Jesús Colón and the Cervantes Society

Editor’s Introduction

Afro-Puerto Rican Oral Histories:A Disruptive Collaboration Jocelyn A. Géliga Vargas (bio) We are a Western people in the manner of our own roots. We are Americans of the United States and Americans of America and Westerners of the West. And we are all this as Puerto Ricans from Puerto Rico. —Former Governor Luis Muñoz Marín, 1953 The contribution of the black race to Puerto Rico is irrelevant, it is a merely rhetorical addition. —Former Governor Rafael Hernández Colón, 1988 Puerto Rico is a work in progress where the wealth of our history does not dictate our fate, the strength of our roots does not tie us to the past and the affirmation of our Hispanicity goes hand in hand with our participation in a nation [United States] whose multicultural vocation increases daily. —Governor Luis Fortuño Burset, 2011 Testimonios afropuertorriqueños: Un proyecto de historia oral en el oeste de Puerto Rico (Afro-Puerto Rican testimonies: An oral history project in western Puerto Rico) is a collaborative research project launched in September 2006. Its purpose is recording the voices, memories, and histories of contemporary Afro-Puerto Ricans in order to fertilize debates about racial constructions and discourses in Puerto Rico and democratize the forum of discussion, representation, and analysis of Afro-Puerto Rican history and identities. In its first year the project was funded by the Otros Saberes Initiative of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), which supported five other Latin American collaborative [End Page 90] research initiatives focused on either Afro-descendents or indigenous communities. During the course of that year we composed a diverse research collective of nearly two dozen members, including academics; community members from the western towns of Aguadilla and Hormigueros, where the oral history project was conducted; and students from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. At the onset of the project we were guided by the following objectives: 1. To employ oral history to ignite profound and self-reflective discussions about contemporary Afro-Puerto Rican identity and experience. 2. To carve out a space for the production and circulation of Afro-Puerto Rican self-representations. 3. To debunk prevalent myths and stereotypes about Afro-Puerto Ricans and the "African heritage" in Puerto Rico. 4. To challenge the circumscription of Afro-Puerto Rican culture, history, and experience to ever-shrinking regions in the east and south of Puerto Rico. 5. To record the life stories of local actors in order to challenge the reduction of Afro-Puerto Rican history to chapters on eminent blacks or "mulattos" or on particular, marginal "communities" so as to demonstrate that this history is written, narrated, and constructed "from below" in everyday struggles to define, negotiate, and assert individual and collective identities. 6. To develop a collaborative research methodology that contributes to building a diverse project community dedicated to research and education about the Afro-Puerto Rican experience in Puerto Rico. By the end of the first year the project had generated an unprecedented Afro-Puerto Rican oral history collection that included thirty-three interviews and a parallel archive of photographic and video material. Thereafter a smaller but equally diverse collective has continued collaborating in the dissemination of the project in publications and presentations as well as in the analysis of the testimonial material collected. In this essay I reflect on the first year of the project, which I have coordinated since its inception, focusing primarily on its evolution in the town of Aguadilla, to argue that the collaborative oral history methodology employed forcefully disrupts the tenets of racial discourse in Puerto Rico as well as dominant saberes (lore) about [End Page 91] contemporary Afro-Puerto Rican subjectivities.1 To contextualize my argument I begin with a necessarily abridged discussion of race and identity in Puerto Rico, followed by a characterization of the field of Afro-Puerto Rican studies, which provided the point of departure for our project. Against these backdrops I discuss how the conjunction of intimacy and identity in the search for alternative saberes about Afro-Puerto Ricanness enabled our collaborative research project to transcend firmly entrenched confines in both social science research and race and identity discourses in Puerto...

Racial Formation and Re-formation in Twentieth-Century Civil Rights Movements Joseph R. Stuart (bio) Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico's Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States. By Ruben Flores. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 353 pages. $29.95 (paper). Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City. By Sonia Song-Ha Lee. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xi + 332 pages. $34.95 (paper). The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi. By Stephen A. Berrey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xci + 331 pages. $29.95 (paper). Race, Religion, and Civil Rights: Asian Students on the West Coast, 1900–1968. By Stephanie Hinnershitz. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. 268 pages. $28.95 (paper). The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland. By Robyn C. Spencer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. 260 pages. $24.95 (paper). At the close of her landmark article "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," the historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall asks, "How can we make ourselves heard without reducing history to the formulaic mantras on which political narratives usually rely?" Too often, Hall argues, the ways that individuals and social structures work for or against certain groups remain "invisible to citizens trained in not seeing and in thinking exclusively ahistorical, personal terms."1 Scholars must nuance and complicate readers' oversimplified views of the civil rights movement by helping them recognize how individuals and organizations foment social, political, economic, and racial change. The past will always be used politically; it is up to those of us [End Page 291] who research and write history to reveal the messy combination of individual agency and societal structures that create the racial, gendered, political, and economic ecospheres Americans inhabit. The five books under review here affirm that civil rights histories did not begin with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education or end with Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination, and that race in civil rights movements went beyond the oversimplified black–white binary. But more than this, these five scholars make larger arguments about civil rights movements in the United States by highlighting the ways that racial formation and identification informed social movements from the 1930s to the 1970s and from California to New York City. Sonia Song-Ha Lee's Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement examines "the political world in which Puerto Ricans and African Americans conceptualized their racial and ethnic identities" in response to New York City's long civil rights movement (3). Lee argues that, although that two groups frequently lived in geographic proximity and faced similar discrimination, they were not natural allies. Americans defined Puerto Ricans as a racially "in-between" people, neither white nor black (unsurprisingly, they fought to be identified with whites rather than African Americans). Despite that preference, twentieth-century sociologists and anthropologists from Oscar Lewis to Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer identified Puerto Ricans through a racialized "culture of poverty," as did government programs, which linked Puerto Ricans with African Americans. Over time, however, many Puerto Ricans began to work with African Americans for civil rights in matters of antipoverty policy. Indeed, one of Lee's great contributions, building on the historiographical trend toward examining interracial political coalitions after World War II, is her exploration of the ways that politics and class created common ground for members of different racial groups within civil rights movements. Despite their shared economic disenfranchisement, New York's Puerto Ricans did not fight for political, social, and labor gains using the tactics embraced by African Americans before World War II. For instance, Lee shows that black and Puerto Rican members followed different paths in the struggle for justice in the workplace in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU). Puerto Ricans' fragile status in the United States made them less willing to incur the wrath of their union bosses. African Americans, who did not fear deportation or other punitive measures, fought vocally for labor rights and used their connections to black community and...

Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York, by Sonia Song-Ha Lee. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xi, 332 pp. $34.95 US (cloth). By documenting and analyzing the many ways in which African Americans and Puerto Ricans, debated, connected, clashed, confronted, and overcame obstacles on the path toward racial justice in New York City during the 1960s and early 1970s, Sonia Song-Ha Lee has made a significant contribution to the study of ethnic and racial politics in the United States. Her book is meticulously researched and beautifully written Lee shows how African Americans and Puerto Ricans were at times insular in their approach to socio-political action and at times entangled in ways that were both crippling and propulsive. In some instances, the process of working together brought about transformations in consciousness, so that movements that began anchored in concepts of racial and ethnic self-determination would transform into movements bound by working-class solidarity and / or anti-colonial sentiment. According to Lee, synergistic impulses were nurtured by three basic factors: malleable racial identities, the rich tradition of political radicalism of New York City's history, and the physical proximity between African Americans and Puerto Ricans in neighborhoods and workplaces. Lee's analysis is distinctive because it steers away from approaches that either see Hispanicity and blackness as irreconcilable or reject the idea of commonality between African Americans and Puerto Ricans because it is considered degrading and stifling. Lee further distinguishes herself by rejecting the notion of political alliances as natural if situated within a context of a similar, objective, socio-economic status. She is also clear about the scope of action of her protagonists: they are primarily political activists whose trajectories often intersected with the trajectories of others in the fields of music and culture but who were mostly concerned with labour issues, educational access and attainment, poverty, and civil rights. Lee builds her case systematically, looking first at the types of racial discourse and structure that provided the ideological context for African American and Puerto Rican socio-economic and political participation in Postwar New York City. From that platform she examines the relationship between African Americans and Puerto Ricans in the labour movement. She then pauses to examine two elements that doubled as context for, and promoters of, action: settlement houses and social reform organizations. These agencies not only brought together African Americans and Puerto Ricans in time and space, but also gave opportunities and encouraged them to discuss and test ideas about how to best engage in political action against poverty and racial discrimination. One aspect of this part of the story that is significant is the role that whites played: bringing together blacks and Puerto Ricans, promoting their agendas and making things happen: racial and minority coalitions ultimately cannot succeed, and in some cases cannot even come off the ground, without support from the ethnoracial majority. …

Puerto Rican migrants have resided in the United States since before the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, when the United States took possession of the island of Puerto Rico as part of the Treaty of Paris. After the war, groups of Puerto Ricans began migrating to the United States as contract laborers, first to sugarcane plantations in Hawaii, and then to other destinations on the mainland. After the Jones Act of 1917 extended U.S. citizenship to islanders, Puerto Ricans migrated to the United States in larger numbers, establishing their largest base in New York City. Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, a vibrant and heterogeneous colonia developed there, and Puerto Ricans participated actively both in local politics and in the increasingly contentious politics of their homeland, whose status was indeterminate until it became a commonwealth in 1952. The Puerto Rican community in New York changed dramatically after World War II, accommodating up to fifty thousand new migrants per year during the peak of the “great migration” from the island. Newcomers faced intense discrimination and marginalization in this era, defined by both a Cold War ethos and liberal social scientists’ interest in the “Puerto Rican problem.” Puerto Rican migrant communities in the 1950s and 1960s—now rapidly expanding into the Midwest, especially Chicago, and into New Jersey, Connecticut, and Philadelphia—struggled with inadequate housing and discrimination in the job market. In local schools, Puerto Rican children often faced a lack of accommodation of their need for English language instruction. Most catastrophic for Puerto Rican communities, on the East Coast particularly, was the deindustrialization of the labor market over the course of the 1960s. By the late 1960s, in response to these conditions and spurred by the civil rights, Black Power, and other social movements, young Puerto Ricans began organizing and protesting in large numbers. Their activism combined a radical approach to community organizing with Puerto Rican nationalism and international anti-imperialism. The youth were not the only activists in this era. Parents in New York had initiated, together with their African American neighbors, a “community control” movement that spanned the late 1960s and early 1970s; and many other adult activists pushed the politics of the urban social service sector—the primary institutions in many impoverished Puerto Rican communities—further to the left. By the mid-1970s, urban fiscal crises and the rising conservative backlash in national politics dealt another blow to many Puerto Rican communities in the United States. The Puerto Rican population as a whole was now widely considered part of a national “underclass,” and much of the political energy of Puerto Rican leaders focused on addressing the paucity of both basic material stability and social equality in their communities. Since the 1980s, however, Puerto Ricans have achieved some economic gains, and a growing college-educated middle class has managed to gain more control over the cultural representations of their communities. More recently, the political salience of Puerto Ricans as a group has begun to shift. For the better part of the 20th century, Puerto Ricans in the United States were considered numerically insignificant or politically impotent (or both); but in the last two presidential elections (2008 and 2012), their growing populations in the South, especially in Florida, have drawn attention to their demographic significance and their political sensibilities.

Reviewed by: Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean by Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof Alexa Rodríguez (bio) Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof. 2019. Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 369 pp. ISBN: 978-0-6911-8353-4. Histories of the late-nineteenth century struggle for Cuban independence typically highlight the actions and voices of white Cubans such as José Martí and Tomás Estrada Palma. Jesse E. Hoffnung-Garskof’s Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean, 1850–1902 details the story of the nineteenth-century Cuban revolution beyond these traditional narratives. It follows Rafael Serra, Sotero Figueroa, Gerónimo and Juan Bonilla, Gertrudis Heredia, and other Afro-Puerto Rican and Afro-Cuban members of La Liga, an “educational and recreational society” that became a hub for the Cuban nationalist movement in the early 1890s, as they emerged as integral figures in the battle for Cuban independence. This trans-national microhistory spans across Cuba, Puerto Rico, Key West, and New York City, and uses a narrative-style to document the ways these Afro-Caribbean artisans organized themselves, navigated, and negotiated racialized spaces within the United States and Greater Caribbean. By employing a “‘migrants’ eye-view of the world,” Hoffnung-Garskof finds that notions of racial inclusion were intensely debated and molded by Puerto Rican and Cuban multiracial communities, publications, and institutions (12). Therefore, Martí’s memorialized declarations for racial inclusion and universal male suffrage were shaped by the ideas, efforts, and experiences of these Afro-Caribbean migrants. Yet, one of the unintended consequences of assisting Martí’s rise to prominence was that by doing so, these Afro-Caribbean migrants diminished their own contributions to the independence movement. As a result, they have [End Page 176] largely been forgotten in histories of the period. In Racial Migrations, Hoffnung-Garskof artfully weaves the story of this group of Puerto Rican and Cuban migrants from their birth, through their travels throughout the Caribbean and US, their convergence at La Liga in New York City, and concludes with the emergence of Tomás Estrada Palma as the new leader of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. Chapter 1, “Beginnings,” provides a detailed account of their personal histories, or “self-making,” as Hoffnung-Garskof terms it (12). It describes the family histories of Rafael Serra, Gertrudis Heredia, Sotero Figueroa, Manuela Aguayo, Juan Gualberto, and José Martí, several of the main historical actors in the book. He traces the ancestry of their parents and situates their families within the social hierarchies of the time and their countries of origin. Using baptismal records, Hoffnung-Garskof draws attention to how racial distinction, determinations of legitimate and illegitimate births, as well as access to wealth and social status, all impacted how these actors were able to move across spaces. Information about the early years of schooling and work of the historical actors also provided a foundation for why these individuals intentionally sought to create an educational space like La Liga for men of the “class of color” and demonstrates how doing so was a political act. Chapter 2, “The Public Square,” contextualizes the development of La Liga within the history of previous efforts in both Puerto Rico and Cuba that combined politics of reform and revolution. Examining how the struggle for civil rights, suffrage, and revolution were all heavily divided by race, the chapter makes evident how race shaped how individuals like Serra and Figueroa were able to enter the public sphere and become prominent public figures. This chapter also introduces two new characters, the brothers Gerónimo and Juan Bonilla, both of Cuban descent and living in Key West, and who eventually worked with Serra in New York City in La Liga. Hoffnung-Garskof examines the spaces the actors navigated as members of the Cuban diaspora in Florida and recreates their racially and ethnically based communities and networks. Chapter 3, “Community,” explores the racial and ethnic networks created by other Afro-Caribbean migrants when they first arrived in New York City and that helped them navigate the racially segregated US. Interested in the understanding the experiences of those...

A History of Latinx Immigrant Activism

Puerto Rican Children’s Literature and the Need for Afro-Puerto Rican Stories Carmen Milagros Torres-Rivera (bio) Puerto Rican children’s literature is rich with the legacy of the legends of the Taínos. The Taínos, the indigenous people who inhabited the island, have been the inspiration for many of the stories published for Puerto Rican youngsters. The picture book Atariba and Niguayona: A Story from the Taíno People of Puerto Rico is a good example. This book was written by Harriet Rohmer based on stories from the Taíno oral tradition. Other stories inspired by the Taíno culture are Corasi, written by Walter Murray Chiesa and The Golden Flower: A Taíno Myth from Puerto Rico, written by Nina Jaffe. Click for larger view View full resolution Coquí, Drums and Dreams (2013) is used with the kind permission of Erick Ortiz Gelpí. Other books deal with characters that have become iconic on this island, such as Juan Bobo, whose antics and different way of thinking have captured the imaginations of children and adults alike. In 1995, Carmen Bernier-Grand published an English version of the adventures of this simpleton character in her book Juan Bobo: Four Folktales from Puerto Rico, part of the I Can Read Books series. [End Page 81] The Juan Bobo character, who understands things differently from other people, appears not only in Bernier-Grand’s book, but also in the picture book Juan Bobo Goes to Work: A Puerto Rican Folktale, written by Marisa Montes. Another Juan Bobo book by this same author is Juan Bobo Goes Up and Down the Hill: A Puerto Rican Folk Tale. Ari Acevedo additionally presents a re-telling of one of Juan Bobo’s most memorable misadventures in the book Juan Bobo Sends the Pig to Mass. The coquí, the little brown amphibian that has become the symbol of Puerto Rico, is also celebrated in many of the stories that are published for children. One of the classic novels that is mostly remembered in its Spanish translation is The Green Song by Doris Troutman Plenn. This 1950s book, through the character of Pepe Coquí, became a symbol of the Puerto Rican migration to New York as well as a representation of Puerto Rican identity. More recent books that include the coquí are Marisa De Jesús Paolicelli’s award-winning book There’s a Coquí in my Shoe published in 2007 and Ed Rodríguez’s Kiki Koki: The Enchanted Legend of the Coquí Frog, published in 2010. De Jesús Paolicelli’s book won the International Latino Book Awards Winner in the category of Best Educational Children’s Book in English as well as an honorable mention (second prize) for the Best Children’s Picture Book in English. Another book starring the coquí is the bilingual Spanish-English book Everywhere Coquis/ En Dondequiera Coquies, by Nancy Hooper. Lulu Delacre, illustrator of many children’s book such as The Storyteller’s Candle/ La Velita de los Cuentos, also wrote a series of stories with the coquí as the main character. One of the chapter books in Scholastic’s I Can Read series is titled Rafi and Rosi. These two coquí siblings are also featured in Rafi and Rosi: Carnival of this same series. Writers of Puerto Rican children’s books have usually taken a folkloric perspective in their writing that echoes the focus of Pura Belpré, the renowned children’s book writer, storyteller, and first Latino librarian in the New York City library system. This approach differs greatly from Nicholasa Mohr’s more realistic portrayal of the challenges faced by Puerto Ricans in the United States in many of her works intended for tweeners and young adults. However, the folkloric representations of Puerto Rican culture lack a balanced representation of the full extent of Puerto Rican cultural diversity. As an educator for over 20 years and as a graduate student of Caribbean linguistics at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, I have been struck by the absence of Afro-Puerto Rican characters in children’s literature. This situation has been documented in Dulce M. Perez’s dissertation titled “African Heritage in [End...

Although Puerto Ricans had been migrating to the United States for decades before the Spanish-American War (or more correctly, the Spanish-Cuban-American War) of 1898, when Puerto Rico became a colonial possession of the United States, until the late 1960s, the literary production of stateside Puerto Ricans was written predominantly in Spanish. Works written largely by first-generation Puerto Rican migrants were either published by small presses and not well publicized, or remained scattered in many of the Spanish-language newspapers of different communities. Moreover, writers from this generation rarely published in English. The Puerto Rican population in the United States in 1910 was only around two thousand people, and significant migration growth did not begin to occur until after 1917, the year when Congress decreed US citizenship for island Puerto Ricans. Thus, early literary expressions were largely ignored by the US literary establishment and were little known within the primarily working-class Puerto Rican communities—the largest one in New York, and a few other smaller ones in cities across the country. A literature primarily written in English that offered firsthand portrayals of the coming-of-age experiences and unprivileged lives endured by most US Puerto Ricans did not emerge until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Galvanized by the civil-rights movement and the militant and socially transforming outlook prevalent during these decades, Puerto Ricans and other US minorities strived for equality, inclusion, and the cultural survival and empowerment of their communities. The literature of this period also gave voice to these struggles, concerns, and experiences. Spanish Harlem, the Lower East Side (renamed by writers as Loisaida), and the Bronx stand out as the most-emblematic settings for the first wave of autobiographical narratives, poetry, prose fiction, and theater that eventually came to be identified as Nuyorican literature (see Introductory Works, Anthologies, and Genres). The label was derived from the fact that the majority of Puerto Ricans, to date, have resided in New York, and was popularized by a group of performance poets who gathered around the Nuyorican Poets Café, founded in 1973. Initially, the term Nuyorican was a derogatory label coined by island Puerto Ricans to distance themselves from the marginal conditions experienced by their migrant fellow citizens and from the negative stereotypes imposed on them by mainstream US society. It was later adopted by the Nuyorican poets as a marker of a distinctive hybrid or “borderland” cultural identity and the Spanish/English bilingual practices, mixing of languages, and code switching that occurred among US Puerto Ricans. The geographically confining nature of the term Nuyorican has led some critics and writers to try out other labels, such as Diasporican, Boricua, Chicago Rican, Orlando Rican, and others, to refer to stateside Puerto Ricans in general or from a particular geographic location other than New York. As of the early 21st century, no comprehensive literary histories of US Puerto Rican literature are available, but there have been some attempts to introduce and characterize the emerging body of literature that began to flourish in the 1970s and 1980s. Most recent critical studies and anthologies of this literary corpus have tended to focus on a particular theme or group of writers (e.g., women, gay, and lesbian) or movements (e.g., Nuyorican Poets Café, autobiographical narratives). Migration continues undeterred in the present, to the extent that the stateside Puerto Rican population of about 4.7 million in 2010 is now larger than the 3.6 million population of Puerto Rico. The strong transnational connections that Puerto Ricans maintain with the island account for reciprocal influences between both communities, which are most evident in their literature and other cultural expressions (see General Overviews). Hence, literary activity and other forms of cultural production continue to be shaped by Puerto Rican contact with mainstream US society, other ethnic and racial groups in different urban settings, and a rapidly growing Latino population that by 2010 included over fifty million people whose ancestry is linked to twenty different Spanish-speaking countries (see Anthologies and Literary Criticism).

Undelivered: From the Great Postal Strike of 1970 to the Manufactured Crisis of the U.S. Postal Service

This review examines Hilda Lloréns’s research into the role that Afro-Puerto Rican women play in advocating for environmental justice and building a sustainable environment in the Puerto Rican archipelago, particularly after the devastation left behind by Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, and the subsequent catastrophic effects of COVID-19 in 2020. Lloréns shows that Afro-Puerto Rican women are able to survive in the face of racial and ecological discriminations and marginalizations, and their survival is emblematic of Puerto Rico’s own survival. The author devotes the entirety of her book to show that as an "ethnographer of home," as she calls herself, it is essential for people to create livable worlds within which they can survive. Survival in the midst of catastrophic climate change is difficult, Lloréns argues, primarily because Puerto Ricans are often on the receiving end of austerity measures that make their existence tenuous, at best. These austerity measures typically come after a climatic event, and result in limited access to clean water, food, electricity, healthcare, housing, and education, which only serve to exacerbate the desperation that many on the island feel. While this desperation was widespread across the island after the hurricanes in 2017, residents in the southeastern region of the island (predominantly Afro-Puerto Ricans) were even more affected. Lloréns shows how these people used their limited resources to cull an existence out of a seemingly hostile land and create a community that sustained them. Lloréns draws on personal experiences, the experiences of her family, ethnography, anthropology, and interviews to show how vital it is to examine Puerto Rico not as a homogenous space but rather as a heterogeneous one with its unique complexities. And by centering the work and experiences of Black Puerto Ricans, Lloréns gives voice to a group that is largely left on the margins of society, but who demonstrates the importance of building community as a sustaining entity.

This article reads the affective charge of ethnonationalism and antiblackness in Puerto Rican poetics and performance. Moving from the “legible” affect in Afro–Puerto Rican feminist poet Julia de Burgos's ethnonational poetry to the “illegible” affect experienced on stage by Afro–Puerto Rican queer theater and performance artist Javier Cárdona Otero, this article provides a fragmented trajectory of the antiblack and white supremacist affective violence constitutive of art-making in Puerto Rico. In doing so, it locates an aesthetic collusion between ethnonationalism and antiblackness that in turn illuminates how the aesthetics of Puerto Ricanness can be antiblack, a claim that calls into question Puerto Rican nationalism's desire or need for ethnic difference.

The Puerto Rican Patient: Some Historical, Cultural and Psychological AspectsVictor J. Teichner, James J. Cadden and Gail W. BerryVictor J. Teichner∗ Send communications to Victor J. Teichner, M. D., 145 East 84th Street, New York, New York 10028.Search for more papers by this author, James J. CaddenSearch for more papers by this author and Gail W. Berry1 Metropolitan Hospital Center, New York, New York and New York Medical College, New York, New York.2 Beth Israel Medical Center, New York, New York and Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online::July 2017https://doi.org/10.1521/jaap.1.1981.9.2.277PDFPDF PLUS ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations AboutReferencesAbad V. and Boyce E. (1979), Issues in psychiatric evaluations of Puerto Ricans: A socio-cultural perspective, J. Operational Psychiatry, 10, 28–39. Google ScholarBarron E. and Richardson J. A. (1978), Counseling women for tubal sterilization, Health Social Work, 3. Google ScholarEncyclopedia Britannica (1974), 15th Ed. Google ScholarFernandez-Marina R. (1961), The Puerto Rican syndrome: Its dynamics and cultural determinants, Psychiatry, 24, 79–82. Google ScholarFernandez-Marina R., Maldonado-Sierra E. D., and Trent R. D. (1958), Three basic themes in Mexican and Puerto Rican family values, J. Soc. Psychol., 48, 167–181. Google ScholarFitzpatrick J. P. and Gould R. E. (1968), Mental illness among Puerto Ricans in New York: Cultural conditions or intercultural misunderstandings?, Task Force paper prepared for the Joint Commission on Mental Health for Children, Chevy Chase, Md. Google ScholarGeismar L. L. and Gerhart U. C. (1968), Social class, ethnicity, and family functioning: Exploring some issues raised by the Moynihan Report, J. Marriage Family, 20, 480–487. Google ScholarLauria A. (1964), Respeto, relajo and interpersonal relations in Puerto Rico, Anthropol. Q., 37, 53–67. Google ScholarLewis O. (1965), La Vida, Random House, New York. Google ScholarMaldonado-Sierra E. D., Trent R. D., and Fernandez-Marina R. F. (1960), Neurosis and traditional family beliefs in Puerto Rico, Int. J. Social Psychiatry, 6, 237–246. Google ScholarMeyer G. G. (1977), The professional in the Chicano community, Psychiat. Ann., 7, VI. Google ScholarMinuchin S., Montalvo B., Gerney B. G., Rosman B. L., and Sheimer F. (1967), Families of the Slums, Basic Books, New York p. 238. Google ScholarPadilla A. M. and Ruiz R. A. (1973), Latino Mental Health, National Institute of Mental Health, Rockville, Md. Google ScholarRendon M. (1974), Transcultural aspects of Puerto Rican mental illness in New York, Int. J. Soc. Psychiatry, 20, 19. Google ScholarRodriguez C. (1974), Puerto Ricans: Between black and while, N. Y. Affairs, 1, 94. Google ScholarRothenberg A. (1964), Puerto Rico and aggression, Am. J. Psychiatry, 120, 962–970. Google ScholarU. S. Commission on Civil Rights (1976), Puerto Ricans in the Continental United States: An Uncertain Future, Washington D. C. Google ScholarU. S. Department of Commerce, Population Division, Bureau of The Census (1977), Persons of Spanish Origin in the United States, Washington, D. C., No. 310, p. 20. Google Scholar Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Cited byCited by1. Systems Theory: The Case of EsperanzaOnline publication date: 30 November 2020. Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar2. Uncommon Strategies for a Common Problem: Addressing Racism in Family TherapyOnline publication date: Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar3. Institutional racism: An analysis of the mental health system.Online publication date: 1 January 1993. Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar4. Clinical Diagnosis among Diverse Populations: A Multicultural PerspectiveOnline publication date: 31 July 2018. Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar5. The Effect of Race on Puerto Rican WagesOnline publication date: Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar6. Ataques de nervios in the Puerto Rican diagnostic interview schedule: The impact of cultural categories on psychiatric epidemiologyOnline publication date: Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar7. The multiple meanings of ataques de nervios in the Latino communityOnline publication date: Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar Volume 9Issue 2Apr 1981 Information© 1981 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.PDF download

From Bomba to Hip-Hop is a collection of essays written over the last five years by Juan Flores, the leading Puerto Rican cultural critic in the Unites States and a professor of Black and Puerto Rican studies and sociology at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center. As the title suggests, music is a connecting thread that runs through the whole book. The ten chapters are united by the common theme of Puerto Rican identity and the survival of cultural memory, especially as these are defined or constructed through popular cultural practices among Puerto Ricans in the United States: the bomba y plena musical groups, Puerto Rican rap and hip-hop, community dances, the casita movement, the writing of ‘Nuyorican’ literature and the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade. The different chapters are peppered with snatches of interviews with artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals. Combining sociological insight with Latin music history and a participant-observer's keen eye for complexity and tension, Flores draws a cultural map of Puerto Rico, a ‘national imaginary’, sensitive to the nuances of struggles over identity and representation, both on the island and in the United States itself.

I consider myself Un negrito, and I also have blood of Taino, as well as blood of conquerors, Spanish, and Other Europeans along way. Piri Thomas In New York City's Spanish Harlem--el barrio--in 1960s and 1970s, guessing was only way Puerto Ricans could figure out their culture and history. In his introduction to Boricuas (1995), Roberto Santiago points out that school was place where they learned about everyone else except themselves. They learned about Fourth of July and how United States was founded by English people who proclaimed that, in this nation, all men were created equal. They learned about how Europeans shared dinner with Indians on Thanksgiving. They learned about Christianity and how people who hold Christian values treated one another with love and respect. They learned about environment and how important it was to keep air and water clean. But who they were as a people was never a consideration; it was a question that seldom entered their minds. Every other group - Italians, Irish, Jews, African-Americans - seemed to have an idea who they were (xiii-xiv). By looking for an idea of what a Puerto Rican is, Down These Mean Streets (1967) is journey of Piri Thomas, a black-skinned Puerto Rican, from hatred of everything or white-like to a more complex understanding of race. Down These Mean Streets is a hybrid text of testimonial and imaginative literature, initiating Nuyorican stage of continental Puerto Rican writing. In this novelized autobiography, Thomas deals with many of issues society stereotypically associates with Latino minorities: poverty, educational failure, gang membership, drug addiction, welfare, petty crime, sexual perversity, and prison life (Sanchez 118-19). Thomas tells reader not only how poverty in ghetto leads him to drugs, youth gangs, and a series of criminal activities for which he will serve seven years in prison, but also how he faces a racism that he does not understand. Thomas's autobiographical account corresponds to category of radicalized African-American works, such as Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcom X (1965) and Elridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice (1967), emerging at time as a reaction to perceived shortcomings of non-violent Civil Rights Movements of fifties and early sixties (Hiraldo 88). Besides African-American literary tradition, Down These Mean Streets is also a book claimed by other literary traditions, such as U.S. Latino/a literature or Hispanic literature of U.S. and Puerto Rican literature written in English. (1) The categorization of Thomas's literary production as an African-American, U.S. Latino, or Puerto Rican exceeds any classification, making reader consider it as something more universal that transcends borders, literary traditions, and time as it might present or deal with issues concerning these societies back then or today. (2) The aim of this paper is to study Chapter 18 (Barroom Sociology) of Down These Mean Streets as a subtext that constructs Piri Thomas's autobiographical account rhetorically. In this chapter, Thomas writes of an encounter among three men - including himself - in a nightclub in South: Gerald Andrew West is a college-educated light-skinned African-American from Pennsylvania who is passing for a Puerto Rican to make, he says, the next step to white (191). He complains that whites allow him to be Negro, but Negroes do not allow him to be white. The second man, Brew, is a dark-skinned African-American from Harlem who talks talk of an angry black nationalist of 1960s. He asks Gerald, [W]hat kinda Negro is yuh? (187). The third man, Piri, an angry and confused dark-skinned Puerto Rican from Spanish Harlem, is passing for Negro, accepting gaze of a social system that blackens him. By narrating Piri's encounter with Gerald in his trip to Dixie, I will show that this chapter frames writing of Thomas's autobiography both at a formal level and a content level, since Thomas ends up writing story that Gerald proposes to write: a book on situation of black men (or Afro-Caribbean men, in case of Piri) and of his experience in South (or in New York City). …