Puerto Rican citizen
Subtitle: history and political identity in twentieth-century New York City
By: Lorrin Thomas.
Series: Historical studies of urban America; Historical studies of urban America
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Chicago; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 354
ISBN-13: 9780226796086
Subjects: Puerto Ricans -- New York (State) -- New York -- Social conditions; Puerto Ricans -- New York (State) -- New York -- Economic conditions; Puerto Ricans -- New York (State) -- New York -- Politics and government
Description: By the end of the 1920s, just ten years after the Jones Act first made them legally 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 unique migrant communities. In this book the author 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 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 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, this book transforms the way we understand this community's integral role in shaping our sense of citizenship in twentieth-century America. -- Book jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Puerto Ricans, citizenship, and recognition; title: New citizens of New York : community organization and political culture in the twenties; title: Confronting race in the metropole : racial ascription and racial discourse during the Depression; title: Pursuing the promise of the New Deal : relief and the politics of nationalism in the thirties; title: How to represent the postwar migration : the liberal establishment, the Puerto Rican Left, and the "Puerto Rican problem"; title: How to study the postwar migrant : social science, Puerto Ricans, and social problems; title: "Juan Q. Citizen," aspirantes, and Young Lords : youth activism in a new world; title: Epilogue: from colonial citizen to Nuyorican.