Fall 2020 Puerto Rico Virtual Research Tour: Home

In The Diaspora Strikes Back the eminent ethnic and cultural studies scholar Juan Flores flips the process on its head: what happens to the home country when it is being constantly fed by emigrants returning from abroad? He looks at how 'Nuyoricans' (Puerto Rican New Yorkers) have transformed the home country, introducing hip hop and modern New York culture to the Caribbean island. While he focuses on New York and Mayaguez (in Puerto Rico), the model is broadly applicable. Indians introducing contemporary British culture to India; New York Dominicans bringing slices of New York culture back to the Dominican Republic; Mexicans bringing LA culture (from fast food to heavy metal) back to Guadalajara and Monterrey. This ongoing process is both massive and global, and Flores' novel account will command a significant audience across disciplines.

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.

This unique anthology highlights the diversity of Latino cultural expressions and points out the distinctive features of the three major Latino populations: Mexican, Puerto Rican and Cuban. It is organized around six central cultural issues: family, religion, community, the arts, (im)migration and exile, and cultural identity. Each chapter focuses on a particular theme by presenting readings from a variety of genres, including short stories, poems, essays, excerpts from novels, a play, photographs, even a few songs and recipes.

Marc Zimmerman works from a theoretical frame of cultural, postcolonial, and diasporic studies to compare the artistic experiences and cultural production of Puerto Ricans with that of Chicanos and Cuban Americans. As he shows, even supposedly mainstream U.S. Puerto Ricans participate in a performative culture that embodies elements of possible cultural "Ricanstruction." Zimmerman examines a spectrum 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 like Jennifer Lopez and Benicio del Toro; visual artists Juan Sánchez, Ramón Flores, and Elizam Escobar; and a group of Chicago Puerto Rican writers.

The Afro-Latin@ Reader focuses attention on a large, vibrant, yet oddly invisible community in the United States: people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean. The presence of Afro-Latin@s in the United States (and throughout the Americas) belies the notion that Blacks and Latin@s are two distinct categories or cultures. Afro-Latin@s are uniquely situated to bridge the widening social divide between Latin@s and African Americans; at the same time, their experiences reveal pervasive racism among Latin@s and ethnocentrism among African Americans.

Exploring cultural expressions of Puerto Rican queer migration from the Caribbean to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes analyzes how artists have portrayed their lives and the discrimination they have faced in both Puerto Rico and the United States. Highlighting cultural and political resistance within Puerto Rico's gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender subcultures, La Fountain-Stokes pays close attention to differences of gender, historical moment, and generation, arguing that Puerto Rican queer identity changes over time and is experienced in very different ways.

Where 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 States.

A valuable recounting of the first formal archaeological excavations in Puerto Rico Originally published as the Twenty-Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1907, this book was praised in an article in American Anthropologist as doing "more than any other to give a comprehensive idea of the archaeology of the West Indies." Until that time, for mainly political reasons, little scientific research had been conducted by Americans on any of the Caribbean islands.

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.

The history of Puerto Rico has usually been envisioned as a sequence of colonizations-various indigenous peoples from Archaic through Taíno were successively invaded, assimilated, or eliminated, followed by the Spanish entrada, which was then modified by African traditions and, since 1898, by the United States. The truth is more complex, but in many ways Puerto Rico remains one of the last colonies in the world. This volume focuses on the successive indigenous cultures of Puerto Rico prior to 1493.

This is a critical study of the construction of gendered spaces through feminine labor and capital in Puerto Rican literature and film (1950-2010). It analyzes gendered geographies and forms of emotional labor, and the possibility that they generate within the material and the symbolic spaces of the family house, the factory, the beauty salon and the brothel. It argues that by challenging traditional images of femininity texts by authors and film directors like Rosario Ferre, Carmen Lugo Filippi, Magali Garcia Ramis, Mayra Santos-Febres, Sonia Fritz and Ana Maria Garcia, among others, contest the official Puerto Rican cultural nationalist discourse on gender and nation, and propose alternatives to its spatial tropes through feminine labor and solidarities.

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.

Offering a comprehensive overview of Puerto Rico's history and evolution since the installation of U.S. rule, Cesar Ayala and Rafael Bernabe connect the island's economic, political, cultural, and social past. Puerto Rico in the American Century explores Puerto Ricans in the diaspora as well as the island residents, who experience an unusual and daily conundrum: they consider themselves a distinct people but are part of the American political system; they have U.S. citizenship but are not represented in the U.S. Congress; and they live on land that is neither independent nor part of the United States.

2015 Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples   Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.