Download or read book The Politics of Puerto Rican University Students written by Arthur Liebman and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-06-13 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1960s, when students everywhere were coming alive politically, and when the Latin American student activist in particular became as archetypal of radicalism as the Latin American dictator was of repression, Puerto Rican students remained strangely silent. With the exception of FUPI, a radical student group with only a small following, student political behavior conformed to that of Puerto Rican society in general—center to conservative. Historically, Puerto Rico has been economically and politically dominated first by Spain and then by the United States. But unlike other colonial dependencies in Latin America, Puerto Rico has never rebelled. Puerto Rican politics centers on the status issue—independence, statehood, or association for the island. But no legendary victories, no heroic defeats offer a battle cry for nationalists, leftists, and independistas. Overwhelming foreign influence in the Church, the schools, the economy, and eventually the mass media deprived the island of any strong indigenous institutions that might foster nationalism. Militancy lies outside the mainstream of Puerto Rican tradition. Against this historical and cultural backdrop, Arthur Liebman closely examines the social background and political activity of students at the Rio Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico. Based on personal interviews with students, faculty, and administrators, as well as on a survey of the student body, his study reveals the strength of political inheritance among university students in Puerto Rico. The student left is small and weak largely because the left of the parents’ generation is small and weak. To date, Puerto Rican students have been the children of their parents and of their society. Within a university that emphasizes practicality, the nonmilitant majority of the students study education, business, engineering, and medicine, being trained to participate in and to reap the rewards of the status quo. Student leftists, in the minority, generally study history, economics, sociology, and law—fields that open wider perspectives on their society and its problems and offer no immediate guarantee of its benefits. Brighter, less religious, and more dissatisfied with their role as a student, the student leftists stand apart from their cohort at the University of Puerto Rico. Like their adult counterparts, they are an anomaly in an acquisitive, relatively conservative society.
Download or read book The Politics of Language in Puerto Rico written by Amílcar Antonio Barreto and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2018-11-05 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A [book] rich in detail and analysis, which anyone wanting to understand the language debate in Puerto Rico will find essential."--Arlene Davila, Syracuse University This is the first book in English to analyze the controversial language policies passed by the Puerto Rican government in the 1990s. It is also the first to explore the connections between language and cultural identity and politics on the Caribbean island. Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898, both English and Spanish became official languages of the territory. In 1991, the Puerto Rican government abolished bilingualism, claiming that "Spanish only" was necessary to protect the culture from North American influences. A few years later bilingualism was restored and English was promoted in public schools, with supporters asserting that the dual languages symbolized the island’s commitment to live in harmony with the United States. While the islanders’ sense of ethnic pride was growing, economic dependency enticed them to maintain close ties to the United States. This book shows that officials in both San Juan and Washington, along with English-first groups, used the language laws as weapons in the battle over U.S.-Puerto Rican relations and the volatile debate over statehood. It will be of interest to linguists, political scientists, students of contemporary cultural politics, and political activists in discussions of nationalism in multilingual communities.
Download or read book Translocas written by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-04-05 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translocas focuses on drag and transgender performance and activism in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Arguing for its political potential, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes explores the social and cultural disruptions caused by Latin American and Latinx “locas” (effeminate men, drag queens, transgender performers, and unruly women) and the various forms of violence to which queer individuals in Puerto Rico and the U.S. are subjected. This interdisciplinary, auto-ethnographic, queer-of-color performance studies book explores the lives and work of contemporary performers and activists including Sylvia Rivera, Nina Flowers, Freddie Mercado, Javier Cardona, Jorge Merced, Erika Lopez, Holly Woodlawn, Monica Beverly Hillz, Lady Catiria, and Barbra Herr; television programs such as RuPaul’s Drag Race; films such as Paris Is Burning, The Salt Mines, and Mala Mala; and literary works by authors such as Mayra Santos-Febres and Manuel Ramos Otero. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, a drag performer himself, demonstrates how each destabilizes (and sometimes reifies) dominant notions of gender and sexuality through drag and their embodied transgender expression. These performances provide a means to explore and critique issues of race, class, poverty, national identity, and migratory displacement while they posit a relationship between audiences and performers that has a ritual-like, communal dimension. The book also analyzes the murders of Jorge Steven López Mercado and Kevin Fret in Puerto Rico, and invites readers to challenge, question, and expand their knowledge about queer life, drag, trans performance, and Puerto Rican identity in the Caribbean and the diaspora. The author also pays careful attention to transgender experience, highlighting how trans activists and performers mold their bodies, promote social change, and create community in a context that oscillates between glamour and abjection.
Download or read book Puerto Rican Chicago written by Mirelsie Velazquez and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The postwar migration of Puerto Rican men and women to Chicago brought thousands of their children into city schools. These children's classroom experience continued the colonial project begun in their homeland, where American ideologies had dominated Puerto Rican education since the island became a US territory. Mirelsie Velázquez tells how Chicago's Puerto Ricans pursued their educational needs in a society that constantly reminded them of their status as second-class citizens. Communities organized a media culture that addressed their concerns while creating and affirming Puerto Rican identities. Education also offered women the only venue to exercise power, and they parlayed their positions to take lead roles in activist and political circles. In time, a politicized Puerto Rican community gave voice to a previously silenced group--and highlighted that colonialism does not end when immigrants live among their colonizers. A perceptive look at big-city community building, Puerto Rican Chicago reveals the links between justice in education and a people's claim to space in their new home.
Download or read book Boom and Bust in Puerto Rico written by A. W. Maldonado and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2021-08-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who is to blame for the economic and political crisis in Puerto Rico—the United States or Puerto Rico? This book provides a fascinating historical perspective on the problem and an unequivocal answer on who is to blame. In this engaging and approachable book, journalist A. W. Maldonado charts the rise and fall of the Puerto Rican economy and explains how a litany of bad political and fiscal policy decisions in Washington and Puerto Rico destroyed an economic miracle. Under Operation Bootstrap in the 1950s and '60s, the rapid transformation and industrialization of the Puerto Rican economy was considered a “wonder of human history,” a far cry from the economic “death spiral” the island’s governor described in 2015. Boom and Bust in Puerto Rico is the story of how the demise of an obscure tax policy that encouraged investment and economic growth led to escalating budget deficits and the government’s shocking default of its $70 billion debt. Maldonado also discusses the extent of the devastation from Hurricane Maria in 2017, the massive street protests during 2019, and the catastrophic earthquakes in January 2020. After illuminating the century of misunderstanding between Puerto Rico and the United States—the root cause of the economic crisis and the island’s gridlocked debates about its political status—Maldonado concludes with projections about the future of the relationship. He argues that, in the end, the economic, fiscal, and political crises are the result of the breakdown and failure of Puerto Rican self-government. Boom and Bust in Puerto Rico is written for a wide audience, including students, economists, politicians, and general readers, all of whom will find it interesting and thought provoking.
Download or read book Remixing Reggaet n written by Petra R. Rivera-Rideau and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-17 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Puerto Rico is often depicted as a "racial democracy" in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing Reggaetón, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaetón musicians critique racial democracy's privileging of whiteness and concealment of racism by expressing identities that center blackness and African diasporic belonging. Stars such as Tego Calderón criticize the Puerto Rican mainstream's tendency to praise black culture but neglecting and marginalizing the island's black population, while Ivy Queen, the genre's most visible woman, disrupts the associations between whiteness and respectability that support official discourses of racial democracy. From censorship campaigns on the island that sought to devalue reggaetón, to its subsequent mass marketing to U.S. Latino listeners, Rivera-Rideau traces reggaetón's origins and its transformation from the music of San Juan's slums into a global pop phenomenon. Reggaetón, she demonstrates, provides a language to speak about the black presence in Puerto Rico and a way to build links between the island and the African diaspora.
Download or read book The United States and the Development of the Puerto Rican Status Question 1936 1968 written by Surendra Bhana and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An antique doll helps a young girl whose mother has carefully protected her from traditional sex roles achieve self-assurance and personal definition.
Download or read book Sponsored Identities written by Arlene M. Dávila and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the creation of an essentialist view of nationhood based on a peasant culture and a unifying Hispanic heritage, and the ways in which grassroots organizations challenge and reconfigure definitions of national identity through their own activities and representations.
Download or read book Puerto Rican Citizen written by Lorrin Thomas and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the end of the 1920s, just ten years after the Jones Act first made them full-fledged 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 distinctive migrant communities. In Puerto Rican Citizen, Lorrin Thomas for the first time 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 incisive 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 of Puerto Rican Citizen 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, Thomas’s book transforms the way we understand this community’s integral role in shaping our sense of citizenship in twentieth-century America.
Download or read book Negotiating Empire written by Solsiree del Moral and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2013-03-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the United States invaded Puerto Rico in 1898, the new unincorporated territory sought to define its future. Seeking to shape the next generation and generate popular support for colonial rule, U.S. officials looked to education as a key venue for promoting the benefits of Americanization. At the same time, public schools became a site where Puerto Rican teachers, parents, and students could formulate and advance their own projects for building citizenship. In Negotiating Empire, Solsiree del Moral demonstrates how these colonial intermediaries aimed for regeneration and progress through education. Rather than seeing U.S. empire in Puerto Rico during this period as a contest between two sharply polarized groups, del Moral views their interaction as a process of negotiation. Although educators and families rejected some tenets of Americanization, such as English-language instruction, they also redefined and appropriated others to their benefit to increase literacy and skills required for better occupations and social mobility. Pushing their citizenship-building vision through the schools, Puerto Ricans negotiated a different school project—one that was reformist yet radical, modern yet traditional, colonial yet nationalist.
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 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 America s Colony written by Pedro A Malavet and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2007-11 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the legal relationship between U.S. and Puerto Rico.
Download or read book Radical Imagination Radical Humanity written by Rose Muzio and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2017-01-25 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides firsthand accounts of militant Puerto Rican activists in 1970s New York City. In this book Rose Muzio analyzes how structural and historical factorsincluding colonialism, economic marginalization, racial discrimination, and the Black and Brown Power movements of the 1960sinfluenced young Puerto Ricans to reject mainstream ideas about political incorporation and join others in struggles against perceived injustices. This analysis provides the first in-depth account of the origins, evolution, achievements, and failures of El Comité-Movimiento de Izquierda Nacional Puertorriqueño, one of the main organizations of the Puerto Rican Left in the 1970s in New York City. El Comité fought for bilingual education programs in public schools, for access to quality jobs and higher education, and against health care budget cuts. The organization mobilized support nationally and internationally to end the US Navys occupation of Vieques, denounced colonial rule in Puerto Rico, and opposed US aid to authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Africa. Muzio bases her project on dozens of interviews with participants as well as archival documents and news coverage, and shows how a radical, counterhegemonic political perspective evolved organically, rather than as a product of a priori ideology.
Download or read book Puerto Rico in the American Century written by César J. Ayala and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-06-23 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Highlighting both well-known and forgotten figures from Puerto Rican history, Ayala and Bernabe discuss a wide range of topics, including literary and cultural debates and social and labor struggles that previous histories have neglected. Although the island's political economy remains dependent on the United States, the authors also discuss Puerto Rico's situation in light of world economies. Ayala and Bernabe argue that the inability of Puerto Rico to shake its colonial legacy reveals the limits of free-market capitalism, a break from which would require a renewal of the long tradition of labor and social activism in Puerto Rico in connection with similar currents in the United States.
Download or read book Fantasy Island written by Ed Morales and published by Bold Type Books. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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.
