Puerto Rican Chicago

Abstract

This book chronicles the response of the Puerto Rican community in Chicago to the urban decay in which they were forced to live, work, and especially learn. Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City, 1940–1977 demonstrates that the work begun by schooling agents in Puerto Rico in 1898 was continued by Chicago officials after 1940. The book offers a historical reading of how the Puerto Rican community acknowledged and confronted the intricate ways their claim to space in Chicago was linked to schooling inequalities and challenges. The complex ways in which Puerto Ricans began to utilize print culture while working across ethnic, racial, and gender differences in order to lay claim to and transform social spaces through community activism are explored in the text. Young women, and youth in general, were instrumental in the development of activist communities, challenging patriarchy-centered histories and theorizations of the migratory and settlement patterns adopted by Puerto Ricans in the diaspora. By highlighting the lives of young Chicago Puerto Rican women in particular—as their participation moved them beyond the traditional domestic sphere, in which they had been consigned to roles as wives or as domestic workers, and into the public sphere, where they assumed positions as community leaders, schoolteachers/administrators, and students—Puerto Rican Chicago deepens our understanding of women as political subjects. Indeed, the increased participation of young women set the stage for broader community mobilization.