Puerto Rican Citizen

Puerto Rican Citizen
Author: Lorrin Thomas
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2010-06-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226796108

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.

Puerto Rican Newspaper Coverage of the Puerto Rican Independence Party

Puerto Rican Newspaper Coverage of the Puerto Rican Independence Party
Author: Maria Cristina Santana
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2000
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780815335207

Examines the struggle of the Puerto Rican Independence Party for serious press coverage in the last three gubernatorial lections, and the ways in which mainstream press coverage of the party shifted away from issues and into personality and personal attacks.

Puerto Rico and the United States, 1917-1933

Puerto Rico and the United States, 1917-1933
Author: Truman R. Clark
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2010-11-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822976056

From 1917 to 1933, the United States kept Puerto Rico in limbo, offering it neither a course toward independence nor much hope for prompt statehood. The Jones Act of 1917 gave Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship, but the status of the island didn't change. In 1922, a Supreme Court decision reaffirmed the 1901 principle that island possessions had no right to equal treatment with continental territories and states. Clark unfolds with clarity the painful truth of the United States' unsavory attempt at being both a democratic and imperial nation: governors were sent without the consent of the Puerto Ricans and with little training; no positive measures were taken to improve the poor economy; little thought was given and no formal policy established to resolve its status or foster self-government.

Fantasy Island

Fantasy Island
Author: Ed Morales
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2019-09-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1568588984

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.