Patricia Silver, Sunbelt Diaspora: Race, Class, and Latino Politics in Puerto Rican Orlando

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sunbelt Diaspora: Race, Class, and Latino Politics in Puerto Rican Orlando by Patricia Silver Guillermo Rebollo Gil (bio) Patricia Silver, Sunbelt Diaspora: Race, Class, and Latino Politics in Puerto Rican Orlando. University of Texas Press, 2020. Pp. 299. Patricia Silver's Sunbelt Diaspora: Race, Class, and Latino Politics in Puerto Rican Orlando offers a critical history of Puerto Ricans' decades-long struggle to form a community in this southern US city, where the legacy of Jim Crow sustains the dominant ideology as to who belongs and who gets to represent, and be represented, in local politics. Silver guides readers, in deft and engaging prose, across the shifting and combated sociopolitical terrain of Orange County, where Puerto Ricans, and Latinx peoples in general, have been subjected to discriminatory policies and regulations, which look to curtail their viability and vibrancy as a political force. [End Page 115] The triumph of this book, however, is that while, yes, Sunbelt Diaspora is very much a study into the intricacies of community building and political mobilization, the author has made the astute decision to focus on the ideological fault lines among Puerto Ricans in Orlando. Specifically, Silver examines how birthplace, race, and class function as criteria of belonging. Since the region has become the primary destination for Puerto Ricans from the island and the diaspora, the matter of perceived national or cultural authenticity garners special significance. While Puerto Ricans from New York tend to be perceived as less authentic, darker and/or more unruly, arrivals from the island—especially those who identify as white and are part of the "professional class"—look to distinguish themselves from the former, even if it means surrendering the possibility to organize around a shared Puerto Rican identity. Silver explains: "Puerto Ricans who have spent much or all of their lives as a US minority in diaspora bring to their relations in Orlando a nonwhite race consciousness that is often at odds with racial perspectives of those who have only ever lived in Puerto Rico and identify as white" (10). Aspirations toward whiteness thus become salient as barriers toward greater and more impactful political mobilization: Some Puerto Ricans in Orlando will strive toward achieving an honorary white status in America, generating social and geographical distance from their fellow Puerto Ricans. Others—the more precarious—will look to organize within the confines of a shared Puerto Rican identity but will remain wary of the more combative positions and actions of "immature Puerto Ricans from New York" (115). Then there are the ones who will be willing to engage the complexity and contradictions of living and building together. Reading Silver's book, it's hard not to be reminded of how Orlando figures in the island imagination of today as the place to which the supposed "best of who and what we are" leave in times of growing economic and political crisis in Puerto Rico; in a time where the tone of the public discourse about the sustainability of life in Puerto Rico becomes heavy with the fear of an impending substitution of population, with foreign investors buying up the land, driving people out. The solution, according to Puerto Rico's elected representatives, is to sit tight until "the best of us" decide to come back. Silver's book, in a way, offers an alternative: to commit to the seemingly obvious, but no less radical, proposition that who Puerto Ricans are in the island is also who they are in Orlando—a people subjected to a history of colonization and displacements, struggling to claim any space they inhabit as rightly theirs, all the while besieged by a pernicious ideology regarding the one true type of Puerto Rican. This book makes clear that for Puerto Rican life to be dignified and just, and sustainable anywhere, this ideology must continuously be discredited and defeated. [End Page 116] Guillermo Rebollo Gil Universidad Ana G. Méndez Guillermo Rebollo Gil Guillermo Rebollo Gil is a writer, sociologist, translator, and attorney. Recent publications include poetry in Pacifica Literary Review, Trampset, and HAD; prose in Sleet and Jellyfish Review; scholarly articles in Journal of Autoethnography and Liminalities. His book-length essay Writing Puerto Rico: Our Decolonial...