Imposing Decency

Imposing Decency
Author: Eileen Findlay
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822323969

Download Imposing Decency Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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

Making Never-Never Land

Making Never-Never Land
Author: Mónica A. Jiménez
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2024-06-04
Genre: History
ISBN:

Download Making Never-Never Land Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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.

Remixing Reggaetón

Remixing Reggaetón
Author: Petra R. Rivera-Rideau
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2015-09-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0822375257

Download Remixing Reggaetón Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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.

We Are Left without a Father Here

We Are Left without a Father Here
Author: Eileen J. Suárez Findlay
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2015-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822376113

Download We Are Left without a Father Here Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

We Are Left without a Father Here is a transnational history of working people's struggles and a gendered analysis of populism and colonialism in mid-twentieth-century Puerto Rico. At its core are the thousands of agricultural workers who, at the behest of the Puerto Rican government, migrated to Michigan in 1950 to work in the state's sugar beet fields. The men expected to earn enough income to finally become successful breadwinners and fathers. To their dismay, the men encountered abysmal working conditions and pay. The migrant workers in Michigan and their wives in Puerto Rico soon exploded in protest. Chronicling the protests, the surprising alliances that they created, and the Puerto Rican government's response, Eileen J. Suárez Findlay explains that notions of fatherhood and domesticity were central to Puerto Rican populist politics. Patriarchal ideals shaped citizens' understandings of themselves, their relationship to Puerto Rican leaders and the state, as well as the meanings they ascribed to U.S. colonialism. Findlay argues that the motivations and strategies for transnational labor migrations, colonial policies, and worker solidarities are all deeply gendered.

Solidarity across the Americas

Solidarity across the Americas
Author: Margaret M. Power
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2023-02-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469674068

Download Solidarity across the Americas Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PNPR) understood that to successfully establish an independent nation it needed to generate solidarity across the Americas with its struggle against US colonial rule. It invested significant energy, personnel, and resources in attending regional conferences, distributing its literature throughout the hemisphere, creating solidarity committees, presenting its case to elected officials and the general public, and promoting the causes of oppressed peoples. The hemispheric outpourings of solidarity with Puerto Rican independence have been obscured by larger, later liberation movements as well as the anticolonial party's ultimate failure to achieve independence. However, as this book shows, they were nonetheless central to anti-imperialists, nationalists, and revolutionaries from New York City to Buenos Aires. Margaret M. Power's new history of the PNPR focuses on how it built a broad movement with active networks in virtually all of Latin America, much of the Caribbean, and New York City. This hemispheric view introduces a sprawling transnational network, nurtured by the PNPR from its founding in 1922 through its military actions of the 1950s and beyond that included individuals, parties, organizations, and governments throughout the Americas, and it resituates the Puerto Rican nationalist movement as a transnational revolutionary influence and force.

Negotiating Empire

Negotiating Empire
Author: Solsiree del Moral
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2013-03-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0299289338

Download Negotiating Empire Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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.

Empire of Purity

Empire of Purity
Author: Eva Payne
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2024-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691256977

Download Empire of Purity Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

How the US crusade against prostitution became a tool of empire Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the US government, transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern. As these activists worked to eradicate prostitution and trafficking, they promoted sexual self-control for both men and women as a cornerstone of civilization and a basis of American exceptionalism. Empire of Purity traces the history of these efforts, showing how the policing and penalization of sexuality was used to justify American interventions around the world. Eva Payne describes how American reformers successfully pushed for international anti-trafficking agreements that mirrored US laws, calling for states to criminalize prostitution and restrict migration, and harming the very women they claimed to protect. She argues that Americans’ ambitions to reshape global sexual morality and law advanced an ideology of racial hierarchy that viewed women of color, immigrants, and sexual minorities as dangerous vectors of disease. Payne tells the stories of the sex workers themselves, revealing how these women’s experiences defy the dichotomies that have shaped American cultural and legal conceptions of prostitution and trafficking, such as choice and coercion, free and unfree labor, and white sexual innocence and the assumed depravity of nonwhites. Drawing on archives in Europe, the United States, and Latin America, Empire of Purity ties the war on sexual vice to American imperial ambitions and a politicization of sexuality that continues to govern both domestic and international policy today.

Race and Nation in Modern Latin America

Race and Nation in Modern Latin America
Author: Nancy P. Appelbaum
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2003-11-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807862312

Download Race and Nation in Modern Latin America Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This collection brings together innovative historical work on race and national identity in Latin America and the Caribbean and places this scholarship in the context of interdisciplinary and transnational discussions regarding race and nation in the Americas. Moving beyond debates about whether ideologies of racial democracy have actually served to obscure discrimination, the book shows how notions of race and nationhood have varied over time across Latin America's political landscapes. Framing the themes and questions explored in the volume, the editors' introduction also provides an overview of the current state of the interdisciplinary literature on race and nation-state formation. Essays on the postindependence period in Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Peru consider how popular and elite racial constructs have developed in relation to one another and to processes of nation building. Contributors also examine how ideas regarding racial and national identities have been gendered and ask how racialized constructions of nationhood have shaped and limited the citizenship rights of subordinated groups. The contributors are Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers, Lillian Guerra, Anne S. Macpherson, Aims McGuinness, Gerardo Renique, James Sanders, Alexandra Minna Stern, and Barbara Weinstein.

Becoming Julia de Burgos

Becoming Julia de Burgos
Author: Vanessa Perez Rosario
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2014-10-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0252096924

Download Becoming Julia de Burgos Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

While it is rare for a poet to become a cultural icon, Julia de Burgos has evoked feelings of bonding and identification in Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the United States for over half a century. In the first book-length study written in English, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario examines poet and political activist Julia de Burgos's development as a writer, her experience of migration, and her legacy in New York City, the poet's home after 1940. Pérez-Rosario situates Julia de Burgos as part of a transitional generation that helps to bridge the historical divide between Puerto Rican nationalist writers of the 1930s and the Nuyorican writers of the 1970s. Becoming Julia de Burgos departs from the prevailing emphasis on the poet and intellectual as a nationalist writer to focus on her contributions to New York Latino/a literary and visual culture. It moves beyond the standard tragedy-centered narratives of de Burgos's life to place her within a nuanced historical understanding of Puerto Rico's peoples and culture to consider more carefully the complex history of the island and the diaspora. Pérez-Rosario unravels the cultural and political dynamics at work when contemporary Latina/o writers and artists in New York revise, reinvent, and riff off of Julia de Burgos as they imagine new possibilities for themselves and their communities.

Reproducing Empire

Reproducing Empire
Author: Laura Briggs
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2003-01-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520936317

Download Reproducing Empire Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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.