Led by poor and working-class Puerto Rican youth, and consciously fashioned after the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords occupied a hospital, blocked traffic with uncollected garbage, took over a church, tested children for lead poisoning, defended prisoners, fought the military police, and fed breakfast to poor children. Their imaginative, irreverent protests and media conscious tactics won reforms, popularized socialism in the United States and exposed U.S. mainland audiences to the country's quiet imperial project in Puerto Rico. Fernandez challenges what we think we know about the sixties. She shows that movement organizers were concerned with finding solutions to problems as pedestrian as garbage collection and the removal of lead paint from tenement walls; gentrification; lack of access to medical care; childcare for working mothers; and the warehousing of people who could not be employed in deindustrialized cities. The Young Lords' politics and preoccupations, especially those concerning the rise of permanent unemployment foretold the end of the American Dream. In riveting style, Fernandez demonstrates how the Young Lords redefined the character of protest, the color of politics, and the cadence of popular urban culture in the age of great dreams.