Puerto Rican Citizen
History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City
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 unique 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.
Casa de las Americas: Casa de las Americas Prize
Honorable Mention
Puerto Rican Studies Association: PRSA-Frank Bonilla Book Award
Honorable Mention
The Immigration and Ethnic History Soc.: Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award in American Immigration History
Won
"Written with simple elegance and brilliantly engaged with the politics of dignity and recognition, Puerto Rican Citizen represents an important achievement—one that I am convinced will assume its rightful place among the best examples of scholarship on Puerto Rican history, Latino studies, and the broader history of citizenship. Engaging the history of the Puerto Rican diaspora, as well as the literature of race, imperialism, and national citizenship, Thomas lays the groundwork for a much-needed reconsideration of the significance of Puerto Ricans in the social history of the United States. Puerto Rican Citizen is a powerful work of original scholarship that should attract a broad audience among academic and general audiences alike."
“In this insightful, well-written study of Puerto Rican New York City, Thomas provides perhaps the best study of Puerto Rican political mobilization, migration, and politics in the post-WWII US to date.”
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Puerto Ricans, Citizenship, and Recognition
One New Citizens of New York
Community Organization and Political Culture in the Twenties
Two Confronting Race in the Metropole
Racial Ascription and Racial Discourse during the Depression
Three Pursuing the Promise of the New Deal
Relief and the Politics of Nationalism in the Thirties
Four How to Represent the Postwar Migration
The Liberal Establishment, the Puerto Rican Left, and the “Puerto Rican Problem”
Five How to Study the Postwar Migrant
Social Science, Puerto Ricans, and Social Problems
Six “Juan Q. Citizen,” Aspirantes, and Young Lords
Youth Activism in a New World
Epilogue
From Colonial Citizen to Nuyorican
Notes
Index
History: American History | Latin American History | Urban History
Sociology: Social History
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