Download or read book The Lettered Barriada written by Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-27 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Reproducing Empire written by Laura Briggs and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-01-20 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Original and compelling, Laura Briggs's Reproducing Empire shows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the "culture of poverty" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this book uncovers the persistence of concerns about motherhood, prostitution, and family in shaping the beliefs and practices of virtually every player in the twentieth-century drama of Puerto Rican colonialism. In this way, it sheds light on the legacies haunting contemporary debates over globalization. Puerto Rico is a perfect lens through which to examine colonialism and globalization because for the past century it has been where the United States has expressed and fine-tuned its attitudes toward its own expansionism. Puerto Rico's history holds no simple lessons for present-day debate over globalization but does unearth some of its history. Reproducing Empire suggests that interventionist discourses of rescue, family, and sexuality fueled U.S. imperial projects and organized American colonialism. Through the politics, biology, and medicine of eugenics, prostitution, and birth control, the United States has justified its presence in the territory's politics and society. Briggs makes an innovative contribution to Puerto Rican and U.S. history, effectively arguing that gender has been crucial to the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, and more broadly, to U.S. expansion elsewhere.

Download or read book Puerto Rico written by Jorell Meléndez-Badillo and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-02 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A panoramic history of Puerto Rico from pre-Columbian times to today Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking territory of the United States with a history shaped by conquest and resistance. For centuries, Puerto Ricans have crafted and negotiated complex ideas about nationhood. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo provides a new history of Puerto Rico that gives voice to the archipelago’s people while offering a lens through which to understand the political, economic, and social challenges confronting them today. In this masterful work of scholarship, Meléndez-Badillo sheds light on the vibrant cultures of the archipelago in the centuries before the arrival of Columbus and captures the full sweep of Puerto Rico’s turbulent history in the centuries that followed, from the first indigenous insurrection against colonial rule in 1511—led by the powerful chieftain Agüeybaná II—to the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1952. He deftly portrays the contemporary period and the intertwined though unequal histories of the archipelago and the continental United States. Puerto Rico is an engaging, sometimes personal, and consistently surprising history of colonialism, revolt, and the creation of a national identity, offering new perspectives not only on Puerto Rico and the Caribbean but on the United States and the Atlantic world more broadly. Available in Spanish from our partners at Grupo Planeta

Download or read book Imposing Decency written by Eileen Findlay and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The interrelationship between sexuality and national identity during Puerto Rico's transition from Spanish to U.S. colonialism.

Download or read book Anarchists of the Caribbean written by Kirwin R. Shaffer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Black British Migrants in Cuba written by Jorge L. Giovannetti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-25 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a valuable transnational history of the African Diaspora through examination of British Afro-Caribbeans in Cuba.

Download or read book Rita Moreno written by Rita Moreno and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Aftershocks of Disaster written by Yarimar Bonilla and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book American Empire and the Politics of Meaning written by Julian Go and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-14 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Policing Life and Death written by Marisol LeBrón and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Obstinate Star written by Rafael Bernabe and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-09-23 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Obstinate Star is a history of Puerto Rico’s independence struggle against Spanish and U.S. colonialism. From the time of the Napoleonic Wars, it traces the movement’s currents, within and beyond the island, linking them to ongoing social conflicts and international trends and conjunctures. Beginning with the radical democratic fight against Spanish control, it moves on to the early reactions to U.S. rule, the role of Nationalism, Communism and New Deal currents during the Great Depression and the Second World War, the rise of new forces in the wake of the Cuban revolution and recent struggles in the epoch of capitalist globalisation.

Download or read book Raising the Living Dead written by Alberto Ortiz Díaz and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-03-08 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eye-opening look at how incarcerated people, health professionals, and others behind and beyond bars came together to problem-solve incarceration. Raising the Living Dead is a history of Puerto Rico’s carceral rehabilitation system that brings to life the interactions of incarcerated people, their wider social networks, and health care professionals. Alberto Ortiz Díaz describes the ways that multiple communities of care came together both inside and outside of prisons to imagine and enact solution-oriented cultures of rehabilitation from the 1930s to the 1960s. Scientific and humanistic approaches to well-being were deliberately fused to raise the “living dead,” an expression that reemerged in the modern Caribbean to refer to prisoners. These reform groups sought to raise incarcerated people physically, mentally, socially, spiritually, and civically. The book is based on deep, original archival research into the Oso Blanco (White Bear) penitentiary in Puerto Rico, yet it situates its study within Puerto Rico’s broader carceral archipelago and other Caribbean prisons. The agents of this history include not only physical health professionals, but also psychologists and psychiatrists, social workers, spiritual and religious practitioners, and, of course, the prisoners and their families. By following all these groups and emphasizing the interpersonal exercise of power, Ortiz Díaz tells a story that goes beyond debates about structural and social control. The book addresses key issues in the history of prisons and the histories of medicine and belief, including how prisoners’ different racial, class, and cultural identities shaped their incarceration and how professionals living in a colonial society dealt with the challenge of rehabilitating prisoners for citizenship. Raising the Living Dead is not just about convicts, their immediate interlocutors, and their contexts, however, but about how together these open a window into the history of social uplift projects within the (neo)colonial societies of the Caribbean. There is no book like this in Caribbean historiography; few examine these themes in the larger literature on the history of prisons.

Download or read book Making Never Never Land written by Mónica A. Jiménez and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2024-04-10 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Puerto Rico has been an "unincorporated territory" of the United States for over a century. For much of that time, the archipelago has been mostly invisible to US residents and neglected by the government. However, a series of crises in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, from outsized debt to climate fueled disasters, have led to massive protests and brought Puerto Rico greater visibility. Monica A. Jimenez argues that to fully understand how and why Puerto Rico finds itself in this current moment of precarity, we must look to a larger history of US settler colonialism and racial exclusion in law. The federal policies and jurisprudence that created Puerto Rico exist within a larger pantheon of exclusionary, race-based laws and policies that have carved out "states of exception" for racial undesirables: Native Americans, African Americans, and the inhabitants of the insular territories. This legal regime has allowed the federal government plenary or complete power over these groups. Jimenez brings these histories together to demonstrate that despite Puerto Rico's unique position as a twenty-first-century colony, its path to that place was not exceptional.

Download or read book The Young Lords written by Johanna Fernández and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-12-18 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Affect Archive Archipelago written by Beatriz Llenín-Figueroa and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-04-04 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by Édouard Glissant’s and Marta Aponte Alsina’s critical-creative work, this book explores how Puerto Rico’s affective archive of Caribbean relations, from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first, has envisioned and embodied decolonization and sovereignty in relation to the archipelagic, the sea, and Caribbean regionalism. The book’s transdisciplinary archive includes historical figures and their legacies; political and activist thought, textuality, and action as performative interventions; and performance and live arts pieces, objects, materialities, and texts as political/activist actions. Affect, Archive, Archipelago begins by delving into the historical-political figures of Ramón Emeterio Betances, Luisa Capetillo, and Pedro Albizu Campos. It then encounters the work of the live arts collective Agua, Sol y Sereno; the political/activist work of Amigxs del MAR, Comuna Caribe, Mujeres que Abrazan la Mar, and Coalición 8M; and Teresa Hernández’s transdisciplinary artistic trajectory. Finally, stemming from the book’s argument and the immediate historical-political-affective context of Puerto Rico’s summer 2019 rebellion (Verano Boricua), the book offers some reflections and proposals for furthering decolonial, sovereign, archipelagic, and reparatory horizons for Puerto Rico

Download or read book The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Nineteenth Century Latin America written by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-29 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Nineteenth-Century Latin America provides a unique, comprehensive, and critical overview of Latin American studies in the nineteenth century, including the major regions and subfields. The essays in this collection offer a complex, yet accessible transdisciplinary overview of the heterogeneous and asynchronous historical, political, and cultural processes that account for the becoming of Latin America in the nineteenth century—from Mexico and the Caribbean Basin to the Southern Cone. The thematic division of the book into six parts allows for a better understanding of the ways in which different themes are interrelated and affords readers the opportunity to draw their own connections among subfields. The volume assembles a robust sample of recent and innovative scholarship on the subject, reformulating from fresh perspectives commonly held views on the issues that characterized the era. Additionally, it provides an overarching analysis of the field and introduces cutting-edge concepts all within one expansive volume, opening the dialogue about topics that share common denominators and modeling how those topics can be approached from a variety of perspectives. The innovative volume will be of interest to students and scholars of Latin American studies and Spanish studies. Readers unfamiliar with the period will acquire a comprehensive view of its complexities, while specialists will discover new interpretations and archives.

Download or read book Beyond Norma Rae written by Aimee Loiselle and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2023-11-03 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources—union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories—Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American working class and its labor activism. While Norma Rae constructed a powerful image of individual defiance by a white working-class woman, Loiselle demonstrates that female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds understood the significance of cultural representation and fought to tell their own stories. Loiselle painstakingly reconstructs the underlying histories of working women in this era and makes clear that cultural depictions must be understood as the complicated creations they are.